Tag Archives: Trump

Current Affairs, Politics

How to Beat Trump in 2024 – The Atlantic

Just Call Trump a Loser. His record is clear. Some nervy Republican challenger should say so.

By Mark Leibovich, April 27, 2022

Getty; The Atlantic

Let’s assume Donald Trump runs again for president in 2024. Yes, I know, caveats, caveats. Republicans say it’s too early to discuss ’24. A lot can change between now and then. Maybe Trump won’t actually run. Maybe he’s just teasing the possibility to milk the attention. Apparently, he likes attention.But if Trump does decide to inflict himself on another race, he will enter as the clear Republican favorite, enjoying a presumption of invincibility inside the GOP.

This has engendered a belief that anyone who challenges Trump must tread lightly, or end up like the roadkill that his primary opponents became in 2016.

That notion is outdated. Trump’s bizarre and enduring hold over his party has made it verboten for many Republicans to even utter publicly the unpleasant fact of his defeat—something they will readily acknowledge in private. I caught up recently with several Trump-opposing Republican strategists and former associates of the president who argued this restraint should end. The best way for a Republican to depose Trump in 2024, they said, will be to call Trump a loser, as early and as brutally as possible—and keep pointing out the absurdity of treating a one-term, twice-impeached, 75-year-old former president like a kingmaker and heir apparent.

In other words, don’t worry about hurting Special Boy’s feelings.

“Why on earth would we hitch our wagons again to a crybaby sore loser who lost the popular vote twice, lost the House, lost the Senate, and lost the White House, and so on?” said Barbara Comstock, a longtime political consultant and former Republican congresswoman from Virginia. “For Republicans, whether they embrace the Big Lie or not, Trump is vulnerable to having the stench of disaster on him.”

Trump’s wasn’t an ordinary election defeat, either. Some nervy Republican challenger needs to remind everyone how rare it is for an incumbent president to lose reelection, and also that Trump was perhaps the most graceless loser and insufferable whiner in presidential history—the first outgoing commander in chief in 152 years to skip his successor’s swearing-in. And that he dragged a lot of Republicans down with him. As Comstock hinted, Trump was the first president since Herbert Hoover to preside over his party’s loss of the House, Senate, and White House in a single term. Said nervy Republican challenger could even (just for fun) remind the former president that he once called the person he lost to “the worst presidential candidate in the history of presidential politics.”

Source: How to Beat Trump in 2024 – The Atlantic

Current Affairs, Politics, Times They Are A-Changing

New research on Trump voters: They’re not the sharpest tools in the box | Salon.com

Now there’s proof: Trump’s voters lack “cognitive sophistication,” often believe Bible is literal word of God

By Chauncey DeVega, Published March 23, 2022 6:00AM (EDT)

Supporters gather at a rally by former President Donald Trump at the Canyon Moon Ranch festival grounds on January 15, 2022 in Florence, Arizona. The rally marks Trump’s first of the midterm election year with races for both the U.S. Senate and governor in Arizona this year. (Mario Tama/Getty Images)

The United States is experiencing an existential democracy crisis, with leading Republicans and millions of their voters and supporters either tacitly or explicitly embracing authoritarianism or fascism.

Democrats, for the most part, have not responded with the urgency required to save America’s democracy from the rising neofascist tide.

American society was founded on white settler colonialism, genocide and slavery. This unresolved birth defect at the foundation of the American democratic experiment meant that the country was racially exclusionary by design, from the founding well into the 20th century.

At present, American politics is contoured by asymmetrical political polarization, in which Republicans have moved so far to the right that the party’s most “moderate” members are far more extreme than the most “conservative” Democrats.

–From article…

This makes substantive compromise and bipartisanship in the interests of the common good and the American people almost impossible.

Source: New research on Trump voters: They’re not the sharpest tools in the box | Salon.com

Memories & History, Politics, Science & Health, Web & Technology

Census interference by Trump administration detailed in email : NPR

By Hansi Lo Wang, Updated January 15, 20226:50 PM ET

A newly released Census Bureau email written during former President Donald Trump’s administration — when Wilbur Ross, shown at a 2020 congressional hearing in Washington, D.C., served as the commerce secretary overseeing the census — details how officials interfered with the national head count.
Andrew Harnik/AP

Former President Donald Trump’s administration alarmed career civil servants at the Census Bureau by not only ending the 2020 national head count early, but also pressuring them to alter plans for protecting people’s privacy and producing accurate data, a newly released email shows.

Trump’s political appointees at the Commerce Department, which oversees the bureau, demonstrated an “unusually” high level of “engagement in technical matters, which is unprecedented relative to the previous censuses,” according to a September 2020 email that Ron Jarmin — the bureau’s deputy director — sent to two other top civil servants.

-From article…

At the time, the administration was faced with the reality that if Trump lost the November election he could also lose a chance to change the census numbers used to redistribute political representation. The window of opportunity was closing for his administration to attempt to radically reshape the futures of the U.S. House of Representatives and the Electoral College.

Source: Census interference by Trump administration detailed in email : NPR

Current Affairs, Memories & History, Politics, Science & Health, Times They Are A-Changing

Welcome to the Martians! We now live in a world stranger than science fiction | Salon.com

In an age of surging authoritarianism, our world is increasingly like science fiction – and not in a good way

By Tom Engelhardt, Published November 26, 2021 4:00AM (EST)

Donald Trump | Aliens (Photo illustration by Salon/Getty Images)

Who knew that Martians, inside monstrous tripodal machines taller than many buildings, actually ululated, that they made eerily haunting “ulla, ulla, ulla, ulla” sounds? Well, let me tell you that they do — or rather did when they were devastating London.

I know that because I recently reread H.G. Wells’s 1898 novel “War of the Worlds,” while revisiting an early moment in my own life. Admittedly, I wasn’t in London when those Martian machines, hooting away, stalked boldly into that city, hungry in the most literal fashion imaginable for human blood. No surprise there, since that was almost a century and a quarter ago. Still, at 77, thanks to that book, I was at least able to revisit a moment that had been mine long enough ago to seem almost like fiction.

Editor’s Note: This is about authoritarianism, Trump, and attacks on American Democracy.

Continue reading Welcome to the Martians! We now live in a world stranger than science fiction | Salon.com →