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Categorie: Media (502)

Gepubliceerd: 26 augustus 2020

It’s all about Trump now

(Door Hugo Kijne te Hoboken USA)

The Republican Party does not have a platform anymore and has officially transformed itself into the Trump-cult that unofficially it has become since 2016.  Instead of presenting policies for the next four years the GOP convention is all about Trump, and the policies are whatever comes up in his head, something even the president doesn’t know yet.  Other than with an empty to-do list the party also seems to operate in a social vacuum.  The corona pandemic is the biggest problem in the USA today and the main challenge for the next president, but you wouldn’t know it if you listened to the convention speeches but dozed off for the one minute Melania Trump expressed sympathy for the victims and thanked the first responders, to subsequently lecture America about social media bullying, something her husband excels at.  After COVID-19 was thus removed from reality Larry Kudlow claimed that Trump built the greatest economy ever in three years, disregarding that the Obama-expansion continued but only with less growth, Pam Biondi blamed the Bidens for nepotism, and Matt Gaetz said that Joe Biden wanted MS13 to move in next door.

Meanwhile it is clear that apart from hysterical lies about Biden told by Kimberly Guilfoyle, Don Jr. and Eric Trump, Trump’s strategy is two-fold.  Pre-election he tries to discourage voting by mail by sabotaging the USPS and to intimidate in-person voters by threatening to send sheriffs to polling stations, hoping that many voters will consider it useless or too dangerous to vote.  Post-election he will claim widespread fraud and refuse to accept the result unless he wins, saying that ‘we may not know for weeks, months, or maybe never who won the election.’ He pursues this strategy in spite of the fact that his campaign manager, Bill Stepien, is all for voting by mail.  Grilled by members of Congress Postmaster General Louis DeJoy promised that mail-in ballots will be processed on time, but promises from Trump appointees are usually not worth more than a diploma from Trump University, in this case especially because DeJoy refused to undo the removal of mailboxes and sorting machines that has already taken place.  A tweet from the president that ballot boxes have not been sanitized was flagged by Twitter as misleading.

The corona crisis was not entirely ignored by Trump, who at a Sunday presser announced that the FDA had issued an emergency authorization for the use of ‘convalescent plasma‘ to treat COVID patients, in spite of obstruction by the ‘Deep State.’  The president claimed that for 35% of the patients the treatment was effective, but FDA commissioner Hahn later withdrew his support for that statement.  This episode is seen by pundits as a test run to announce an even more dangerous approval of an equally untested vaccine before the November election.

Asked at a White House presser about his support for a QAnon cult member who is running for a House seat Trump was told that QAnon believes he will protect the world from a cabal of satanic worshippers and cannibalistic pedophiles.  ‘Is that a bad thing?’ he asked, after claiming that he doesn’t know much about QAnon other than that they like him very much.  It may have inspired Charlie Kirk to say that Trump is ‘the bodyguard of Western civilization’ at the GOP convention.

During the convention Trump and his family members are repeatedly breaching the boundaries between campaigning and governing.  The president used a pardon and a small naturalization ceremony as propaganda material, and his wife gave her speech from the White House rose garden she just mutilated, all violations of the Hatch Act, but hey, who is going to prosecute?

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Categorie: Media (502)

Gepubliceerd: 20 augustus 2020

Trump Interrupted

(Door Hugo Kijne te Hoboken USA)

It was too early for an October surprise, but a surprise it was.  Yesterday the Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee issued a report about its investigation of ties between the Trump campaign and Russia in 2016.  The conclusions of the report go beyond what Robert Mueller found earlier:  there was intensive collusion between the campaign and Russians, of which at least one was connected to his country’s security services; Trump had welcomed the Russian interference in the election; his campaign manager had regularly provided the Russians with campaign data, and on at least one occasion the president had committed perjury answering Mueller’s written questions.  The committee characterized the collusion as ‘a grave counter-intelligence threat.’  The report came as a blow to Trump, who had been planning a further roll-out of the ‘Obamagate’ narrative by Bill Barr, arguing that Obama and Biden had illegally spied on his campaign while there was no reason to suspect that anything fishy was going on.  The president even said that he should get a third term because of what had happened to his first campaign.

Potentially an even bigger blow was the reversal of changes at the postal service that would have made voting by mail difficult or even impossible.  On Fox News Trump spoke the quiet part out loud, stating that if the Democrats don’t make a deal on his very limited corona relief package they won’t get money for the USPS, and without that money they cannot have universal mail-in voting.  Without evidence the president keeps claiming that mail-in voting will lead to massive fraud, even saying that in California ‘they send ballots to everybody and their dogs, even dead people.’ But his Postmaster General, who milked the postal service for millions via one of his companies before he started destroying it, was forced – by threatening legal action by state AGs and congressional Democrats – to issue a statement that all changes would be delayed until after the elections.  Even Trump suddenly tweeted ‘SAFE THE POST OFFICE,’ probably after he was told that the USPS is twice as popular as he is, but it is still unclear if the changes that have already been made, the removal of mailboxes and high-speed sorting machines, will be undone.

Even if the postal service is restored to full capacity in time for the elections there may be major damage, because by constantly sowing doubt about voting by mail Trump could have made numerous voters decide that to even try to vote isn’t worth it, while it also gives him an ‘argument’ to challenge the result of the election if he loses, and possibly even to demand that all votes that have not been counted on election day be discarded.  It goes to show that the president knows that at this point he’s losing and will do everything to stay in power, just like the autocrats he admires.

After launching a new racist ‘birther’ campaign, this time against Kamala Harris, Trump issued some strong opinions on cities with Democratic majorities.  About New York City, which has strict gun laws, he said ‘if you take their guns away they’ll sue you,’ earning him the endorsement of Pat Lynch, the head of the largest police union.  More in general the president said ‘let Democrat cities die,’ but about Wisconsin, where he badly trails Biden, he said ‘every lawn has a Trump sign.’

Trump visited his brother, Robert, in the hospital for less than an hour on the day before Robert died, and then went golfing.  Speaking about his brother the president as usually made it all about himself, saying that Robert had been ‘very happy’ with his presidency and was very angry with China.  Trump expected to meet his brother again, but it is of course possible that Robert doesn’t end up in hell.

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Categorie: Media (502)

Gepubliceerd: 13 augustus 2020

Trump’s Worst Nightmare

(Door Hugo Kijne te Hoboken USA)

Donald Trump doesn’t sleep a lot, and it won’t get any better soon.  The president is a racist and a misogynist, so Joe Biden’s choice of Kamala Harris, a black woman, as his VP candidate is about the worst thing that could have happened to him.  Harris’s race and gender are sufficient to launch Trump into the curtains of the Oval Office, let alone her political and legal skills and electrifying laugh.  In the Vice Presidential debate she’ll send Mike Pence crying to the wife he calls ‘mother,’ and on the campaign trail she’ll be a formidable asset.  Trump undoubtedly considers it ‘unfair’ that Biden did this to him, after he had just shown such gracious generosity to the American people.  First he signed an executive order that pre-existing conditions have to be covered by health insurance plans.  Nasty slanderers call that an empty gesture, because those conditions are already covered by Obamacare, which Trump is trying to get invalidated by the courts, but the president argues that even if the ACA is overturned pre-existing conditions  will still be covered, just not for the 25 million Americans who will lose their coverage altogether.

Next, the president signed four executive orders at his country club in New Jersey, surrounded by members who mostly didn’t wear masks and didn’t care about social distancing, violating the directives of NJ’s governor but just how Trump likes it.   The orders, some of which are really just suggestions, pertain to halting evictions and deferring student loan payments, and extending unemployment benefits by $400/week as well as deferring payroll taxes.  The latter two are the most controversial because the president expects the states to contribute $100 of the $400, money the states simply don’t have, and taxation is a responsibility of Congress, not of the executive branch.  Moreover, payroll taxes fund Social Security, so any cuts in these taxes threaten a program most Americans rely on, now and in the future.  On the corona front Trump has given up on protecting the American people.  He would rather not talk about the pandemic, but when asked he says that the US is doing great, much better than the world, and that it will all go away, while Americans are still getting sick in record numbers and testing becomes a bigger mess every day.

It’s fairly obvious that Trump sees a vaccine as his only way out of this predicament, and therefore he keeps announcing that a safe and effective vaccine might be available on or just before Election Day, no matter how unlikely that is.  And nobody would be surprised if the president would take a shortcut and start touting his BFF Putin’s vaccine, of which the safety and effectiveness has not been demonstrated in any way.  Peter Navarro may already be negotiating the purchase of millions of doses that will probably end up next to his hydroxychloroquine collection.

In his attempt to sabotage the upcoming elections Trump’s Postmaster General, after creating a mess by ‘re-aligning’ USPS management and changing delivery procedures, is now trying to inflate costs by raising the postage on mail-in votes by 300%, something the states cannot afford.  With a pandemic raging in the country Trump will force people to either risk their life or lose their vote, and even pro-Trump Republicans realize that it affects his voters as well as Biden’s.

As always the president was good for a few laughs this week.  First it came out that he inquired with the governor of South Dakota if and how he could get his countenance added to Mount Rushmore, and then he stated that the Spanish Flu pandemic, which lasted from 1918 to 1920, ended WW II in 1945.  Only when it comes to gaffes can Trump compete successfully with Joe Biden and come out a winner.

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Categorie: Media (502)

Gepubliceerd: 07 augustus 2020

The Empty Presidency

(Door Hugo Kijne te Hoboken USA)

Some pundits speculate that Trump is issuing ever more absurd statements to distract the US population from his abysmal failure in handling the corona crisis, but the president doesn’t think tactically, let alone strategically, and the simple truth is that he has nothing but dangerous nonsense to offer.  In one interview he touted his ability to remember the words ‘person, woman, man, camera, TV’ for more than twenty minutes as proof of his acuity, and in an interview with Axios’s Jonathan Swan he argued that the COVID-19 mortality rate should be calculated as a percentage of known cases, not as a percentage of the population.  As Swan’s eyebrows reached Olympic heights Trump tried to illustrate his bizarre point that the US is doing much better than ‘the world’ with colored pages prepared by his staffers, and at a press conference on Wednesday he said that COVID would just ‘go away,’ as in ‘everything at some point goes away.’  In the context of the debate on whether schools should be opened the president posted the falsehood on Facebook and Twitter that kids are ‘almost immune for COVID,’ and both platforms took his message down.

Regarding the upcoming election Trump keeps griping about voting-by-mail, which according to him will lead to massive fraud and rigged elections, which has never been shown to be the case.  The Postmaster General, a Trump-appointee, has already made delivery procedures harder, so that completed ballots may not arrive in time to be counted, but the president is now getting pushback from Republicans whose constituents also vote by mail and who fear that they’ll lose their election if that is no longer an option.  It is particularly galling that Trump keeps trying to disrupt the elections right after the funeral of John Lewis, who literally bled for voting rights.  Asked about Lewis the president said he didn’t have a high opinion of a Congressman who didn’t attend his inauguration and his State of the Union speeches, calling that “a big mistake” and thus making it all about himself again.  Some reporters see an acknowledgement that he’s in deep trouble in Trump’s actions, and an open invitation for Russia and China to interfere in his favor, without him realizing that they would only do that because they want America as weak as possible.

Sunday August 2^nd, the day the White House was supposed to unveil a national health care plan to replace Obamacare, came and went without Trump announcing the policy that was going to knock our socks off.  In the ongoing negotiations in DC about corona relief the president limits himself to sniping at ‘Chuck and Nancy’ from the sideline without making any contribution, and when asked about his plans for a possible four-year extension of his presidency the only thing he can offer is a complaint that he’s been treated ‘very unfairly’ during the first four years.

It turns out that already in 2019 the Manhattan DA has asked Deutsche Bank for information about ‘extensive and protracted criminal activity at the Trump Organization’ and has received what he (now she) asked for, which doesn’t bode well for Trump and his eldest sons once the president leaves office.  Meanwhile Trump allies are trying to get Kanye West, a bipolar black man in serious need of professional help, on the ballot in battleground states, in hopes that he’ll take votes away from Joe Biden.

An important part of the president’s campaign is making it look like Biden is not playing with a full deck anymore, by showing video clips, sometimes doctored, of Biden speaking incoherently or mispronouncing certain words.  Unfortunately for Trump though Project Lincoln has produced a video with the occupant of the Oval Office misspeaking and misreading words at a level that Biden can only aspire to approach, so that’s not working too well.

 
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