Trump is melting down. Again. By Eugene Robinson Columnist August 19 Uh-oh. President Trump is in such a state of panic about his dimming reelection prospects that he’s getting his lies mixed up and occasionally blurting out the truth. “It’s tough for Apple to pay tariffs if it’s competing with a very good company [Samsung] that’s not,” the president told reporters Sunday — flatly contradicting the ridiculous and utterly false narrative that he has spent months trying to sell. Trump apparently forgot his standard lie that China is somehow paying “billions of dollars” in tariffs, acknowledging instead that they are taxes paid by U.S. companies and, ultimately, the American consumer. This reflects more than just the difficulty of juggling multiple lies. Evidence suggests that Trump is melting down. Again. And for good reason. Fears of a global recession, greatly exacerbated by Trump’s erratic and self-destructive trade policies, have sent financial markets tumbling. A sharp downturn would close off one of the principal lines of attack the president was hoping to use against his Democratic opponent. He tried it out at a rally in New Hampshire last week: “You have no choice but to vote for me,” he told the crowd, “because your 401(k)’s down the tubes, everything’s gonna be down the tubes” if he loses. “So whether you love me or hate me, you gotta vote for me.” Fact check: No. Trump is flailing. He berates his handpicked chairman of the Federal Reserve, Jerome H. Powell, for not cutting interest rates fast enough to goose the economy. He practically begs Chinese President Xi Jinping for a meeting to work out a trade deal — any trade deal, apparently — and is met with silence. He threatens more tariffs but then backs down, at least for now. According to published reports, he sees himself as the victim of a conspiracy to exaggerate the growing economic anxiety in order to hurt his chances of winning a second term. He entertains grandiose, almost Napoleonic fantasies — purchasing Greenland from Denmark in what he calls “a large real estate deal,” perhaps, or imposing a naval blockade to force regime change in Venezuela. He apparently spent much of this past weekend fuming about not getting credit for how his New Hampshire rally broke an attendance record for the arena that had been set by Elton John. And Trump can’t seem to stop railing against a recent Fox News poll that showed him losing to four of the leading Democratic contenders. The president seems to consider Fox News his administration’s Ministry of Propaganda — indeed, that is the role the network’s morning-show hosts and prime-time anchors loyally play — but the polling unit is a professional operation. “There’s something going on at Fox, I’ll tell you right now. And I’m not happy with it,” Trump told reporters Sunday . He added a threat, saying that Fox “is making a big mistake” because he is “the one that calls the shots” on next year’s general election debates — the implication being that Fox News might not get to broadcast one of them if it doesn’t toe the party line. For the record, Trump’s claim about his political standing is that it couldn’t be better — but could be better. “Great cohesion inside the Republican Party, the best I have ever seen,” he tweeted Monday. “Despite all of the Fake News, my Poll Numbers are great. New internal polls show them to be the strongest we’ve had so far! Think what they’d be if I got fair media coverage!” An hour later, he was back on Twitter to attack Anthony Scaramucci, who famously spent 11 days as White House communications director and recently became the latest Trump supporter to hit the “eject” button. Predictably, Trump called him a “nut job,” claimed to barely know him and dusted off the ultimate insult, calling him “bad on TV.” The astonishing thing is that the president of the United States is, let’s face it, raving like a lunatic — and everyone just shrugs. The nation is still reeling from two mass shootings. The financial markets are yo-yoing by hundreds of points. A bomb in Afghanistan, where we’re still at war, killed 63 revelers at a wedding. Tension between the United States and Iran continues to mount. North Korea keeps testing new missiles. India is playing with fire in Kashmir. Hong Kong has been convulsed for months by massive protests seeking to guarantee basic freedoms. And Trump obsesses about buying Greenland. The truth is that we don’t have an actual presidency right now. We have a tiresome reality show whose ratings have begun to slide — and whose fading star sees cancellation on the way.
It's sad that it took another multimillionaire CEO in Tim Cook to go play golf with him, have a sit down, and explain to him like a 5 year old that Apple is paying the tariffs on goods coming from China. The average Joe can't do that and that's why he'll never really relate to most citizens' issues like healthcare, wage stagnation, etc.
Good article, and great contextualizing of where we are today, but I sort of disagree with the way he frames it here. Mainly because Trump does not see himself this way. He doesn't see that cancellation is on the way, and there is some grand strategy here. Trump doesn't think strategically like this. He acts in the moment, and the moment only. Its why he can continue to live the way he does, and not have died by a heart attack by now. He compartmentalizes, and is narrowly focused on the moment. What Trump sees is "I have to do X" to stay in power RIGHT NOW, and I will do anything, and everything I need to do in the moment to retain power & control OF THE MOMENT. I'll lie to you about something that is easily fact checkable, and then talk over you when you try to fact check me. I'll race bait all day every day because AT THE MOMENT its something that can cause a trigger in the media, and he's not worrying about what'll happen the next day. Its all in the moment to "WIN" the moment. Yesterday was just about brow beating Jewish people. Just wait... there are still Black people, Asian people, Indians, etc. etc. that will have their chance at getting brow beat to death with over the top racial outrages of the day. If you think he's gotten worse, get ready... he's going to go lower and lower, and try to normalize himself as an autocrat King who cannot leave office. Which leads us down to the final point.... He's not leaving office. If he gets beat, it'll be the ultimate test of the Secret Service, and military officials who will undoubtedly get a call from the White House to do something stupid like send 100 troops to the White House. You think I'm joking, or being hyperbolic.... Just wait. I would LOVE to be wrong here, but if you think that is not going to happen you haven't been paying attention. You think he's gotten worse... Just wait.
Tensions mount between Trump, Pence camps heading into 2020 election behind the scenes, tensions have been mounting among Trump, Pence and their top advisers ever since the GOP’s resounding losses in the 2018 midterms. In the weeks afterward, Trump asked aides about replacing Pence on the ticket, and he asked again for their thoughts on Pence during his August vacation at his golf course in Bedminster, N.J., according to Trump advisers who spoke on condition of anonymity to talk about private discussions with the president. rumors that Kushner and Ivanka Trump wanted to consider replacements for Pence — specifically trying to find a woman running mate, such as Nikki Haley, to help win back the suburbs in 2020 — have worried the vice president’s camp https://news.yahoo.com/tensions-strain-between-trump-pence-heading-into-2020-election-090031895.html
trumpism... its effect on the republican party and democracy... and on America. Republicans to scrap primaries and caucuses as Trump challengers cry foul The moves, which critics called undemocratic, are the latest illustration of the president's total takeover of the GOP apparatus. https://www.politico.com/story/2019/09/06/republicans-cancel-primaries-trump-challengers-1483126
President Obama? Yes, he did a pull-up all right. He pulled the country up from an economic catastrophe, the worst since the Great Depression, one on the verge of an even worse outcome, one left to that Democratic president by a two term Republican administration. President Obama not only did that, he left office with the country having a robust, growing economy that Mr trump and every other lying Republican in Congress keeps trying to take credit for. So what has trump done with that economy? He gave a huge and utterly needless tax giveaway to the wealthiest in our country that has exploded the deficit, threw the country under the bus by starting a bizarre trade war with China that the fool is busy losing, while damaging our industrial economy and our farm economy to boot. There is a very long list I could make that would add to his litany of failure, but that litany has been posted here many, many times, and added to damn near every day. He's lied about it the entire time, like he lies about virtually everything else, thousands of lies since taking office. Yet you continue to grovel at his feet, @Roc Paint. I don't get it. You're a fine fellow except when it comes to this topic. Maybe you'll wake up some day. I hope so.
Folks need to break away from the Republican Party, start a new party, join another party, or run as an independent this election. If you don’t like what’s going on, you have options. Same as those on the other side.
Someone tell me that this is a joke. This is the sort of thing that oligarch's do in countries where democracy is a total farce. Countries like Russia, for example. So what are trump's rabid supporters going to do for him next? Arrest anyone "brave" enough to run against him for the nomination? That's another thing trump's good friend, Putin, loves to do. Arrest the leaders of the opposition on "trumped up" charges if they can't intimidate them into changing their minds. That doesn't work? Murder is always an option for Vladimir Putin, the fellow trump has nothing but praise for. Is there no limit to how low the Republican Party can sink? No limit at all?
Just proves that Republicans by and large are selfish and vote for their own well being over the good of the whole. DD
Just go vote and we're done with this mistake we made... New data makes it clear: Nonvoters handed Trump the presidency Most of our assessments of the electorate in 2016 are dependent on estimates. Polling before the election that suggested where people were leaning; exit polling after the fact that gives us some sense of who actually turned out. When more than 137 million people vote, understanding exactly who they were and why they voted the way they did necessarily involves some guesswork. On Thursday, though, Pew Research Center released an unusually robust survey of the 2016 electorate. In addition to having asked people how they voted, Pew’s team verified that they did, giving us a picture not only of the electorate but also of those who didn’t vote. There are a number of interesting details that emerge from that research, including a breakdown of President Trump’s support that confirms much of his base has backed him enthusiastically since the Republican primaries. The data also makes another point very clear: Those who didn’t vote are as responsible for the outcome of the election as those who did. As we noted shortly after the election, about 30 percent of Americans were eligible to vote but decided not to, a higher percentage than the portion of the country who voted for either Trump or his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton. Pew’s data shows that almost half of the nonvoters were nonwhite and two-thirds were under age 50. More than half of those who didn’t vote earned less than $30,000 a year; more than half of those who did vote were over age 50. Pew’s data allows us to see very specifically how voter turnout and candidate support compare. By looking at the preferred candidate in a demographic group and then comparing the density of that group in the population that voted with the density in the nonvoting population, we get a sense for how nonvoters determined the 2016 results. We’ll start simply. Women tended to prefer Clinton to Trump and made up a higher percentage of the voting population than the nonvoting population. That split alone helps explain Clinton’s popular-vote victory. But “women” contains multitudes. Black, working-class Democratic women; white, wealthy Republican women. The split by party shows how that makes a difference: Republicans made up more of the voter pool than the nonvoter pool and, unsurprisingly, broadly supported Trump. (Remember: We’re not comparing actual turnout to the pool of registered voters — we’re comparing percent of voters to percent of nonvoters. In a world where voting doesn’t vary by demographic, the percent of voters from any group would be the same as that group’s percentage of nonvoters. If a demographic group votes less than another, though, it will be below the centerline while the other group is above it.) Looking at race and ethnicity, we see how the heavier turnout of white voters affected the contest. Black and Hispanic voters voted much more heavily Democratic than white votes backed Trump, but they turned out less. While half of nonvoters were white, 74 percent of voters were. An even more dramatic example of that comes when we look at age groups. People under 30 preferred Clinton by 30 points but made up much more of the nonvoter population than the population that actually voted. A third of nonvoters were under 30; only 1 in 8 voters was in that age group. Here’s what the income divide in Pew’s chart looks like. Each of these demographic groups contains fragments of the others, of course. Some of those earning under $30,000 in income are Republican or black or female. If we overlap race and income, the dots above separate a bit. Whites making more than $30,000 a year skewed Republican and made up more of the voter pool than the nonvoter pool. Poorer whites and nonwhites generally made up more of the nonvoter pool than the voter pool. Income and education generally correlate, but the chart looking at education and race is remarkably different from the chart above. College graduates leaned toward Clinton — but whites without college degrees voted heavily for Trump. Nonwhites without a college education were 40 percent of the nonvoter pool and only 1 in 5 actual voters. Evangelicals were the most strongly pro-Trump of the religious groups of voters, and they represented more of the voting pool than the nonvoting pool. Black Protestants and Hispanic Catholics made up less of the voting population than the nonvoting population — and strongly preferred Clinton. If we step back and look at the bigger picture — all the demographic data points from Pew’s analysis, including those above — the expected trend emerges. Demographic groups that preferred Trump were three times as likely to be a bigger part of the voter pool than nonvoters. Among groups that preferred Clinton, they were about 50 percent more likely to be a bigger part of the nonvoting community. Clinton nonetheless won the popular vote. But an increased turnout of under-30 voters in, say, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan could easily have changed the results of the history.
I would be well served to do the same thing, @Roc Paint, but it's an addiction for me. Not D&D, but politics in general. It goes back to watching the Kennedy/Nixon debate in 1960 on the TV in the den of my parent's house. Kennedy cool and capturing my imagination, Nixon sweating under the bright lights of the studio. Later, I got to vote against Nixon myself, going to the voting booths with Dad in the neighborhood, the old style with the curtain for privacy, Dad going into one, me into the other. In 1972, I was arguing with him about Nixon and Watergate, because he didn't like McGovern for some reason, and it's the only time I know of that he voted for a Republican. He actually told me I was right about Nixon when Watergate led to Nixon's demise. A special moment for a kid with his father, no matter that I was an adult at the time. The Kennedy-Nixon Debate. It was seen by an estimated audience of 70 million Americans, two-thirds of the adult population of the country, being broadcast over all three television networks. It really needs to be digitally remastered. It looked vastly better at the time! ;-)
