In case you think Trump was more honest, intelligent and articulate in the past, you might want to watch this interview with Dan Rather from 21 years ago.
At the 6:00 mark he makes a derogatory remark about John McCain, proving that Trump really believes that POWs are losers. It’s not a political tactic. But this was out there in 2016. He called McCain a loser on the campaign trail. And more than 60 million Americans voted for him anyway. So unless something shifts dramatically, I’m not sure that he’ll lose any voters over the latest revelations that he has the historical knowledge of a second grader and thinks that soldiers are suckers and losers.
But if you’ve got a few minutes, watch the whole interview. He has always been a monumentally pompous ignoramus and con artist. The only thing different is that he now wears orange make-up and dyes his hair canary yellow.
He has been demeaning him and degrading him since 2015, probably even before that since he’s made it very clear that he thinks anyone who is shot down is a loser.
President Trump wasn’t simply furious that the flags on federal buildings had been lowered to half-staff to honor the late Senator John McCain in August 2018: He actually tried to have them raised, again, on all buildings across the country, according to a former senior official at the Department of Homeland Security.
In an interview on Friday, the ex-official, Miles Taylor, who served in D.H.S. from 2017 to 2019, said he was traveling in Australia to meet with security partners to discuss sensitive counterterrorism issues, when he and others on the trip, including the former D.H.S. Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen and Chad Wolf, a former senior official who is now the acting secretary, got news of Mr. McCain’s death.
It was around 3 a.m. Australia time when Mr. Taylor started getting phone calls from the White House and from a military aide that eventually woke him up, he said. “I get someone from the White House, a senior person there, who calls and says, ‘What is going on with the flags. The president is upset, this has gone out too soon and he doesn’t want it to happen.’”
Mr. Taylor said he was uncertain of the procedure for lowering flags to half-staff, and spotty Wi-Fi on the trip across the globe had left him somewhat out of the loop on how the president was reacting to Mr. McCain’s death (the White House had lowered its own flag on the presidential complex, only to raise it again, in what was seen at the time as a perplexing break from protocol).
After some frantic middle-of-the-night research and calls, he said, he had a clearer picture. “D.H.S. houses the Federal Protective Service, which guards all federal buildings but also has responsibility to lower the flags in cases of national mourning,” he said. After the White House had initially lowered its flag to half-staff, D.H.S. had sent a notice for all federal buildings to follow suit.
“I was then asked, ‘Would you guys be able to rescind the directive?’” Mr. Taylor said. He had not discussed the push from the White House with Ms. Nielsen, who was still asleep down the hallway. But he told the senior White House official that “we would need a compelling reason for the White House to order us to do that.”
On a follow-up call, the official relented and said that aides back at home were hoping to push the president simply to issue a proclamation and keep the flags lowered.
“They never ended up giving us that order, but the intimation I got was, ‘This shouldn’t have happened,’” Mr. Taylor said. It was that the president “won’t want them down, and he’s angry, and look into what you would be able to do with it.” He said that he found the episode “pretty astounding and disgusting.”
Mr. Trump has angrily denied a new report in The Atlantic that said that he was furious when he saw the flags lowered to half-staff. “What the fuck are we doing that for? Guy was a fucking loser,” the president told aides, according to the article.
Speaking with reporters on Thursday night, Mr. Trump insisted that he respected Mr. McCain even though they disagreed.
“I was never a fan. I will admit that openly,” Mr. Trump said. But “we lowered the flags. I had to approve that, nobody else, I had to approve it.”
The comments he made are believable because he’s made similar comments in public. Nobody in this country can credibly say when they read those remarks he’s reported to have made, “that just doesn’t sound like him.”
Many of us have long warned that this fall would see a dirty campaign without precedent, that Donald Trump would stop at nothing to foment chaos, and so forth. But up till now there has been a certain abstractness about it. Who knew exactly what form it would take and whether it would have any real effect?
It’s here, and it’s not abstract any longer. What was assumed to be just more of the usual Trump lunacy is starting to feel terrifying. He and his campaign really are pulling out all the stops and they are doing it in the middle of a deadly pandemic that has ravaged the people and destroyed the economy. Creating even more disorder and turmoil in middle of this crisis, in an effort to concoct or create an electoral victory he will not have earned legitimately, is over-the-top even for him.
This week the president gave a number of interviews and rallies in which he sounded more unhinged than usual. In fact, they were so bad that if his plans only depended upon him, we could probably feel a bit reassured. Unfortunately, his henchmen all seem to be on board and none more so than Attorney General Bill Barr, who appeared on CNN Wednesday and signaled that he’s prepared to enlist the Department of Justice and federal law enforcement in Trump’s election chaos strategy.
Barr always has an arrogant, supercilious attitude, whether he’s facing Congress or members of the media. But he was downright angry with anchor Wolf Blitzer and it took him off his usual game. More than any other interview I can remember, this one revealed that Barr’s insolence is actually cover for the fact that he really doesn’t know what he’s talking about. The man who once told the New York Times that investigating the silly, manufactured Clinton-related Uranium One “scandal” was more justified than any probe into Russian interference in the 2016 election still sees the world from the perspective of a Fox News viewer, rather than as the leader of the federal government’s most powerful law enforcement agency. And like his boss, Barr is much too egotistical to have a clue how ignorant that makes him.
He showed how little he knows or cares about the ethics of his position by saying that he wouldn’t talk about the case of Jacob Blake case (the Black man in Kenosha, Wisconsin, who was shot seven times in the back by a police officer) and then proceeded to share his conclusion that Blake was armed and in the process of committing a felony. When Blitzer pointed out that this was not established fact, Barr came back with “I’ve stated what I believe …” In other words, he was prejudging the facts of the case on television, which totally taints the Justice Department’s investigation.
He couldn’t simply say, “I won’t comment on the case because the department is investigating,” as any other attorney general would have done. That was because Barr clearly has a political agenda, which became more explicit as he went on to deny the existence of systemic racism. He said that “the narrative that the police are on some, you know, epidemic of shooting unarmed Black men is simply a false narrative and also the narrative that that’s based on race.” He elaborated on this by saying that Black men are stopped more often by police is not the result of racism but rather of “stereotypes” about Black people being criminals. In other words, he doesn’t even know what racism is, nor does he have the self-awareness to know that his own antediluvian attitudes are racist — another thing he has in common with President Trump. (I really shouldn’t have to say this, but Barr is wrong about all of this.)
Barr blatantly lied when he said that Russia hasn’t been interfering in the election up until now and that China is a greater threat to the integrity of the process, despite the fact that the U.S. intelligence community and the FBI have said the opposite. Indeed, the very next day the Department of Homeland Security issued a bulletin saying it has high confidence that “Russian malign influence actors” have targeted the absentee voting process “by spreading disinformation” since at least March:
Russian state media and proxy websites in mid-August 2020 criticized the integrity of expanded and universal vote-by-mail, claiming ineligible voters could receive ballots due to out-of-date voter rolls, leaving a vast amount of ballots unaccounted for and vulnerable to tampering. These websites also alleged that vote-by-mail processes would overburden the U.S. Postal Service and local boards of election delaying vote tabulation and creating more opportunities for fraud and error.
The attorney general must be on their mailing list because these were exactly the arguments he set forth in the CNN interview, at one point getting very testy with Blitzer on the subject. He insisted that the nation is “playing with fire” by changing the method of voting in this election, fatuously insisting that it will cause people to lose faith in the process — which of course is exactly what he is doing in spreading this hysterical propaganda.
When Blitzer asked him about Trump’s recent exhortation to his voters to vote by mail and then go to the polls to try to vote again, the attorney general said he couldn’t comment because he didn’t know the laws in individual states, as if any of them allowed voting twice in the same election. When quizzed about how many cases of voter fraud the Justice Department is pursuing, he said he didn’t know, although he did mention one case that purportedly had 1,700 cases of mail-in voter fraud. That story was totally wrong and the DOJ had to issue a correction saying Barr had been given incorrect information.
Barr’s most ludicrous contention was that foreign countries are going to counterfeit ballots and mail them in. He has no evidence other than what he calls “logic” to back up this ridiculous claim, which proves how divorced from reality the attorney general of the United States actually is. The Washington Post’s Philip Bump explains:
For one thing, any number of those ballots would conflict with existing submitted ballots and be rejected. For another, ballots meet particular design and production standards that would need to be matched. But most important, ballots submitted by mail are validated upon receipt, usually by matching the ballot’s signature to the recorded signature for the voter. As a forgery expert with whom we spoke in June made clear, this would be nearly impossible to fake.
Barr is essentially spreading a ludicrous conspiracy theory about foreign interference with mail-in ballots, while also helping a foreign adversary interfere in the election by spreading several different conspiracy theories. It’s insane.
We’ve long known that Barr was happily performing the role of Trump’s “Roy Cohn,” seeing his primary role as leader of the Justice Department as leading a war against Trump’s political enemies. But Barr is also a true believer, not just a cynical fraud. His willingness to distort the rule of law to benefit his patron, while at the same time falling down the rabbit hole of one right-wing conspiracy theory after another, is the very definition of Trumpism in action. And he’s not even trying to hide it.
The Donald is going to have a very bad Friday. Since Thursday afternoon’s Atlantic report on Acting President Donald Trump’s gobsmacking dismissal of Americans in uniform as suckers and losers, ad-makers have been busy.
“If the revelations in today’s Atlantic article are true, then they are yet another marker of how deeply President Trump and I disagree about the role of the president of the United States,” Biden said in a statement Thursday evening.
That is way too tame, IMHO. Biden makes it sound as if he and Trump have a policy difference when it is more clear than ever that Trump has a deeply unsettling personality disorder. Biden has every right to be much, much angrier.
Donald Trump called our troops who gave their lives "losers" and "suckers." John Cornyn — will you say ANYTHING?
Our troops deserve leaders who will respect their service and fight for them and their families.
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.
North Carolina begins mailing absentee ballots today, the first state in the nation to do so. Depending on how long the Post Office takes to deliver them, people in the state can begin registering their votes in just days. By law this year, Boards of Elections must begin processing absentees by September 29. There are no drop boxes, but voters (or a near relative or verifiable legal guardian) may drop off their ballots — properly sealed, signed and witnessed — at their county Board of Elections office. Voters may still mail in their ballots, but given this summer’s reporting about mail delivery slowdowns, they had best not delay.
My county uses optically scanned paper ballots. As soon as elections officials adjudge the bar-coded envelopes properly signed and witnessed, staff will open them and scan in the ballots. Absentee votes here will be “in the bank” as early as a month before early voting starts and perhaps six weeks ahead of November 3.
North Carolina has a new web site where absentee voters can track whether their absentee ballots were received and approved. If there is some deficiency, voters will have a chance to “cure” those ballots and make them acceptable. Waiting until days before the election to vote by mail works against that happening.
Voting machine types vary by county. Most use hand-marked paper ballots. Only seven of 100 North Carolina counties use touch screen machines, including Mecklenburg (Charlotte), the state’s largest. I am unsure how absentee-by-mail works in those counties.
Phones will not stop ringing at our local covid-armored Democratic Party headquarters. Voters are more confused than usual this year. So many well-meaning 501(c )(3) groups are offering advice — some mailing absentee ballot request forms, others sending text messages — that voters don’t know whom to trust. That includes the acting president.
A little bit of knowledge….
When Trump suggested in Wilmington, North Carolina on Wednesday that voters vote by mail and vote again in person (you know, just to be sure), he himself was committing a crime by urging others to commit crimes.
It happens every election. A few voters send in absentee ballots, forget about it, then show up in person on Election Day to vote (they will be told they may not). Or the converse. They apply for an absentee ballot, but it does not arrive before the start of early voting, so they vote in person instead. Later, the absentee ballot arrives in the mail and they think they can vote that too.
No. You get one vote. That’s it. First, any second ballot submitted will not count. Procedures are in place to prevent that. Second, vote twice on purpose and you will be charged with a felony. (See story of my friend accused of voting twice through a clerical error.)
….after you Vote, which it should not, that Ballot will not be used or counted in that your vote has already been cast & tabulated. YOU ARE NOW ASSURED THAT YOUR PRECIOUS VOTE HAS BEEN COUNTED, it hasn’t been “lost, thrown out, or in any way destroyed”. GOD BLESS AMERICA!!!
It sounds as if someone tried to explain to Trump how things work in North Carolina and he repeated back badly what he had just heard, as he often does. It simply causes confusion and chaos for the president of the United States to suggest people try to vote twice to test the system, as Rick Hasen of Election Law Blog observes.
Unlike North Carolina, most states do not process mail-in votes until Election Day. So what Trump thinks he heard will not work in most of the country. Or else the mini-mobster who thrives on chaos is trying deliberately to create more to undermine the results, overwhelm the system with crimes, and invalidate the election polls show him losing.
The executive director of North Carolina’s State Board of Elections reminded voters that voting twice is a Class 1 felony.
Michigan’s Attorney General Dana Nessel was more blunt:
“Let me be perfectly clear: voting twice is illegal, no matter who tells you do to it. The president’s idea is a great one for people looking to go to jail,” Nessel said in a statement.
Irony is not dead, just resting
Naturally, Trump advised a national audience to commit election crimes in Wilmington, just down the road from Bladen County where the most blatant case of election fraud in decades occurred in 2018.
The raw numbers of absentee requests in the area raised red flags, including with Harris’s son, an assistant U.S. attorney. Dowless was caught and charged. The state Board of Elections overturned the results and held a new election in 2019. The system worked.
Yet the irony of Trump recommending people vote twice in North Carolina two years later was not lost on Marc Elias, perhaps the top Democratic elections attorney in the country.
So, strap in for a rough ride. Elias has more election resources at Democracy Docket.
#FlattenTheVoterCurve #KeepCalmVoteEarly
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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.
I’m so old I remember when the Republicans were the flag-waving patriots who would punch you in the nose if you deigned to criticize the military for anything.
When President Donald Trump canceled a visit to the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery near Paris in 2018, he blamed rain for the last-minute decision, saying that “the helicopter couldn’t fly” and that the Secret Service wouldn’t drive him there. Neither claim was true.
Trump rejected the idea of the visit because he feared his hair would become disheveled in the rain, and because he did not believe it important to honor American war dead, according to four people with firsthand knowledge of the discussion that day. In a conversation with senior staff members on the morning of the scheduled visit, Trump said, “Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers.” In a separate conversation on the same trip, Trump referred to the more than 1,800 marines who lost their lives at Belleau Wood as “suckers” for getting killed.
Belleau Wood is a consequential battle in American history, and the ground on which it was fought is venerated by the Marine Corps. America and its allies stopped the German advance toward Paris there in the spring of 1918. But Trump, on that same trip, asked aides, “Who were the good guys in this war?” He also said that he didn’t understand why the United States would intervene on the side of the Allies.
Trump’s understanding of concepts such as patriotism, service, and sacrifice have interested me since he expressed contempt for the war record of the late Senator John McCain, who spent more than five years as a prisoner of the North Vietnamese. “He’s not a war hero,” Trump said in 2015 while running for the Republican nomination for president. “I like people who weren’t captured.”
There was no precedent in American politics for the expression of this sort of contempt, but the performatively patriotic Trump did no damage to his candidacy by attacking McCain in this manner. Nor did he set his campaign back by attacking the parents of Humayun Khan, an Army captain who was killed in Iraq in 2004.
Trump remained fixated on McCain, one of the few prominent Republicans to continue criticizing him after he won the nomination. When McCain died, in August 2018, Trump told his senior staff, according to three sources with direct knowledge of this event, “We’re not going to support that loser’s funeral,” and he became furious, according to witnesses, when he saw flags lowered to half-staff. “What the fuck are we doing that for? Guy was a fucking loser,” the president told aides…
People never use the full McCain quote, which is a missed opportunity for this article.
“He was a war hero because he was captured,” Trump said at the 2015 Family Leadership Summit in Ames, Iowa.
“I like people who weren’t captured, ok?” the current Republican front-runner told political consultant Frank Luntz, who hosted the event.
“He lost and let us down,” Trump said. “I’ve never liked him as much after that.”
“I don’t like losers,”
Anyway …
Trump’s understanding of heroism has not evolved since he became president. According to sources with knowledge of the president’s views, he seems to genuinely not understand why Americans treat former prisoners of war with respect. Nor does he understand why pilots who are shot down in combat are honored by the military. On at least two occasions since becoming president, according to three sources with direct knowledge of his views, Trump referred to former President George H. W. Bush as a “loser” for being shot down by the Japanese as a Navy pilot in World War II. (Bush escaped capture, but eight other men shot down during the same mission were caught, tortured, and executed by Japanese soldiers.)
[…]
On Memorial Day 2017, Trump visited Arlington National Cemetery, a short drive from the White House. He was accompanied on this visit by John Kelly, who was then the secretary of homeland security, and who would, a short time later, be named the White House chief of staff. The two men were set to visit Section 60, the 14-acre area of the cemetery that is the burial ground for those killed in America’s most recent wars. Kelly’s son Robert is buried in Section 60. A first lieutenant in the Marine Corps, Robert Kelly was killed in 2010 in Afghanistan. He was 29. Trump was meant, on this visit, to join John Kelly in paying respects at his son’s grave, and to comfort the families of other fallen service members. But according to sources with knowledge of this visit, Trump, while standing by Robert Kelly’s grave, turned directly to his father and said, “I don’t get it. What was in it for them?” Kelly (who declined to comment for this story) initially believed, people close to him said, that Trump was making a ham-handed reference to the selflessness of America’s all-volunteer force. But later he came to realize that Trump simply does not understand non-transactional life choices.
“He can’t fathom the idea of doing something for someone other than himself,” one of Kelly’s friends, a retired four-star general, told me. “He just thinks that anyone who does anything when there’s no direct personal gain to be had is a sucker. There’s no money in serving the nation.” Kelly’s friend went on to say, “Trump can’t imagine anyone else’s pain. That’s why he would say this to the father of a fallen marine on Memorial Day in the cemetery where he’s buried.”
I’ve asked numerous general officers over the past year for their analysis of Trump’s seeming contempt for military service. They offer a number of explanations. Some of his cynicism is rooted in frustration, they say. Trump, unlike previous presidents, tends to believe that the military, like other departments of the federal government, is beholden only to him, and not the Constitution. ..
Another explanation is more quotidian, and aligns with a broader understanding of Trump’s material-focused worldview. The president believes that nothing is worth doing without the promise of monetary payback, and that talented people who don’t pursue riches are “losers.” (According to eyewitnesses, after a White House briefing given by the then-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Joe Dunford, Trump turned to aides and said, “That guy is smart. Why did he join the military?”)
Yet another, related, explanation concerns what appears to be Trump’s pathological fear of appearing to look like a “sucker” himself. His capacious definition of sucker includes those who lose their lives in service to their country, as well as those who are taken prisoner, or are wounded in battle. “He has a lot of fear,” one officer with firsthand knowledge of Trump’s views said. “He doesn’t see the heroism in fighting.” Several observers told me that Trump is deeply anxious about dying or being disfigured, and this worry manifests itself as disgust for those who have suffered. Trump recently claimed that he has received the bodies of slain service members “many, many” times, but in fact he has traveled to Dover Air Force Base, the transfer point for the remains of fallen service members, only four times since becoming president. In another incident, Trump falsely claimed that he had called “virtually all” of the families of service members who had died during his term, then began rush-shipping condolence letters when families said the president was not telling the truth.
Trump has been, for the duration of his presidency, fixated on staging military parades, but only of a certain sort. In a 2018 White House planning meeting for such an event, Trump asked his staff not to include wounded veterans, on grounds that spectators would feel uncomfortable in the presence of amputees. “Nobody wants to see that,” he said.
I was reminded of this story Trump himself told to Howard Stern:
“I was at Mar-a-Lago and we had this incredible ball, the Red Cross Ball, in Palm Beach, Florida.
And we had the Marines. And the Marines were there, and it was terrible because all these rich people, they’re there to support the Marines, but they’re really there to get their picture in the Palm Beach Post.
So, you have all these really rich people, and a man, about 80 years old – very wealthy man, a lot of people didn’t like him – he fell off the stage…
So what happens is, this guy falls off right on his face, hits his head, and I thought he died.
And you know what I did? I said, ‘Oh my God, that’s disgusting,’ and I turned away.
I couldn’t, you know, he was right in front of me and I turned away. I didn’t want to touch him. He’s bleeding all over the place, I felt terrible.
You know, beautiful marble floor, didn’t look like it. It changed colour. Became very red.
And you have this poor guy, 80 years old, laying on the floor unconscious, and all the rich people are turning away..
What happens is, these 10 Marines from the back of the room.
They come running forward, they grab him, they put the blood all over the place—it’s all over their uniforms—they’re taking it, they’re swiping [it], they ran him out, they created a stretcher.
They call it a human stretcher, where they put their arms out with, like, five guys on each side…
I was saying, ‘Get that blood cleaned up! It’s disgusting!’ The next day, I forgot to call [the man] to say is he OK.
Pres. Trump appeared to suggest that his supporters should commit voter fraud by attempting to vote both by mail and in person pic.twitter.com/zcvdzYCY8x
He was called on that and this was his response: he wants his voters to “test the system.”
Based on the massive number of Unsolicited & Solicited Ballots that will be sent to potential Voters for the upcoming 2020 Election, & in order for you to MAKE SURE YOUR VOTE COUNTS & IS COUNTED, SIGN & MAIL IN your Ballot as EARLY as possible. On Election Day, or Early Voting,..
….after you Vote, which it should not, that Ballot will not be used or counted in that your vote has already been cast & tabulated. YOU ARE NOW ASSURED THAT YOUR PRECIOUS VOTE HAS BEEN COUNTED, it hasn’t been “lost, thrown out, or in any way destroyed”. GOD BLESS AMERICA!!!
You know what this means. He wants his yahoos, possibly armed, to go clog up the lines, go into polling stations and demand to see if their (alleged) mail-in vote has been counted. If they have not been counted, they are supposed to demand a ballot and vote again.
All of this is ridiculous at best (you can go online to see if your ballot has been received) and at worst attempted voter fraud. But it’s obvious that his real motive is to turn election day into a massive clusterfuck so that he can invalidate the election.
The Cult is with Dear Leader, mostly because of Fox News:
The president continues to have a strong grip on Republican voters, something he has cultivated since his inauguration. A Suffolk University-USA Today poll found that only 30 percent of Americans think the country is on the right track — but 60 percent of Republicans do. The numbers were even better among those who say that Fox News is their most trusted source of news and commentary; 7 in 10 think the country is headed in the right direction. Three-quarters of Fox fans also said the economy is in recovery, compared with about two-thirds of Republicans and a third of Americans overall.
That enthusiasm, though, goes only so far: Suffolk has Biden leading by seven points.
Joe Biden has some news ads out in the battlegrounds, designed to speak directly to seniors who might have a niggling feeling in the back of their minds that maybe Fox and Trump aren’t on the level, mostly because they probably know that old people are basically being used as human sacrifices for Trump’s re-election:
President Trump spent last week trying his best to convert the power of his office into a shift in presidential polling. The Republican Party presented a parade of people meant to attest to Trump’s effectiveness as president and to intone about the dangers of electing former vice president Joe Biden. It was one of the few remaining times that Trump will be able to command the nation’s attention before voters begin casting ballots in the presidential election.
A Washington Post average of polls conducted immediately before the two conventions had Biden leading Trump 51 percent to 42 percent. With polls released this week after the Republican convention, we can update those numbers.
Biden leads Trump 51 percent to 42 percent.
That things didn’t change much shouldn’t be a surprise. The race has been remarkably static, with Trump’s daily high in FiveThirtyEight’s average of polls never beating Biden’s low. Biden came into the conventions with an unusually large lead, and he comes out of them with one, too.
But why? Why didn’t Trump’s repeated assertions that Biden would doom the nation to collapse work? New polling from CNN and polling partner SSRS offers a hint.
Overall, Biden leads Trump by eight points in CNN’s poll. That differs by demographic group, as you’d expect.
ALL VOTERS
MEN
WOMEN
DEMS
INDS
REPS
Overall
Biden +8
Trump +4
Biden +20
Biden +92
Biden +14
Trump +88
CNN also asked respondents who they thought could best handle a range of issues like the economy or the coronavirus pandemic. Biden held the advantage on nearly every issue. The one exception was the economy, on which the two candidates were essentially even.
ALL VOTERS
MEN
WOMEN
DEMS
INDS
REPS
Overall
B+8
T+4
B+20
B+92
B+14
T+88
Economy
T+1
T+18
B+14
B+83
T+1
T+93
Pandemic response
B+12
T+3
B+27
B+94
B+18
T+83
Keep America safe
B+6
T+9
B+21
B+86
B+14
T+88
Address racial inequality
B+18
T+7
B+30
B+94
B+25
T+68
Now notice what happens when we contrast the numbers above with what Americans are actually worried about. (The figures below reflect the percentage who say they are very or somewhat worried about the issue.)
ALL VOTERS
MEN
WOMEN
DEMS
INDS
REPS
State of economy
58%
49
66
80
61
28
Pandemic
60
49
71
89
60
30
Risk of crime
37
29
45
41
40
27
Impact of racism
60
49
71
89
60
30
“Women more than anything else, they want security,” Trump said in a Fox News interview this week. “They want safety. They have to have safety.”
Most women can see that this ignorant, orange, pile of chaos is endangering everyone in the world, not just themselves. (Why more men don’t see this is a sad mystery.) Maybe it’s an instinctual thing, I don’t know.
Women are more worried about crime than other groups — but less so than about the pandemic. And they see Biden as better able to keep America safe by a wide margin.
Trump’s problem, in essence, is that the pandemic continues to be a much larger source of concern for Americans, and Americans continue to see his handling of it as subpar. (Only 40 percent viewed Trump’s handling of the pandemic with approval in CNN’s poll.) What’s more, Trump’s focus on crime has not only failed to overtake concern about the virus, it’s not even particularly effective as an argument.
Anyone with any sense can see that Trump’s handling of the pandemic has been an unmitigated disaster and that the catastrophic state of the economy today is a direct result of that. The whole world is in a state of heightened anxiety and it’s obvious that the president of the United States is not just incapable of handling the crisis, (he’s out there selling snake oil cures and lying about treatments!) he’s deliberately making things worse so he can pretend to be a tough guy by making empty bellicose threats about “law ‘n order.”
He’s responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of people, is openly trying to sabotage the election and now he’s telling his followers it’s ok to take up arms in the streets. This is what has most of America terrified.
And terror is a big motivator:
Oh, and speaking of enthusiasm? Trump regularly touts the record enthusiasm in his base. In CNN’s poll, that is clear, including that 87 percent of his supporters say there is no way they will change their minds about whom they will vote for.
Among supporters of Biden, the figure is 94 percent
