Tag Archive: Stormy Daniels

With Kamala Harris replacing Joe Biden, Trump is stuck

Vice President Kamala Harris and President Joe Biden

Donald Trump has had a bad month. Ever since July 21, when President Joe Biden announced that he would not seek re-election and that he was endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris for the Democratic Party presidential nomination, Trump has been flummoxed at every turn, and is losing support.

For most of this year, it was the other way around. President Biden received negative coverage from the “news” media, even after many successes. Biden was singled out as “old,” even though Trump is nearly the same age. Trump was leading in most polls, especially in the “battleground” or “swing” states — Michigan, Pennsylvania, Nevada, Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina and Wisconsin — where most analysts think the election will be decided.

Then came the first Trump/Biden presidential debate on June 27. Biden, after criss-crossing the western hemisphere from Normandy to Hollywood, having been over-prepared by his staff, and with a cold (followed by a COVID diagnosis), had a rough night. Republicans and the press pounced, Democrats panicked, and the “Biden is old” meme sunk in. After several weeks of one prominent Democrat after another saying that Biden should drop out of the campaign, the President finally did.

Since then, however, the 2024 election has been upended. Harris has been crushing Trump in fundraising, voter enthusiasm,  crowds, and endorsements by big unions and others. Harris’s choice of Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her running mate has also added tremendous energy to the Democratic ticket. Walz has proven to be immensely popular and is one of the most dynamic running mates in recent memory. Walz’s resume as farmer, teacher (and union member), winning football coach, Army National Guard veteran, Congressman and Governor, as well as his plain-spoken, decent manner, are motivating the Democratic base and attracting Midwestern voters and others who might not usually be part of the base.

30 minutes of grief, then a pivot from Biden to Harris

The new 2024 election optics

We are big supporters of President Joe Biden. There have been many posts here outlining his accomplishments and tremendous successes, including:

–strengthening America’s economy and creating a record number of jobs;

–leadership and respect around the world, as well as expanding NATO;

–protecting the rights of women and minorities;

–successfully placing hundreds of federal judges on the bench, including U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson;

–forgiving over one hundred billions of dollars in student loans (despite Republican efforts to stop it); and more.

Likewise, we have laid out the reasons why President Biden deserved Democratic support for his presidential re-election efforts, such as the fact that he is the incumbent president who decided to seek another term, and that he won the 2024 primaries (with over 14 million Democratic votes) very handily.

But reality has taken a different turn. Whether events of the past few weeks are fair or not, President Biden has announced that he will no longer seek the nomination for president in 2024. Instead, Biden has fully endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris for the job.

Normally, we would want to spend days grieving over and processing what happened. However, with the 2024 elections just 105 days away, and the Democratic National Convention (where the presidential and vice presidential candidates are formally nominated) only 27 days from now, there is no time for that. Instead, we grieved for about half an hour, and then pivoted to Vice President Harris.

A tale of two Memorial Days

President Joe Biden with Vice President Kamala Harris and Defense Secy. Lloyd Austin at Arlington National Cemetery, 5/27/24

When then-U.S. Senator John Edwards campaigned for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2003 and 2004, one of his main themes was that “there are two Americas,” meaning those who are well-off economically (or who don’t face discrimination based on race, religion, gender, etc.), and the rest of us. Edwards was correct, but there is also another major divide in America: the divide between the political right and left. That right-left political divide often shows up, for example, in the “news” sources that people choose, from the powerful Republican media machine (Fox “News,” Newsmax, OAN, the New York Post, the Wall Street Journal, etc.) on the right to a smattering of blogs, which cannot compete with such Republican machine, on the left. And nowhere was this right-left political divide more on display last weekend than in the Memorial Day messages from President Joe Biden and his upcoming election opponent, Donald Trump.

President Biden, the father of a son who served in the military and who died prematurely (though he was not killed in combat), displayed his well-known patriotism, compassion and decency in his Memorial Day speech, given at Arlington National Cemetery. Some of Biden’s quotes included:

Trump is on trial, but what should we call it?

Suggestion from the 2018 State of the Union

Donald Trump is on trial right now in New York City, facing criminal charges for “business fraud.” However, that term is really the last step that began with (1) having adulterous affairs (2) with porn star Stormy Daniels and Playboy model Karen McDougal (3) just months after Trump’s wife Melania gave birth to son Barron, then (4) covering up the Daniels affair by paying $130,000 in “hush money” to Daniels (5) through Trump’s lawyer Michael Cohen, as well as (6) involving the Trump-friendly National Enquirer in paying $150,000 to McDougal to kill the story of her affair with Trump, and (7) paying off a Trump Tower doorman who claimed to have a story about a child Trump allegedly fathered out of wedlock. According to the New York prosecutors, the covering up of such payments by Trump and others constitutes falsifying New York State business records. Ultimately, all of these actions were designed to influence the 2016 presidential election by keeping important information about Trump’s character and crimes out of the news. And while the cover-ups worked to some extent in 2016, presumably the facts are not hidden anymore.

Understandably, however, the news media have had a bit of a hard time describing the subject matter of Trump’s trial for purposes of short headlines or to appeal to the short attention spans of many readers and viewers. Thus, we have seen the trial described as:

Trump vs. Biden

President Joe Biden

After Super Tuesday‘s results this week in both the Republican and Democratic presidential primaries, it is clear that Donald Trump and Joe Biden will have a 2024 rematch of their 2020 presidential election. Trump and Biden each won almost all of their Super Tuesday contests, with Trump losing only Vermont to Nikki Haley and Biden losing just American Samoa to someone named Jason Palmer. In the delegate count, Trump and Biden again are very well on their way to securing their respective party’s presidential nominations, with Trump thus far gaining 1,004 of the necessary 1,215 Republican delegates, and Biden getting 1,516 out of the required 1,968 delegates on the Democratic side. Haley has announced that she is abandoning her presidential campaign, but she refused to endorse Trump at this time.

Accordingly, as the nomination process now shifts to an early general election campaign between Trump and Biden, a key question is going to be: what is the 2024 presidential election about? The answer to that question may well determine who becomes our next president. For example, Trump and the Republicans will likely keep talking about trans bathroom use, and caravans of “migrants” (an apparent change from “immigrants” or “illegals”), because they either have the wrong policies or no policies at all on truly important issues such as the economy, climate change, healthcare, gun violence, etc. President Biden and the Democrats, in addition to running on their strong record of economic recovery and growth, have made “freedom” a centerpiece of their 2024 campaign thus far, which includes freedom from Republican government intrusion into women’s health decisions (i.e., abortion), freedom to vote, preserving our democracy and elections against Republican dictatorship, etc.

Republican overreaching may hurt them in 2024 elections

Younger activists, a major Republican fear

Republicans have a predictable pattern: even with government nearly evenly divided, they get drunk with power, use their votes to overreach with extreme policies, and wind up alienating voters in the next election. In June 2022, for example, the U.S. Supreme Court, with three new right wing Republican justices courtesy of Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell, voted along party lines to take away the right to abortion that had been established in the Court’s Roe v. Wade decision nearly 50 years earlier. This decision set off a firestorm among voters, especially younger voters, who showed up to the voting booths in droves five months later and gave the Democrats considerably better results (retaining control and actually winning a one-seat majority in the U.S, Senate, barely losing control of the House, and gaining state governorships and state legislature majorities) in an off-year election where the party in power usually does much worse.

Republicans, however, did not learn the lesson from the 2022 elections, i.e., that their extremism scared away voters. Instead, the GOP has charged ahead with even more extremist actions that could hurt them in 2024. These include:

Trump criminal arraignment will be test for news media today

New York tabloid coverage of Donald Trump

Donald Trump is being arraigned today on numerous criminal charges at the New York State Supreme Court in Manhattan. Thus far, much of the news media coverage of this process has focused on what Trump is saying and doing, e.g. his reaction to his indictment, his travel plans, and his plan to fly back from New York to Florida later today to give a speech, no doubt full of whining and complaining about being subject to the legal system. But today is really about what is being done to Trump, and what he faces, i.e. hopefully some modicum of justice. It’s also a teachable moment for many Americans, to find out this country was founded upon the principle that no one is above the law.

Therefore, the news media have a choice today: will they correctly focus on what is happening to Trump, including booking, fingerprinting, reading of the charges against him, analysis of the legal process going forward, the potential for prison time, etc.? Or will the media continue to base their coverage on Trump’s own statements and travels? In particular, will the news media fully cover the rather meaningless Republican circus of Trump’s Florida speech tonight, letting him once again set the agenda? If so, then we will know that the media will cover the 2024 presidential elections, like the 2020 elections, in the most superficial and damaging way.

Trump and the Republicans have a Michael Cohen problem

House Oversight and Reform Committee Chairman Elijah Cummings (D-MD)

Republicans are having some major difficulties with former Donald Trump personal attorney Michael Cohen‘s testimony before the U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Reform yesterday. Cohen sat for over 7 hours, giving testimony about the workings of the Trump Organization that was riveting, and at times stunning. Notably, the committee Republicans rarely if ever attacked Cohen’s specific allegations about Trump wrongdoings and illegal acts. Instead, they, and Republicans in the media and elsewhere, simply painted Cohen as “a liar” based on his guilty plea in two previous cases, one of which involves scheming with Donald Trump to cover up hush money payments to porn star Stephanie Clifford a/k/a Stormy Daniels, as well as lying for Trump about efforts to build a Trump Tower in Moscow. Apparently, these Republicans realize that they face the following problems regarding Michael Cohen:

Trump’s great border wall distraction

Climate change, one issue that gets less focus in favor of immigration

If you follow major news stories for the past few months or longer, you might think the biggest issue of our time is illegal immigration, and specifically Donald Trump‘s desired border wall. After all, Trump and the Republicans created the phony “caravan” issue before the 2018 midterm elections. Then, in December, Trump shut down the federal government over his inability to convince Congress, and the American people, to approve his wall. The shutdown was so disruptive that it forced the news media and the voters to spend more time focusing on the wall and immigration. After the Trump Shutdown hurt Trump and the Republicans in the polls, and amidst the threat of a second Trump Shutdown, Trump caved to the Democrats regarding funding for border “fencing.” However, Trump then declared a fake “National Emergency” as a ploy to circumvent Congressional approval and steal money from other taxpayer funds, such as disaster relief, to try to fund his wall.

Sean Hannity’s giant conflict of interest

Fox News, completely removed from “news”

Yesterday, in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, Michael Cohen‘s attorney was forced to reveal that Cohen has three clients: Donald Trump, former Republican National Committee Deputy Finance Chairman and donor Elliott Broidy, and Sean Hannity of Fox News. The reveal of Hannity as Cohen’s heretofore mystery third client raises some serious questions: