America Faces No Greater Threat Than Joe Biden and the Democrat Party. Their Assault to Our Borders Is As Great As Their Assault to Free Speech and Free Elections
Saturday, June 27, 2020
TRUMP CONCEDES HE HAS NO PLAN FOR A SECOND TERM - THE REALITY SHOW HUCKSTER ALSO ADMITS HIS PLAN FOR THE FIRST TERM WAS TO GET RICH AND SERVE GOLDMAN SACHS
Stocks Tumble as Infections Rise and Second Lockdown Begins
Stocks plunged on Friday as infections rose in several states, the White House relaunched its coronavirus taskforce, and Texas pulled back on the reins of its reopening.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 730 points, 2.84 percent, to 25015.55. The S&P 500 declined 2.42 percent. The Nasdaq Composite dropped 2.59 percent.
The yield on ten-year Treasuries, often viewed as a safe haven for investor cash, dropped to 0.64 percent. Yields move down when bond prices move up.
All 11 sectors of the S&P were down. The worst performing sector was communication services, a tech heavy category that includes Facebook, Google parent Alphabet, and Netflix, which fell 4.49 percent. Financials declined 4.33 percent. The best performing sector was utilities, which dropped by 1.03 percent.
The only gainer among the Dow stocks was Cisco, which rose 2.41 percent. The biggest decline was Goldman Sachs, down 8.65 percent after the Federal Reserve said Thursday that big bank capital restrictions would be limited due to economic risks stemming from the pandemic.
Of course, it is unlikely that Trump is consciously sacrificing his reelection to the higher good of maximizing U.S. COVID-19 deaths. The more probable explanation for his conduct is that the man is simply a delusional, spiteful sociopath. He craves the attention and affirmation he experiences at rallies and is indifferent to the epidemiological consequences of satisfying this appetite.
Trump cancels weekend golf retreat as virus cases surge
Washington (AFP) – US President Donald Trump on Friday made a last-minute cancellation of a weekend trip to his New Jersey golf course as concerns grew over a new surge in coronavirus cases across the country.
Just hours before he was due to board Air Force One at Andrews Air Force Base outside the capital, the White House announced the scrapping of the trip to Bedminster without offering any explanation.
Judd Deere, a presidential spokesman, limited himself to saying that the cancellation had “nothing to do with” new 14-day quarantine recommendations made by New Jersey’s governor for people travelling to the state from areas where infection rates were high.
Trump held a rally on Tuesday in Arizona, a state that is suffering from a surge in cases.
The governors of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut on Wednesday announced the implementation of a 14-day quarantine for anyone who has recently been in a state with high infection rates.
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo said he was not trying to prevent people entering from other states, since states have no mechanism for closing their borders, but did warn that anyone not respecting the quarantine rules could face penalties.
Trump Rambles Unintelligibly About Plan for Second Term
President Donald Trump thinks. Photo: Erin Schaff/The New York Times/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Sean Hannity would never intentionally ask President Trump a difficult question. But he would ask Trump an easy question that Trump found difficult to answer. It happened Thursday during a Wisconsin town hall when the Fox News host teed Trump up to rattle off a list of all the marginalized people he plans to harm in a potential second term. Instead, Trump garbled out an unintelligible answer that a very charitable interpreter would explain as: “I have experience now, so I would know better than to do things like hire John Bolton, who sucks.”
Charitable or not, no one would be able to find a second-term priority in this answer:
Trump’s words are even more striking in written form.
Well, one of the things that will be really great, you know the word experience is still good. I always say talent is more important than experience. I’ve always said that. But the word experience is a very important word. It’s an — a very important meaning.
I never did this before. I never slept over in Washington. I was in Washington, I think, 17 times. All of a sudden, I’m president of the United States. You know the story. I’m riding down Pennsylvania Avenue with our First Lady and I say, ‘This is great. But I didn’t know very many people in Washington. It wasn’t my thing. I was from Manhattan, from New York. Now I know everybody, and I have great people in the administration.”
You make some mistakes. Like, you know, an idiot like Bolton. All he wanted to do was drop bombs on everybody. You don’t have to drop bombs on everybody. You don’t have to kill people.
At another point in the sit-down with Hannity, Trump said Joe Biden “can’t speak.”
Trump Is Seeking Reelection on a Pro-Coronavirus Platform
Trump-COVID 2020. Photo: Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images
The novel coronavirus has put Donald Trump’s reelection campaign on life support.
In late February, America’s unemployment rate was at a half-century low, consumer confidence was high, and betting markets were bullish on Trump’s odds of a second term. Four months and 123,000 U.S. coronavirus deaths later, times have changed. Before COVID-19 made its presence in the U.S. felt, Joe Biden led the president by roughly five points in national polls. Today — with tens of millions unemployed, and Houston’s ICUs running out of capacity — the Democrat leads Trump by more than ten.
Like other leaders in afflicted countries, Trump enjoyed a brief polling boost at the onset of the pandemic. But this “rally around the flag” effect started dissipating in early April. The White House ostensibly attributed its declining numbers to the economic consequences of lockdown, rather than the public-health catastrophe it had failed to prevent. Thus, the administration pressured states to expedite reopening, while Trump trumpeted an unproven antimalarial drug as a COVID-19 elixir. In response to these actions, many accused the president of crassly prioritizing his reelection above Americans’ health and safety. This was a plausible critique at the time. But as an assessment of Trump’s handling of the pandemic in recent days, it is actually too generous.
At this point, it is quite clear that Donald Trump’s interest in keeping his job — and the American public’s interest in minimizing the spread of the coronavirus — are perfectly aligned. Formal restrictions on economic activity have been relaxed throughout most of the country. The force that’s holding down the economy (and the president’s poll numbers) is not lockdown orders; it’s the uncontrolled spread of a deadly virus. The more Trump does to curb COVID-19, the better his odds of getting back into contention. Recent polling from the (Democrat-aligned) Global Strategy Group indicates that the voting public is paying close attention to coronavirus case counts. For once, objective facts about a pressing policy challenge are politically salient. Trump can become a more popular president by doing a better job.
But for Donald J. Trump, some things are more important than winning an election — and spreading the novel coronavirus is ostensibly one of them.
One of the most effective — and least economically compromising — ways to contain the pandemic is to encourage universal mask-wearing in public indoor spaces. Instead, Trump has derided masks as both ineffective and anti-conservative. Which is to say: He has actively discouraged his supporters from wearing masks, even as poll after poll shows upward of 70 percent of Americans supporting mask-wearing in public.
Surveys also show that the American public overwhelmingly supports widespread coronavirus testing. And yet, Trump has said that he told his people to “slow down the testing” because it was uncovering too many new cases. After administration officials tried to pass this off as a joke, Trump clarified that he was entirely serious. The White House then confirmed Trump’s sincerity by cutting off federal funding to 13 COVID-19 testing sites, including seven in Texas where a “massive virus outbreak” is currently sweeping the state. Marginally reducing testing capacity will make it harder for states and cities to respond to nascent outbreaks by tightening social-distancing protocols or preparing hospital systems for higher ICU demand. But it won’t do much to disguise the ongoing existence of a public-health crisis.
Most egregiously, Trump has been traveling to coronavirus hotspots across the country, and has ostensibly been trying to orchestrate superspreader events. On Tuesday, the president went to Arizona — where new cases of coronavirus have been growing at a clip of 3,000 a day — and convened a large indoor rally before a mostly unmasked crowd of shouting fans. Actively worsening a public-health crisis in a must-win swing state is an odd thing to do if your goal is to win reelection in November. By contrast, if Trump’s top priority is to help the novel coronavirus be fruitful and multiply, then his Phoenix trip makes perfect sense.
Of course, it is unlikely that Trump is consciously sacrificing his reelection to the higher good of maximizing U.S. COVID-19 deaths. The more probable explanation for his conduct is that the man is simply a delusional, spiteful sociopath. He craves the attention and affirmation he experiences at rallies and is indifferent to the epidemiological consequences of satisfying this appetite. He would like to suppress coronavirus testing because he wants the numbers he sees when watching cable news to be less threatening to his self-esteem than they are at present. His liberal critics are pro-mask, so he is against them. But whatever Trump’s subjective reasoning, it remains the case that his approach to the pandemic is now objectively pro-coronavirus. The U.S. president is seeking reelection on an anti-mask, anti-testing, pro-superspreader-event platform.
Thankfully, at least for now, this does not appear to be a winning strategy.
Friday, MSNBC “Morning Joe” host Joe Scarborough compared President Donald Trump and his presumptive 2020 opponent, former Vice President Joe Biden.
Scarborough argued that Trump’s behavior amid the coronavirus pandemic makes it seem like “he doesn’t want to get reelected.” The host also suggested the president wants to “lose badly and take the Republican Party down with him.”
“This guy that you and I have known for many years, not only is he not acting like he doesn’t want to get re-elected, he’s acting like he really wants to lose badly and take the Republican Party down with him,” Scarborough stated. “I mean, one of this would make sense in the conventional sense, but you look at every single move he’s making, he’s on the 25 percent of a 75/25 issue. And it keeps happening every day.”
“This looks like a deliberate attempt to drive his campaign into the ground every day,” he later added. “He knows what he’s doing.”
Co-host Mika Brzezinski agreed with Scarborough, saying his behavior makes it seem like he does not want four more years in the White House.
“He doesn’t want four more years,” Brzezinski argued. “That’s clear. You can tell by his behavior. His attitude towards the health of the American people, he doesn’t want to be there. … But he also doesn’t like losing.”
Scarborough then said Trump is not acting like he thinks he will be in the White House in 2021, suggesting he could pull out of the race early rather than losing in November.
“He’s known when to leave the stage before,” he added. “Again, I’m the only one saying this. I would not be surprised if he left the stage again. And again, I’m the only person saying it, I don’t think it’ll happen, but it’s a possibility.”
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