Month: June 2020

Oh lordy, say it ain’t so:

The White House is preparing a speech on race relations written by Stephen Miller, who crafted the Trump Administration’s immigration plan along the southern border with Mexico.

Well, nobody said it was going to be an attempt at healing, did they? If this report from White House correspondent April Ryan is correct, maybe Trump’s race speech will actually be a call for war?

If so, putting this guy in charge of making the case would make a lot of sense:

Emails leaked to Hatewatch, a branch of the Southern Poverty Law Center, show that White House adviser Stephen Miller shared white nationalist content with right-wing news website Breitbart and sought to guide its editorial coverage before he joined the Trump administration.

Hatewatch reviewed more than 900 emails Miller sent to former Breitbart editor Katie McHugh between 2015 and 2016. McHugh was fired from Breitbart in 2017 for posting anti-Muslim tweets, but she has since renounced the far-right.

• More than 80% of the emails related to race or immigration in some manner, per Hatewatch.

What Hatewatch says the emails show:

• Miller shared links from white nationalist sites, such as VDARE, directly to McHugh, and suggested she draw on the content for her own reporting.
• Miller recommended Breitbart write about the book “The Camp of the Saints,” a novel often denounced as racist that SPLC says is “popular among white nationalists and neo-Nazis because of the degree to which it fictionalizes the ‘white genocide’ or ‘great replacement’ myth into a violent and sexualized story about refugees.”
• McHugh says Miller told her to aggregate from a 2015 article in American Renaissance, a white supremacist publication, that focused on interracial crime.
• Miller “sought to create a counternarrative” to the news about the removal of the Confederate flag after a shooting at an African American church in Charleston, South Carolina. McHugh wrote an article titled, “Amazon takes down Confederate flag, continues to sell communist merchandise,” based on her conversation with Miller.
• Miller wanted Breitbart to focus on the race of Chris Harper-Mercer, a student who killed nine people at a community college in Oregon, after media reported Harper-Mercer “espoused racist beliefs.” Miller points out Harper-Mercer is described as “mixed race.”
• Miller told McHugh he was discussing story ideas with Pamela Geller, an activist known for her extreme anti-Muslim views.
• Miller sent McHugh a link to an InfoWars story about comments made by Rev. Franklin Graham “advocating an end to Muslim immigration to the United States.”
• Miller refers to legislation by former President Calvin Coolidge that limited immigration to the U.S. based on eugenics.
• Miller helped shape one of McHugh’s stories about the Hart-Celler Act — which abolished racial quota laws for immigration — from the perspective that it was harmful to the country.

Elizabeth Moore, a spokesperson for Breitbart, responded to Hatewatch with the following statement.

“The SPLC claims to have three- to four-year-old emails, many previously reported on, involving an individual whom we fired years ago for a multitude of reasons, and you now have an even better idea why we fired her. Having said that, it is not exactly a newsflash that political staffers pitch stories to journalists — sometimes those pitches are successful, sometimes not.

“It is no surprise to us that the SPLC opposes news coverage of illegal-immigrant crime and believes such coverage is disproportionate, especially when compared to the rest of the media, which often refuse to cover such crimes.

No one in our senior management has read the book, ‘Camp of the Saints,’ but we take The New York Times at their word that it is a ‘cautionary tale,’ and the National Review at theirs that ‘the central issue of the novel is not race but culture and political principles.'”

White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham said in a statement:

“We have not seen the report. The SPLC, however, is an utterly-discredited, long-debunked far-left smear organization that has recently been forced — to its great humiliation — to issue a major retraction for other wholly-fabricated accusations.  They libel, slander, and defame conservatives for a living. They are beneath public discussion.”

This just gets more and more surreal every day.

Media analyst Eric Boehlert wrote to me the other day to thank Hullabaloo readers for checking out his newsletter Press Run over the past few weeks. And to thank us, he was nice enough to offer us a special discount price to subscribe. So, if you were thinking of doing that, today would be a good time.

Here’s his latest and I was glad to see him bring this up. It’s been driving me nuts to see the press ignore the many Biden appearances and speeches and at the same time act as though he’s the one hiding in his bunker:

Recent days have brought a wave of good news for Democrat nominee Joe Biden, as he opens up one of the largest leads over an incumbent president in modern American history. Weighted down by his incompetent response to a public health crisis and a heartless reaction to a national outpouring of protest over police injustice, Trump now finds himself trailing by significant margins.

For readers of the New York Times, this development might come as a surprise, since the paper’s message this spring has leaned heavily on the idea Biden is struggling. Specifically, the newspaper has been obsessed with portraying Biden as stuck in his Delaware basement during a pandemic, broadcasting out messages, unable to counter the savvy Trump.

Indeed, the message from the Times has been that “perilously passive” Biden is “grappling,” “uncertain,” “tentative,” “cloistered,” “stuck at home,” and “struggling with basic technical difficulties,” while Democrats are “worried” and “perplexed.”

The storyline is that Biden became a spectator while Trump was running the campaign show. Today, that narrative has proven to be dead wrong and it ought to be buried.  

This is a perfect example of the press firmly clinging to the idea that Democrats are in a constant state of confusion and that Trump and Republicans can easily outmaneuver them. (See: Dems in Disarray.) And preferred media narratives are hard to break.

“At a moment that is emerging as a critical test for both Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump, the presumptive Democratic candidate for president is constrained by the limitations of a pandemic that has confined him to his home in Wilmington, Del., for the past three months,” the Times recently stressed, as huge protests against police abuse began spreading nationwide. Ironically, that weekend it was Biden who had met with protesters out in the streets while Trump was whisked down to the White House underground bunker as protesters amassed outside. Nonetheless, the Times insisted, “For Mr. Biden, the risks of staying in political isolation are likely to escalate as these twin crises play out.”

The Times and much of the campaign press have routinely presented the Biden-basemen coverage as reflecting a “fear” that “anxious” Democrats have. (“Democrats who fear he has slipped off the radar screen.”) But a close reading of the coverage usually produces very few Democrats officials who are fearful, and certainly very few Democratic voters. Instead, the narrative seems driven by journalists assuming Democrats are freaking out.

Note that news outlets often raising doubts about Biden’s visibility this spring are the same ones not covering Biden’s public events, while simultaneously covering every Trump utterance as breaking news. The media’s message is confusing: Biden’s stuck inside vs. Biden’s boring when he leaves his home so we’re not covering him.

The continuous stuck-in-the-basement coverage has become reminiscent of the media’s But Her Emails storyline from 2016, a Republican-built talking point designed to define the Democratic nominee. And make no mistake, the Biden narrative is a GOP taunt.

Today, poll after poll confirms that Biden’s lead has ballooned since March, when the Covid-19 crisis struck America and Trump began fumbling his way through the national health crisis. In the latest Monmouth poll, Biden leads Trump by 11 points, up from a 3-point advantage in March. Monday brought a new CNN poll that showed Biden ahead by 14 points. Despite his absence from the campaign trail — despite being “stuck in his basement” — Biden’s advantage has expanded.

Yet this spring, the Times was certain, “Mr. Biden faces the challenge of building enthusiasm for his candidacy, something Mr. Trump enjoys from his devoted base.” When running for office, would you rather have enthusiasm from a devoted base or an 14-point lead?

By embracing the basement narrative, the Times and much of campaign press fundamentally misread the unfolding race. Convinced that Biden had to be as high profile as Trump, the press assumed that lots of attention on Trump would mean lots of good news for Trump. It’s a continuation of a common narrative for the press: ‘Trump grabs so much attention!’ ‘Trump sets the news agenda!’ ‘Trump has 80 million Twitter followers!’ Trump maintains “an inescapable public presence,” as the Times put it.

Turns out none of that mattered over the last month. In fact, that has all worked to Trump’s disadvantage as Americans have watched his erratic mishandling of a public health crisis and then a nationwide protest movement.

During the height of the pandemic, many in the D.C. press were sure Trump was winning the messaging battle by hosting his daily briefings, even though they were awash in lies, misinformation, and petty partisan attacks. Turns out Americans were not impressed and gave Trump historically low approval ratings for handling a crisis, as compared to other world leaders during the pandemic, and even as compared to governors across the country who often received glowing reviews from voters.

The errant Biden narrative represents a clear misunderstanding about what this election is going to be about — a referendum on the most radical president in American history.

Trump’s going to start holding his rallies again. And I assume many in the media will see this as Trump “coming back.” But there’s no reason to think that’s true. Over the past few years, the free media attention given to his grotesque public appearances have served to help him keep his base in his thrall. But if the veil has been lifted on some of those people over the past couple of months, the rallies won’t help.

Meanwhile, Biden is actually doing some good stuff that deserves to get more attantion from the media.

Subscribe to Press Run at the special price for digby readers, here. It’s good stuff.

This piece by Never Trumper Max Book makes the correct observation on the surface but misses the big picture:

In 2014, Tom Cotton ran for the U.S. Senate proclaiming: “I believe in less government and more freedom.” Seven days ago, amid massive anti-racism protests accompanied by scattered looting, the Republican senator from Arkansas demanded the deployment of at least five Army divisions to the streets. “No quarter for insurrectionists, anarchists, rioters, and looters,” he wrote, employing a military term for “take no prisoners.”

There was no conceivable justification for such a draconian move. But Cotton’s panicky, premature demand is symbolic of the Republican Party’s transition from tea party libertarianism to Trumpian authoritarianism.

When President Barack Obama was in office, Republicans fulminated against executive orders and government spending. Now, they’ve learned to stop worrying and embrace both at unprecedented levels. (The budget deficit is projected to be $3.8 trillion this year, more than six times higher than when Obama left office.) The rejection of libertarianism isn’t necessarily a bad thing. What’s worrying is that the Republican Party has become increasingly hostile toward liberal democracy.

He’s right that it’s become increasingly hostile to liberal democracy. But he’s wrong that this is a new phenomenon. The so-called “Tea Party libertarians” and today’s Trump cult are the same people. And they are no different today than they were then except for the bogus rationales they use to justify their hatred for modern America and the people with whom they are forced to share the country.

They have been in revanchist mode since the 1960s. Trump just finally ripped away the phony ideological veil they’ve been using to cover up their primitive desire to reverse all the progress that’s been made on behalf of racial minorities, women, gays and other forms of economic and social justice.

Trumpism is the conservative movement and the conservative movement is Trumpism. Whatever pretensions they had toward intellectualism, whether libertarian or conservative, were no more than an inch deep.

For instance, the allegedly libertarian Tea Party’s anger toward “health care reform” was incoherent and absurd, particularly considering that it was essentially a private-sector plan. Their anger was completely out of proportion and could only be explained as a backlash against the first African American president, the fear of losing power, and a deeply embedded reflexive reaction against any kind of government program that might benefit people who threatened their superior place in society.

In a way Trump did us a favor. It’s all out in the open and everyone knows what we’re dealing with now.

It appears that Tucker Carlson is looking to usurp the crown Prince and become the son Donald Trump never had:

Tucker Carlson rips into President Trump's senior adviser Jared Kushner:

"The president's famously sharp instincts, the ones that won him the presidency almost four years, have been since subverted at every level by Jared Kushner." pic.twitter.com/ew2VbocUoh

— Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) June 2, 2020

“Some key advisors around the president don’t seem to understand this or the gravity of the moment. No matter what happens they’ll tell you, ‘Our supporters aren’t going anywhere,” The trailer parks are rock-solid. What choice do they have? They’ve got to vote for us.’ Jared Kushner, for one, has made that point out loud.”

“No one has more contempt for Donald Trump’s voters than Jared Kushner and no one expresses it more frequently. In 2016, Donald Trump ran as a law and order candidate because he meant it and his views remain fundamentally unchanged today. But the president’s famously sharp instinct, the ones that won him the presidency almost four years ago, have been since subverted at every level by Jared Kushner. This is true on immigration, foreign policy, and especially on law enforcement.”

Keep your eye on Tucker. His neo-fascist turn is highly opportunistic. He’s got political power stars in his eyes.

Update: Oh my, I missed this part

Fox News host Tucker Carlson faced intense backlash Monday night after he argued that the nationwide unrest over racism and police brutality sparked by the death of George Floyd “is definitely not about black lives.”

Carlson’s comments came during a fiery monologue that kicked off his prime-time show Monday, following another day of large demonstrations in the wake of last month’s fatal incident in which Floyd, an unarmed black man, died after a white police officer in Minneapolis knelt on his neck for more than eight minutes. For roughly 25 minutes, Carlson criticized the Black Lives Matter movement and growing calls for cities to defund police departments or completely get rid of them.

“This may be a lot of things, this moment we’re living through, but it is definitely not about black lives,” Carlson said. “Remember that when they come for you, and at this rate, they will

“Anyone who has ever been subjected to the rage of the mob knows the feeling,” he continued. “It’s like being swarmed by hornets. You cannot think clearly. And the temptation is to panic. But you can’t panic. You’ve got to keep your head and tell the truth. … If you show weakness of any kind, they will crush you.”

Definitely sounded better in the original German.

I thought you might be interested in seeing the demographic breakdown of the coronavirus in California. This is from a project undertaken by the LA Times which compiles all the information and updates it daily.

Right now California’s caseload is rising but it appears that the hospitals are holding up pretty well.

This tells us that young people who are going out into the world to work or protest need to be careful of their parents and grandparents. I’m sure they know that but it’s a good idea to reinforce it since it appears that the pandemic is obviously no longer seen as a reason to avoid contact with others.

Here’s the breakdown for people aged 50-64:

It’s the same for seniors until they get above 80 and then more white people die than anyone else.

The explanation for all of this is obviously rooted in poverty and racism. And it’s horrifying.

This is from April and its been born out in all the data since then. It’s not just California:

An analysis published by the Los Angeles Times on Saturday reveals that Black and Latino Californians aged 18 to 64 are dying at higher rates than their white or Asian peers, relative to population, as the pandemic continues to highlight deep inequalities across the country.

According to the Times:

When accounting for each group’s share of the population, black and Latino patients under the age of 65 had higher rates of fatality than even older blacks and Latinos—although people over 65 still make up the overwhelming majority of COVID-19 deaths. The trend is particularly noticeable among those age 18 to 49, the Times analysis found…

Among patients ages 18 to 49, black residents are dying nearly two and a half times as often as their share of the state’s population. By comparison, black people 65 and older are dying twice as often as their share of that age group. Latino death disparities also go down as patients get older, the analysis found.

The new reporting adds extra numbers to a powerful preliminary analysis performed by my Mother Jones colleagues Eddie Rios and Sinduja Rangarajan published mid-April, which found that Black people overall have disproportionately contracted and died from the coronavirus. In 20 of the 28 states plus DC for which a usable racial breakdown of infection data was provided, Black people make up a larger share of coronavirus infections than they do of the general population.

According to that reporting:

In 18 of the 23 states plus DC for which a usable racial breakdown of fatality data was provided, Black people likewise make up a disproportionately large share of coronavirus fatalities. In Michigan, Black people are 14 percent of the state’s population but 33 percent of its coronavirus cases and 40 percent of its deaths. In Wisconsin, Black people are six percent of the state’s population but 25 percent of its coronavirus cases and 39 percent of its deaths.

Be careful out there.

I’m going to guess, yes.

Trump is so excited he can hardly contain himself:

Donald Trump is planning to restart rallies in the next two weeks in a major turning point for the president since the coronavirus shut down traditional campaigning.

Trump’s advisers are still determining where the rallies will take place and what safety measures will be implemented, depending on the type of venue chosen. Campaign manager Brad Parscale is expected to present Trump with possibilities within the next few days.

The president has been itching to resume his boisterous rallies, his favorite way to connect with supporters and let off steam. He’s planning to use the events to drive home what is expected to be a major theme of his campaign: that he is the leader of the country’s reopening and economic rebound. Trump held a hastily-called press conference Friday to celebrate an unexpectedly strong jobs report, and his campaign immediately began running a massive ad campaign seizing on the news.

“Americans are ready to get back to action and so is President Trump. The great American comeback is real and the rallies will be tremendous,” Parscale said in a statement. “You’ll again see the kind of crowds and enthusiasm that sleepy Joe Biden can only dream of.”

The move comes at a precarious moment for Trump. National and swing state polls show him taking a major hit amid his handling of the pandemic and the social unrest that followed the killing of a African American man at the hands of Minnesota police. He is trailing Joe Biden substantially in many polls.

The president’s team views the rallies as a way of rejuvenating his base and displaying the enthusiasm behind his reelection bid. They are eager to create a contrast with Biden, who has largely remained secluded in his Delaware home and hasn’t held a major campaign event since spring.

While Trump is likely to face blowback for resuming in-person events while the coronavirus pandemic is still ravaging the country, his advisers contend that the recent massive protests in metropolitan areas will make it harder for liberals to criticize him.

Trump hasn’t held a rally since March, though in recent weeks he has used ostensibly official events to visit swing states. He is gradually returning to normal political life, with a pair of in-person fundraisers scheduled for this month. He will headline an event Thursday at a private home in Dallas.

Trump journalist Byron York is all for it:

Given recent gatherings, seems reasonable time for President Trump to resume holding rallies. Could be held outside. Give out masks at entrance, encourage use. But mass gatherings are now OK. Biden could re-start, too, of course. pic.twitter.com/4zk0otNSf1

— Byron York (@ByronYork) June 8, 2020

The last I heard, wearing a mask was for losers so I don’t think handing them out is going to go over all that well. So, even if they’re outdoors, they’ll be huddled close together (Trump won’t stand for social distancing at his rally) for hours.

A majority — 63 percent — say they always wear a mask when shopping, going to work or interacting with other people in public. Another 21 percent say they sometimes wear a mask. Seven percent say they wear a mask “rarely” and just eight percent say they never wear one.

But despite generally widespread mask-wearing, Republicans are more likely t

o follow Trump’s lead by expressing reluctance to donning protective masks.

Among the 15 percent of adults who say they rarely or never wear a mask, 83 percent plan to support Trump over Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential contest. 

I’m going to guess that it’s that 15% who attend MAGA rallies. They tend to be middle-aged or older. And from the looks of it, they aren’t in particularly great health. They are the exact opposite of the young, healthy protesters. So, good luck to them!

Rallies and tweeting are literally the only things he knows how to do as president. And I’m not exaggerating. That is what he believes the job of the president is — keeping his base happy with propaganda.

Let him do it. I have a sneaking suspicion they aren’t going to be quite as “magical” as he thinks they ar e. In recent months, hte more people see of him, the less they like him.

This says everything about the mental competence of the very stable genius:

My God https://t.co/y8aKYiQvBf

— digby (@digby56) June 9, 2020

The man who watched that inane report, believed it and decided to publicly share his thoughts about it is the president of the United States. And he has the nuclear codes.

Update: Susan Collins finally steps up:

Susan Collins asked re Trump’s tweet on injured Buffalo protester says president shouldn’t comment on issues that are “before the courts.”

— Alex Bolton (@alexanderbolton) June 9, 2020

Just kidding. She made a completely inane comment. Of course.

North Carolina ‘s Gov. Roy Cooper in his coronavirus briefing on Monday urged citizens to get a COVID-19 test if they have been exposed to any crowd:

“We are seeing more viral spread, and these numbers are concerning,” Gov. Cooper said. “If you have been in any kind of crowd, please go get tested. When you’re around people, wear your masks and try to keep six feet away from others. Especially if you are a leader, set a good example.” 

Cooper spoke briefly with protesters in Raleigh and will get a test today. New cases stemming from participation in the last two weeks of George Floyd protests nationwide will appear in two to three weeks.

North Carolina is among nearly two dozen states seeing climbing infection rates as they partly reopen their economies. Some of those numbers nationwide reflect increased testing capacity. Still, hospitalizations in North Carolina hit a record high on Monday. The state saw 1,370 new diagnoses confirmed on June 6, a new record.

“Our metrics have moved in the wrong direction,” Dr. Many Cohen told reporters. “I am concerned.”

Newsweek reports other states are seeing similar trends trends:

Arizona’s highest single-day increase came on June 5, with 1,579 new cases, according to local news outlets. Daily case counts have risen steadily since the end of May. The Arizona Department of Health’s latest report, published Sunday, notes a statewide increase of 1,438 additional diagnoses.

[…]

California reported its highest daily increase in cases this past Friday, with 3,593 new cases confirmed. Public health officials also confirmed the state’s previous single-day high one week before: 3,705 new cases on May 30. California’s outbreak trajectory began to trend upward during the last week of May. According to the state’s California Department of Public Health, officials have identified at least 2,000 new cases statewide every day since May 25.

Cases in Arkansas rose nearly 30 percent in the last week.

As the Trump administration tries to ignore the virus away, food pantries around the country are struggling to keep up with demand:

The economic fallout from the Covid-19 pandemic, which has now left at least 20 million Americans unemployed, has pushed the nation’s network of food banks to the brink. Food pantries and other nonprofits are still seeing lines of cars with families waiting for hours to pick up food.

Advocates believe expanding food stamp programs is a more efficient way to get food to the hungry. Opposition in Congress, however, makes the idea a nonstarter, Politico reports, “even as Washington has spent hundreds of billions of dollars on other forms of aid like unemployment insurance and stimulus checks.”

The Atlantic adds:

But as the pandemic persists, more and more states are pulling back on the measures they’d instituted to slow the virus. The Trump administration’s Coronavirus Task Force is winding down its activities. Its testing czar is returning to his day job at the Department of Health and Human Services. As the long, hot summer of 2020 begins, the facts suggest that the U.S. is not going to beat the coronavirus.

The acting president needs his adulation from worshippers. He plans to restart his rallies in the next two weeks whatever the risks to their health. We’ll see how much he has to pad attendance numbers this time around.

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For The Win, 3rd Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV mechanics guide at ForTheWin.us. This is what winning looks like.
Note: The pandemic will upend standard field tactics in 2020. If enough promising “improvisations” come my way by June, perhaps I can issue a COVID-19 supplement.

And I’m sure he’s whispering in the president’s ear as well:

“If you pull back the police from these communities there will be, there will be more harm done in these communities,” Barr said.

Hmmm. That’s Barr shifting his own rhetoric. Normally what he says is that if you don’t “show the proper respect” for police they won’t do their jobs and then you won’t have protection against criminals. And really, that’s what he means.

Barr also insisted that the Lafayette Square maneuver had nothing to do with Trump’s walk which is so ridiculous as to be laughable. It’s obvious they timed it specifically to be on our TVs in the minutes before Trump gave his “domination” speech and then walked over to the church and held the bible upside down. They wanted to demonstrate “domination” in the minutes before Trump’s appearance.

The whole thing was a propaganda ploy and the violence against the protesters was obviously part of it. How can anyone possibly believe otherwise?

He also contradicted Trump’s lie about the bunker:

Baier: If you had to do Monday over again, would you do something different?
Barr: Based on what I know now, no… Things were so bad, the secret service recommended the President go down to the bunker. We can’t have that in our country. pic.twitter.com/2p64yP9G0s

— Acyn (@Acyn) June 8, 2020

And here we thought it was just an inspection…

In the same interview, Barr says it was his decision to move the perimeter pic.twitter.com/0jbZOFZcxY

— Acyn (@Acyn) June 8, 2020

I don’t know why the Attorney General, who is a lawyer, not an actual general, was involved in such tactical decisions at all or being asked to weigh in on them. This is ridiculous.

Anyway, he’s also an inveterate liar:

Barr claims “projectiles” were thrown at him pic.twitter.com/DYJ7A51yFF

— Acyn (@Acyn) June 8, 2020

Apparently, he is unaware that he had cameras on him and the whole country was watching his little trip around the perimeter before Trump made his speech that day. We saw the crowd. It was not violent. And then the cops abruptly descended on them and violently pushed them back, using tear gas. We know what we saw. It’s all on video.

Barr’s comments mirror those of President Trump, who has repeatedly slammed proponents of defunding police departments and cast himself as a “law & order” president.

This year has seen the lowest crime numbers in our Country’s recorded history, and now the Radical Left Democrats want to Defund and Abandon our Police. Sorry, I want LAW & ORDER!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 8, 2020

It’s interesting that he put it that way. The reason the crime rate is so low is because Trump handled the pandemic so badly that we had to shut down the whole country. I guess you can call that a silver lining but I think most Americans wouldn’t consider the 110,000 (and counting) dead bodies to be anything worth bragging about.

Barr and Trump are instinctive authoritarians. Barr’s smarter than Trump but not nearly as smart as he thinks he is. I’m not sure what motivates Trump beyond “winning” in the “ratings” sense but for Barr it’s obviously just power for power’s sake. He sees the country as being full of enemies of decent people (herrenvolk) who must be … dominated.

White House: No regrets over photo op. Also Bill Barr gave the orders. President only "sorry antifa wreaked havoc." pic.twitter.com/XCwqnT0RQr

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) June 8, 2020

They keep saying he may give a big speech on race. I can’t imagine what they think he could possibly say on the subject that wouldn’t make things worse. It’s all he knows how to do.

Tremendous sincerity, what a guy. Hard to believe, with this kind of political talent, his numbers would “tank” so badly in Utah! https://t.co/KqHsHmSRKo

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 8, 2020