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Want To Fix An Election? Trump Will Show You How.

November 28, 2020

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              If I were to write a book about the Donald Trump presidency, it would begin and end with the opinion published yesterday by the 3rd Circuit, which rejected yet another attempt by Trump’s legal team to reverse the vote in Pennsylvania – an opinion that you can download here. The opinion was written by a judge who not only was appointed to the 3rd Circuit by none other than Donald Trump, but happens to be an active member of the Federalist Society, a “group of conservatives and libertarians dedicated to reforming the current legal order.”

            Here is how the opinion begins: “Free, fair elections are the lifeblood of our democracy. Charges of unfairness are serious. But calling an election unfair does not make it so. Charges require specific allegations and then proof. We have neither here.”

              Trump has been bleating about ‘massive voter fraud’ ever since his attacks on Joe as a ‘far-left radical’ didn’t make a dent in the polls and also didn’t deflect away from the miserable job he has done responding to Covid-19. However, there was only one, little problem on November 4th.

Not only did Joe win the popular vote by 52% of all votes cast, but he also racked up sizable pluralities in the must-win battleground states. He won Michigan by 150,000 votes, the margin in Nevada was more than 30,000 votes, in Pennsylvania Joe garnered 85,000 more votes than Trump.  Joe carried these three states by more than 265,000 votes. In 2016, Trump flipped these three states with a margin of slightly less than 90,000 votes.

              When ‘killer’ Rudy Giuliani stood across the street from the Fantasy Island porn shop and made his first public statement about the Pennsylvania vote, he must have mentioned the word ‘fraud’ at least four times. Twice during that bizarre performance, he stressed that what happened in Pennsylvania was ‘massive fraud.’ The phrase ‘massive fraud’ is now used by members of the Trump noise brigade (e.g., Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity) to the point that you can’t mention one word without mentioning the other.

But when Giuliani pleaded his case before the 3rd Circuit, he didn’t talk about ‘fraud’ at all. Instead, he said that some counties didn’t let Republican poll watchers get right next to the ballot counters, and also allowed voters to fix technical defects in their votes. Rudy’s been going around waving a pile of papers which he says are ‘hundreds’ of affidavits supporting these claims, but somehow no evidence of any kind was presented to the Court before, during or after his appeal.

Incidentally, the same day the 3rd Circuit told Trump and his ‘legal strike force’ to get lost, the state of Wisconsin finished its recount and found that Joe, not Trump, deserved a few more votes. This little exercise in post-election nothingness only cost the Trump campaign $3 million, money which perhaps they got from a donor in Texas who is now suing the campaign to have his donation returned in full.

On the one hand, I really wish that Trump would do what every, other loser in a Presidential election has done (with the exception of Hillary Clinton), which is to simply shut the f##k up and go away. On the other hand, he is providing us with a remarkable degree of entertainment during the holiday season, a time when newsworthy content tends to be slight.

When Trump first began ranting about a ‘rigged’ election, I thought that maybe it was a strategy designed to cover up his attempt to steal some votes. Given the closeness of the 2016 election and the miserable job he has done in the following four years, how could he imagine that he might win an honest election the second time around?

Why wouldn’t Trump sit down with Roger Stone and try to figure out how to steal the Presidential vote? After all, Dick Nixon might have fixed the 1972 election if the Watergate burglars had remembered to remove a piece of tape from the office door.

MAGA Isn’t A Movement. It’s A Cult.

November 23, 2020

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              By this time next week, most states will have certified their election results and Trump will continue to tweet about the voting ‘fraud.’  The following week, the electors will cast their votes at the Electoral College and Trump will still be tweeting about how he was ‘robbed.’

              Why does Trump keep letting Rudy Giuliani go out there, make an ass of himself by waving a sheaf of papers in the air which allegedly is comprised of ‘thousands’ of affidavits that are ‘evidence’ of ‘massive fraud?’

              I’ll tell you why. Because every time that Trump or one of his creatures stands up and says or tweets something about how the election was a farce, the media reports the pronouncement as if it is news. I’m not talking about alt-right media like Breitbart or Fox. I’m talking about my friends in the so-called ‘responsible,’ mainstream media, a.k.a., The Washington Post and/or The New York Times.

              The manner by which these stalwart icons of respectable journalism have aided and abetted what will be Trump’s post-election stance is a disgrace. Not only did they all dutifully assemble in the parking lot across the street from a porno shop to watch Rudy produce his ‘proof’ of how the election was stolen away, they then re-assembled and engaged in the same self-indulgent, nonsensical reporting when Rudy repeated his act at the RNC.

              I don’t really know why my liberal media friends continue to respond like a dog on the leash every time that Trump or one of his minions jerks the chain which tethers them on the other end. And because they will continue to give the Trump noise machine every benefit of every doubt after Joe is sworn in, I can already predict what Trump is planning to do.

              What he’ll do is go after the new Administration in the same way that he believes the Democrats and their Deep State allies tried to de-legitimize his Administration from Day 1. Recall the Million Moms March that took place in DC the day after Trump was sworn in? I guarantee that on January 21, 2021 there will be a ‘spontaneous’ demonstration in D.C. by a ‘Stop the Steal’ bunch hired and organized by the spin-meister Roger Stone.

              For Trump, losing the election gives him an unparalleled opportunity to engage in payback for the Mueller investigation, the impeachment, and the continued drumbeat about how the Putin Gang would love to undercut Biden’s win. And then Trump’s son can run for President in 2024, assuming he recovers from Covid-19.

              Trump’s so-called ‘base’ isn’t just his diehard supporters. It’s a cult. And the reason I call MAGA a cult is because you can get up and say anything at all to a cult-like audience, no matter how crazy, how uninformed, how totally detached from reality, and they’ll believe it because the words came out of your mouth.

              The members of the Branch Davidian cult who followed David Koresh at the Waco Mount Carmel compound believed that Judgement Day was on the way. They believed that David Koresh was a true ‘Lamb of God’ from the Book of Revelation and that he would prepare his flock for the world-ending apocalypse that, was going to occur.

              How different is that nonsense from the nonsense being peddled by Trump, Rudy and the other leaders of the MAGA cult about ‘massive voter fraud.’ Now maybe Sidney Powell went a little too far beyond accepted cult devotionals when she announced that money being used to crate illegal ballots was coming in from ‘Communist states.’ But poor Sydney was probably just demonstrating that her verbal cup had runneth over out of sheer joy.

              I think what Trump needs to do is change the cult’s name from MAGA to MESHUGAH. It’s a Yiddish word which means ‘crazy,’ and that’s what we are dealing with here. The lunatics have clearly and completely taken over the asylum, wouldn’t you agree?

How Big Is MAGA-USA?

November 14, 2020

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              Ever since Donald Trump began running around the country selling his MAGA hats and other junk at big rallies, I have been hearing and reading about something called the Trump ‘base.’ This is an alleged national upsurge of neo-populist sentiment which has supposedly remade the national electoral map.

              It’s no longer Republicans versus Democrats, conservatives versus liberals, red states versus blue states. The country is now supposedly divided between people who adore Donald Trump and people who don’t.  And no matter what happens between now and January 20, 2021 – you can already buy tickets for the inauguration event online – it is assumed that Trump will find some way to continue leading this merry band of supporters into and beyond the Promised Land.

              Will Trump run again in 2024? Will he start a new media empire to compete with Fox? These are just two of the possible options available to a guy who can count on a seemingly endless tidal wave of support from millions, if not gazillions of adoring fans.

              So in the interests of full disclosure and at least a bit of honesty from the so-called mainstream, ‘fake news’ media, I’m going to try and figure out exactly how large the Trump ‘base’ really happens to be. Because the truth is that the liberal, mainstream media has been just as complicit in promoting the idea of a Trumpian political movement as what we have been hearing from the so-called media on the alt-right.

              Let’s start with the rallies that Trump continued to hold after his inauguration in 2017. He held 10 big rallies between February 18 and December 8, 2017. Four of these events were held in states that are more or less owned by the GOP: Tennessee, Kentucky, West Virginia, and Alabama. Two rallies were held in Florida, the remaining four rallies were held in other swing states: Iowa, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Arizona. Trump lost Pennsylvania and Arizona last week.

              In 2018 Trump did 46 rallies, most connected to various state-level campaigns, an election where the Democrats flipped the House. He went to Montana 4 times to showcase the GOP Congressman Matt Rosendale who lost his campaign to unseat Senator John Tester. He also went into Indiana 4 times and helped the GOP flip a Senate seat. He also did 3 rallies in Missouri and helped another GOP candidate, Josh Hawley, flip a Senate seat. Other than 2 rallies each in Nevada, Minnesota, Florida, and Pennsylvania, all the other events were held in reliably, red states.

              Now let’s look at this last campaign, beginning with rallies in 2019. From February 11, 2019 until last week, Trump held 73 rallies, including 25 rallies in Michigan, Wisconsin, and PA – fat lot of good those rallies did for him, right? He also made 8 appearances in Florida before adoring fans. In other words, half his campaign appearances were held in 4 states that he needed to get re-elected and only one of those states remained red. Still wondering how come Trump’s not going to be making  speech on January 20, 2021 unless he holds a private inaugural event for himself?

              According to one of the media venues that has never (repeat: never) published a single article about Trump which isn’t first blessed by the White House staff, these events have typically drawn somewhere between 10,000 and 14,000 hardy souls. So let’s say that the total number that have shown up over the last four years to see the Great Man has been somewhere around a million and a half supporters of the MAGA creed.

              Incidentally, a research team at Stanford estimates that more than 30,000 people contracted the corona virus at 18 of Trump’s events between June 20 and September 22 of this year. That’s an infection rate of roughly 14%, which is three times the national infection rate, but anything out of an elitist academic institution like Stanford must be fake news.

              Next week I’m going to continue my analysis of the size of MAGA-USA by looking at the number of people who watch or listen to media venues which promote Trump’s new brand.

Don’t Worry. It’s Not Over But It’s Over.

November 5, 2020

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              Yesterday, one of  The New Yorker Magazine’s chief political spieler, Amy Davidson Sorkin, summed up the 2020 campaign this way: “Trump’s continued hold on the votes and imaginations of so many Americans suggests that his Presidency represents not just a tragedy but a national crisis of character.” 

              To me, this statement represents everything that has gone wrong with current liberal reactions to Trump, as well as to how the election will ultimately spill out, no matter who wins.

              I wonder if Amy Sorkin ever heard of Viet Nam. For sure, she’s too young to remember Korea.  Those were tragedies, and they were both the handwork of Democrats. If Gore had been President in 2001, we probably would have ended up with a million troops in the Near East.

              Democrats love to start useless wars that they can’t figure out how to end. And by the way Amy, your alma mater, Harvard University, is the school which supplied the great brains that got us into Viet Nam. So I don’t need arrogant lectures from you on what constitutes a national tragedy, okay?

              Trump hasn’t been a tragedy; he’s been a farce. He has made more promises to do more things that never got done than probably all the other  44 Presidents combined over the previous 217 years. Remember his Mexican wall?

              What Joe has going for him is one simple fact of political life.  It’s tough to win an election to any public office if the people who do the voting don’t particularly like who you are. Do they dislike you because of how you look, or how you talk? Do they dislike you because you’re in favor of some things that they’re against? WTFK, okay?

All I know is that less than four months after he was inaugurated, Trump’s approval rating sunk to 40%, and it has never gone above 45% from then until now. And with the exception of a couple of weeks in late March, early April of this year, his approval rating has sat down at or below 40%.

Biden, on the other hand, usually rings up at or above a 50% approval rating in all the national polls. CNN put him at 55% last week, so did Fox News. In the same Fox poll, Trump’s disapproval rating was 55%. When was the last time that Fox News gave out better number for a Democrat than for someone from the GOP?

We won’t know exactly who voted for Trump versus who votes for Joe for at least another couple of days. But I’m willing to bet that just as Joe may have pulled out more Democrats this year that Hillary pulled out in 2016, so some of the 2016 folks who voted for Trump may have decided to go blue this time around. Or maybe some folks voted for GOP candidates but didn’t vote for Trump.

In Arizona, foe example, which is still a contested state, so far with 88% of the expected vote counted, Trump has gotten 12% more votes this year than he received in 2016. But Joe’s vote total right now is 27% higher than what Hillary got four years ago! When you look at those kinds of numbers, the idea that Arizona should still be in the GOP is something of a joke.

Now look at Georgia, which is almost done counting votes and Trump is ahead by 49.51% to 49.25%. Trump’s votes total this year is 16.6% over what he received in 2016. Joe’s vote number is – ready? – 29.5% higher than the blue number in 2016.

If Trump had actually done anything in the last four years, I would be willing to bet that he would have made a real and possibly tragic mess out of whatever he touched. But the only thing he’s done is exactly what he is doing now – shooting his mouth off with a combination of stupidity, braggadocio, insults, and empty threats.

And if he fires Anthony Fauci tomorrow, good for him. Dr. Fauci could use a break before he starts working for President Joe.  

What Are The Polls Saying Today?

October 12, 2020

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I don’t really blame Trump for saying that the virus is ‘disappearing.’ What’s he supposed to say? That things are getting worse?   I also don’t really blame him for pretending that he’s completely recovered from the virus. Again ,what should he say? That he feels lousy as hell and can’t draw a deep breath?

Trump has one, simple problem. And the problem is this: He’s going into the last three weeks of a campaign to get re-elected as President and it turns out that a majority of American just don’t like him very much.

This is a guy who went over the 50% disapproval mark in March, 2017 and has never dipped underneath that level again. He was at 56% disapprove versus 40% approve in January, 2019, got it down to 50% disapprove versus 46% approve on March 1st, 2020, went back up to 56% negative and 40% positive on July 1st of this year, and right now the numbers sit at 53% negative versus 43% positive. Here’s how it look since mid-year 2016:

A week before his re-election campaign ended in 2012, Obama’s approve-disapprove numbers were evenly split – 49.8% approved, 47.6% went the other way. At no time during Obama’s eight-year run did his negatives outpoll his positives by more than 8%. Other than a three-day period this past March, the gap between disapproval and approval of Trump has never been less than 8%.

Trump was a novelty in 2016. His brash rhetorical style, the plain talk, the insults, the curse words, the nicknames, the rallies with the hats and the chants – it was very new and very different from what had come before. And the fact that his opponent not only entered the contest with high negatives but disappeared from the campaign trail for the last several month, didn’t hurt him at all.

I can just imagine how Rudy Giuliani felt this past Saturday when his campaign cavalcade showed up in Kingston, PA to be greeted by a crowd that maybe numbered 50 people, maybe less.  This is the reception that waited for him in front of county GOP headquarters in a county (Luzerne) where Trump got 60% of the 2016 vote. Frankly, I think I’m being charitable by saying that there were 50 people standing around:

Anyway, back to the polls. As of today, Joe leads Trump in the national polls by 52.3% to 41.9%, a gap of 10.4%.  Less than 6% of the voters are now dog-shit, which means that everyone has more or less made up their minds on how they are going to vote.

Who did the Trump campaign trot out this weekend to explain why the polls are all wrong? None other than Corey ‘retread’ Lewandowski, who appeared on Fox and gave the same spiel about ‘hidden voter enthusiasm’ that he’s been delivering since he published a piece back in July which claimed that, ”President Trump continues to draw huge ratings and massive enthusiasm, while Democratic presumptive nominee and 44-year career politician Joe Biden remains hidden away in his basement.” Back in July, Joe had a 9.5% lead. Now it’s 10.4%.

As for the battleground states, here’s how they look today:

Joe is now at or above 50% in the five states (MI, MN, NH, PA, WI) that get him over the finish line. But he is also now slightly ahead in every battleground state except Texas, where according to Ted Cruz, the race is ‘incredibly volatile.’ The word ‘volatile’ means your guy isn’t winning, okay?

On September 1st, Trump was ahead in 4 of 13 battleground states. Biden’s overall average in the 13 states was 48.15%, Trump was at 45.08%. Today, Biden’s average in the battleground states is 49.43%, Trump’s at 44.67%. Get it? Joe’s gone up; what’s-his-name’s gone down. And by the way, the dog-shit number in September was 7%, now it’s under 6%.

What Michael Moore said in 2016, that many Trump votes were ‘fuck you’ votes, was true then but sure isn’t true now. Because once you’re the man in charge, no matter how you pretend to somehow be everyone’s good friend, the ‘fuck you’ votes will be aimed at you.

But let’s not forget one very important thing. We don’t need to win. We need to kick what’s-his-name’s ass so bad that any attempt he makes to invalidate the results because it’s nothing more than another ‘scam,’ can be quickly and decisively put to bed.

I voted yesterday by mail. You better vote too.

High 5 to Paula Schapp for the Giuliani pic.

Will Trump’s Tiny Tax Bill Hurt Him At The Polls?

September 28, 2020

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              Here was Donald Trump’s reply to The (failing) New York Times story published yesterday about how he’s not quite the business success he claims to be: “The Fake News Media, just like Election time 2016, is bringing up my Taxes & all sorts of other nonsense with illegally obtained information & only bad intent.”

              Maybe I’m wrong, maybe like Joe Biden I’m ‘sleepy Mike,’ but I thought that the 2016 Trump campaign was kept alive when emails illegally stolen from the DNC server were published following the release of the Billy Bush (“I moved on her like a bitch”) tape. Those DNC emails which cooked Hillary’s goose weren’t illegally obtained?

              The better reaction to The (failing) New York Times story came today from Rush Limbaugh. He accused the paper of committing a “crime” by “meddling in the 2020 election.” Know what? I always thought that negative reporting about Trump might some day become a crime. After all, it’s only one step away from being ‘fake news.’

              Obviously, those of us who don’t like Trump and don’t want to see him around beginning next year enjoyed reading the article; I read it twice. Obviously, the timing wasn’t accidental; if nothing else it will give Trump something else to think about before tomorrow night’s debate.

              On the other hand, I’m not really sure that the disclosure that Trump paid $750 in federal taxes in 2016 and 2017 will make any difference in how things are going to turn out on November 3rd. In fact, I suspect that his tiny tax bill will if anything, firm up his support.

              Remember Ronald Reagan and the Cadillac being driven around in 1980 by the ‘Welfare Queen?’ Reagan’s campaign narrative focused on one thing, namely, that the federal government was your enemy, not your friend. Why was the federal government an outfit whose tax obligations should be avoided at all costs? Because after spending money on national defense, everything else the government pays for is one kind of welfare program or another. In other words, the money goes right down the drain.

              Last night one of the CNN spielers said that Trump’s non-payment of taxes meant that he was refusing to engage in the behavior which unites all Americans, namely, making sure that we can pay the costs of government programs that people really need. She then ticked off such essential federal outlays as payments for education, wildfire relief, medical care, disability and a few more.

              Now this woman (I forget her name) and the rest of the liberal media may think that everyone agrees with them about the importance of all the various government programs. I happen to know lots of folks who consider themselves conservatives (remember, I’m in the gun business) who would just as soon want their federal tax bill to be as low as Donald Trump’s.

              The GOP has been hammering away about government ‘waste’ and government ‘inefficiency’ for lo, these past 40 years. And now they finally have a Presidential candidate who is really draining  the swamp by making sure that none of his money flows into the swamp itself.

              The media is reporting that, based on this story, Trump will soon be facing the repayment of more than $200 million in personally-guaranteed debt, the reports are usually given in a rather gleeful tone. But this certainly isn’t the first time that Trump has found himself unable to pay his business debts. What about all those Atlantic City casinos? How about Trump Air? And let’s not forget the World Football League, okay?

              Trump is the only real estate developer who has used the projects he builds to promote his own name. I briefly lived in a New York City apartment on West 57th Street built by a real estate tycoon named Seymour Durst. Know when I learned that I had lived in one of his properties? When his son Robert was arrested in 2015 and now awaits his trial for murder in 2021.

              As of this morning, Joe’s lead in the 4 battleground states which he needs – NH, MI, PA, WI – is holding steady even though the national aggregate poll has him down a little bit. The good news is that everyone seems to think that the electorate has more or less made up its mind for how they are going to vote.

              We’ll see what happens tomorrow night.

All Of A Sudden, Trump Changes His Tune.

September 27, 2020

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I told you so. I predicted it yesterday and I’m right. Once I saw Trump standing behind Ruthie’s coffin wearing a mask, I knew he was going to pivot again and try to make up some lost ground. And since he can’t move any further to the Right, he’s moving a little bit to the Left.

Note the picture above. Note who’s wearing masks.

Every…single…person…sitting…behind…Trump…is…wearing…a…mask!

Wasn’t it just back at the end of June when Trump did a big rally in Tulsa and nobody wore a mask? That’s right. The Tulsa rally is where his good buddy Herman Cain wasn’t wearing a mask and a week later ended up dead.

Wasn’t it just a week or so ago that Trump said for the 345th time that he believed that wearing a mask was actually a health risk?

But don’t worry. Trump has now decided to go positive about the virus and launch a $300-million ad campaign before the election which will promote the idea that all we need to do is stay positive about the way our lives have changed and everything will work out just fine. This campaign, incidentally, was the brainchild of the CDC’s PR guy, Michael Caputo, who just disappeared from public view after he accused scientists at the CDC of ‘sedition’ because the goal of their research was to undermine Trump.

So last night I decided to watch Trump’s speech at the Harrisburg rally just to see whether or not my prediction about a slight shift back towards the political center would turn out to be correct. It was correct in spades. And if you don’t believe me, just look again at the picture above. From now on, or at least for another couple of weeks until Trump changes his tune again, all of a sudden he’s now a big fan of masks.

And what’s really great is that the masks are just like the hats. They are official MAGA masks, which are already on sale for a paltry $19.99. And guess who gets the profits from the purchase of these masks?

What’s most amazing about Trump’s sudden embrace of public health is that he didn’t say one word about the pandemic in his speech last night. To the contrary, he spent the entire 45 minutes or so basically extolling everything he’s accomplished and bashing the liberal media. He particularly had it in last night for Lester Holt and the NBC Nightly News, claiming at least a half-dozen times that Holt had completely ignored the ‘fact’ that Trump was ‘nominated’ for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Know how many people were nominated this year for the 2020 Nobel Peace Prize? Try 318. That’s what being ‘nominated’ for the Nobel Peace Prize really means. It means nothing. But Trump went on and on about how he was victimized by NBC because they only report ‘fake,’ not ‘real’ news.

Trump then spent another 20 minutes or so talking about the ‘tremendous’ progress being made on the Mexican wall. Back in May, he said that 182 miles had been finished; last night the number was 300 miles. The border is only 1,200 miles long, Trump says they are adding 10 new miles every week and that the whole project would be finished ‘soon.’ 900 unfinished miles divided by 10 means the job will get done by 2024. I guess that’s ‘soon.’

Of course during this segment of his speech, Trump led the crowd in his ‘build the wall’ chant. At least when he mentioned Nancy Pelosi’s name to some scattered boos, he didn’t direct the audience to do the ‘lock her up’ chant. That one’s still reserved for Hillary,

Meanwhile, for all the bullshit and all the bluster, the pre-election polls continue to drift the other way. The national aggregate poll ticked up another notch this morning – the gap now stands at 7.3 percent for Joe, and the highest-rated poll of all, the ABC/Washington Post poll came out this morning and reported that the gap is now up to 10 percent.

The poll did contain a bit of disconcerting news, namely that the two dog-shit candidates, together now represent a bloc of 7 percent – 4 percent for the Libertarian, 3 percent for the Green. But assuming that some of the Libertarians will break for Trump and some of the Greenies will make a last-minute switch to Joe, right now this is not yet a big deal.

The most interesting thing about Trump’s speech is that he didn’t seem all that interested or engaged. I mean, how many times can you get up and say the same thing again, and again, and again? Which might be energizing if it resulted in an upward boost for the campaign.

So far, the dynamic of the campaign hasn’t changed at all.

All Of A Sudden, There’s A New Trump On The Campaign Trail.

September 26, 2020

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Yesterday I talked about how Joe’s 7-pojnt lead both in the national, as well as most state-wide polls, hasn’t really changed since the end of June. The size of the Sedaris dog-shit vote also keeps going down.

So Trump has been behind in this campaign from the day that Biden became his chief opponent, and typical of Trump, he immediately started off by attacking Joe. After all, calling Hillary a ‘crook’ worked in 2016. Why not try it again?

So Trump started saying that Biden was also a crook because he set up his son, Hunter, for all kinds of illegal payoffs in the Ukraine.

When that didn’t work, Trump then began saying that ‘sleepy Joe’ was to demented or senile to be President. That didn’t work.

By now, in late July, the corona virus was beginning to take a toll in red states. So Trump started telling everyone that his Administration deserved an A+ for their efforts to protect us from the virus, and by the way, we would shortly have a vaccine.

When that didn’t work, Trump decided to ‘get tough’ on crime, a message that Republican Presidents have more or less copyrighted since Nixon invented his ‘silent majority’ in 1968.

Trump even began using the phrase ‘silent majority’ in his tweets. But it didn’t work. The polls didn’t change. In fact, after he did some photo ops in Racine, Wisconsin where protestors had burned some commercial properties, his state-level numbers in Wisconsin went down.

When the ‘tough on crime’ messaging didn’t help, Trump started pushing the idea that the election would be a ‘scam’ and he wouldn’t accept the results. This one also went over like a lead balloon, even though the mainstream media is trying their best to keep this nonsense alive.

So then he pivoted to another message, which basically said that things were tough but he would lead us back to things being even better than they were before. This was a riff on Make America Great Again, but the words Make America Great Again Redux don’t fit on the front of a baseball cap.

Want my prediction for the messaging that Trump will trot out next? Believe it or not, he’s going to come out with some kind of spiel that moves him slightly towards the political center and puts just a little distance between him and the beloved alt-right. Why is he going to do this? Because the latest polls don’t give him any other choice.

On Thursday, Fox News published a poll which showed that Joe was now leading in Ohio – that’s Ohio – for the first time since August 16th. Now this isn’t a poll conducted by The (failing) New York Times, or CNN, or one of those other liberal media operations. It was conducted by Fox News which, by the way, is a highly-rated polling operation, according to Nate Simon and his 538 team.

It’s not just that Joe has jumped out to a small lead in Ohio that’s important to understand. It’s that the Sedaris dog-shit vote is down to 3 percent and worse, eight percent of the voters who voted for Trump in 2016 have decided to pull the paper lever for Joe. In other words, Joe’s lead in Ohio is based on bleeding votes away from Trump!

So here’s what Trump is going to do. Mark my words, he’s going to start describing himself as some kind of nice, compassionate, understanding guy who just wants the best for everyone in America, even if he has been running a campaign which until now has appealed to the absolute worst.

Why do I say this? Because Trump not only went to pay his respects to Ruthie although he was too busy to show up at Elijah Cummings’s funeral, but he also then appeared in public – ready? – wearing a mask!

You wait and see. Trump is going to try this new script for a couple of weeks. And he’ll receive nothing but unquestioned plaudits from the ‘enemy of the people,’ i.e., the liberal media and the ‘lamestream’ now mainstream press.

What Will We Write About If Biden Wins?

July 29, 2020

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              The latest issue of The Atlantic Monthly contains an article which makes the case that Trump could still pull things out in November because he has key advantages that our side doesn’t have. The problem with this article, however, is that it’s based on a mish-mash of quotes from various sources, all of whom will find themselves without anyone to talk to if Biden actually wins. Let’s look at each argument in turn.

              Argument #1. Trump will spin a slight recovery into the beginning of a real economic return. To buttress this point, the author of The Atlantic piece, Peter Nicholas, says that a new ABC-WaPo survey still gives Trump a 50 percent mark for how he’s handled the economy. Except the mark is actually 47%, Trump is tied with Joe in the new poll and his positive number has dropped by 19 points since March.

              Argument #2. The polls are no more correct than they were in 2016.  Which experts does Nicholas quote for this idea? None other than KellyAnne Conway, who deserves the Lifetime Medal of Freedom for how much bullshit she has pitched for Trump over the past four years.

              Argument #3. Trump can use the powers of incumbency to campaign all the time. Nicholas uses as an example of Trump’s media presence his daily briefing on Covid-19. Except there’s only one little problem. Trump has now twice abandoned those briefing because he looks and sounds like a fool.

              Argument #4. Biden still can’t convince the Bernie supporters to get onboard. This argument is bolstered by a comment from big-mouth Nina Turner, a co-chair of the Sanders campaign, who believes that voting for Biden is like eating a “bowl of shit.” The pro-Trump media has had a field-day with that one.

              Argument #5. Biden’s vote might be suppressed because Trump is against the mail-in vote and in-person voting sites are being reduced as a protection from Covid-19. Why do we assume that making people wait longer to vote will only hurt Biden? Why couldn’t the same lack of voting sites hurt Trump?

              Argument #6. Trump could always pull an October surprise. Trump can pretend that a vaccine is ready to hit the market, but how does such news mitigate the fact that because of how Trump responded to the ‘Chinese plague’ back in February, we need to rush a vaccine into production at all? And what about the possibility that an October surprise would be pulled off by Biden against Trump?

              Trump may want to believe that he’s a ‘wartime’ President but Americans aren’t lining up to support him the way they supported George Bush after the Twin Towers came down. Why not? Because Trump isn’t a wartime President. He’s a real-estate salesman who figured out how to use social media against an opponent who ran a totally inept and mismanaged campaign.

              When Obama was President, every time I walked into a bookshop there was always a big display of anti-Obama books. He was undermining the Constitution, he was promoting nefarious social policies, he was born outside the United States, he was doing this or doing that.  Now I go into bookstores and that same display case is filled with anti-Trump books. He’s a Fascist, a crook, a liar, next month Michael Cohen’s tell-all will be on display.

              So here’s the question: What are all these writers going to do if Biden wins? Can you imagine an anti-Biden book which argues that he’s a threat to this or a threat to that? If things keep going the way they are going in this campaign, nobody’s going to buy a book which tries to prove that Biden’s anything other than what he really is – a nice guy who might have beaten Trump in 2016 except he didn’t run because of the untimely death of his older son.

              Yesterday the President of the United States got up in public and promoted the medical views of a doctor who actually believes that DNA from outer-space aliens is being used to treat patients here on Earth. And Biden’s the demented candidate this year?

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