(Let’s remember that four presidents have literally been shot dead.)
When he tweets this:
There is nothing we can ever give to the Democrats that will make them happy. This is the highest level of Presidential Harassment in the history of our Country!
It is unbelievable that talk like this can go about, and skillfully manipulated to explain an otherwise inane comment such as this.
Another comments releases the opinion that Trump has completed the ownership of the Republican party:
The New York Times
Trump’s Takeover of the Republican Party Is Almost Complete
Supporters of President Trump at a rally in Grand Rapids, Mich., on Thursday. The Trump campaign has helped install allies in every state important to the 2020 race.CreditTom Brenner for The New York Times
By Alexander Burns and Jonathan Martin
On Election Day in 2016, the Republican Party was divided against itself, split over its nominee for president, Donald J. Trump.
In Ohio, a crucial battleground, the state party chairman had repeatedly chided Mr. Trump in public, amplifying the concerns of Gov. John Kasich, a Republican dissenter. In New Hampshire, the party chairman harbored deep, if largely private, misgivings about her party’s nominee. The Republican Party of Florida was listing, hobbled by local feuds and a rift between donors loyal to Senator Marco Rubio and former Gov. Jeb Bush and those backing the man who humiliated both in the primaries.
Those power struggles have now been resolved in a one-sided fashion. In every state important to the 2020 race, Mr. Trump and his lieutenants are in firm control of the Republican electoral machinery, and they are taking steps to extend and tighten their grip.
It is, in every institutional sense, Mr. Trump’s party.
As Mr. Trump has prepared to embark on a difficult fight for re-election, a small but ferocious operation within his campaign has helped install loyal allies atop the most significant state parties and urged them to speak up loudly to discourage conservative criticism of Mr. Trump. The campaign has dispatched aides to state party conclaves, Republican executive committee meetings and fund-raising dinners, all with the aim of ensuring the delegates at next year’s convention in Charlotte, N.C., are utterly committed to Mr. Trump.
To Joe Gruters, who was co-chairman of Mr. Trump’s campaign in Florida and now leads the state party, the local Republican Party is effectively a regional arm of the president’s re-election effort.
“I’ve had probably 10 conversations with the Trump team about the delegate selection process in Florida,” Mr. Gruters said, adding of a potential Republican primary battle, “The base of the party loves our president, and if anybody runs against him, they are going to get absolutely smashed.”
State and local Republican organizations typically operate below the radar of national politics, but they can be vital to the success of a presidential candidate. Party chairmen and their deputies are tasked with everything from raising money to deploying volunteers to knock on doors, and in many states they help choose delegates for the nominating convention.
Val DiGiorgio is the chairman of the Republican Party in Pennsylvania, one of the most vulnerable states from Mr. Trump’s 2016 coalition.CreditHannah Yoon for The New York Times
For Mr. Trump, who prevailed in 2016 as an outsider with little connection to his party’s electoral apparatus, the ability to control the levers of Republican politics at the state level could make the difference in a close election or a contested primary. It also leaves other Republicans with precious little room to oppose Mr. Trump on his policy preferences or administrative whims — on matters from health care to the Mexican border — for fear of retribution from within the party.
Mr. Trump’s aides have focused most intently on heading off any dissent at the Charlotte convention: To that end, two of Mr. Trump’s top campaign aides, Bill Stepien and Justin Clark, have worked quietly but methodically in a series of states where control of the local party was up for grabs. They have lifted Mr. Trump’s allies even in deep-blue states like Massachusetts, and worked to make peace between competing pro-Trump factions in more competitive states such as Colorado.
The devotion to Mr. Trump was on clear display Saturday outside Denver, where the state party gathered to elect a new chairman. Though Mr. Trump’s unpopularity helped drive Colorado Republicans to deep losses last fall, there was no sign of unrest: Mr. Trump’s name was emblazoned on lapel pins and a flag toted by one candidate for the chairmanship, and his slogan — “Make America Great Again” — was printed on the red hat from which the candidates drew lots to determine their speaking order.
Mr. Trump himself stayed out of the race, and campaign aides sent the White House a short memo last month urging the president not to pick sides between allies after Representative Ken Buck, a deeply conservative candidate, lobbied administration officials for support.
But when Mr. Buck claimed victory in the race for chairman, he described his mission in terms of unflinching loyalty to the president.
“The key is that we make sure that the voters of Colorado understand the great job the president has done,” Mr. Buck said. “That is what my job is.”
Mr. Trump faces at least a quixotic challenge in the Republican primaries from William F. Weld, a moderate former governor of Massachusetts, and other Republicans have toyed with entering the race. But advisers to Mr. Trump view it as an urgent priority to maintain Republican support: With low approval ratings among voters at large, including educated whites who once leaned Republican, Mr. Trump can ill afford additional fractures on the right.
Devotion to President Trump was on display Saturday outside Denver, where the Colorado Republican Party met to select a new chairman for the coming presidential campaign.CreditRachel Woolf for The New York Times
So far, loyalty has prevailed.
“There is no challenge to the president,” declared John Watson, a former supporter of Mr. Kasich who now leads the Georgia Republican Party. “The party is in near-unanimous lock step in support of him, certainly at the activist and delegate level.”
In some respects, the shift toward Mr. Trump in Republican state organizations has been organic, driven by the president’s immense popularity with the party’s most committed voters. In Arizona, an emerging presidential swing state, conservative activists in January ejected a chairman aligned with the Republican establishment in favor of Kelli Ward, a former Senate candidate with fringe views who tied herself closely to Mr. Trump.
But Mr. Trump and his aides have also taken a more active hand in shaping the party leadership around the country, mostly to their own great advantage, according to half a dozen Republicans briefed on the Trump campaign’s loyalty operation. A division of the Trump campaign known as the Delegates and Party Organization unit has closely tracked state party leadership elections and occasionally weighed in to help a preferred contender.
In Michigan, for instance, Mr. Trump’s campaign manager, Brad Parscale, recently endorsed a former state legislator, Laura Cox, to take over Michigan’s discombobulated state party.
The Trump campaign has also taken steps to blunt the influence of a few Republican governors who are hostile to the president. In Massachusetts, Trump aides worked in January to help a hard-line candidate, Jim Lyons, win the chairmanship against a candidate linked closely to the state’s Republican governor, Charlie Baker, who is a critic of Mr. Trump. (As a candidate, Mr. Lyons vowed to “make the Massachusetts Republican Party great again.”)
In Maryland, where Gov. Larry Hogan has mused about challenging Mr. Trump, presidential loyalists in the party apparatus are prepared to flout Mr. Hogan’s wishes in selecting delegates. In Maryland and some other states, convention delegates are selected by a combination of primary voters and members of the state party committee — constituencies overwhelmingly supportive of Mr. Trump.
“No other candidate, no matter if it’s Governor Hogan, Bill Weld or anybody else, will get one single delegate out of Maryland,” said David Bossie, the state’s R.N.C. committeeman and an adviser to Mr. Trump.
“The key is that we make sure that the voters of Colorado understand the great job the president has done,” said Representative Ken Buck, the Colorado G.O.P. chairman. “That is what my job is.”
Some states are so fully in the grips of Trump enthusiasts that the campaign has sought to keep Mr. Trump neutral in local races, out of concern that he could alienate one supportive faction or another. In Rhode Island last weekend, the campaign dispatched an aide to answer questions from party activists about Mr. Trump’s view of the race for state chairman, after Sean Spicer, the former White House press secretary, reportedly made calls on behalf of a candidate who was ultimately defeated. The Trump campaign made clear that Mr. Spicer had been acting on his own, a person familiar with the conversations said.
Last month, several top Trump strategists, including Mr. Stepien and Mr. Clark, informed the president directly on the efforts to lock down party organizations for his re-election, people briefed on the meeting said. In a statement, Mr. Clark described the operation as part of a long run-up to the 2020 convention.
“Like any good campaign operation, we are working to ensure that state party chairs and delegates reflect the will of Republican voters, who support President Trump in record numbers,” Mr. Clark said. “Our goal is to pave the way for a convention in Charlotte that gives the president a multiday platform to share his achievements with 300 million Americans.”
Though the Republican National Committee has stopped short of formally endorsing Mr. Trump, state chairmen elected with the help of Mr. Trump’s campaign have defended him fiercely, even from Mr. Weld’s long-shot effort. When the former Massachusetts governor rolled out his campaign, Mr. Lyons blasted him harshly, as did Stephen Stepanek, a former co-chairman for the Trump campaign in New Hampshire who now leads that state’s Republican Party.
That hard-edge approach has stirred some discomfort in New Hampshire, where some traditional Republicans prize the state’s reputation for political independence and have resisted efforts to quash an open primary. Steve Duprey, a member of the Republican National Committee from the state, hosted Mr. Weld there in late March and argued that New Hampshire’s "special role” as an early-voting state required it to be open to candidates besides Mr. Trump. He said in an interview he believed primary competition was healthy, as a general matter.
“Our job is to be neutral and treat them all equally, period,” argued Mr. Duprey, who was a close adviser to John McCain.
There are still elements of the Republican Party that have yet to fall fully in line behind the president, Republicans acknowledge. The party suffered serious defections in 2018 among moderate white voters who have historically tended to support Republicans, and some of the party’s traditional financial backers have not yet committed to supporting him in 2020. Advisers to Mr. Trump acknowledge that mobilizing the party’s major-donor base remains one of the most important challenges for his campaign.
But there is no comparable reticence among the Republican Party’s field captains in the states. At the meeting in Colorado over the weekend, Vera Ortegon, the state’s R.N.C. committeewoman, alluded to the president’s nagging Republican critics in the form of a stern warning.
Jackson Barnett contributed reporting from Denver.
© 2019 The New York Times
And yet: claims for unemployment insurance are at their lowest levels in 5 decades, and the economic indexes: NASDAC, DOW, up, may say something else per public confidence according to the the republicans., even though it was Obama who turned things around, after the ’ Great Recession.
Donald Trump Is Trying to Kill You
Trust the pork producers; fear the wind turbine.
April 4, 2019
There’s a lot we don’t know about the legacy Donald Trump will leave behind. And it is, of course, hugely important what happens in the 2020 election. But one thing seems sure: Even if he’s a one-term president, Trump will have caused, directly or indirectly, the premature deaths of a large number of Americans.
Some of those deaths will come at the hands of right-wing, white nationalist extremists, who are a rapidly growing threat, partly because they feel empowered by a president who calls them “very fine people.”
Some will come from failures of governance, like the inadequate response to Hurricane Maria, which surely contributed to the high death toll in Puerto Rico. (Reminder: Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens.)
Some will come from the administration’s continuing efforts to sabotage Obamacare, which have failed to kill health reform but have stalled the decline in the number of uninsured, meaning that many people still aren’t getting the health care they need. Of course, if Trump gets his way and eliminates Obamacare altogether, things on this front will get much, much worse.
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But the biggest death toll is likely to come from Trump’s agenda of deregulation — or maybe we should call it “deregulation,” because his administration is curiously selective about which industries it wants to leave alone.
Consider two recent events that help capture the deadly strangeness of what’s going on.
One is the administration’s plan for hog plants to take over much of the federal responsibility for food safety inspections. And why not? It’s not as if we’ve seen safety problems arise from self-regulation in, say, the aircraft industry, have we? Or as if we ever experience major outbreaks of food-borne illness? Or as if there was a reason the U.S. government stepped in to regulate meatpacking in the first place?
Now, you could see the Trump administration’s willingness to trust the meat industry to keep our meat safe as part of an overall attack on government regulation, a willingness to trust profit-making businesses to do the right thing and let the market rule. And there’s something to that, but it’s not the whole story, as illustrated by another event: Trump’s declaration the other day that wind turbines cause cancer.
Now, you could put this down to personal derangement: Trump has had an irrational hatred for wind power ever since he failed to prevent construction of a wind farm near his Scottish golf course. And Trump seems deranged and irrational on so many issues that one more bizarre claim hardly seems to matter.
But there’s more to this than just another Trumpism. After all, we normally think of Republicans in general, and Trump in particular, as people who minimize or deny the “negative externalities” imposed by some business activities — the uncompensated costs they impose on other people or businesses.
For example, the Trump administration wants to roll back rules that limit emissions of mercury from power plants. And in pursuit of that goal, it wants to prevent the Environmental Protection Agency from taking account of many of the benefits from reduced mercury emissions, such as an associated reduction in nitrogen oxide.
But when it comes to renewable energy, Trump and company are suddenly very worried about supposed negative side effects, which generally exist only in their imagination. Last year the administration floated a proposal that would have forced the operators of electricity grids to subsidize coal and nuclear energy. The supposed rationale was that new sources were threatening to destabilize those grids — but the grid operators themselves denied that this was the case.
So it’s deregulation for some, but dire warnings about imaginary threats for others. What’s going on?
Part of the answer is, follow the money. Political contributions from the meat-processing industry overwhelmingly favor Republicans. Coal mining supports the G.O.P. almost exclusively. Alternative energy, on the other hand, generally favors Democrats.
There are probably other things, too. If you’re a party that wishes we could go back to the 1950s (but without the 91 percent top tax rate), you’re going to have a hard time accepting the reality that hippie-dippy, unmanly things like wind and solar power are becoming ever more cost-competitive.
Whatever the drivers of Trump policy, the fact, as I said, is that it will kill people. Wind turbines don’t cause cancer, but coal-burning power plants do — along with many other ailments. The Trump administration’s own estimates indicate that its relaxation of coal pollution rules will kill more than 1,000 Americans every year. If the administration gets to implement its full agenda — not just deregulation of many industries, but discrimination against industries it doesn’t like, such as renewable energy — the toll will be much higher.
So if you eat meat — or, for that matter, drink water or breathe air — there’s a real sense in which Donald Trump is trying to kill you. And even if he’s turned out of office next year, for many Americans it will be too late.
Donald Trump’s tax dodge
Analysis by Chris Cillizza, CNN Editor-at-large
Updated 9:59 PM EDT, Thu April 04, 2019
(CNN) Start here: There is absolutely nothing stopping Donald Trump from authorizing the release of his past returns.
Not the audit he has claimed to be under for years. (Side note: We have no way of knowing if Trump has been under audit, but we do know it would not preclude him from releasing his taxes.)
Not that his finances are very complicated, as he often claims.
Not that people don’t care to see them, as Kellyanne Conway has said.
And not, as Trump said today, because the decision is up to his lawyers.
Asked whether he would instruct the IRS commissioner to comply with a request by House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Richard Neal, D-Massachusetts, for his tax returns from 2013 through 2018, Trump offered on Thursday: “They’ll speak to my lawyers and they’ll speak to the Attorney General.”
Which is a) not an answer to the question and b) is totally meaningless. Trump is the President. If he wanted the returns released to Neal, they would be in the Massachusetts Democrat’s hands within a matter of days.
The simple fact – and this has been obvious to anyone paying attention for the last several years – is that Trump made the decision at some point early in his 2016 campaign that the flack he would take for not releasing any returns would be nothing compared to what would happen if he did release them.
The Point: This isn’t about what Trump can legally do. This is about what Trump wants to do. And he really doesn’t want his tax returns going public.
View on CNN
© 2019 Cable News Network. Turner Broadcasting System, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Trump in California
‘Trump-Pence must go’: Trump visits California, where he is wildly unpopular, to raise money
CHRIS WOODYARD | USA TODAY | 2 hours ago
LOS ANGELES — President Donald Trump returned Friday to one of the most hostile political territories for him in the U.S.— California.
After a stop at the U.S. border with Mexico in Calexico, California, Trump arrived in Los Angeles to attend a fundraiser in a state where his job-approval ratings have been dismal and his past visits have been met by protesters. This time around, a few protesters held up a sign saying “Trump-Pence must go” as the president’s motorcade drove nearby on Sunset Boulevard on the way to a Beverly Hills mansion.
Trump was also expected to make an unannounced side trip to the coastal city of Rancho Palos Verdes for a dinner at his Trump golf course overlooking the Pacific Ocean with a group that included members of the City Council, the Los Angeles Times reported.
Trump hasn’t been shy at hurling jabs-- during his visits or year-round, really, from his Twitter account-- at California’s Democratic leaders and their policies. This time was no exception. During his border visit, he complained that California’s political leaders are whiners.
"I’m talking about the politicians in California. They complain,” Trump was quoted as saying by CNN in Calexico, California, pointing to the state’s recent wildfires that claimed thousands of homes as an example.
He went on to say, "When their forests go up (in flames), they complain. They gotta take care of their forests a lot better. "
His visit came as the president was once again redefining his immigration policies, which have been widely criticized as unnecessarily cruel by many California leaders with close economic or cultural ties to nearby Mexico. Trump backed off Thursday from his latest threat to close the U.S.-Mexico border in the face of an immigration surge.
He flew to Los Angeles from a visit to the U.S. side of the border with Mexico. There, he took a look at a two-mile refurbished section of fencing and took aim at the surge in migrants, saying there’s no room left in the U.S. for them. He was briefed on border security, which is sure to become a core part of his 2020 bid for re-election.
He called the increase in immigrants showing up at the border “a colossal surge, and it’s overwhelming our immigration system."
He added, "We can’t take you anymore. Our country is full.”
The president arrived in Southern California still basking in his attorney general’s recent synopsis of special counsel Robert Mueller’s report that found no collusion between his campaign and Russia in the 2016 election. “According to polling, few people seem to care about the Russian Collusion Hoax, but some Democrats are fighting hard to keep the Witch Hunt alive,” Trump tweeted ahead of his border visit.
Trump’s visit could be a much-needed boost to the spirits of Los Angeles-area Republicans, said Shawn Steel, the Republican National Committeeman from California, who called Trump’s visit an “energizer.” The GOP saw major losses in the 2018 midterm elections in California.
The “giant dark cloud” of the Mueller report has lifted, Americans are enjoying another year of a strong economy and Trump has scored foreign policy successes, Steel said. At the same time, he said Democrats in power were making missteps unpopular with moderates. He cited Gov. Gavin Newsom’s plan to end the death penalty as an example.
President Donald Trump
President Donald Trump
SCOTT OLSON/GETTY IMAGES
Steel said among the party’s goals is winning back the four congressional seats it lost in November in the traditional GOP stronghold of Orange County, just south of Los Angeles.
But it won’t be easy. Polls show Trump remains deeply unpopular in California. A Quinnipiac University poll released in February showed only a 28% job-approval rating across the state for Trump. Having won seven seats in the midterm election, Democrats hold a 46 to seven advantage in congressional seats from California.
As of February, Democrats held an almost two-to-one voter registration advantage over Republicans. Since 2011, the Republican percentage of the vote has slipped from 30.9% to 23.6%, according to the California Secretary of State’s office.
“They are becoming an endangered species,” said Susan Estrich, a political science professor at the University of Southern California.
She said there is no getting around Trump’s unpopularity.
“There’s probably no state in the country that likes Trump least,” Estrich said.
Contributing: Associated Press
‘Trump-Pence must go’: Trump visits California, where he is wildly unpopular, to raise money
CHRIS WOODYARD | USA TODAY | 2 hours ago
LOS ANGELES — President Donald Trump returned Friday to one of the most hostile political territories for him in the U.S.— California.
After a stop at the U.S. border with Mexico in Calexico, California, Trump arrived in Los Angeles to attend a fundraiser in a state where his job-approval ratings have been dismal and his past visits have been met by protesters. This time around, a few protesters held up a sign saying “Trump-Pence must go” as the president’s motorcade drove nearby on Sunset Boulevard on the way to a Beverly Hills mansion.
Trump was also expected to make an unannounced side trip to the coastal city of Rancho Palos Verdes for a dinner at his Trump golf course overlooking the Pacific Ocean with a group that included members of the City Council, the Los Angeles Times reported.
Trump hasn’t been shy at hurling jabs-- during his visits or year-round, really, from his Twitter account-- at California’s Democratic leaders and their policies. This time was no exception. During his border visit, he complained that California’s political leaders are whiners.
"I’m talking about the politicians in California. They complain,” Trump was quoted as saying by CNN in Calexico, California, pointing to the state’s recent wildfires that claimed thousands of homes as an example.
He went on to say, "When their forests go up (in flames), they complain. They gotta take care of their forests a lot better. "
His visit came as the president was once again redefining his immigration policies, which have been widely criticized as unnecessarily cruel by many California leaders with close economic or cultural ties to nearby Mexico. Trump backed off Thursday from his latest threat to close the U.S.-Mexico border in the face of an immigration surge.
He flew to Los Angeles from a visit to the U.S. side of the border with Mexico. There, he took a look at a two-mile refurbished section of fencing and took aim at the surge in migrants, saying there’s no room left in the U.S. for them. He was briefed on border security, which is sure to become a core part of his 2020 bid for re-election.
He called the increase in immigrants showing up at the border “a colossal surge, and it’s overwhelming our immigration system."
He added, "We can’t take you anymore. Our country is full.”
The president arrived in Southern California still basking in his attorney general’s recent synopsis of special counsel Robert Mueller’s report that found no collusion between his campaign and Russia in the 2016 election. “According to polling, few people seem to care about the Russian Collusion Hoax, but some Democrats are fighting hard to keep the Witch Hunt alive,” Trump tweeted ahead of his border visit.
Trump’s visit could be a much-needed boost to the spirits of Los Angeles-area Republicans, said Shawn Steel, the Republican National Committeeman from California, who called Trump’s visit an “energizer.” The GOP saw major losses in the 2018 midterm elections in California.
The “giant dark cloud” of the Mueller report has lifted, Americans are enjoying another year of a strong economy and Trump has scored foreign policy successes, Steel said. At the same time, he said Democrats in power were making missteps unpopular with moderates. He cited Gov. Gavin Newsom’s plan to end the death penalty as an example.
Steel said among the party’s goals is winning back the four congressional seats it lost in November in the traditional GOP stronghold of Orange County, just south of Los Angeles.
But it won’t be easy. Polls show Trump remains deeply unpopular in California. A Quinnipiac University poll released in February showed only a 28% job-approval rating across the state for Trump. Having won seven seats in the midterm election, Democrats hold a 46 to seven advantage in congressional seats from California.
As of February, Democrats held an almost two-to-one voter registration advantage over Republicans. Since 2011, the Republican percentage of the vote has slipped from 30.9% to 23.6%, according to the California Secretary of State’s office.
“They are becoming an endangered species,” said Susan Estrich, a political science professor at the University of Southern California.
She said there is no getting around Trump’s unpopularity.
“There’s probably no state in the country that likes Trump least,” Estrich said.
© Copyright Gannett 2019
Sorry double printed.