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Post by cliffs on Sept 5, 2020 10:57:21 GMT
NEW YORK (AP) — Showcasing Black Americans at the Republican National Convention to allay white voters' fears that President Donald Trump is a racist. Sharing touching stories about the president's concern for the military. Painting Democrat Joe Biden as an unacceptable alternative who threatens the American way of life.
It's all part of the Trump campaign's effort to construct a “permission structure” — a clunky catchphrase for creating an emotional and psychological gateway to help disenchanted voters feel comfortable voting for the president again despite their reservations about him personally.
Both the GOP convention and the president’s recent “law and order” mantra have been aimed squarely at former Trump supporters who’ve grown unhappy with his inflammatory rhetoric and handling of the coronavirus pandemic. The goal is to humanize Trump and demonize Biden so that these voters, particularly women and suburbanites, feel that they can vote for Trump again anyway.
“Their new theme is that it’s OK to support Trump even if you don’t care for him,” said Alex Conant, a Republican strategist who advised Florida Sen. Marco Rubio’s presidential bid four years ago. “People don’t like him because they think he is racist, sexist or doesn’t care about average people. But their message now is ‘Don’t look at what he said, look at what he does.’”
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Post by cliffs on Sept 6, 2020 11:59:35 GMT
Trump, despite his later protestations, green-lighted the $130,000 payment to silence Daniels ahead of the 2016 election, reasoning he would “have to pay” his wife a far greater sum if the affair ever became known, Cohen writes, adding the president later reimbursed him with “fake legal fees.”
“It never pays to settle these things, but many, many friends have advised me to pay,” Trump said, according to Cohen. "If it comes out, I’m not sure how it would play with my supporters. But I bet they’d think it’s cool that I slept with a porn star.”
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Post by cliffs on Sept 8, 2020 11:29:40 GMT
The Washington Post’s editorial board laid out in its latest column why it believes four more years of President Donald Trump will prove “catastrophic” to the country.
The editorial concluded with a warning:
Another term could allow Mr. Trump to complete the demoralization, politicization and destruction of a workforce that was once the envy of the world: the American civil service, health service, Foreign Service and uniformed military. In everything from consumer safety to air quality to life expectancy, the results would be catastrophic. But there would be nobody left to measure them.
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Post by cliffs on Sept 9, 2020 11:59:24 GMT
President Donald Trump on Tuesday seemed to finally admit that Mexico hasn’t paid to build the border wall as he has repeatedly vowed. Then he suggested yet another way he could get the cash: toll booths.
“And you know, Mexico is paying for the wall,” he said at a rally in North Carolina on Tuesday. “Just so you understand, they don’t say that. They never say it. But we’re gonna charge a small fee at the border. You know, the toll booths.”
“We’re putting a small toll on and maybe we’re going to do something with remittance,” Trump added. “All the money that we spent on the wall will be coming back.”
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Post by cliffs on Sept 9, 2020 20:50:16 GMT
President Trump's admission that he downplayed the coronavirus threat earlier this year despite understanding the pathogen's dangers is one of the more staggering revelations in Bob Woodward's forthcoming book about the president. But not to be lost among the fallout from that is the fact that Trump reportedly disclosed a secret new nuclear weapons to Woodward, The Washington Post reports.
"I have built a nuclear — a weapons system that nobody's ever had in this country before," Trump told Woodward, while reportedly discussing how close the U.S. and North Korea had come to war in 2017. "We have stuff that you haven't seen or heard about. We have stuff that [Russian President Vladimir] Putin and [Chinese President] Xi [Jinping] have never heard about before. There's nobody — what we have is incredible."
Trump is known for the occasional, exaggerated boast, but this is apparently the real deal. Woodward reports that anonymous sources confirmed the U.S. military does have a new secret weapons system, but they did not provide any details about it. They were also reportedly taken aback by Trump's willingness to disclose the information.
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Post by cliffs on Sept 10, 2020 11:21:04 GMT
When Trump met Kim for the first time, he thought "Holy sh-t," Kim is "far beyond smart," the president told Woodward. The two leaders had an instant chemistry, Trump explained, comparing it to a whirlwind romance: "You meet a woman. In one second, you know whether or not it's going to happen." And he showed Woodward Kim's gushing letters, which included phrases like "another historic meeting between myself and Your Excellency reminiscent of a scene from a fantasy film," and "that moment of history when I firmly held Your Excellency's hand at the beautiful and sacred location as the whole world watched."
Trump is aware of his affinity for authoritarian strongmen like Kim, Turkey's Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and Russian President Vladimir Putin, Woodward writes. "It's funny, the relationships I have, the tougher and meaner they are, the better I get along with them," Trump told him. "You know? Explain that to me someday, okay?"
The president's personal lawyer and fixer, Michael Cohen, suggests Trump's Putin fixation is about money, but he told MSNBC's Rachel Maddow on Tuesday that "his hatred for Barack Obama is plain and simple: He's Black, he went to Harvard Law, he graduated the top of his class, he's incredibly articulate, and he's all the things that Donald Trump wants to be, and he just can't handle it."
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Post by karma4u on Sept 10, 2020 16:24:38 GMT
On the world football field, he's the ball.
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Post by karma4u on Sept 10, 2020 23:35:56 GMT
 Comforting to know and this from his son-in-law. Described as Trump’s “ever-loyal cheerleader and true believer,” Kushner told Woodward that we might understand the president a little bit better if we simply studied Alice’s Cheshire Cat, specifically. The colorful cat can best be remembered for its ominous grin, and ability to disappear and reappear at will while speaking only in metaphors. (Okay, I’m starting to see it!) “If you don’t know where you’re going, any path will get you there,” Kushner paraphrased to Woodward in an effort to make sense of Trump’s, um, energy. Kushner also told Woodward there are “a hundred different shades of gray,” with the president. “And if people try to get a quick answer out of him, it’s easy. You can get him to decide in your favor by limiting his information. But you better be sure as hell that people with competing views aren’t going to find their way to him. And when that happens, he’s going to undo his decision.”
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Post by karma4u on Sept 11, 2020 0:38:46 GMT
THIS, is in control of the nuclear codes? He is not in control of himself.  |
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Post by cliffs on Sept 11, 2020 23:27:10 GMT
WASHINGTON — Presidents over the decades thought they could manage Bob Woodward and many, as Karl Rove put it this week, came to regret it. Then came President Donald Trump, who being Trump thought so much of his powers of persuasion that he opened up to Woodward not once or twice but an astonishing 18 times.
So Trump may have 18 times as many reasons for regret, as the latest blockbuster from Woodward reveals a president who privately understood how deadly the coronavirus really was even as he was telling the public the opposite. With an election 53 days away, perhaps no other president who talked with Woodward did as much to undermine himself.
The question consuming Washington this week is why did he talk in the first place? Why give so much access to a journalist who made his reputation taking down a president during Watergate? And the answer is: because he is Trump. He has infinite faith in his ability to spin his own story. He is forever seeking approval and validation from celebrity and establishment figures like Woodward. And as much as he likes to excoriate the “fake news,” he is drawn irresistibly to the spotlight.
“He can’t help himself,” said Timothy O’Brien, who experienced it firsthand in writing his own book on Trump during his business days. “He’s profoundly addicted to public attention, and the media is his vehicle for making sure he gets it. His view is he can live with negative coverage and positive coverage. He can’t live with no coverage. So he constantly puts himself in the crosshairs.”
“What Trump did was neither normal or advisable,” said Dan Pfeiffer, who was a senior adviser to Obama. “Instead of just sitting down for an interview, Trump treated a reporter famous for bringing down a president like his personal sounding board. It is truly one of the most stupidly self-destructive communications decisions made by a politician in memory.”
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Post by cliffs on Sept 14, 2020 11:17:47 GMT
LAS VEGAS (AP) — In open defiance of state regulations and his own administration’s pandemic health guidelines, President Donald Trump on Sunday hosted his first indoor rally since June, telling a packed, nearly mask-less Nevada crowd that the nation was “making the last turn” in defeating the virus.
Eager to project a sense of normalcy in imagery, Trump soaked up the raucous cheers inside a warehouse. Relatively few in the crowd wore masks, with one clear exception: Those in the stands directly behind Trump, whose images would end up on TV, were mandated to wear face coverings.
Not since a rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, that was blamed for a surge of coronavirus infections has he gathered supporters indoors. There was no early mention from the president that the pandemic had killed nearly 200,000 Americans and was still claiming 1,000 lives a day.
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Post by cliffs on Sept 15, 2020 10:48:01 GMT
President Donald Trump may have just set a personal worst: Four lies inside a single sentence.
Dale explained on the CNN website that Trump was referring to donations to the failed 2015 Virginia Senate campaign of McCabe’s wife, Dr. Jill McCabe. But he noted that the donations were all to her, not to him, that the donations were legal, that none came from former secretary of state Hillary Clinton and that McCabe was not “head of the FBI.” For most of 2015, he was the assistant director in charge of the Washington field office.
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Post by cliffs on Sept 16, 2020 10:34:00 GMT
PHILADELPHIA (AP) — Fielding compelling questions about voters’ real-world problems, President Donald Trump denied during a televised town hall that he had played down the threat of the coronavirus earlier this year, although there is an audio recording of him stating he did just that.
Trump, in what could well be a preview of his performance in the presidential debates less than two weeks away, cast doubt on the widely accepted scientific conclusions of his own administration strongly urging the use of face coverings and seemed to bat away the suggestion that the nation has racial inequities.
“Well, I hope there’s not a race problem,” Trump said Tuesday when asked about his campaign rhetoric seeming to ignore the historical injustices carried out against Black Americans.
Face-to-face with everyday voters for the first time in months, Trump was defensive but resisted agitation as he was pressed on his administration's response to the COVID-19 pandemic and why he doesn't more aggressively promote the use of masks to reduce the spread of the disease.
“There are people that don’t think masks are good,” Trump said, though his own Centers for Disease Control and Prevention strongly urges their use.
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Post by cliffs on Sept 16, 2020 11:25:42 GMT
Fox News’ Laura Ingraham conspiratorially accused ABC News of ambushing Donald Trump with its televised town hall with the president on Tuesday.
Trump faced tough questions from undecided voters — and criticism of his administration’s catastrophic handling of the coronavirus pandemic — in the broadcast hosted by George Stephanopoulos.
The president tried to blame Democratic nominee Joe Biden for not implementing a national mask mandate — despite the fact that Biden is not the president and does not have the authority to do so — and was challenged by a voter on his attempts to repeal the Affordable Care Act. Trump also stumbled when talking about the concept of herd immunity, calling it “herd mentality.”
Ingraham, who often uses her widely watched prime time show to defend Trump, suggested the Democratic National Committee had “put the whole thing on.” She also called Stephanopoulos, who served as White House communications director for former President Bill Clinton, a “former Clintonite.”
“The president loves mixing it up with everybody,” Ingraham said in praise of the president.
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Post by cliffs on Sept 18, 2020 11:42:02 GMT
WASHINGTON (AP) — A former adviser to Vice President Mike Pence who served on the White House coronavirus task force says President Donald Trump once suggested that COVID-19 might be a good thing because it would stop him from having to shake hands with “disgusting people."
Olivia Troye is the latest former member of the Trump administration to speak out against him and urge voters to deny him a second term. She joins a growing list that includes Miles Taylor, former chief of staff at the Department of Homeland Security, and former White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci.
Trump said Thursday that he did not know Troye, who was Pence's homeland security adviser.
In a video released Thursday by the group Republican Voters Against Trump, Troye says working for Trump was “terrifying” and says he was more concerned about his reelection chances than about protecting the nation from the virus.
“The truth is he doesn't actually care about anyone else but himself,” she says.
Troye alleges that, during one task force meeting she attended, the president said: “'Maybe this COVID thing is a good thing. I don’t like shaking hands with people. I don’t have to shake hands with these disgusting people.'”
“Those disgusting people are the same people that he claims to care about. These are the people still going to his rallies today who have complete faith in who he is,” she says, insisting, “If the president had taken this virus seriously, or if he had actually made an effort to tell how serious it was, he would have slowed the virus spread, he would have saved lives."
Asked about Troye as he left the White House late Thursday for a campaign rally in Wisconsin, Trump said he had no idea who Troye is.
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Comforting to know and this from his son-in-law.