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Trump’s Not Resisting A Transition. He’s Building A Brand.

November 16, 2020

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              For all the brilliant investigative reporting about Trump done by my friends in the mainstream (liberal) media, leave it to The Wall Street Journal, a media property owned by  Fox, to explain what the pronouncements about a ‘rigged’ election are really all about. You can download the article right here. [Thanks Paula.]

              What Trump’s Presidency has been from even before he started his 2016 campaign was and remains an effort to build yet another brand, in this case, the MAGA brand that he can now use to sell all kinds of crap as well as to license the trademarked MAGA brand to anyone else who wants to use it to make a quick buck.

              When did Trump copyright MAGA?  His application was filed with the Patent and Trademark office in – ready? – 2013 and was approved on July 14, 2015. Exactly one month earlier on June 16, Trump publicly announced his 2016 Presidential campaign. And you think he started giving away those hats with the disgusting MAGA lettering for free?

            What other Presidential candidate has ever created a logo that didn’t along with his or her name? Here’s the official Hillary campaign logo from 2016:

             Here’s the logo from Joe and Kammie’s current campaign. Wow! A logo like this will surely sell a lot of perfume, right?

              Remember the big, raucous, and energetic rallies that Bernie held in 2019? I recall a rally he held in New York City after he recovered from a heart attack. It was called the ‘Bernie is Back’ rally and the crowd was enormous – probably more than 25,000 showed up to help Bernie restart his campaign. Here’s Bernie’s campaign logo which would make a really great design for a line of clothing or maybe some gluten-free snacks:

              Notice the difference between these logos and the Trump MAGA brand:

              Notice whose name isn’t on the Trump logo. But Trump owns the logo so he owns the brand. And even when just of a few of his diehard supporters show up on a street corner waving their signs about the ‘rigged’ election, they’re wearing the MAGA hats, waving the MAGA banners, buying the brand.

              When all is said and done, what Trump really looks at every day isn’t the alt-right websites or the Fox talking heads. It’s his website where he sells the MAGA crap and I guarantee you that he will introduce other product lines as soon as his legal challenges to the 2020 election come to an end.

              One of the things that folks love to collect are posters, buttons, and other crap from political campaigns. Want to buy a JFK poster from his 1960 campaign? You can get an allegedly original poster for the measly price of $595 bucks. On the other hand, that same website is selling Trump campaign posters for $2.95. Obviously, there’s room for the Trump election memorabilia market to expand.

              But the whole point about MAGA is that it isn’t a slogan based on a specific political campaign. It’s a brand and a name that can stand on its own if it’s promoted for the kinds of products that can be linked in some way to Trump. One product he might roll out is a line of self-defense ammunition. After all, Trump could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue, gun someone down and he’d still be elected President. Or maybe what he should sell is a Nazi flag with an inscription that reads, “there are good people on both sides.”

              All hyperbole aside, the fact is that we have never had a President who was so blatant about using hi political authority to line the pockets of his pants. Download the WSJ article here and you’ll notice how so much of the revenue at various Trump locations came from GOP groups who held events at Trump hotels. When did this revenue increase? During the 2016 and 2020 campaigns.  Gee, what a surprise.

              Trump isn’t resisting a transition to Biden because he believes there’s any chance that he’ll be sworn in again as President on January 20, 2021. He’s challenging the inevitable because his behavior promotes his name and his brand. Which is what his entire Administration was all about.

              I only wish my friends in the liberal media would figure this one out.

Trump Doesn’t Have The Virus!

October 5, 2020

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              Here’s what’s really going on. Trump doesn’t have any infection at all. Trump is using the sickness thing to create a new campaign narrative because what he has been saying so far in this campaign has only made his numbers worse. Plus, the campaign is dead broke and nobody even knows where the money has gone.

              Tuesday night Trump debated Joe. He made a complete mess of the debate, most of all the moment when he mocked Joe for always wearing the ‘biggest mask’ he had ever seen.

              Trump did a rally in Duluth, MN on Wednesday before 3,000 folks. During the debate, he claimed his rallies were drawing 35,000 fans.

              On Thursday he went to his golf club in New Jersey for a fundraiser. Nobody’s giving him any money. Joe’s fundraising right after the debate set a new, one-day record for how much he has taken in.

              On Friday Trump stayed at the White House and looked at the polls, which show his campaign cratering like never before. He’s trailing Joe by double digits in the national polls. The NBC/WSJ poll has him down by 14 points! The situation in the battlegrounds is just as bad or worse:

              Note that Joe is now ahead in every swing state except Texas. Note that he’s at the 50-point mark in Wisconsin, Michigan, Minnesota, and New Hampshire. He wins those 4 states, he wins. Overall, Joe is the choice of 48.77% of all voters in the swing states, Trump’s at 44.9%. A week ago, Joe was at 48.2%, Trump was at 45.2%.

              And most important, the Sedaris dog-shit number was 6.6% last week, this week it’s 6.3%. In other words, more and more voters have made up their minds and they’re not making up their minds in favor of Trump.

No matter how you slice it and dice it, Joe’s numbers are going up and Trump’s numbers are going down. Wasn’t it supposed to be the other way around?

              Trump and his gang have exactly four weeks to pull this one out. You don’t have any more money and you’re not about to collect any more dough. The whole idea of the election as ‘fraud’ has gone over like a lead balloon. And worst of all, not only hasn’t the virus disappeared, as Trump claimed it would several months ago, but in a majority of states, particularly red states, it’s getting worse.

              So here’s what you do. You stop ignoring the corona virus and you stop saying it’s something that was cooked up by the Chinese government and the Deep State. You also stop denying the importance of social distancing to distinguish yourself from the other side.

              You’re the tough guy, remember? You’re the guy who GETS THINGS DONE! So you’ll defeat the virus and you’ll also defeat Joe. And after those two problems disappear, you’ll really bring the country back to being great again!

              What’s the most effective way to hammer home this message and make everyone forget that you spent the last nine months saying exactly the reverse?  You get infected by the virus and to make sure that everyone knows how tough you are, you recover, check out of the hospital, and go back to the White House in just two days.

              How do we know that any of those videos allegedly made at Walter Reed weren’t made in a video studio somewhere else? We don’t. How do we know that the doctors who all happen to be military guys and thus have to follow orders from the Commander in Chief are telling the truth? We don’t.

              Trump’s video message before he drove outside for that stupidly obvious photo op included a comment about how his campaign is generating more enthusiasm than ever before. And he also is now saying that he ‘learned’ about the virus by becoming infected himself. So now he’s ready to attack the problem on all fronts.

              The reason that more than 210,000 Americans have died from this pandemic is because Trump refused to learn anything about the virus when it first appeared. He was too busy blaming the Chinese and disagreeing with health experts to learn anything at all.

              I give this new reality-TV campaign a week before the script changes again. Meanwhile, I believe he’s still testing positive the way he’s been testing positive all along.

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

September 26, 2020

mikethegunguy Blogs , , 1 Comment

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.

Once Again The Liberal Media Gives Trump A Pass.

September 24, 2020

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              Three weeks ago, The Atlantic Monthly magazine published an article alleging that Trump had mocked the deaths of U.S. troops when he visited a military cemetery in France. The article was truly a bombshell and the magazine promised more such assaults in the weeks to come.

              Yesterday the promised piece came out and in every respect it demonstrates to me just how craven and unreliable the liberal media has become.  The current article is a piece about how Trump and his minions are cooking up a big scheme to ‘subvert’ the results of the 2020 election through a combination of voter intimidation, electoral-college interventions and disqualifying mail-in voting; all measures justified by charging the Democrats and/or the Deep State with fraud.

What’s the difference between calling the Presidential election a ‘scam’ and saying exactly the same thing about the Mueller report? There’s no difference. It worked once, why not try it again?

              What I find both interesting and disheartening about this article is the degree to which the liberal media continues to let and even encourage Trump’s ability to establish the public political narrative on his own terms. And if the narrative is total bullshit and has absolutely no connection to any reality at all, so what?

              There’s a remarkable anecdote in Michael Cohen’s book where he describes a meeting between Trump and a group of Evangelical leaders in 2012. The purpose of the meeting was to begin laying the groundwork for a Trump campaign, and the confab ended with a ‘laying on of hands’ ceremony in which the ministers all gave Trump their blessings because he promised to fight for their most cherished issues; i.e., school prayer, tax exemptions and ending abortion ‘rights.’ [See pages 125 et. seq.]

              So the meeting ends, the Evangelicals walk out of Trump’s office and Trump turns to Cohen and says, “Do you believe that anyone believes that bullshit?” And that moment perfectly and completely sums up what the Trump presidency is all about.

              There is absolutely nothing Trump says that necessarily connects to anything he either thinks or does. But if he says it more than once, it becomes the rhetorical framework in which the entire political narrative is then defined – by the media on both sides! Which is perfectly exemplified by The Atlantic Monthly piece.

              Here’s the statement around which the entire article revolves: “Trump’s state and national legal teams are already laying the groundwork for postelection maneuvers that would circumvent the results of the vote count in battleground states.” And this groundwork consists primarily of various voter-suppression efforts in the battleground states based on the alleged recruitment of 50,000 GOP volunteers who will be at all the polling stations to challenge ‘suspicious-looking’ individuals (read: Blacks) who show up to vote.

            Where does the author of The Atlantic piece, Barton Gellman, get his information about the formation of this poll-watching army that will appear at various polling locations on November 3rd? He gets it from an article published in The (failing) New York Times back in May which was based entirely on statements made by operatives from the Trump campaign.

Meanwhile, when a reporter for New York Magazine went out to Harrisburg in August to interview the staffers who were organizing the grass-roots Trump effort in the all-important battleground state of Pennsylvania, she couldn’t find one, single meeting that was held to recruit and train these dedicated volunteers.

Did Barton Gellman bother to go out to rural Pennsylvania to validate the claims that Trump had a 50,000-strong army getting ready to pounce on anyone suspected of trying to vote for the Biden team?  Of course not. What he did was sit in his office and talk to a couple of liberal academics who know what’s going on in the boondocks because they have written books about various voting issues that have come up in the past.

The liberal media falls for it every time. They take the totally false messaging from the Trump campaign, compare it to evidence-based, academic research that has to be true because, after all, it’s evidence-based, and then compare the two versions as if anyone should be taking anything said by Trump seriously at all.

Trump’s comment to Michael Cohen about how anyone could believe such bullshit could have been a comment made not just about Evangelical ministers, but about liberal media as well.

Where’s The Trump Campaign?

August 3, 2020

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 Last Friday, the President of the United States, a.k.a. Donald Trump, flew down to Florida to meet with a group of cops and get their endorsement for his re-election campaign. The cops are probably the only people in the whole country who are willing to even meet with Trump these days, never mind support his attempt to take another four-year White House lease.

              The picture above is Air Force 1 landing at the Tampa airport and as you can see, there was a large crowd waiting for the nation’s Chief Executive to come bounding down the stairs.

There’s only one little problem.  The above picture is what Trump would have posted on his Twitter except that a photographer got a shot of the entire crowd:

              And here’s a photograph of the thousands of Trump fans who couldn’t squeeze into the airport but were happy and willing to greet their beloved President as he came outside:

              This is how Trump described his trip to Florida in a tweet: ”My visits last week to Texas and Frorida had massive numbers of cheering people gathered along the roads and highways, thousands and thousands, even bigger (by far) than the crowds of 2016. Saw no Biden supporters, and yet some in the Fake News said it was an equal number. Sad!” And don’t think for one second that the way he spelled Florida was a mistake. It’s just another example of how racism (in this case against Asians) permeates his campaign. He really is a POS.

              If the ‘Chinese flu’ had never arrived, right now Trump would be holding one of his Nuremburg-style rallies every day. Instead, he spent the weekend playing golf, something he has done more than 270 times since he was inaugurated in 2017. That’s only an average of one golf outing every five days. Just like Ike. Hey – that’s a new slogan for Trump. Just like Ike.

              Back to the polls. Here’s how the swing-state numbers look today: 

              There really has been no change from last week. Note that Joe has his largest leads in the states where he is at or just about at 50 percent (FL, WI, MI, PA, and NH.)  If he wins those 5 states along with all the Commie-Socialist states, he’s well past 300 electoral votes. So that’s the good news today. And here’s some more good news.

              Back at the end of March when the Democratic primaries were basically finished and done, according to the Federal Election Commission, Biden had $26.3 million on hand, Trump’s campaign was sitting on almost $100 million bucks.  As of June 30, Trump had $113 million in the bank, Joe had $108 million waiting to be spent. Biden raised $63 million in June, Trump raised $55 million, but Trump’s campaign spent $50 million that same month, Joe’s gang spent $36 million and change. When you’re raising less and spending more and your numbers don’t improve, sending out a completely phony tweet about the ‘massive’ crowds in Florida won’t help you one bit.

              Today the Trump bunch resumed their TV advertising campaign by placing an ad in four swing states: AZ, FL, GA, and NC.  They had paused their ads for two weeks so that the new campaign manager, Bill Stepien, could re-evaluate their messaging and come up with a new and more powerful ad. So what’s the message this time around? That Biden is a ‘tool’ of the ‘radical Left’ who will triple your taxes, defund the police, and lead the country down to radical Socialism or worse.

              This advertising blitz doesn’t mention the corona virus, not once. But Trump  mentioned it on Twitter this morning when he criticized his own virus expert, Deborah Birx. I think Trump is smart by pretending that the Covid-19 emergency won’t hurt his campaign. After all, three out of ten Americans still believe that what he says about the virus is true. So if 30% are willing to give this liar and racist MF any kind of credibility at all, add to that group the Sedaris 10% dog-shit vote and maybe you’re still in the game.

              Don’t relax, don’t think it’s done. It’s not done and this is a very serious time.

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