trumpty plumpty

[KUTradition]

apparently melania goes all pro-abortion rights in her new book

[KUTradition]

two former White House advisors report that trump had to be shown voter data (indicating roughly equal dem/pub split) before he would release emergency funds to wildfire victims in CA

[jhawks99]

Susan Rice just called Draft Dodgin Donnie Neville Chamberlain and a surrender monkey.

[Shirley]

two former White House advisors report that trump had to be shown voter data (indicating roughly equal dem/pub split) before he would release emergency funds to wildfire victims in CA

Watching that on CNN.

What a piece of shit.

[Sparko]

Trump weaponized everything he touched.

[jfish26]

This has elegiac-paean-to-the-dead-mall-or-rickety-carnival vibes.

The reasons people say they leave Donald Trump’s rallies early

The Republican nominee consistently draws large, enthusiastic and rowdy crowds to his rallies and other campaign events, and at nearly all of them, another trend is clear: Scores of people head out before the end.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics ... res-early/

Less than 25 minutes into Donald Trump’s remarks, Melissa Prescott walked out.

She arrived at the Linda Ronstadt Music Hall in Tucson at 8:30 a.m. on a hot September day, waited in line outside with her teen daughter for more than four hours, then waited another hour inside before Trump took the stage about 2:15 p.m. As Trump was complaining about 2016 exit polls and speaking about how he likes “the old people the best,” Prescott, along with dozens of others, started trickling out.

“I’m glad we got in. I wish I could stay to hear more,” said Prescott, 36, who explained that she needed to go pick up her disabled cousin.

The Republican presidential nominee consistently draws large, enthusiastic and rowdy crowds to his rallies and other campaign events, and at nearly all of them, another trend is clear: Scores of people leave early.

Most stay. But Trump often runs late and goes long, prompting many to bow out because of other responsibilities, priorities or, sometimes, waning patience and interest, according to Washington Post interviews and observations across dozens of events. Some said they wanted to beat traffic or had work the next day. Others complained about sound quality. One man wanted to go home to his French bulldog. Another needed to get home to his daughter. A third had a Yorkie with him that started acting out. A fourth man said his phone died.

The early rally departures have touched a nerve in Trump, who has long shown intense interest in attendance, ratings and other optics. He has mentioned the subject in a defensive tone lately after Vice President Kamala Harris needled him over it and suggested people leave out of “exhaustion and boredom.”

“Honestly nobody” leaves the rallies, Trump said at a recent town hall in Flint, Mich. At an event in Walker, Mich., Trump insisted “nobody ever leaves,” before adding, “and when they do, I finish up quick, believe me.” Trump then suggested that it looks like people are leaving their seats because they want to come up and take photos with him.

[...]

In Atlanta, over the summer, crowds gathered for several blocks in the sweltering heat down a busy highway, waiting to get inside a Trump rally. But as he kept talking, slashing into Republican Gov. Brian Kemp and going off script, hundreds if not thousands of people left the arena.

More recently, in Indiana, Pa., attendees trickled out as Trump falsely claimed that “every legal expert” wanted abortion policy sent back to the states, over an hour into his speech. More left as he repeated his warning about “World War III.”

By 9:20 p.m., about 90 minutes after he began, the empty seats were noticeable at the Kovalchick Convention and Athletic Complex, while Trump called the nation’s capital a “horror show.” He wrapped up his speech about five minutes later.

In Las Vegas, some attendees grew frustrated with Trump’s tardiness and said they had trouble hearing him. A reporter standing by the door counted more than 200 people leaving in the first 20 minutes. One attendee said they still loved Trump but said the former president would have said “You’re fired” if anyone else had been as late as he was.

Anastasia Bennett, 22, quickly grew tired of the insults and was ready to leave. Bennett was undecided before attending the rally with her aunt, who supports Harris. But after hearing Trump speak, she said she planned to vote for Harris.

“It was the insults and just being an hour late,” she said.

In Tucson, some attendees began filing out around the time Prescott left. Republican Senate candidate Kari Lake was among the first to exit. She waved at supporters outside who had been unable to get into the event but had remained there in hopes of being let in late or catching a glimpse of Trump exiting afterward.

As Carlos Chaboya, 65, left to walk to his car a few blocks away, a man in his truck stopped to ask him if Trump was still speaking onstage. Another man on foot asked him if people could still get into the rally.

“He’s still going. I gotta go home, but he’s still on,” Chaboya said, warning the man that they weren’t letting anyone else in.

Chaboya said he arrived about 8:30 a.m. and, like Prescott, was among the last to be let into the venue. He said he was leaving because his daughter, who is home-schooled, called him and said the internet wasn’t working.

“I gotta get it back up for her, so I’m gonna go do that,” said Chaboya, who is retired.

Prescott said she was excited to see Trump, even if briefly, after driving for two hours in August to Glendale and waiting more than two more hours in line, only to be turned away because the rally was at capacity.

When she entered the Tucson event, Prescott was frustrated to learn that the concession stands were already closed, and she and her daughter were unable to get food.

[japhy]

This has elegiac-paean-to-the-dead-mall-or-rickety-carnival vibes.

This does not dance off the tongue like "The Great Wall of Rubedom", but you still have my admiration.

[Sparko]

This has elegiac-paean-to-the-dead-mall-or-rickety-carnival vibes.

This does not dance off the tongue like "The Great Wall of Rubedom", but you still have my admiration.

Perfect frame. But the Post? My oh my. Thought it was the Washington Times. His crowds are smallish and anxious to leave doesn't sound horse racy enough.

[jfish26]

[jhawks99]

Who gets the contract to sell Korans?

[twocoach]

Ryan Walters sure is trying hard to get a cushy Trump job if Trump gets reelected.

[MICHHAWK]

Who gets the contract to sell Korans?

that's not even a real religion.

[Sparko]

Who gets the contract to sell Korans?

that's not even a real religion.

You and Larry David can meet with Rushdie at Fatwa acres. With a lead pipe.

[jfish26]

Who gets the contract to sell Korans?

that's not even a real religion.

You are correct, it's a text.

[RainbowsandUnicorns]

Eric is a nutshell.



1. "157 hotels". "Let me just repeat that number. 150 hotels". Does he realize 150 and 157 is not the same number?
2. Then he describes the conditions the immigrants came from. NO? Oh, I'm sorry! That's the conditions the Americans were dealt with. Fuck the immigrants.
3. "What does Kamala do? She offers $750". "The TV in the person's house costs more than $750".
SO much wrong with those two statements but hey, we are dealing with Eric Trump.
4. He has a major problem with Ukrainian and Russian "Kids" (after he says they are 21) shooting each other in the face with AK-47s but how many times has he shown the same angst when little kids get their faces blown apart in an American school?
5. Pakistan and Bin Laden? What the fuck do they have to do with "this administration"?
6. His father didn't exactly ace hurricane relief when he was President.

[japhy]

ELECTION INTERFERENCE!

Reality is interfering with trumpty plumpty's narrative.

As the clock crept toward midnight on Thursday evening, Donald Trump unleashed two all-caps social media missives that neatly captured the sophistication of his arguments on the economy. One vomited forth a bunch of scattershot promises to end taxes on untold numbers of people while falsely pushing the idea that Trump delivered the largest tax cut in U.S. history. The other raged that Kamala Harris will end “FRACKING,” featuring a video depicting her as a radical socialist who will destroy American energy production, and concluding: “Only President Trump will bring back Trump’s strong economy.”

In a case of spectacular bad timing, only eight hours later, we learned that in September, the economy added a stunning 254,000 new jobs, far surpassing expectations.

This is the last jobs report before the early voting really gets underway. While there will be one more on Friday, November 1, it will come too late to have any real political effect. By contrast, the surprising nature of today’s report will prompt many days of positive headlines about jobs—including from local news outlets, which independents tend to read—that will keep on mitigating Harris’s leading vulnerability against Trump: economic approval numbers.

I’m not sure people appreciate the magnitude of one of Harris’s biggest achievements in this campaign: fighting Trump to a near-draw on the economy. There is a telling number buried in a new Cook Political Report poll of the seven key battleground states: Harris is now dead even with Trump on which candidate likely voters trust on “getting inflation under control.” In August, Cook’s polling found Trump leading by six points on this question; now each candidate has 47 percent.

To be sure, Harris is not yet where she needs to be on the economy overall against Trump. The Cook poll—which also finds Harris with slight leads in Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Arizona, and Nevada, a tie in North Carolina, and Trump ahead in Georgia—finds Trump ahead of Harris by 50–45 percent on who is trusted to handle the economy overall. And other polls find Trump with an advantage on that same question.

But Trump’s edge on that overall metric has been steadily shrinking in many polls. And the Cook poll’s finding that Harris has reached parity on inflation in particular is important: It suggests Harris’s messaging is working. Harris has poured immense resources into highlighting the aspects of her economic agenda that are focused on affordability: Her campaign has spent $35 million broadcasting just three ads about her policies to curb costs on a variety of fronts, ads that have run over 50,000 times.

What’s more, there are signs that Harris is achieving some separation from President Biden’s unpopularity. The Cook poll finds that in those battleground states, Harris’s job approval as vice president is 51–49 percent, whereas Biden is 11 points underwater.

Impressions of Biden’s age-related feebleness fed a sense that he couldn’t control inflation, driving his numbers down further, which in turn made him seem even less in control, in a kind of political death spiral. By contrast, Harris may have broken out of that doom loop, in part through the sheer energy of her performance. The media focus on Harris has lifted her approval, which in turn has probably led voters to be open to appreciating actual economic conditions—in which both inflation and joblessness are low.

The September jobs report will be helpful here as well: It finds that not only did job creation wildly beat expectations, unemployment is down again to 4.1 percent and wage gains are strong and outpacing inflation. The Harris campaign highlighted this clip to illustrate the gushing tone of the coverage:

If I’m right that voters are now more open to hearing the facts about actual economic conditions, this jobs report could matter more than it otherwise might have.

Beyond all this, Harris’s performance may also be helping mitigate any effect in which voters see her as tainted by their disapproval of Biden. Never Trump strategist Sarah Longwell sees this happening in her focus groups of undecided and swing voters, noting that they show these voters really registered Harris’s debate comment that “you’re not running against Joe Biden, you’re running against me.”

“Her current economic proposals give voters something forward-looking to evaluate,” Longwell tells me about what her focus groups are showing. “They have a persistent negative view of Biden’s economy. But you’ll now hear some voters saying Harris’s policies will be more helpful to their families than Trump’s.”

Finally, Harris may be benefiting from a dynamic that often eludes pundits. Our political debates about the economy are often straitjacketed—they revolve solely around the single metric of trust or approval on “the economy,” which treats voter impressions as if they only turn on appreciation of each candidate’s technical economic know-how. But that’s a vast oversimplification. Another metric that matters here is voters’ impressions of which candidate cares about their needs and problems—that is, which candidate they believe is on their side. And here Harris retains an advantage.

In this sense, the current campaign carries faint echoes of another campaign it is rarely compared to: the 2012 presidential race. Because it is apparently a fact of our political life that Democratic presidents clean up disastrous GOP messes and are often judged harshly on their inability to achieve this immediately, Barack Obama in 2012 also faced stubbornly low economic approval numbers as the country ground its way back from the Great Recession.

At the time, pundits robotically cited Mitt Romney’s superior economic numbers as proof Obama was doomed. But Obama advisers believed economic disapproval of him largely registered dissatisfaction with the status quo and that the “Who’s on your side?” comparison would ultimately enable Obama to neutralize Romney on the issue. And they were right. The comparison between 2012 and 2024 is admittedly imperfect, but in one narrow sense it may prove apt: Then, as now, technical economic approval numbers may not be determinative after all.

Trump could still win this race, as it remains very close. The sort of undecided, low-propensity voter who is still out there does remember Trump’s economy fondly and doesn’t hold him accountable for the Covid-fueled economic catastrophe of his last year. Perversely, this remains a big reason for persistent voter sourness on the economy right now. All of that unquestionably remains a major hurdle for Harris.

But if she can persuade remaining swing voters that the Harris economy of the future is not the Biden economy of the present—or, at least, the one that many voters perceive—and that it is superior to, well, whatever it is Trump is telling us he’ll do, then she can win. The new jobs report suggests the pieces are falling into place for her to do just that.

[Overlander]

I have become a fan of the podcast “The Rest is Politics-US”
It features Anthony Scaramucci, who I did not care for when he was on Trumps team.

I have come to respect his opinions and points of view. He has amazing insight into Trump and what motivates him.

He was sounding the alarm that the Harris Team needs to get out there more….pounding the message.

[jfish26]

Projection and lies. The P&L that is the focus of today’s GOP.

[twocoach]

Projection and lies. The P&L that is the focus of today’s GOP.

What's crazy is that he is telling these lies about what is happening in Florida, Georgia and North Carolina, three hugely important battleground states that Trump desperately needs to win. Does he not see that the undecided voters in those states KNOW that he is lying and will remember him using them for his own personal gain when they go vote in one month?

[jfish26]

Projection and lies. The P&L that is the focus of today’s GOP.

What's crazy is that he is telling these lies about what is happening in Florida, Georgia and North Carolina, three hugely important battleground states that Trump desperately needs to win. Does he not see that the undecided voters in those states KNOW that he is lying and will remember him using them for his own personal gain when they go vote in one month?

I do think it’s the sort of thing - really not unlike ruining Springfield by making it a proxy battleground - that risks flying WAY too close to the sun.