Nebraska Republican Senator Sassy said to day , that " there will be a Senate Republican bloodbath, if, Trump looses the election."
“Could you imagine if I lose?” he said. “I’m not going to feel so good. Maybe I’ll have to leave the country…”- Trump off the cuff , on the campaign trail.
Trump continues bizarre appeals to suburban women as he campaigns in Covid hotspots
(CNN)If President Donald Trump loses his reelection bid in November, it will be in part because of his fundamental misunderstanding of the beliefs of “suburban women,” whom he has tried to win back with a series of bizarre and racist appeals that seem more targeted to a stereotype from the 1950s and 1960s than the American women who actually live in those areas today.
Many of the female voters who have abandoned Trump recoil from his divisive language and disapprove of both his handling of race relations and the pandemic. But he has tried to convince them to support him through a campaign of fear and xenophobia, with claims about the Democratic agenda that plunge deep into the realm of the ridiculous and would be believed only by the most naïve, low-information voters.
His speech Saturday night in Michigan exemplified those political miscalculations when it comes to women he has referred to as the “suburban housewives of America” as he tried to create fear about crime from immigrants and argued that Joe Biden will upend life in the suburbs by putting public housing projects in the middle of leafy neighborhoods – a reference to an Obama-era housing regulation aimed at ending segregation.
“Would you like a nice low-income housing project next to your suburban beautiful ranch style house? Generally speaking, no,” Trump said in Muskegon. “I saved your suburbs – women – suburban women, you’re supposed to love Trump,” he said.
The President went on to make the ludicrous claim that Biden and Democrats want to overwhelm Michigan neighborhoods with refugees from Syria, Somalia and Yemen, and “poorly vetted migrants from jihadist regions.”
Continuing his long-standing pattern of mocking women he perceives as opponents in sexist or misogynistic language — a tactic that does not go over well with women in either party — Trump attacked Democratic Gov. Michigan Gretchen Whitmer during the same rally, along with his 2016 opponent Hillary Clinton, and NBC’s Savannah Guthrie, who moderated his Thursday night town hall.
Trump accused Whitmer, whom he has previously called “a dictator,” of unnecessarily locking down her state as she fought the pandemic. That led his crowd to break into a chant of “Lock her up!” a little more than a week after federal authorities revealed a plot by extremists to kidnap Whitmer and overthrow the government.
Rather than condemning the derailed plot — which led to terrorism, conspiracy and weapons charges against more than a dozen men — or discouraging that kind of divisive language, Trump essentially endorsed the cheer with his authoritarian rhetoric about jailing his political opponents by adding Clinton and the Biden family into the mix.
“Lock them all up,” Trump replied to the crowd.
He complained that Whitmer said publicly that his refusal to denounce White supremacists, extremists and hate groups has emboldened activists like those who allegedly planned the foiled attack against her.
“I guess they said she was threatened, right?” Trump said, seeming to doubt the specifics of the case and underplaying the violence it could have entailed. “She was threatened, and she blamed me — she blamed me, and our people were the ones that worked with her people, so let’s see what happens.”
Whitmer immediately responded on Twitter: “This is exactly the rhetoric that has put me, my family, and other government officials’ lives in danger while we try to save the lives of our fellow Americans. It needs to stop.” Her staff echoed that plea. “Every single time the President does this at a rally, the violent rhetoric towards her immediately escalates on social media. It has to stop. It just has to,” her deputy digital director wrote on Twitter.
On Friday at a campaign event in Detroit, Biden condemned Trump for refusing to denounce White supremacist groups at the first debate and for criticizing Whitmer after the kidnapping plot was revealed.
“What the hell’s the matter with this guy?” Biden said. “Attacking Governor Whitmer on the same day this plot was exposed. It’s despicable.”
At his rallies Friday night and Saturday, Trump also attacked Guthrie as angry and overly emotional during the NBC town hall.
“Her face – the anger, the craziness,” he said, describing how he viewed the dynamic during a speech to his supporters Friday night. As he doubled down on the trope of the hysterical woman, he added that he told Guthrie to “Take it easy. Relax.”
Later in Janesville, Wisconsin, Saturday night, the President tried to undermine the credentials of the next female debate moderator, NBC News White House Correspondent Kristen Welker, by claiming that he’d known her “for a long time” and that “she is very unfair.” The final presidential debate, which Welker will moderate, is on Thursday in Nashville, Tennessee.
It remains unclear if the President simply does not understand how those attacks on women could backfire at a time when millions of female voters are deciding whether to give him a second chance, or whether he simply can’t resist engaging in those tactics because they rev up his crowds. Biden was up by 25 points among women voters in an average of the last five live interview polls, according to an analysis by CNN’s Harry Enten. In the final pre-election polls in 2016, Hillary Clinton only had a 13-point edge among likely female voters.
“The fake news keep saying that suburban women don’t like me because I don’t sound nice,” the President said. “I don’t have time to be nice. I got a lot of work to do for you.”
But his remarks have gone far beyond the limits of acceptable political discourse: he has referred to Democratic vice presidential nominee Kamala Harris as “a monster” and recently said of Clinton, “the glass ceiling broke her.”
While returning to some of his old lines from the summer about how the radical left plans “to erase American history, purge American values and destroy the American way of life,” Trump tried to revive the debate Saturday night over removing monuments that glorify American historical figures who were slave owners.
“This election will decide whether we preserve our magnificent heritage or whether we let far left radicals wipe it all away,” he said. “They constantly smear America as a racist country. … America is the most magnificent, most virtuous nation that has ever existed.”
At one point, he described his joy in watching law enforcement authorities move in on crowds to prevent violence in Minneapolis after the protests against racial injustice.
“I don’t know, there’s something about that — when you watch everybody getting pushed around — there’s something very beautiful about it. I don’t care what I’m doing. Not politically correct … But you people get it.”
Trump campaigns as if the pandemic is over
Trump campaigned in Wisconsin and Michigan on Saturday while scarcely mentioning the coronavirus pandemic, despite the fact that cases are rising in a majority of states across the country.
Michigan’s case count on Friday was the state’s highest number of positive test results reported in one day, according to the state’s Department of Health and Human Services.
Wisconsin also reported a new record high number of cases on Friday, according to data from Johns Hopkins University. The state’s positivity rate was at 23.91% as of Saturday morning, according to the COVID Tracking project.
On Friday, US Surgeon General Jerome Adams said Wisconsin is one of the Covid-19 “red” states that federal officials are watching closely.
“Your positivity rates are over 10% and going in the wrong direction. Cases are in the red, going in the wrong direction,” Adams said during a news conference in Wisconsin Friday. “It is critical that we actually understand where this virus is circulating so that we could get cases under control and reverse positivity.”
Without laying out any specifics, Trump claimed Saturday that his plan “will crush the virus” and said his teams are working toward a safe vaccine and a “very rapid recovery.”
He acknowledged at one point that some states are currently seeing spikes, but then downplayed those increases in cases as part of a typical pattern for the virus.
Trump said there had been a recent spike or surge in cases in states like Arizona and Florida, but then insisted that it went back down.
“You’ve got to open up,” he said in Wisconsin. “You’ve got to get your place going.”
© 2020 Cable News Network. A Warner Media Company. All Rights Reserved.
On Point
This ‘War Game’ Maps Out What Happens If The President Contests The Election
Listen to our roundtable with former military officials here.
Did the president mean it when he told Fox News recently he might not accept the election results in November? What might happen if the results of the presidential election are contested? Former government officials from both parties held a “war game” to think through the consequences. We hear what they discovered.
Guests
Rosa Brooks, professor of constitutional and international law and national security at the Georgetown School of Law. Former Defense Department official. Co-founder of the Transition Integrity Project, which held the war game. (@brooks_rosa)
Ret. Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell (2002-2005). Served 31 years in the U.S. Army. Adjunct professor of government and public policy at the College of William & Mary.
Interview Highlights
In June, Ret. Col. Lawrence Wilkerson joined us for a conversation about the use of the military amid protests against police brutality. During the conversation, Col. Wilkerson revealed he is part of two groups devoted to protecting the November elections: the National Task Force on Election Crises and the Transition Integrity Project.
Below, Rosa Brooks, co-founder of the Transition Integrity Project, gives us some more detail about the goals and lessons of the project.
On co-founding the Transition Integrity Project
Rosa Brooks: “I think a lot of people have been wondering in the back of their minds for a few years now, what would Donald Trump do if he lost? Would he leave? Or is he the kind of guy who would say, ‘The election was stolen. I actually won. It’s fake news that I lost. I’m staying.’ And the seeds for the Transition Integrity Project were planted back last autumn. I was at a big dinner, one of those big D.C. dinners, and I was chatting with a federal appellate court judge, and a guy who was a corporate counsel at a big corporation.
"And I said idly as one does, I said, ‘Wow, what if Trump lost but wouldn’t leave?’ And the federal judge said immediately, ‘Oh, no, that would never happen. The military would never let that happen.’ And the other guy said, ‘Oh, no, that would never happen. The Secret Service would never let that happen.’ And I thought, 'Wait, what? What do you mean the military would never let that happen? What do you mean by the military? What do you mean, wouldn’t let that happen?’
"I had this sort of image of … the Joint Chiefs of Staff are going to march across the Potomac from the Pentagon, you know, carrying a bunch of bazookas and head to the White House because I can’t see that happening. And if it happened, it wouldn’t really be a good thing. And the same for the Secret Service. You know, who exactly are we talking about? What mechanisms, what institutional mechanisms?
"And this conversation left me thinking, I think a lot of people have this false sense of security, that there exists some magic institution that in the event of President Trump doing something in defiance of the law, in defiance of democratic rule of law, norms would just kind of descend like the Gods and rescue America. But that’s not really how people and institutions work. So the impetus for creating this project was to really find a way to talk in a more granular way about the what ifs.
"What would happen? And what would these actors do? With a view, obviously, not just towards scaring the heck out of everybody, which I think we are succeeding and doing, unfortunately. But, you know, primarily with a view towards figuring out how do we make those scary realities not come true? What can be done between now and November to make sure that America stays the America we want it to be and becomes the America we want it to be.”
On members of the Transition Integrity Project
Rosa Brooks: “I can give you some names. We’re actually in the process of going back to all of our participants and saying, ‘Are you willing to have your name publicly connected to this?’ We had promised everybody, you know, we’ll keep your participation confidential if you would like us to. But a lot of people are beginning to say, ‘I’m happy to be publicly connected to it.’
"So they ranged from people like Michael Steele, the former chairman of the Republican National Committee, to John Podesta, who has worked for Hillary Clinton, very senior levels, Obama, et cetera. … People like Larry with deep experience, obviously, not only in the military, but Larry also has deep experience at the State Department. … We had former Governor Jennifer Granholm from Michigan. We had Donna Brazile, who is a Democratic consultant. We had Republican political consultants and even a couple of former Republican members of Congress, some of whose names are not yet out there.
“So it was a very varied group. We had people who had worked for members of Congress at senior levels. We had people who had been members of Congress from both parties. We had journalists. We had people like Bill Kristol on the conservative side, as well as people who had worked for big tech companies. So we really were trying as much as we could to assemble a group of people who, If asked to role play, if asked ‘OK pretend you’re on the Trump campaign, pretend that you’re a Democratic elected official, pretend that you are Facebook or Twitter.’ We wanted people who would have a real life sense of how those actors and organizations likely would behave based on actual experience in those sectors.”
What are ‘war game’ tabletop exercises?
Rosa Brooks: “They’re widely used in the national security world, but they’re also increasingly used in the private sector and in other areas of government in the nonprofit sector, because basically it’s just a way to think through some what ifs. That’s a little bit more structured, a little bit more disciplined than just sitting around together saying, ‘Hey, what if this bad thing happens? What if that happens? What do we do?’
“The idea is that you don’t get to say, ‘Oh, that could never happen.’ That you actually have to think about the things that probably won’t happen, that you hope won’t happen. But think about, ‘Could they happen, how could they happen? If they happen, what would we do?’ Not because you’re predicting an outcome, but because you want to be prepared and in fact, you want to prevent the bad outcomes from ever coming about. So they can be structured in all kinds of different ways.”
On how the game works
Rosa Brooks: "We used a form of gaming called the Matrix game, which essentially you start with a scenario: Trump loses the popular vote but wins in the Electoral College, or Biden has a narrow win in the Electoral College and a larger win of the popular vote, or whatever it may be. And, you know, we worked with experts on polling and election law to try to come up with scenarios state-by-state that were as realistic as possible.
"And you then take your participants and we assign them into teams. So we had a team playing the role of the Trump campaign. We had a team playing the role of the Biden campaign. And we had teams playing elected officials from each party. We had a media team. We had a public team with some polling experts who could help say, ‘Here’s how people might respond in this situation or that situation.’
"And then each team gets to make moves. And the moves take the form of essentially saying, ‘OK. Hello, we’re the Trump campaign. We’re going to do X in order to accomplish Y. And we believe it’s going to be successful because Z.’ And that move might be we’re going to request a recount, or we’re going to file a lawsuit requesting a halt to vote counting in Michigan, or wherever. And we think that will help us. Because here’s what we’re trying to accomplish with this and here’s why we think it’s going to work.
"And then the other players can weigh in and say things … based on their real life experience and say, ‘Yeah, that’s probably going to be successful or no, you know, that’s a total long shot, or who knows, 50-50.’ Based on that we actually, you know, these games are quite artificial. They have all kinds of constraints. That’s one of the reasons to emphasize they’re not predictions. They’re explorations of possibilities. Not, this is what’s going to happen.
"But then there’s an element of pure randomness. We literally had our guy running the games, an expert on game design would roll a 10 sided [dice]. And depending on the comments from participants, the probability of success of a particular move might be judged to be 20%, or 80% or 50-50. And depending on that initial assessment, the dye would be rolled to determine, ‘OK. It worked. You know, the court ruled in your favor. Or, the recount was stopped, or it didn’t work.’ And then other players sequentially would be able to make moves in response.
"And this would go on through several phases with different teams making moves and the other teams responding to them in an effort as much as we could to, you know, in a period of four or five hours, to simulate what would take place in the real world over weeks. And in fact, a couple of months. In an effort to try to figure out if that happened, what, in fact would these other actors do? What would career civil servants do? What would the military do? What would elected officials do?”
On lessons of the “war game”
Ret. Col. Lawrence Wilkerson: “Let me just say some of the things that we’re putting out there. Among those things, one that is very important is the media, particularly the mainstream media. They cannot act as they usually act with regard to elections. They have to play a coup on election night. They can’t be declaring some state like Pennsylvania for one candidate or the other. When Pennsylvania probably has thousands upon thousands of votes yet to come in and count. So the media has to get its act in order and it has to act very differently than it normally does.
“Second, as I said before, citizens have to vote. Even with COVID-19, they have to vote. And we also have learned that poll workers have to be younger. And we’ve started a movement all across the country to train young people. And we’ve had really good luck with the volunteers to do so, to be poll workers. Because we found out in Wisconsin, for example, poll workers are mostly over 60. And many of them didn’t show up because they were afraid of COVID-19. And so Wisconsin went from about one 188 polling places, to about 15. That’s disastrous. And we need citizens in general to be aware of some of the things we’ve talked about here so that they can alert their members of Congress as constituents of those members to take action, or to be aware of the same thing.
"And lastly, let me say this to all my military friends out there, as we used to say in the chairman’s office. The military needs to stay in barracks. Simply stated, that means the military has no business taking any side in either part of this election. And I remember in 1989 when Cory Aquino in the Philippines telephoned us, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and said, ‘I have a company that’s about to take over my government. Can you help me?’ And we essentially made sure that company stayed in barracks. So we don’t need the military interfering in any way, fashion or form with these elections. I know that’s dire. I know that’s too serious, maybe. But I’ve read the history books.”
Boston Globe: “A bipartisan group secretly gathered to game out a contested Trump-Biden election. It wasn’t pretty” — “On the second Friday in June, a group of political operatives, former government and military officials, and academics quietly convened online for what became a disturbing exercise in the fragility of American democracy.”
Newsweek: “Bipartisan Group Predicts ‘Violence’ If Trump Loses Election and Refuses to Leave White House” — “A bipartisan group of about 80 political operatives and academics has been involved in discussions about what could happen if President Donald Trump were to lose the November election and then contest the results, potentially refusing to leave the White House.”
Financial Times: “How America could fail its democracy test” — “Donald Trump has won the electoral college by a clear margin. Yet America is in ferment. Cities around the world are holding candlelit vigils for US democracy and smaller Democratic states have joined California to threaten ‘Calexit.’ Unions plan a general strike to pressure chief executives to back America’s majority.”
Washington Post: “Trump’s assault on election integrity forces question: What would happen if he refused to accept a loss?” — “President Trump’s relentless efforts to sow doubts about the legitimacy of this year’s election are forcing both parties to reckon with the possibility that he may dispute the result in November if he loses — leading to an unprecedented test of American democracy.”
Related:
Mass. Voters Doubt Election Results Will Be Trusted, Split On Trump’s Respect For Rule of Law
Trump Will Try To Subvert The Election. We Must Be Prepared
Massachusetts Law Enforcement Readies For Contentious Election
That coordination includes a centrally located command center that will gather intelligence from around the state about potential disruptions to the election or possible violence following the election results.
© Copyright WBUR 2018
As always the Marxist strive to shift the focus of suspicion onto their opponent for their own activity.
The Marxists intend to reject and battle against the election so they accuse their opponent of of it.
No surprise here.
And none here either. Its a game, a waiting game in addition to other things, depending on the side of the isle.
Got a friend, worried, if covid spike occurs, his business may fail more likely, and he goes by the theory, that Trump’s prediction of overall business failures leading to another great depression, then simulating world wide ideological conflict balances out the opposite.
That if such a scenario would unfold, the potential loss of life from ensuing hunger, psychological and physical distress, would be far greater then the economy being left open, albeit in a limited manner.
But he also believes that Vivid was intended to be a biological weapon, and what happens next, would be a strike on China with all we’ve got . Bad? Not according to the same person, since US military is so overwhelming and specifically perfect in limited ways, that China knowing this intelligence would be very timid to engage.
Now this for starters , if Trump wins. But the ‘socialists’ within their ranks, proclaiming ‘none dare call it a cinspiracy’ would concentrate on saving lives at the exclusion of anything else.
Is You get 2 versions of the same story, depending on which side of the isle put you by the cards dealt.
What unabashedly say You, in spite of having an earlier abridged version. before.
I couldn’t quite follow all of that but…
The last thing the socialists are concerned with is “lives”. Socialism is about centralizing power and at any expense. They quite readily eat their own.
Well power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. That cliché has become self serving by now.
But here is another take on mud slinging, and nothing surprises there either, here, except the depth of the swamp from which voters can fish out something tangible.and rational.
"Stay Updated on Developing Stories
How low will Donald Trump go?
(CNN)With just 16 days(!) until the 2020 election, it will be here before you know it. Every Sunday, I outline the 5 BIG storylines you need to know to understand the upcoming week on the campaign trail. And they’re ranked – so the No. 1 story is the most important of the coming week.
By Tuesday, according to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, we should know whether Congress and the White House will find a way to make a deal before the election on a coronavirus stimulus package.
“While there was some encouraging news, much work remains,” Pelosi said in a letter sent to her colleagues on Sunday afternoon. “I am optimistic that we can reach agreement before the election. To that end, we are writing language as we negotiate the priorities, so that we are fully prepared to move forward once we reach agreement.”
The nut of the issue appears to be the size of the bill – particularly as it relates to funding for testing (and other Covid-19-related issues) for minority communities.
The White House offered a $1.8 trillion bill last week which Pelosi quickly rejected. (Some Democratic Party leaders – including 2020 presidential candidate Andrew Yang – have suggested Pelosi needs to cut a deal for the good of the country.)
And while she seems open to the idea of a deal generally, other parts of Pelosi’s letter are, um, less encouraging.
“The White House had assured Democrats that they would accept our language on testing with a ‘light touch,’” she wrote. “Unfortunately, as the committees of jurisdiction review the White House’s language provision-by-provision, it has become clear that these changes are not a light touch but instead, a deep dive.”
The clock is ticking. 48 hours and counting.
Yes, President Donald Trump looks like he is going to lose the presidential race to former Vice President Joe Biden. But it now increasingly looks like his unpopularity with the electorate could also cost his party the Senate and drive them even further into the House minority.
Inside Elections, a non-partisan handicapping tip sheet run by Nathan Gonzales, a CNN contributor, revised its seat projections in the Senate and the House in Democrats’ favor.
Gonzales is now predicting a four- to six-seat Democratic gain in the Senate, which, if it comes to pass, means that Democrats will win the Senate majority whether Biden wins the White House or not.
On the House side, Gonzales now says Democrats are likely to gain between 10 and 20 seats, which could well double their current majority. (Republicans need a net gain of 17 seats to win the House majority, which is, well, not happening.)
If Inside Elections is right, Democrats would have full control over Washington that they haven’t enjoyed since the first two years of Barack Obama’s first term.
What that would mean is, effectively, an undoing of the last four years of Trump’s presidency – whether on health care, the environment, the tax code or the overall regulatory process in the nation’s capital.
Side note: Keep an eye WAY down-ballot on the battle for state legislative control. This will be the last election before the country redraws its state legislative and House district lines in the wake of the 2020 Census. Which party controls the majority controls the line-drawing software in many of these states.
More than 22 million people – across 45 states and the District of Columbia – have already voted, whether by mail or in person.
That’s roughly half of the total number of early votes – 46 million – cast in the 2016 election. And we are still more than two weeks from the actual Election Day!
Some of the swing state vote total comparisons tell the story of the booming early vote in 2020.
In Florida, almost 2.3 million votes have been cast in this election, roughly double the number of ballots cast at this point in 2016. In Michigan, the vote total is near 1.3 million, nearly three times as large as 2016.
And it’s just not large turnout that’s the story. Democrats are dominating the early vote in the 27 states who reported ballots cast by party affiliation. To date, 5.4 million registered Democrats have voted early while 2.5 million registered Republicans have done so.
(NOTE: This voting information comes from by Catalist, a data company that provides data, analytics and other services to Democrats, academics and non-profit issue advocacy organizations.)
To be clear: Party registration – and early vote numbers – aren’t determinative of outcomes. (My friend Harry Enten explains why here). But what we know is that early vote turnout is very likely to shatter every past record – and that Biden is very likely to have a considerable lead when Election Day dawns.
It’s been three weeks since Trump and Biden first shared a debate stage. And that first debate was an unmitigated disaster for the President as his bullying, interrupting and white-hot rhetoric triggered a decidedly negative reaction in the electorate.
Trump’s refusal to participate in a virtual second debate now means that Thursday night’s head-to-head in Nashville, Tennessee, is Trump’s last chance to alter in some way the operating dynamic of the race.
It’s not totally clear how Trump will do that, although my best guess is that he will spend a lot of time talking about Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, and his time spent on a board of a Ukrainian natural gas company.
Those attacks, however, have to date been of limited appeal outside of Trump’s most loyal followers. Those voters aren’t Trump’s problem. It’s the loosely affiliated Republican and independents that the President needs a message for.
If the past few days is any indication, Trump doesn’t have that message. What he has been pitching in his whirlwind series of campaign stops since his recovery from Covid-19 is just more of the same base-stroking.
One other thing to keep in mind: Biden has said he would not participate in this final debate unless Trump tests negative for coronavirus.
“He just had Covid,” Lara Trump, the wife of Eric Trump, told CNN’s Jake Tapper of the President on Sunday. “He has now been cleared of Covid, which means he took a negative test, I’m sure he’ll take another one before the debate.”
The most dangerous animal is a wounded and trapped one. That goes for humans, too – specifically the President of the United States.
Trump finds himself, with just over two weeks before the election, down in national and swing-state polling, being heavily out-raised and outspent by the Biden campaign and seeing signs everywhere of Republicans starting to jockey for what the party will look like when/if he loses.
Trump’s tweets – and campaign rally speeches – over the past few days suggest that he a) knows he is losing b) has no idea how to turn it around (see item No. 2) and c) is going to try to burn down, well, everything on his perceived way out the door.
That reality makes Trump even more dangerous to Biden – and the country – than he has shown himself to be over the past almost four years. Trump will say and do absolutely anything between now and November 3 – motivated roughly equally by a desire to win and a passion to make things as bad and ugly and awful as possible for Biden in the event he wins.
Trump has already taken to trumpeting potentially hacked materials tied to the Bidens. He has repeatedly questioned Biden’s mental health and acuity. He has encouraged the QAnon movement. He has suggested that the Navy Seal Team 6 killed an Osama bin Laden body double.
And that’s just in the last few weeks! How much lower can Trump go than that, you ask? I am not even sure what “lower” looks like but I am absolutely certain there is no bottom for this President. Never has been.
© 2020 Cable News Network. A Warner Media Company. All Rights Reserved.
Did you listen to the Veritas recording of Jeff Zucker of CNN telling his reporters to focus ONLY on Mr Trump? Bloomberg did the same.
"I’m worried that if President Trump loses — as looks likely — that he’s going to take the Senate down with him,” Nebraska Sen. Ben Sasse said of the GOP’s campaign odds in a conference call with constituents.Anna Moneymaker
Oct. 19, 2020, 9:45 AM EDT
WASHINGTON — Republican senators are increasingly voicing fears that President Donald Trump could lose the election, and some are openly fretting that he’ll turn the party’s candidates into electoral roadkill, distancing themselves from him to an unusual extent.
A weekend of agonizing from Republicans did not yield any perceivable course correction from Trump as he continued his inflammatory rhetoric on the campaign trail and directed some of his fire right back at anxious GOP senators on Twitter.
Pointed warnings of electoral defeat have come in recent days from Sens. Ben Sasse of Nebraska, Ted Cruz of Texas and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina. All are former Trump critics turned allies who reliably vote with the president.
“I’m worried that if President Trump loses — as looks likely — that he’s going to take the Senate down with him,” Sasse said in a conference call with constituents last week, according to a recording first reported on Thursday by the Washington Examiner. “I’m now looking at the possibility of a Republican bloodbath in the Senate.”
The elevated fears come as Democrat Joe Biden leads Trump by more than 9 points in the NBC News national polling average, and as some forecasters say Democrats are likely to secure control of Congress. The grim GOP outlook follows Trump’s widely criticized debate showing, hospitalization for Covid and a failure to secure an economic stimulus package.
“I hope that they’re having a moment of moral clarity. I think they’re realizing that the Trump show is almost over,” said Olivia Troye, a former homeland security adviser to Vice President Mike Pence who served on the White House coronavirus task force. “They have ridden the Trump wave long enough. But I think it’s no longer helpful to do that for them.”
Troye, a longtime Republican, says she plans to vote for Biden and Democrats down the ballot this fall. “There needs to be a significant change,” she said, and insisted that Sasse represents the misgivings of many party elites who are afraid to speak up.
At the Supreme Court hearing last Thursday for Judge Amy Coney Barrett, Graham, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee and a Trump golfing partner who is in a close re-election battle himself, told Democrats, “Y’all have a good chance of winning the White House.”
Cruz, a Trump rival in 2016 and now a staunch ally, said recently on CNBC that if Americans are angry and depressed, “we could lose the White House and both houses of Congress," and the 2020 election “could be a bloodbath of Watergate proportions.”
The remarks also represent a jockeying for position in an anticipated post-Trump world, when the party will have to chart a new path. As others in the GOP cozy up to far-right conspiracy movements like QAnon, Sasse suggested in his remarks that he wants to excise some of the party’s Trumpian elements.
Sasse unloaded on Trump, saying that he “kisses dictators’ butts,” mistreats women, “mocks evangelicals behind closed doors” and has “flirted with white supremacists.” He said that Trump’s family “has treated the presidency like a business opportunity,” and that Trump refused to take the coronavirus seriously for “months” and instead “treated it like a news cycle PR crisis rather than a multi-year public health challenge.”
Liam Donovan, a lobbyist and former Republican operative, said the remarks “strike me less as panic and more as resignation setting in.”
“Even then only Sasse has been critical of the president. Cruz is essentially pre-spinning the loss and laying the blame with Democrats,” he said. “Both suggest the writing is on the wall, but otherwise very different tacks.”
Trump lashed back Saturday in a series of tweets, saying that Sasse has returned to his “stupid and obnoxious ways” after being “nice” to him in recent years and earning his endorsement, which helped Sasse win renomination to his Senate seat in May.
“Little Ben is a liability to the Republican Party, and an embarrassment to the Great State of Nebraska,” Trump wrote. “Other than that, he’s just a wonderful guy!”
Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., who trails his Democratic opponent Cal Cunningham in a competitive race, is openly contemplating Trump’s defeat and orienting his messaging around it.
“The best check on a Biden presidency is for Republicans to have a majority in the Senate. And I do think ‘checks and balances’ does resonate with North Carolina voters,” he told Politico.
Garland Tucker, a retired Raleigh financier who briefly challenged Tillis in the Republican primary before ending his bid early and endorsing him, told NBC News that there is “apprehension” in the party that Trump could lose.
“Any conservative and any Republican fears that could be the case,” he said. But several days ago, he predicted “a very close election” that could tighten if Trump “has a successful next three weeks.”
Tucker said he remained optimistic that Trump would win but added that Republican candidates are in trouble if he doesn’t. “The weaker President Trump is at the top of the ticket, the more likely it is that we lose the Senate majority,” he said. “The two are pretty inextricably combined.”
The fears were compounded on Friday when Trump tore into Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, a 24-year GOP incumbent fighting for her political life, for opposing Barrett’s Supreme Court nomination this close to an election. “Well, she didn’t support Healthcare or my opening up 5000 square miles of Ocean to Maine, so why should this be any different,” he tweeted. “Not worth the work!”
To some GOP operatives, the tweet was a slapdash rant that further jeopardized a potentially pivotal Senate seat, as Collins has no path if Trump supporters don’t vote for her. But to Trump allies, his reaction was understandable given that Collins was not willing to support Barrett.
“It’s disappointing that Collins wouldn’t back Barrett, or feels she can’t,” Tucker said. “And I’m sure he’s frustrated.”
Just got back. I did not. Encapsulate the point being made obsrvr, .if You would.
Veritas is an organization formed to attempt to verify what is really going on. They use infiltrators to spy on inner meetings. In a meeting at CNN during the Russian Hoax coup, they mobile-phone recorded Mr Zucker telling all of the reporters to drop any other research and only research Mr Trump. Some of the reporters quietly complained. Mr Bloomberg did the same later concerning the Ukraine Hoax coup.
It was a short recording but certainly revealing.
It certainly feels like, both parties are complicit into opposing cyberspying)and using unilateral involvement of one side( the Chinese), as a counterdefense against the Russian involvement on the other.
This makes sense, since the Russian / Chinese antipathy goes back many decades, and their international cover has progressed unto the US political process.
The internal/external debate has become interpermeable, with Russian/American interests coinciding with Chinese/American interests, revealing all kinds if covert activities.
What this implies, is, a very involved egaletorian/corporate mix, deductively signifying a proto-dialectical secondary concern with outworn labeling (capitalist/socialust)
That such representations can not be understood except within a reified conceptual matrix, defies the inherent logic of popular understanding.
The veiled reality appears to circle around a changing internationalism, and the issue is not that argued in terms of identifiable personal, national interests, but on the pain and tribulation involved in reaching the goals inherent in the NWO.
Therefore all the rest of it is merely dressing for various parts in a high stakes political playbook.
The reason d’etre is an avoidance of a huge cataclysmic conflict, no body desires.
"Decision on subpoena for Trump tax returns now in hands of Supreme Court
Analyst reveals who poses biggest legal threat to Trump if he loses election 04:28
(CNN)With just over two weeks until the presidential election, a decision on whether to further delay handing over President Donald Trump’s financial records to New York prosecutors now rests with the Supreme Court after Trump’s attorneys argued for a stay of the “unprecedented” document request.
The brief is the final filing by the two sides before the court can decide whether to again push off enforcement of a subpoena by the Manhattan district attorney’s office for years of Trump’s financial records, including tax returns, from his longtime accountant, Mazars USA.
“Once the records are produced, the status quo can never be restored,” Trump’s attorneys wrote, asking the court to again block enforcement of a subpoena that has been tied up in litigation for more than a year.
“The District Attorney’s boilerplate reasons for why the grand jury needs these records immediately thus do not outweigh the irreparable harm that the President will suffer absent interim relief,” Trump’s lawyers wrote.
Trump’s campaigning stoops to new lows as Covid cases spike
Trump’s lawyers have argued that the subpoena, which seeks eight years of financial records, is overbroad and was issued in bad faith, claims that were rejected by the 2nd US Circuit Court of Appeals. The appellate court ruled earlier this month that “there is nothing to suggest that these are anything but run-of-the-mill documents typically relevant to a grand jury investigation into possible financial or corporate misconduct.”
Cable News
"“Decision on subpoena for Trump tax returns now in hands of Supreme Court”
Well, that is why , the rush to replace Ginsburg!
“Russia continues to spread coronavirus conspiracies
Along with China and Iran, Russia is ramping up efforts to spread conspiracy theories and disinformation about the coronavirus pandemic in the U.S., according to an internal U.S. intelligence bulletin obtained by ABC News – a development that critics say reflects another example of Trump and the Russians parroting similar talking points.”
Wonder why, and even if it is a talking point. If it is, then something underlies it, like intelligence of international security issues.
This aura of an inflating bubble is becoming apparent, there is no way to downplay this, if the timeline is taken back to the very beginning of this administration: 2016.
The big bet of what happens after the election is the newest bubble to be either blown out, or imploded out of proportion. The energy either explodes , or. Implodes with a very strong whoosh.
A quiet after an exploding storm, or an unearthly phony peace followed by a blowout . There are no Grey colors on an impending possible horizon, the landscape feels torn apart violently
Nietzche wrote of a morally significant optical allusion: 'Beyond Good and Evil.
It was allusive as it became illusive.
That moralisn has become frozen into the rock bottom of political reality, this race is way beyond the foundations of party line, I am convinced that much more a political showcase, to fill in the cracks that a failing democracy has come to exhibit: it is the rush to popularize the antidote to optics of imagery that brings ‘meaning’ down to the people with their grasp on the digital computer.
Politics is as determinate as the complex drivulets which flow from the ice of winter’s of philosophical despair.
It really is no surprise that both parties assail each other of mismanagement .
There is no surprises, no expectations of surprise , since there has never been a mandate, at least in the 2016 election, no .new deals , its the same old search for an America which is really not really ’ there’.
So sit back with your popcorn , watch the commercials in-between, and pretend to be outraged.!
"The current president, Mr. Obama said, “hasn’t shown any interest in doing the work or helping anybody but himself and his friends or treating the presidency as anything more than a reality show that can give him the attention that he craves”
Really?
"Barbara Streisand:
After Jared Kushner said that New Yorkers deserve to suffer extensive deaths and sickness of coronavirus because the governor did not beg Trump sufficiently for help, it is laughable that he wants to sue for having his words plastered across Times Square."
Seeing Trump deliver in Arizona, in a very solid but Hitleresque delivery, one couldn’t but be amazed how far the USA have devolved from the days of Thomas Paine, while thinking about how je will neremembered by posterity.
Hos diatribe against Bozos and the Washington Post, added jealousy to his vitriolic fear of post election prosecution of he looses.
But, if he is right, then surely. D as Capital can be thrown into eternal oblivion.