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A legendary US Homeland Security official just sounded the alarm over Trump — and for - good reason! 
Showing posts with label MILES TAYLOR. Show all posts
Showing posts with label MILES TAYLOR. Show all posts
Monday, July 21, 2025
Tuesday, July 23, 2024
Trump. "He's just a f*ing idiot," Miles Taylor, former chief of staff Department Homeland Security
The Mark Thompson Show
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Saturday, April 20, 2024
Trump CAUGHT PAYING Woman for TRIAL PICTURE BOOK
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MeidasTouch host Ben Meiselas reports on Donald Trump paying a woman $100k to follow him around with a portable printer and make him picture books by printing nice articles about him.
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Sunday, March 17, 2024
Former Trump official backing Biden says others will speak out
Monday, November 2, 2020
RSN: Mort Rosenblum | The Scream
01 November 20
It's Live on the HomePage Now:
Reader Supported News
RSN: Mort Rosenblum | The Scream
Mort Rosenblum, Reader Supported News
Rosenblum writes: "On a downer evening in 1882, Edvard Munch watched the setting sun turn clouds blood red over a Norwegian fjord. 'I sensed a scream passing through nature,' he wrote in his diary. 'The color shrieked.' Tonight, the Arizona crimson sunset is screaming."
Munch captured the deepest anxieties of the human condition with an agonized gaunt face in his painting, “The Scream.” Those hands clapped tightly over ears might be blocking out the poisonous lying harangue of a cruel despotic narcissist who threatens unspeakable calamity.
This sounds overdramatic, and that’s the problem. It isn’t. If the worst of human nature muscles aside the best of it on Nov. 3, we can only guess at the unavoidable consequences for America and the wider world it is abandoning.
More than 90 million early ballots are already cast, and few made-up minds are likely to change. Still, enough undecided or apathetic eligible voters remain to sway the results either way. We have only hours left to persuade everyone within our reach to consider the stakes.
My last Mort Report, a flat-out rant, detailed a range of overriding issues. At this point, we need calmly reasoned conversations within our own circles, by phone if not in person, to focus on their personal concerns. Every minute counts.
There is the obvious: carpools for people who need a ride or moral support to brave long lines and the menace of goons trying to steal their most valuable asset: the right to choose leaders who faithfully represent the citizens they are sworn to serve.
But more, we need a firm grasp on what Donald Trump and his enabling Republicans have already stolen. For the quarter-million victims of a plague he purposely let run wild, it is too late. If he is re-elected, far more will be lost.
As Bob Woodward reveals, he hid the threat for his own purposes. He left states to flounder, favoring partisan governors. He blocked tests and tracing, replaced world-class experts with quacks, and he lied baldly at White House campaign rallies masked as press briefings.
This was a master stroke, Jared Kushner boasted to Woodward. Trump put himself in a position to blame every failure on governors and claim any success for himself alone. Remember? “I take no responsibility.” When he could no longer deny the pandemic, he blamed it all on China.
Covid-19 is the immediate crisis, a harbinger of inevitable killer pathogens to follow. It pales compared to the climate collapse that his shortsighted, self-serving policies worsen with each passing month. In the meantime, he fans embers into global conflicts that risk flaring out of control.
We need to help people see this deeply disturbed sociopath for who he is. His success centers on a single skill: an ability fire up fearful cultists he privately disdains, selling a reality that is patently, and spectacularly, horse shit. And faithless lawmakers sustain him.
Even if Trump had improved the economy for more than a wealthy few (he’ll complete his term with the worst economic record since Herbert Hoover despite inheriting the Obama-Biden boom), money is not how a civilized nation keeps score.
In talking to friends and family, local situations bring it home. But for a godawful example of the dichotomy between the best of human nature and the worst, look at Arizona and the Department of Homeland Security.
Miles Taylor, as DHS chief of staff, wrote that “Anonymous” op-ed in The New York Times in September 2018 and followed with a book: A Warning. Professionals should keep their jobs to curb Trump’s excesses, he wrote. But recently, like so many others, he had enough.
George W. Bush created the DHS after 9/11 to thwart terrorists and other external threats. It also oversees immigration and border security. Now, as Trump creates endless enemies abroad, he has perverted the department into his personal Gestapo, focused on domestic dissidents.
Chris Cuomo grilled Taylor on CNN this week for lying months before when asked if he was “Anonymous”: “Why should we trust you now?” He acknowledged that but explained why. Trump would have narrowed the story to one disgruntled flunky. He wanted a focus on facts.
Taylor has a point. Trump has lied at least 25,000 times, all for ignoble purposes. Taylor has owned up, as he promised he eventually would. His book proceeds go to charity. And his basic truths are substantiated by countless other defectors, with documents, audio and video.
Trump, Taylor said, told top-level aides at a strategy session that he wanted agents to gas, jolt with electricity, and fire live ammunition at asylum seekers who approach the border. By long-standing international accords, people in danger have the right to a fair hearing.
Cuomo was stunned: “We’re talking about women and children seeking a better life in the United States, fleeing violence and persecution,” he replied, “and the commander in chief is saying he wants to electrify them?”
Yes, Taylor said. He added that when Trump noticed shock on his aides’ faces, he said, “Well, maybe you could just shoot them in the legs to slow them down.”
Cuomo asked again: ‘You told him that it was mostly women and children, and he said that they should be shot or gassed, seriously? ‘
“Correct,” Taylor replied. His quotes, he said, are verbatim. “And if that’s not gut-wrenching to you, then you are not human.”
Taylor said Trump promised pardons for border agents who pushed beyond legal limits. “I don’t care what you need,” he quoted Trump as saying. “Just break the law and do it.”
Unethical conversations were common in the Oval Office, Taylor said. Reporters who cover Washington well know how often Trump’s will prevails across the board. But immigration policy, pushed by Stephen Miller since Inauguration Day, now defines us as a nation.
In the final debate, Joe Biden confronted Trump about 545 children lost in the system who may never see their parents again. “They are so well taken of,” the president said. He had been shown a spiffed-up model. “They’re in facilities that were so clean.”
Stunning as that is, it is a mere peek under the corner of a filthy rug. Few Americans know what it hides, but the outside world does, and we are hated for it.
The Obama administration built wire enclosures for asylum seekers who awaited processing, which belies Trump’s claim that Democrats want “open borders.” In 2017, Jeff Sessions ordered family separations, taking even toddlers from their mothers, to discourage new arrivals.
Holding centers were jammed with people waiting endlessly in limbo. From the outset, Miller invoked Title 42, a public health provision that bans immigrants with communicable diseases. Now, the Covid plague that Trump says is over, provides a perfect excuse.
Now asylum seekers are kept in Mexico in defiance of international norms, prey to drug cartels who extort ransom from their families. They wait in Kafka-esque limbo, with no guidance about how to apply for a rare hearing. Those already in the United States are shipped out en masse, often to Central American states adjacent to those they fled, with no facilities to receive them.
Private contractors grow rich in the process, paid to keep migrants in hotel rooms, guarded by hired toughs who forcefully repel civil rights lawyers trying to help them. Despite it all, destitute families still sneak across, facing increased risks in a hostile desert to escape corrupt authorities and murderous gangs back home.
The southern border is only part of it. In 2015, at the height of human tides triggered largely by fallout from Bush’s senseless Iraq War, Angela Merkel took in 1.1 million refugees. After five years, a study shows a net gain to the German economy. Trump’s slashed aid to Africa and drought-caused famine provoked a new surge. This year, America capped arrivals of desperate people at 15,000, down from 18,000.
It is not just asylum seekers and refugees. Brilliant students who enrich our society are being given limited visas, forcing them to return home midway through their university studies. And Trump is extending his war on truth to foreign correspondents.
A new law under review would limit journalist visas to 240 days. Serious news organizations can’t maintain bureaus under that restriction. Governments would retaliate, as China has done, leaving us blind, deaf – and dumb – in a world that needs reporters more than ever.
Solutions demand diplomacy to ease conflict, targeted aid to help people survive at home, international pressure on authoritarian governments, and serious global cooperation to mitigate climate collapse. Trump is heading us in all the wrong directions.
Now, with only hours left, what matters most is seeing Trump for who he is.
I almost felt sorry for my senator, Martha McSally, who is among the most hypocritical, press-averse, partisan, incompetent, and slavishly pro-Trump legislators in Congress. Her blatantly false ads slander Mark Kelly, who I know to be dead honest and believe is infinitely better qualified.
She was named to fill John McCain’s empty seat after losing her own race in 2018. PACs linked to Mitch McConnell dumped $15 million into her campaign just in the last month, narrowing Kelly’s lead.
At a stop near Phoenix, Trump called her to the stage like this: “Martha, just come up fast. Fast. Fast. Come on. Quick. You got one minute! One minute, Martha! They don’t want to hear this, Martha. Come on. Let’s go. Quick, quick, quick. Come on. Let’s go.”
She bounded up like a happy poodle, spoke a few words, and melted away. Two non-entity Senate candidates, male and not from Arizona, droned on at length. When reporters corralled her later, she said, “Give me a break. President Trump will be President Trump.”
Exactly. He is a tone-deaf misogynist, along with everything Lindsey Graham called him before joining his circus: a “race-baiting, xenophobic religious bigot” as opposed to Biden, who Graham said back then is “as good a man as God ever created.”
One ad by McSally’s supporters faked a photo purportedly showing Mark Kelly dressed as Hitler at a 1985 costume party, and he is taking it to court. Eerily, echoes of Der Führer are getting louder.
This morning, I got a note from a German friend who, like me, was born in 1943 when Nazis still threatened to put their stamp on a world at war. “Don’t get too close to the Trump cult,” he wrote. “This looks like a rerun of Germany 1933/4. Sorry to observe this.”
Polls suggest a far happier picture. Trump is on the run. With nothing to lose in his final years, Biden could rise above his image of a comfortable old shoe to be a boot ready to kick ass. Bright young comers, multihued with fresh energy and ideas, are ready to move it.
Now it is up to us, and we cannot underestimate the danger. If the coming months go badly, Edvard Munch’s screaming face might well be the icon that now defines us.
Mort Rosenblum has reported from seven continents as Associated Press special correspondent, edited the International Herald Tribune in Paris, and written 14 books on subjects ranging from global geopolitics to chocolate. He now runs MortReport.org.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
Thursday, October 29, 2020
RSN: Robert Reich | Reversing the GOP Power Grab
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It's Live on the HomePage Now: Robert Reich | Reversing the GOP Power Grab The vote on Barrett’s confirmation occurred just eight days before Election Day. By contrast, the Senate didn’t even hold a hearing on Barack Obama’s nominee, Merrick Garland, who Obama nominated almost a year before the end of his term. Majority leader Mitch McConnell argued at the time that any vote should wait “until we have a new president.” Barrett was nominated by a president who lost the popular vote by nearly 3 million ballots, and who was impeached by the House of Representatives. With Barrett now on the court, five of the nine justices have been appointed by presidents who lost the popular vote. The Republican senators who voted for her represent 15 million fewer Americans than their Democratic colleagues. Barrett now joins 5 other reactionary justices who together will be able to declare laws unconstitutional, for perhaps a generation. Barrett’s confirmation was the culmination of years in which a shrinking and increasingly conservative, rural, and white segment of the U.S. population has been imposing its will on the rest of America. They’ve been bankrolled by big business, seeking lower taxes and fewer regulations. In the event Joe Biden becomes president on January 20 and both houses of Congress come under control of the Democrats, they can reverse this trend. It may be the last chance – both for the Democrats and, more importantly, for American democracy. How? For starters, increase the size of the Supreme Court. The Constitution says nothing about the number of justices. The court changed size seven times in its first 80 years, from as few as five justices under John Adams to ten under Abraham Lincoln. Biden says if elected he’ll create a bipartisan commission to study a possible court overhaul “because it’s getting out of whack.” That’s fine, but he’ll need to move quickly. The window of opportunity could close by the 2022 midterm elections. Second, abolish the Senate filibuster. Under current rules, 60 votes are needed to enact legislation in that chamber. This means that if Democrats win a bare majority there, Republicans could block any new legislation Biden hopes to pass. The filibuster could be ended with a rule change requiring a mere 51 votes. There’s growing support among Democrats for doing this if they gain that many seats. During the campaign, Biden acknowledged that the filibuster has become a negative force in government. The filibuster is not in the Constitution, either. The most ambitious structural reform would be to rebalance the Senate itself, as well as the Electoral College. For decades, rural states have been emptying as the U.S. population has shifted to vast megalopolises. The result is a growing disparity in representation. For example, both California, with a population of 40 million, and Wyoming, whose population is 579,000, get two senators. If population trends continue, by 2040 some 40 percent of Americans will live in just five states, and half of America will be represented by 18 Senators, the other half by 82. This distortion also skews the Electoral College, because each state’s number of electors equals its total of senators and representatives. Hence, the recent presidents who have lost the popular vote. This growing imbalance can be remedied by creating more states representing a larger majority of Americans. At the least, statehood should be granted to Washington, D.C. The Constitution is also silent on the number of states. Those who recoil from structural reforms such as the three I’ve outlined warn that Republicans will retaliate when they return to power. That’s rubbish. Republicans have already altered the ground rules. In 2016, they failed to win a majority of votes cast for the House, Senate, or the presidency, yet secured control over all three. Amy Coney Barrett’s ascent is the latest illustration of how grotesque the Republican power grab has become, and how it continues to entrench itself ever more deeply. If not reversed soon, it will be impossible to remedy. What’s at stake is not partisan politics. It’s representative government. If Democrats get the opportunity, they must redress this growing imbalance – for the sake of democracy.
Supreme Court Allows Ballot Extensions in Pennsylvania, North Carolina, for Now
Miles Taylor, a Former Homeland Security Official, Reveals He Was 'Anonymous'
Trump's COVID Advisers: He's Now Pushing Herd Immunity
Ex-DHS Official Miles Taylor Regrets Family Separations. Now He's Trying to Stop Trump
Yemen on Brink of Losing Entire Generation of Children to Hunger, UN Warns
Trump to Strip Protections From Tongass National Forest, One of the Biggest Intact Temperate Rain Forests As of Thursday, it will be legal for logging companies to build roads and cut and remove timber throughout more than 9.3 million acres of forest — featuring old-growth stands of red and yellow cedar, Sitka spruce and Western hemlock. The relatively pristine expanse is also home to plentiful salmon runs and imposing fjords. The decision, which will be published in the Federal Register, reverses protections President Bill Clinton put in place in 2001 and is one of the most sweeping public lands rollbacks Trump has enacted. The new rule states that it will make “an additional 188,000 forested acres available for timber harvest,” mainly “old growth timber.” For years, federal and academic scientists have identified Tongass as an ecological oasis that serves as a massive carbon sink while providing key habitat for wild Pacific salmon and trout, Sitka black-tailed deer and myriad other species. It boasts the highest density of brown bears in North America, and its trees — some of which are between 300 and 1,000 years old — absorb at least 8 percent of all the carbon stored in the entire Lower 48′s forests combined. “While tropical rainforests are the lungs of the planet, the Tongass is the lungs of North America,” Dominick DellaSala, chief scientist with the Earth Island Institute’s Wild Heritage project, said in an interview. “It’s America’s last climate sanctuary.” While Trump has repeatedly touted his commitment to planting trees through the One Trillion Tree initiative, invoking it as recently as last week, his administration has sought to expand logging in Alaska and in the Pacific Northwest throughout his presidency. Federal judges have blocked several of these plans as illegal: Last week, the administration abandoned its appeal of a ruling that struck down a 1.8 million-acre timber sale on the Tongass’s Prince of Wales Island. Alaska Republicans — including Gov. Mike Dunleavy and Sen. Dan Sullivan, who is locked in a tight reelection race — lobbied the president to exempt the state from the roadless rule on the grounds that it could help the economy in Alaska’s southeast. Fishing and tourism account for 26 percent of regional employment, according to the Southeast Conference, a regional business group, compared with timber’s 1 percent. When Sullivan briefed Trump on the Tongass earlier this year, according to an individual familiar with the conversation who spoke on the condition of anonymity to comment frankly, the president asked him, “How the hell do you have an economy without roads?” Asked about the exchange, the White House declined to comment. Southeast Alaska’s economy has taken an enormous hit during the pandemic. Robert Venables, the executive director of the Southeast Conference, said in an interview that though 1.4 million cruise passengers typically visit the region each summer, that number dropped to just 48 people this summer. The area’s fisheries also have suffered because of climate change, and the global economic crisis hurt seafood prices. “The economy is collapsing,” he said, adding that the Trump administration’s action might allow loggers to extract timber from some relatively accessible old-growth stands. “There’s some common-sense, near-term relief.” But even Venables criticized the administration as going too far and predicted that the decision probably would be reversed next year if Democrats won the White House. “It seems like the ball’s being punted from one end to the other,” he said. “The real disappointment here is a compromise could not be found that could create a more lasting peace.” Logging in Alaska costs U.S. taxpayers millions each year, because of a long-standing federal mandate that companies profit from any timber sale. This means the Forest Service often covers harvesters’ costs, including road building. According to a Taxpayer for Common Sense analysis of the Forest Service’s accounts, the Tongass timber program has lost roughly $1.7 billion over the last 40 years. After Taxpayers for Common Sense commented during the federal environmental review that it would be more economically efficient to hold timber sales in parts of the forest that already have roads, the Forest Service acknowledged that that was true. The agency said its plan “reflects a different policy perspective on the roadless management issue rather than a change in the underlying facts and circumstances,” adding that the Trump administration believes “that overall reduction in federal regulations is good for the American public due to reduced burden to the taxpayer and reduced burden to business.” Ninety-six percent of the comments during the U.S. Forest Service’s environmental review opposed lifting the existing safeguards, while 1 percent supported it. In a sign of how unpopular the administration’s push to lift roadless restrictions has become, all five Alaska Native tribal nations withdrew as cooperating agencies in the process two weeks ago, after the Forest Service published its blueprint for opening up the entire Tongass to development. “We refuse to allow legitimacy upon a process that has disregarded our input at every turn,” the tribal leaders wrote. Some of these tribes had conducted clear cuts decades ago, when they gained legal control over their ancestral lands. Marina Anderson, the tribal administrator for the Organized Village of Kasaan on Prince of Wales Island, recalled in a phone interview that her late father was a logger and said that the entire village had suffered the consequences of felling so many trees. A landslide occurred Monday morning; while Anderson was speaking on the phone, a second landslide occurred. “These landslides happen on clear-cut lands. This morning I said, ‘It’s landslide day,’ ” she said, noting there had been heavy rain. “I’ve grown up seeing these mudslides my whole life. As a culture committed to balance, it’s my responsibility to bring back that balance from what [my father] had done.” The roughly 60 residents in the village, which does not have a grocery store, rely heavily on salmon, berries and other staples they can harvest from the forest. “Climate change is hitting us pretty hard,” Anderson said, adding that tribal officials oppose extensive logging because old-growth trees help lower stream temperatures and provide key wildlife habitat. Referring to the new plan, she said, “It will only devastate even more what is already in progress.” Environmentalists, who have successfully blocked a slew of timber sales on the Tongass since the early 1970s, said they will challenge the repeal of protections in court. “Years ago a previous administration tried to eliminate the essential protection the roadless rule provides on the Tongass and the courts rejected the attempt,” said Eric Jorgenson, managing attorney for the Alaska office of Earthjustice, an environmental law firm. “Today’s effort is no better justified and we believe it will meet a similar fate.” Still some experts said they worried the decision could greenlight timber sales that would release more carbon into the atmosphere. DellaSala noted that last month he had to evacuate from his home near Talent, Ore., because of a massive blaze nearby, a clear sign of how catastrophic climate impacts are already affecting the United States. “It’s personal for me,” he said, adding that his home survived but that many others nearby did not. “We don’t have a lot of time to get this right, and we are heading in the wrong direction.” |
POLITICO NIGHTLY: Trump’s path begins in Florida
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With help from Renuka Rayasam and Myah Ward TAMPA TWO — Good evening and hello from the state of election cliffhangers, where on Thursday, in a rare crossing of paths, President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden will campaign in the same city, Tampa. It’s the heart of the Tampa Bay media market, which forms the westernmost barbell end of the I-4 Corridor, which is geographically and politically in the center of the state (but more on that later). The dueling visits underscore how the path to the White House runs through the region. Tampa Bay’s mix of urban, suburban, rural, white, Black, Hispanic, working-class and retired voters gives Tampa Bay an Everywhere, USA feel. And its central importance to the swing region of the swing state — one Trump needs to win for a second term — heightens the importance of their visits. Trailing by various margins in most polls of most swing states, Trump is still essentially tied with Biden in Florida. If the president is going to have another come-from-behind victory, it starts here. And if Biden wants to kill Trump’s chances in one place, Florida is the MAGA horcrux and Tampa is the place to smash it. Beyond location, the similarities end there for the two contrasting presidential campaigns and candidates. Biden is hosting a drive-in rally to ensure social distancing (his campaign won’t even announce where it’s at yet). Trump is proudly hosting his event in the parking lot of Raymond James Stadium, which as the home of Tampa Bay Buccaneers, fittingly has a pirate ship built in. There’s an added benefit for Trump: The stadium is a new site for in-person early voting, and the campaign figures he can seriously juice turnout before, during and after his rally. It’s a controversial move that has the Biden campaign privately fuming, because electioneering is prohibited within 150 feet of a polling station, but the rally is technically on the outskirts of the no-electioneering boundary. The Hillsborough County election supervisor issued a statement warning voters of traffic delays. Trump also plans a rally in South Florida this weekend, and Biden has a Thursday event in Democrat-rich Broward County. Florida doesn’t so much have Election Day as Election Days. Floridians have three methods of voting: absentee by mail, early in person and on Election Day. Republicans used to dominate absentee voting and Democrats in-person early voting. But during the pandemic Trump demonized the former and Democrats prioritized the latter. So their roles have reversed. So far in 2020, Democrats have rolled up a huge and historic advantage over Republicans in casting absentee ballots. But once in-person early voting started, Republicans stormed back. As of this morning, the Democrats’ margin remained huge (246,000), but that’s half the size it was eight days ago, according to state data. In all, a record 6.9 million of Florida’s 14.4 million registered voters had already cast ballots as of this morning; 2.6 million are Republicans (38 percent); 2.8 million are Democrats (41 percent) and 1.5 million are independents (21 percent). The ballots are counted by party affiliation, but the votes in them aren’t tabulated. So we don’t know who’s actually winning until Election Day. Polls indicate Biden is ahead among independents, which is usually crucial. On Election Day morning in 2016, Democrats had cast 90,000 more early and absentee ballots than Republicans. But those were just the raw ballots cast by party. Once the ballots were opened and the votes were tabulated, they showed Hillary Clinton had a huge pre-Election Day lead of 247,000 votes. But then Election Day happened. And Trump won it by even more. At the end of the day and at the end of the election, he carried Florida by fewer than 113,000 votes. It used to be that whoever won the two media markets of I-4 — Orlando and Tampa Bay — won the state. President Barack Obama disproved that in 2012 when he ran for reelection. He followed a strategy of maximizing votes in the state’s big cities (Miami, Fort Lauderdale, West Palm Beach, Orlando, Tampa and Jacksonville), where high Black, Hispanic and youth turnout helped him carry Florida by less than a point over Mitt Romney, who won the Tampa Bay and Orlando media markets by just a point each. Four years later, the old rules held: Trump won Tampa Bay by 8 points, and Orlando’s market by 3 points, and he carried the state overall by 1.2 points. It was only a matter of time before Trump and Biden collided in the same city, so it’s little surprise it’s Tampa. As of this morning, Republicans had cast 39 percent of the early and absentee ballots in the Tampa Bay market and Democrats 40 percent. Which candidate will drive up more turnout? Whoever does could very well win Tampa Bay, win Florida and win the White House.
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With Trump on board, Air Force One lands at Phoenix Goodyear Airport for a campaign rally in Arizona. | Getty Images | |||
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A BREWING BIDEN BACKLASH — Good evening from I-20 in West Texas in between Abilene and Dallas, where Ryan Lizza writes from his latest road trip. He emails Nightly: I’ve been touring the Sun Belt swing states. After Nevada, Arizona and Texas, I’m heading to Georgia and North Carolina — I won’t make it to Florida but Marc Caputo has that covered above — before returning to Washington for Election Day. Over the weekend, in between Arizona and Texas, I stopped in Santa Fe, N.M., a swing state in recent memory that is now solidly Democratic, and I believe I caught a glimpse of what could be waiting for Biden if he wins on Tuesday. In neighboring Arizona and Texas, Republican governors have opened up their states, with relatively few Covid restrictions left in place. As coronavirus has spiked in those places, it’s been left to local jurisdictions to tighten things up again. For instance, in El Paso, which is experiencing a sharp rise in cases, a county-wide 10 p.m. to 5 a.m. curfew was put into effect Sunday along with a two-week stay at home order. But in New Mexico, Democratic Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham has left in place statewide public health restrictions reminiscent of what most states had earlier this year. As with Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, the tough response has been met with a backlash from the right. On Saturday several hundred protesters, many from the more conservative southern part of the state, gathered at Santa Fe’s circular state capitol building, known as the Roundhouse. I stumbled upon the group walking around downtown. (Even on a day off in a non-swing state you can’t escape politics in 2020.) At first I thought it was a Trump rally, and while there was a Trump campaign presence there and plenty of pro-Trump sentiment, the crowd was there to protest lockdowns and mask-wearing. There were anti-vax protesters, QAnon diehards, and several Christian groups. When it was over many lined up to sign a petition to recall Lujan Grisham. While this libertarian-infused anti-lockdown ideology has been bubbling on the right all year, we should expect it to become turbocharged if Biden takes office, just as it has in states with Democratic governors, especially if he pushes national policies on mask wearing and lockdowns. The circumstances of a Biden presidency would be remarkably similar to those of the last two Democratic presidents, when they took over after Republicans in 1993 and 2009. Just like Bill Clinton and Obama, Biden would inherit a weak economy, massive budget deficits, and he will almost certainly be pushing an ambitious progressive agenda. We know what happens to the Republican opposition in Washington under those circumstances: They become obsessed with austerity, they withdraw support from legislation they might have embraced under a Republican president, and they focus on crippling the agenda of the new Democratic president as a means of winning the midterm elections.
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GET IN THE VOTE — Trump won the presidency with 46 percent of the popular vote. His approval rating, according to Gallup, has never hit 50 percent. He remains under 50 percent in national polling averages. The president’s inability to capture a majority of support sheds light on his extraordinary attempts to limit the number of votes cast across the battleground state map — a massive campaign-within-a-campaign to maximize Trump’s chances of winning a contest in which he’s all but certain to win less than 50 percent of the vote, national political reporter David Siders writes.
In Philadelphia, his campaign is videotaping voters as they return ballots. In Nevada, it’s suing to force elections officials in Nevada’s Democratic-heavy Clark County to more rigorously examine ballot signatures for discrepancies that could disqualify them. And that’s just a few of its efforts. Never before in modern presidential politics has a candidate been so reliant on wide-scale efforts to depress the vote as Trump. For Trump, the math makes sense. In 2016, he won Arizona, Florida, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — five of this year’s most important swing states — with under 50 percent of the vote. In two others — Georgia and North Carolina — he captured exactly half the votes. Having failed to expand his base beyond a committed — and sizable — core in his first term, the president stands to gain from a diminished turnout, particularly among voters of color. | |
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Nightly asks you: What is the most important issue no one is talking about in the 2020 elections? Use our form to send in your answer, and we’ll include select responses in our Friday edition. | |
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BIDEN IS HOW FAR AHEAD? This morning, an ABC News/Washington Post poll found Biden up an eye-popping 17 points in Wisconsin, leading the president 57 percent to 40 percent. But a poll from the Marquette University Law School released later in the afternoon found Biden ahead by a much smaller margin, 47 percent to 43 percent, with Libertarian Jo Jorgensen sitting at 2 percent. Both polls come from respected, high-quality pollsters. So who do you believe? The answer from Morning Score author Zach Montellaro : Neither — kinda. He emails Nightly:
Most public polling agrees that Biden leads in Wisconsin. The first thing you should do with any poll, whether it confirms your prior beliefs or not, is consider it as merely one datapoint in a universe of them. Even this close to the election, the best thing to consider is a polling average rather than each individual poll. The folks at FiveThirtyEight, for example, have Biden with an average lead of 8.5 points in Wisconsin. That’s probably closer to the truth.
And it is OK when polls disagree. Everything from how samples are constructed to who a pollster believes is a likely voter comes into play. Polls are not exact predictions of what will happen on Election Day. They’re both a snapshot of that particular moment and time, and they aren’t pinpoint accurate (hence margins of error, and the less publicized confidence interval!).
KEYSTONE — Trump won Pennsylvania by less than 1 percentage point in 2016. The 2020 polls show Biden is up in the Rust Belt state by nearly 4 points, according to the Real Clear Politics average. But Hillary Clinton was also famously up in Pennsylvania polls.
Biden and Trump tore through Pennsylvania earlier this week, and the race seems to be tightening there. Nightly’s Renuka Rayasam reached out to Shrewsbury’s finest, Holly Otterbein, over Slack to talk about what to watch for in the state. This conversation has been edited.
Where are the places that matter? What should we be watching for on election night?
In 2020, Biden is looking to turn out the Democratic base in Philadelphia and the surrounding suburbs, and perhaps get even bigger turnout there than Hillary Clinton did. He also wants to flip or make headway in areas in northeastern Pennsylvania that went from supporting Obama to Trump. And he wants to tamp down Trump’s margin of victory in western Pennsylvania. Trump, meanwhile, is hoping to find more voters in Trump strongholds in the state, in places such as western and northeastern Pennsylvania.
I should also add: We almost certainly won’t know who won Pennsylvania on election night because officials can’t begin counting mail ballots until Tuesday by law. But in the days that follow, one bellwether to watch is Erie County. It was an Obama-Trump county, was decided by less than 2 percentage points in 2016, and swung back to Democrats in 2018.
Do you trust these polls that say Biden is up, in some cases by double digits?
Will this election tell us anything about which way Pennsylvania will tilt long term? Until Trump, no Republican presidential nominee had won here since 1988. But we go back and forth between Republican and Democratic governors regularly, and often have divided government. Right now Democrat Tom Wolf is the governor, and the state legislature is controlled by Republicans. Regardless of what happens next week, Pennsylvania’s swinginess will not change. The election is a referendum on Trump, here and around the country. It will tell us what Pennsylvanians think of his job performance. | ||||||||||||||||
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HEALTHY HALLOWEEN — Executive health editor Joanne Kenen emails us: Health reporters’ inboxes are being flooded with tips about how to safely celebrate Halloween, including whether or how to trick or treat. The CDC has Halloween advice, including safety warnings about multiple layers of masks and best practices for distributing candy. Here’s another tip: Don’t dress up as the coronavirus. There’s nothing funny about it — although there’s probably a psych grad student out there somewhere writing a dissertation on spiky virus costumes as an empowering anti-anxiety self-care tool. Instead, here are seven mask-focused suggestions culled from a brainstorming Slack session by POLITICO’s health care team for your Covid-safe costume parade. 1) The White House coronavirus task force is the perfect group costume. “Deborah Birx” is simple, with color-coordinated scarves and statement earrings. “Anthony Fauci” can wear aviators and a Nats mask. On second thought, scratch that. It might be hard to find enough of those Harry Potter invisibility cloaks to do a good impersonation of the task force. 2) A vaccine vial. The cap can be a mask that says “NOT QUITE YET” or “TESTING ONE, TWO, THREE.” 3) Bleach. ‘Nuf said. The white mask will blend right in. 4) A package delivery person — FedEx, Amazon, UPS and of course, a U.S. mail carrier, reverently carrying our ballots. 5) A Zoom mute button — the true star of the pandemic. 6) It’s a good year to be any masked superhero — except the Lone Ranger. His eyes-only mask doesn’t cut it.
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