Trump 'sought to frame and create a culture war’ by deploying DHS agents to Portland: reportThe leader of the free world is intentionally causing chaos in Portland to help his struggling 2020 re-election campaign, The Washington Post reported Friday.
The story, titled, “Operation Diligent Valor: Trump showcased federal power in Portland, making a culture war campaign pitch” was written by reporters Marissa J. Lang, Josh Dawsey, Devlin Barrett and Nick Miroff.
“As statues of Confederate generals, enslavers and other icons tumbled from their pedestals amid protests last month, President Trump issued an executive order meant to break the cascade,” the newspaper reported. “It enlisted the Department of Homeland Security, created in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks to protect the country against external threats, to defend U.S. monuments and federal property against ‘anarchists and left-wing extremists’ who he said are advancing ‘a fringe ideology.'”
“The order signaled Trump’s eagerness to mobilize federal power against the societal upheaval that has coursed through America since George Floyd’s death,” the newspaper explained. “But Trump’s June 26 declaration came too late. The momentum of the protests was fading in many U.S. cities, and confrontations between federal authorities and civilians were becoming less frequent. Then Trump found Portland, according to administration and campaign officials.”
“Sinking in the polls over his handling of the coronavirus pandemic, Trump seized a chance to appear as a field general in a wider American cultural conflict over racial justice, police misconduct and the reexamination of American history and monuments,” the newspaper explained. “In Portland, he found a theater for his fight.”
Trump has been closely monitoring the DHS response to protests.
“Trump has taken a keen interest in tactical operations against the protesters in recent weeks, according to White House and administration officials at the center of the response, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations. When the fog of tear gas is thickest here in the wee hours of the morning, the president is sometimes up early on the other side of the country, calling Wolf for real-time updates from the front,” the newspaper explained.
But it may all be backfiring on Trump.
“The scenes of militarized federal forces on the city’s streets have stunned many Americans and unnerved former Homeland Security officials, but they have not quieted the protests. In many ways, the agents and the barricades they have erected have re-energized the demonstrators and have converted the courthouse into a proxy for the Trump administration itself,” the newspaper explained.
Read the full report:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/portland-protests-operation-diligent-valor/2020/07/24/95f21ede-cce9-11ea-89ce-ac7d5e4a5a38_story.htmlTrump hates looking like a loser —right now he looks like one of the biggest losers in U.S. history: op-ed
Writing in the Washington Post this Friday, columnist Henry Olsen says that although President Trump recently canceled his scheduled convention acceptance speech in Jacksonville, Florida, due to the states continued coronavirus spread, the move nevertheless reflects a Trump pattern of “belatedly recognizing that fighting the coronavirus is Americans’ top priority.”
“Trump has, unfortunately, long resisted this notion,” Olsen writes. “Throughout March and April, he veered between prioritizing fighting the virus and displaying a barely concealed desire to see this fight quickly put behind him. As the novel coronavirus’s spread slowed, he shifted to show support for a quick reopening to turbocharge the economy. He never adopted the views of some extremists such as Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick (R), who said he was willing to risk older people’s lives to keep the economy open. But that’s what millions of older people thought Trump believed as he played down their real fears and emphasized getting back to business.”
Signifying Trump’s reluctant reversal are his recent press briefing and appearances wearing a mask, in an attempt to convey to the public that he does indeed take the virus seriously. He’s even slightly walked back his insistence that all schools reopen in the fall.
“All of this surely has political motives as well as altruistic ones,” writes Olsen. “Trump’s job approval ratings had been dropping since April, and he now trails former vice president Joe Biden in all national polls and virtually every swing-state poll. If these ratings don’t improve, Trump is looking at the biggest popular vote loss by an incumbent president since Herbert Hoover.”
Ultimately, Olsen writes, the new tone will “tax Trump’s abilities as nothing in his life has before.”
“…Trump hates looking like a loser, and right now, he’s looking like one of the biggest losers in U.S. history,” he concludes.
Read the full op-ed over at The Washington Post:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/07/24/good-trump-canceling-his-convention-now-its-time-hard-part/?hpid=hp_save-opinions-float-right-4-0_opinion-card-a-right%3Ahomepage%2Fstory-ansUnimaginative Trump returns to spewing racist paranoia as his reelection hopes appear to crumble before him
In 2018, Donald Trump’s very-stable-genius plan to win the midterm elections for Republicans was to hype the hell out of a so-called caravan of Central American refugees who were crossing Mexico in hopes of seeking asylum in the United States. About 7,000 people, mostly consisting of families with children, were indeed making the 2,500-mile trek to escape poverty and gang violence, but Trump and his Republican sycophants tried to convince American voters that they were coming to the U.S. to kill white people and burn down the suburbs. Through his preferred media of Twitter and Fox News, Trump endlessly hyped the “invasion” of these migrants, and suggesting they might be terrorists, and were coming to create gang warfare, not escape it.This article was originally published at SalonThe nonstop fear-mongering about the caravan did work its magic on the ever-gullible mainstream news media. A Media Matters study published two weeks before the election showed a precipitous rise in cable news coverage of what would have otherwise been a minor story, as similar caravans had been in previous years.
But if Trump and his minions succeeded in hijacking the news cycle with their racist hysterics, they failed in their goal of winning the 2018 midterm elections. While Republicans certainly leveraged their unfair electoral advantages to maintain a wildly disproportionate share of power, Democrats racked up historic wins, retaking the House of Representatives with a 40-seat pickup, as well as winning seven governorships and hundreds of state legislature seats.
While the news media let Trump’s racist hype machine around the caravan drive their coverage, the actual voters were worried about an issue that had fallen out of the headlines 15 months prior: Health care, by far the biggest concern cited by voters in 2018 exit polls.
Trump and the Republicans had tried to repeal the Affordable Health Care in the summer of 2017, failing only at the last minute when Sen. John McCain voted against the effort. But while McCain may have blunted the impact slightly, Democrats were still able to run a bunch of ads and hold numerous events highlighting the fact that Trump wanted to take away people’s health insurance. The strategy worked not only to win that election, but to keep the health care issue central to voters’ concerns, no matter how much Trump was hyping racist fears.
Now it’s time for another, even more important election and Trump, never one to believe that he was wrong just because he failed, is pulling out the same playbook. He’s replaced “caravan” with phrases like “professional anarchists, violent mobs or arsonists, looters, criminals, rioters, antifa,” all terms he uses to describe the largely peaceful protesters who have been demonstrating against police brutality and racism since May.
It’s essentially the same trick: Taking a group of people who are both peaceful and in fact genuinely opposed to violence — refugees who are fleeing violence, protesters who object to police brutality — and portraying them as a threat to life and limb (and most importantly, to property) of “real” Americans, defined as people who are sure Jesus was white.
Naturally, Fox News and other Republican camp followers are echoing the message in maximally hyperbolic terms, with Fox prime-time host Laura Ingraham declaring that if Joe Biden defeats Trump in November, “You will become the target for criminals, for radicals, and the cancel culture” who will destroy “our families, our kids, our churches, our schools, our whole way of life.”
To bolster this message, Trump is sending federal police, outfitted to look like invading troops, into American cities to arrest people without cause, tear-gas groups of protesters and beat people, all to generate images of violence and chaos he can use to scare what he imagines to be a “silent majority” of scared white people cowering in their suburban homes. With his usual lack of subtlety, Trump even tweeted Thursday that the “Suburban Housewives of America” should believe that “Biden will destroy your neighborhood.” (He appears unaware that most women with children under 18 at home work outside the home.)
But there is no reason to believe this strategy will work for him. As I wrote on Thursday, all the polling so far suggests that voters accurately perceive that Trump’s crackdowns are the source of violence, not the protesters themselves. As Jamelle Bouie of the New York Times pointed out on Friday, there is “a silent majority in this country,” but it opposes Trump’s racism and fear-mongering.
Perhaps more importantly, however, that silent majority cares a lot about protecting access to health care. They cared in 2018, when those concerns secured massive wins for Democrats in the midterms. They cared in 2019, when Democrat Andy Beshear won the gubernatorial race in Kentucky — a state Trump won by 30 percentage points — in large part because the previous Republican governor, Matt Bevin, kept finding ways to take away people’s Medicaid.
While there hasn’t been much polling in recent months to gauge the highest-priority issues, it’s a safe bet that these health care-sensitive voters aren’t particularly pleased with the way that Trump and the Republicans have let the coronavirus wash over our country, infecting more than 4 million Americans and killing 144,000 as of Friday morning — with both infection rates and death rates sharply on the rise once again.
Moreover, largely because Trump and the Senate Republicans have mishandled this crisis so badly, more than 5 million Americans have lost their health insurance since the pandemic hit. Many of these people are, or should have been, eligible for Medicaid coverage, but the refusal to expand Medicaid in 14 states, combined with massive Trump-era cuts to education and outreach programs have kept many Americans off the rolls.
Trump’s surprise victory in 2016 left many progressives wondering if he was some kind of political genius, even as he seems to think it’s a brag-worthy event to pass a cognitive test used to determine if someone has debilitating dementia. But that election was a fluke in many ways, a true black swan event. Thanks to his pathological narcissism, Trump cannot imagine what it would like to worry about losing health care access, and also can’t believe that other people might not be as racist as he is. So he’s running a campaign strategy, if you can even call it that, reflecting the “concerns” of a pampered racist poisoned by Fox News, instead of the things American voters are actually worried about. So long as Democrats stay out of the Trumpian media morass and continue to advertise their superior policies on real issues people, they have nothing to fear from Trump’s “anarchists and looters” strategy.
https://www.rawstory.com/2020/07/unimaginative-trump-returns-to-spewing-racist-paranoia-as-his-reelection-hopes-appear-to-crumble-before-him/AP reporter reveals why scaled-down GOP convention is so ‘devastating’ to Trump’s campaign
Donald Trump has agreed to scale back the Republican National Convention in recognition of the coronavirus threat, and MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough said that poses a major threat to his re-election campaign.
The “Morning Joe” host said the president’s poll numbers remained underwater just six weeks before early voting begins, and Associated Press reporter Jonathan Lemire revealed the Trump campaign was increasingly alarmed by the situation.
“There is widespread alarm,” Lemire said. “It’s not that early anymore, because of early voting beginning in a few weeks. We are now in the middle of the summer. The efforts to expand the map are all but gone. The New Mexicos, Minnesotas — it’s not going to happen to expand the states, so they’re facing deficits they have to win. Michigan has been on the verge of being gone for a while, Pennsylvania, we were surprised the polls didn’t have Joe Biden up more, particularly considering the strength around Scranton and that area — he’s from Scranton, it’s been discussed.”
Polls show Biden ahead in Florida, as well, and Lemire said the loss of a big public event in Jacksonville deals a major blow to the president’s re-election.
“There’s no path without Florida,” Lemire said. “He’s not re-elected if he doesn’t win Florida. That’s why partially canceling the convention was so devastating to the president. Yes, he had to bow to pressure. In many ways, it was inevitable. There’s surges of cases in the state, and also a real reluctance of donors and Republican senators to go. A number of Republican senators had said they wouldn’t attend, they were having trouble raising money, getting guests committing to stay for a few days. The last thing the president wanted was to appear in a minor league ballpark and only have a handful of people there. they’re not going to be any cardboard cutouts like we saw last night in the baseball games.”
“The campaign is running out of events to change the momentum,” he said. “There’s no longer a convention, it’ll be a speech some virtual events. He can’t have a campaign rally, no discussions of having rallies. They are underwater. We have seen an effort in the briefing room this week to try to stick to his talking points. It’s not a new tone — we’ve seen the tweets — but right now they are simply in trouble and they know they’re running out of time.”
'Beyond a blowout': Morning Joe panel stunned by new polls showing Trump re-election hopes collapsing
Reacting to new polling that came out late Thursday that shows Donald Trump trailing presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden by 13 points, the panel on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” was stunned at the continuing collapse of the president’s re-election prospects.
With a graphic illustrating the Quinnipiac poll that shows Biden beating Trump 51 percent to 38 percent, co-host Joe Scarborough said that numbers are looking insurmountable for the president to overcome.
“I’m hesitant to suggest this is where the real numbers are right now,” the host said before adding, “Obviously we’re at the end of July. When I saw the Quinnipiac plus 13 out of Florida, I thought that’s probably an outlier, maybe we’re close to eight, nine, based on the polls.”
“Michigan plus nine, Minnesota, a state that Trump’s campaign believed for three years they were going to bring along into their column, along with New Mexico, those are long gone,” he continued. “They’re not going to be able to campaign in Minnesota or New Mexico because they now have to worry about Texas. We’ve probably done five, six polls over the past month basically show Texas deadlocked within the margin of error except the Dallas News poll this week that showed Biden up by five — bad across the board right now.”
“Yes, it’s early, blah, blah, blah, it’s early,” Scarborough suggested. “It’s important to remember, as Donald Trump’s people are starting to tell him, early voting starts soon. We’re about six weeks away from people starting to vote early and some of these attitudes about the president seem increasingly locked in.”
Asked to comment, Washington Post editor Eugene Robinson stated the polling is devastating to the president.
“I think he’s totally upside down on the coronavirus issue,” Robinson stated. “And, look, if these numbers in Florida are anything like what the result ends up to be, this is beyond a blowout. This is — you can’t possibly lose Florida by those kinds of margins and expect anything, you know, expect to come close in the general election.”
And for that poll to come out and then all those Fox News polls, the president’s favorite poll that show him well behind in those midwestern battleground states and Pennsylvania — these are devastating blows to a president.”
“We’re getting to the point where traditionally, you know, pundits say people are starting to pay attention,” he continued. “First of all, people have been paying attention to this election all along. There’s nobody in this country that doesn’t have an opinion about Donald Trump and who doesn’t have an opinion about this election.”
Watch below:
