The Disunited States of Trump (Trump Thread #104)

[TheNorthWestPawsage]

Trump used manipulation and race-baiting four years ago. He’s at it again. We are weary and worried but we shall persist.

Cartoon by Chris Riddell.

Previous thread:
www.mumsnet.com/Talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/3983600-Less-than-100-days-and-counting-Trump-thread-103?msgid=99566209#99566209

Yes Claws I've noticed Trump saying that type of thing too about New York. Anyone who didn't vote for him is the 'enemy'. That was obvious to me from the the first word out of his mouth during his inaugural speech in 2017. Then and now he has made no attempt to build any bridges.

Oops it’s thy father and corals. But never mind. The version we used to sing was more or less this one

So now he is throwing another accomplished and distinguished expert under the bus, the director of the CDC, Dr. Redfield, was totally dismissed by Trump spewing his rubbish. . How anyone can think Trump should be president is beyond me.

and why does he sit on chairs like he is on a toilet seat having a crap ? bullet proof vest ?

I like this poll.

Gideon leads Collins by 12 points in Maine Senate race
thehill.com/homenews/campaign/516729-gideon-leads-collins-by-12-points-in-maine-senate-race-poll

Maine Democrat Sara Gideon has opened up a 12-point lead over Sen. Susan Collins (R) in a Quinnipiac University poll released Wednesday in Maine's marquee Senate race.

Gideon, who currently serves as the Speaker of the Maine House, garners the support of 54 percent of likely Maine voters in the poll, compared with 42 percent for Collins, who is seeking her fifth term.

Gideon's candidacy marks the toughest challenge Collins has faced since she was first elected to the Senate in 1996, with Democrats railing against her high-profile votes supporting President Trump's tax plan and confirming Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court.

Collins is a disgrace.

Barr also:

edition.cnn.com/2020/09/16/politics/barr-justice-department-speech/index.html

The vile contemptuous William Barr ...why is his tongue so far up trumps arse🤔

Interesting on the media and Trump:

www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/09/media-mistakes/616222/

www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/sep/17/donald-trump-accused-of-sexual-assault-by-former-model-amy-dorris

nymag.com/intelligencer/article/donald-trump-criminal-case.html
Even accounting for legal delays, many experts predict that Trump would go to trial in Manhattan by 2023. The proceedings would take place at the New York State Supreme Court Building. Assuming that the judge was prepared for an endless barrage of motions and objections from Trump’s defense team, the trial might move quite quickly — no longer than a few months, according to some legal observers. And given the convictions that have been handed down against many of Trump’s top advisers, there’s reason to believe that even pro-Trump jurors can be persuaded to convict him. “The evidence was overwhelming,” concluded one MAGA supporter who served on the jury that convicted Paul Manafort, Trump’s former campaign chairman. “I did not want [him] to be guilty. But he was, and no one is above the law.”

Trump’s conviction would seal the greatest downfall in American politics since Richard Nixon. Unlike his associates who were sentenced to prison on federal charges, Trump would not be eligible for a presidential pardon or commutation, even from himself. And while his lawyers would file every appeal they can think of, none of it would spare Trump the indignity of imprisonment. Unlike the federal court system, which often allows prisoners to remain free during the appeals process, state courts tend to waste no time in carrying out punishment. After someone is sentenced in New York City, their next stop is Rikers Island. Once there, as Trump awaited transfer to a state prison, the man who’d treated the presidency like a piggy bank would receive yet another handout at the public expense: a toothbrush and toothpaste, bedding, a towel, and a green plastic cup.

🤞🤞🤞🤞🤞🤞
🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏

Yes, we are about the same age born. And I do think there was more 'commonality of experience' in the world when we were children than there is today. But as the saying goes 'There is more that unites us than divides us' and I do think that most nations will find their way back to each other in time. I think once Scrotus and so many of the divisive leaders in other democratic countries are gone the bonds of human experience will link us once again. At least I sincerely hope so.

Have you seen this about the request to use a heat ray against protesters?

My gut feeling is that someone, ahem, suggested it to the military police.

www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2020/09/17/military-police-heat-ray-against-d-c-protesters-congressional-letter/3476175001/

This made me

Love that meme GetTheDoorFrank

Hilarious but true, Frank

Oh Lord, the WH is having a conference on American history ...

I don't advise it:

www.pscp.tv/w/1OwGWLONYvAJQ

Yamiche Alcindor (PBS News)
@Yamiche

'Trump just announced he will soon be signing an executive order establishing a "national commission to promote patriotic education" called the "1776 Commission."

It is unclear what that means but he has been trashing the 1619 project which aims to educate the nation with facts.'

Going back to Claws observation that Trump's America would only be red voting states.

An only-red-states America probably isn’t one Trump would actually llke.
Poorer, smaller —and with far fewer places for Trump to golf.
www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/09/17/an-only-red-states-america-probably-isnt-one-trump-would-actually-like/

Speaking at a news briefing Wednesday evening, President Trump tried to make his administration’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic seem better by waving a magic wand: What if you just excluded states that didn’t vote for him in 2016?
“If you take the blue states out, we’re at a level that I don’t think anybody in the world would be at” in terms of coronavirus deaths, Trump said. “We’re really at a very low level. But some of the states, they were blue states and blue state-managed.”
While it is true that there have been more deaths in blue states than red ones, far more deaths are occurring in red states at this point and have been for months. In fact, the number of deaths in blue and red states are, by now, almost equal, with about 47 percent of all confirmed deaths since the beginning of the pandemic occurring in states that supported Trump.
Regardless, though, this isn’t how it works. With both the pandemic and crime, Trump assumes credit for good news in places with Republican leadership and shifts blame for bad news to places with Democratic leadership. Trump’s effort to simply wave away blue states as somehow not counting as part of America when he doesn’t want to include them is unsurprising but nonetheless cynical.

It’s also probably not a can of worms that Trump wants to open. An America that excludes blue states is an America that looks very different — often in ways that Trump wouldn’t appreciate.
Let’s first assess his original claim, that removing blue-state coronavirus deaths somehow puts the United States in a much better position. It doesn’t.

Here, for example, is data through Tuesday.
Take out the blue states and Red America is still the country with the second-most deaths after Brazil. (In this little thought experiment, both the United States and the collected blue states are excluded from global rankings.) On a per-million basis, the United States’ position in 11th place goes to 15th — a slight but subtle improvement.
What does this Red America look like? It’s a lot smaller in both population and geographic terms.
It’s also a much whiter country, with a far lower density of immigrants.
Exclude the blue states, and the economic picture shifts dramatically.
The employment picture improves somewhat, though a smaller density of the population would be working.
But it’s otherwise a poorer, less-educated country.
It’s also a country with a more quickly increasing deficit, given the extent to which blue states often pay more in taxes than they receive in services.
Then, of course, there are the cultural amenities. Extract blue states, and you lose 42 percent of NHL teams, 43 percent of NBA teams, 44 percent of NFL teams and fully half of Major League Baseball teams — including Trump’s favorite, the New York Yankees.
That’s his favorite team because Trump was, until recently, a New Yorker. But if you take the blue states out of America, suddenly a broad range of Trump-branded properties are excluded from the America Trump wants to lead. Trump Tower? No longer American. His hotel in D.C.? Out. His hotel in Vegas or his club in Bedminster, N.J.? Now foreign territory.

To put this in terms that will be immediately appreciable to Trump, 159 of the 276 visits he has made to Trump-branded properties since being inaugurated will suddenly have meant travel outside the United States. Fully 155 of the 242 rounds of golf he has played at Trump-branded properties will have meant leaving the comfortable confines of Red America and venturing into those fearsome blue states, with their immigrants and high per-capita GDP and Trump Organization properties.
Oh, we would also need to find a new place to put the White House.

Ex-Pence aide throws support behind Biden, citing Trump's virus response
thehill.com/homenews/administration/516948-ex-pence-aide-throws-support-behind-biden-citing-trumps-virus

A former aide to Vice President Pence will vote for Democratic nominee Joe Biden in the November election because of President Trump's handling of the coronavirus pandemic, according to a new ad from an anti-Trump group of Republicans.

Olivia Troye, who served as Pence's Homeland Security adviser and an adviser to the White House coronavirus task force, said in an ad released Thursday from Republican Voters Against Trump that Trump failed to keep Americans safe.

"If the president had taken this virus seriously, or if he had actually made an effort to tell how serious it was, he would have slowed the virus spread, he would have saved lives," Troye said in the ad.

Troye claimed that the president said during one coronavirus task force meeting that the virus may be a "good thing" because he would no longer have to shake hands with "these disgusting people."

The vice president's office and the Trump campaign did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Have you seen this video about Pence and his 'mother', they are a seriously weird couple. Seems Pence was also caught with his fingers in the till in the early days of his career, what a bunch of degenerates sitting in the white house.

twitter.com/donwinslow/status/1294430136431865856

Yes - so far Pence has had it easy as Trump has drawn all the attention. But there are likely a few more skeletons in the old Pence 'wardrobe'... Mother really won't like the spotlight if it falls on "butter wouldn't melt" Mike.

Talking of VP's - this would make the next VP quite influential.

'Everybody's got leverage': Dreading a 50-50 Senate split
An evenly divided Senate looks increasingly likely after November.
www.politico.com/news/2020/09/17/50-50-senate-control-416424

An evenly split Senate would make life grueling for whoever is president next year. Any one senator could determine the fate of critical nominations or key pieces of the party’s legislative agenda. And in an era of already deep polarization, it could lead to even worse gridlock, as inconceivable as that sounds.

“A 50-50 Senate makes it really difficult for the party of the president to do everything that they may want to do because party discipline, conference discipline, is very challenging,” said Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.).
But if Democrats pick up a net three seats, that’s what happens. Should Joe Biden win the presidency, they’ll hold the majority; if President Donald Trump is reelected, Democrats need four seats to do so. That’s because under an evenly divided chamber, the party that holds the White House runs the Senate, with the vice president casting the deciding 51st vote to break any tie.
....

Who is running the Senate might not actually be known until January if the two Georgia Senate races go to runoffs. But interviews with more than 15 senators in both parties found agreement on this much: hardly anyone is rooting for it.

“Everyone's got leverage,” said Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.), who said he didn’t want to think about that outcome just yet. “We’re just talking about pedal to the metal and hopefully winning as many [seats] as we can.”

A split Senate also would drastically reduce the likelihood that Democrats nix the legislative filibuster if they gain full control of Washington. Progressives have urged using the “nuclear option” to unilaterally gut the filibuster in order to enact a bold agenda for a President Joe Biden, but getting all 50 Democrats in the ideologically diverse caucus to sign on would be difficult. (The vice president could be the deciding vote on a rules change in the event of a 50-50 split.)

Of course, the senators hastened to add, if it means being in the majority, they’d take it.

“Better than a Senate with Mitch McConnell in charge... but not as good as a 52-48 Senate,” said Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii.) “It would just make it harder to get legislation passed. If you’re ever not unanimous you can’t pass a bill, assuming that the Republicans oppose everything that Joe Biden proposes.”

An evenly split Senate is a rarity. It’s only happened three times in the Senate’s storied history, in 1881, 1953 and most recently following the 2000 election and that didn’t last long. Amid frustration with George W. Bush’s conservative agenda, Sen. Jim Jeffords of Vermont left the Republican Party in May 2001 to caucus with Democrats and deliver them full control of the body, at least for the 107th Congress. Republicans won back the majority in 2002.