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Post by Admin on Jul 15, 2020 6:46:51 GMT
President Trump, whose halting leadership in the face of the coronavirus pandemic Americans increasingly question, boasted Monday about his one undisputed success: the ability to command media attention.
The president shared a video, originally posted by his social media director, of former Vice President Joe Biden during a recent campaign event. The heavily edited footage showed Biden asking whether an unidentified noise was rain and telling campaign staff to allow supporters to take cover inside.
“Is this what you want for your President???” Trump tweeted. “With no ratings, media will go down along with our great USA!”
Trump, the former host of the NBC reality series “Celebrity Apprentice,” is obsessed with television ratings. As a candidate in 2016, he frequently touted the increases seen in ratings for debates. As president, he’s often said that cable news networks, as well as the New York Times and the Washington Post, would be out of business without him.
And he often cites the ratings of shows whose hosts, including CNN’s Chris Cuomo and MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough, are critical of him.
In March, as the coronavirus was beginning to spread across the country, he bragged on Twitter that viewership for the daily televised coronavirus task force briefings was on par with the season finale of “The Bachelor” and on the rise.
But by late April, as Trump’s meandering performances at those briefings were panned, the president changed course.
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Post by Admin on Jul 16, 2020 1:17:57 GMT
Hillary Clinton has claimed that Donald Trump may refuse to leave office if he is defeated in November – and that voter suppression tactics are a key part of his strategy. “I think it’s a fair point to raise as to whether or not if he loses he’s going to go quietly or not, and we have to be ready for that,” Mr Trump’s defeated 2016 opponent said in a television interview on Monday night. Speaking to The Daily Show’s Trevor Noah from her home in Chappaqua, New York, Ms Clinton said she believed the president and other Republicans were scaremongering about voter fraud to try to undermine the presidential election before it took place. On the issue of fraudulent mail-in ballots, which Mr Trump has loudly talked up in recent weeks, Ms Clinton said: “There have been so many academic studies and other analyses which point out that it’s just an inaccurate fraudulent claim. There isn’t that problem.” Some have speculated that Mr Trump may use his professed mistrust of mail-in ballots as a basis for post-election claims that November’s eventual vote – if he loses it – was rigged or stolen and therefore not to be trusted. For his part, Joe Biden has said he is confident the US Army can be trusted to peacefully escort Mr Trump from the White House should he refuse to give up power. The orderly transfer of the presidential office was also a worry in 2016, when the depth and intensity of political division raised concern that violent protests might break out whichever candidate won. Ms Clinton acknowledged those concerns in her concession speech in New York, when she called on her side to accept the result and move on. “Our constitutional democracy enshrines the peaceful transfer of power,” she said then. “We don’t just respect that. We cherish it. It also enshrines the rule of law; the principle we are all equal in rights and dignity; freedom of worship and expression.” During her Daily Show interview, Ms Clinton also claimed that Republican governors and state legislatures were making it harder for people to vote by cutting the number of polling stations, purging voter rolls and making it harder to register.
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Post by Admin on Jul 19, 2020 19:22:36 GMT
Joe Biden leads Donald Trump by 15% among registered voters nationally and holds a 20-point lead when it comes to who Americans trust to handle the coronavirus pandemic, according to a major poll out on Sunday.
In the same ABC News/Washington Post poll, Biden led by two points in March and 10 points in May. Now, among respondents who said they will certainly vote in November, Biden leads by 11%.
Fox News also released a poll on Sunday. It put Biden ahead on coronavirus, race relations and the economy and eight points up nationally.
In an interview with Fox News Sunday recorded at the White House on Friday, Trump said “I’m not losing, because those are fake polls” and refused to say if he would accept the result if Biden won in November.
“I have to see,” Trump said. “I have to see. No, I’m not going to just say yes. I’m not going to say no, and I didn’t last time either.”
On Saturday, the New York Times and Washington Post reported that the White House is seeking to block funding for coronavirus testing and tracing, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health, and state and Pentagon efforts to tackle Covid-19 abroad.
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Post by Admin on Jul 20, 2020 5:45:03 GMT
‘I’m not losing’ Wallace unveiled the results of a Fox News poll that showed Trump losing by eight points to the presumptive Democratic nominee, Joe Biden. Trump was also behind Biden on the response to the pandemic, on race relations and on the economy. He trails in other polls too.
Trump said: “I’m not losing, because those are fake polls.”
Not only did Trump deny the hard data, he also refused to say if he will accept the result of November’s presidential election if he comes out the loser.
“I have to see,” he said. “Look … I have to see. No, I’m not going to just say yes. I’m not going to say no, and I didn’t last time either.”
Anthony Scaramucci, Trump’s former director of communications, tweeted: “The Chris Wallace interview is Biden’s campaign ad.”
The same Fox News poll showed that when asked if Biden and Trump had the mental soundness to serve as president, 47% of respondents said Biden did and 43% said Trump did.
More were certain Trump did not (51%) than Biden (39%).
Trump, 74, responded by asking that Biden, 77, immediately take a cognitive test. The president said last week that he “aced” an unspecified test. It is assumed he is referring to a cognitive assessment from 2018. Wallace, 72, said he had also taken the test, after seeing the president had.
“It’s not the hardest test,” he said. “They have a picture and it says ‘What’s that’ and it’s an elephant.”
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Post by Admin on Aug 1, 2020 8:20:14 GMT
After voting for President Trump in 2016 and staunchly defending him in conservative publications, a Federalist Society leader appears to be having some very public buyer's remorse.
Steven Calabresi, co-founder of the powerful conservative legal organization, is now calling on the House of Representatives to do again what it has already done once this year: impeach Trump.
In a scathing opinion piece in The New York Times published online Thursday, the Northwestern University law professor points to what ignited his newfound ire with the president: a tweet Trump sent out shortly after news broke Thursday morning that the U.S. economy had suffered its biggest recorded contraction ever last quarter.
"With Universal Mail-In Voting (not Absentee Voting, which is good), 2020 will be the most INACCURATE & FRAUDULENT Election in history. It will be a great embarrassment to the USA," the president intoned on Twitter. "Delay the Election until people can properly, securely and safely vote???"
Calabresi declared himself "appalled" by the tweet, which he characterized as "seeking to postpone the November election."
"Until recently, I had taken as political hyperbole the Democrats' assertion that President Trump is a fascist," the conservative legal scholar wrote. "But this latest tweet is fascistic and is itself grounds for the president's immediate impeachment again by the House of Representatives and his removal from office by the Senate."
It was a remarkable turnaround for a man who as recently as November had accused House Democrats of conducting an "unconstitutional" and "Kafkaesque 'trial' " in their Trump impeachment proceedings.
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