Trump campaign messaging strategy might need work
CNN reported yesterday that Donald Trump‘s reelection campaign has temporarily halted their ad spending “as they review their messaging strategy.”
So, “Kill Them With COVID And Then Don’t Let Them Vote” hasn’t been working well? Go figure.
Photo by Cayobo, used under Creative Commons license. https://is.gd/OXcIHT
Donald Trump’s response to COVID
There is a growing electoral threat to Donald Trump, and it is poised to swamp him in the 2020 elections taking place just 99 days from now. If you guessed that the secret weapon is COVID, you’re only partially correct. Indeed, Trump’s deadly failure to respond to the Coronavirus has now claimed the lives of 150,000 Americans. But in particular, the secret weapon that is poised to defeat Trump in 2020 is a giant bloc of voters that is terrified of COVID, and that went for Trump over Hillary Clinton in 2016.
Byron Allen reduces Donald Trump to black “hired help”
We like nothing better than to hear folks effectively frame their political arguments, and yesterday, black media entrepreneur Byron Allen did just that. At a Yahoo! Finance economic conference focusing on recovery from the COVID pandemic, when the subject of Donald Trump calling unflattering or inconvenient news reports “fake news,” Allen said:
President Trump is completely wrong. What he’s not understanding is that he’s nothing more than temporary hired help. He works for the American people. He answers to us, we don’t answer to him.
Allen’s statement is so important as a reminder that, while Trump has locked children in cages, sent armed thugs to kidnap peaceful protesters in our cities, refused to obey subpoenas, enriched himself and his family at our expense, and committed many other deplorable and even illegal acts while in the White House, our Constitution provides that the president is supposed to be the servant of all Americans, not the other way around. That is an important statement about who really has the power in the United States, once they recognize it.
A second brilliant element of Allen’s remarks is that he flipped the script on hundreds of years of U.S. racial history, where blacks literally were brought here against their will as “help,” i.e. as slaves, only to continue to be “hired help” for whites for generations, at substandard wages, after obtaining their freedom. By calling Trump “hired help,” Allen completely reverses this racial stereotype and reminds us that Trump, a white man, is hired to serve black Americans, brown Americans, women, and the rest of us. One could even say that Byron Allen figuratively turned Donald Trump into a black man in terms of Trump’s status in America. And finally, Allen’s description of Trump as “temporary” points us to the light at the end of the tunnel, suggesting that whatever pain Trump is inflicting upon America will end someday, hopefully by next January 20 if enough voters come out and vote the right way this November.
Well done, Byron Allen.
Photo by Kheel Center, used under Creative Commons license. https://is.gd/K7xIVH
Kanye West, whose presidential campaign is soon to be headed south
Kanye West, who says he is running for president as an independent under the “Birthday Party,” held his first political rally yesterday, in South Carolina, whose population is 27 percent black. At the rally, Kanye said that Harriet Tubman, a beloved national figure and former slave who rescued scores of fellow slaves via the Underground Railroad, “never actually freed the slaves, she just had them work for other white people.” And today, Kanye failed to meet the requirements to be placed on the South Carolina presidential election ballot.
Good thing Kanye isn’t trying to attract black voters.
Photo by Pieter-Jannick Dijkstra, used under Creative Commons license. https://is.gd/FIdhMy
Reaction to Goya Foods CEO praise of Donald Trump
Goya Foods CEO Robert Unanue showed up at the White House Rose Garden on Thursday and heaped political praise on Donald Trump, saying things like:
We are all truly blessed … to have a leader like President Trump who is a builder ….
After calls to boycott Goya Foods products went viral, Unanue doubled down in a Fox News interview on Friday, saying that the negative reaction to his remarks was “suppression of speech.” Here’s our response:
https://twitter.com/MessagingMatt/status/1281680000090099719
Photo by Jade Jackson, used under Creative Commons license. https://is.gd/ocxoIr
Winston Churchill, wartime leader and Trump opposite
Back in March, Donald Trump told reporters that, when it comes to his role regarding the Coronavirus (a/k/a COVID-19 or COVID):
I view it as, in a sense, a wartime president. I mean, that’s what we’re fighting.
Since then, however, Trump has acted quite the opposite of “a wartime president.” Instead, Trump has cut and run from COVID at every turn. Trump has failed to unite the country and take bold national steps to combat the virus. On the contrary, Trump has been as divisive as any president in U.S. history, whipping up a race war, teargassing peaceful protesters, and focusing on cultural shiny objects such as Bibles and Confederate statues. Moreover, in the face of further attacks on America by Russia, Trump has stood down and done nothing. This failure to unite and protect our nation is not only fatal in terms of lives, it is proving politically fatal to Trump and those Republicans who follow him.
Pennsylvania Democratic Governor Tom Wolf takes precautions with mask and temperature check
A revealing new study by two University of Chicago economists indicates that fear of COVID (a/k/a COVID-19 or Coronavirus) has had a greater negative impact on the U.S. economy than government-imposed Coronavirus lockdowns, as Americans make their own choices for themselves and their families. Among the findings from Drs. Austan Goolsbee (former Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Barack Obama) and Chad Syverson, based on cell phone records of customers visiting over 2 million businesses:
–“While overall consumer traffic fell by 60 percentage points, legal restrictions explain only 7 of that.”
–“Individual choices were far more important and seem tied to fears of infection.”
–“Traffic started dropping before the legal [shutdown] orders were in place; was highly tied to the number of COVID deaths in the county; and showed a clear shift by consumers away from larger/busier stores toward smaller/less busy ones in the same industry.”
The study appears to indicate that (1) many Americans feared the Coronavirus even though they were being told by Republican politicians not to fear it; and (2) based on the current explosion in COVID cases, those fears were perfectly rational.
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