Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) on Friday openly pleaded with White House officials to stage an intervention with President Donald Trump and make clear to him that he is going to lose badly unless he changes course.
Writing on Twitter, Grassley urged White House officials to make Trump read a Wall Street Journal editorial that warned the president is on track to face a “historic repudiation” at the ballot box.
“Will somebody with access to the Oval Office read the WSJ editorial ‘The Trump Referendum’ to President Trump,” Grassley wrote. “We won’t have more good SCOTUS justices or the best economy in 50 years like we have had if he doesn’t follow that advice.”
Technically Bill Clinton had the best economy of the last 50 years with 18 million jobs created and having a budget surplus.
By direct comparison Obama had an average GDP of 2.36
including the Great Recession, while Trump had an average GDP of 2.33 without the Covid crash. Job growth for Obama’s last 3 years was 5.8 million, while it was 5.4 million for Trump’s first 3 years. Unemployment improved by 4 points in Obama’s second term (7 points total for his 8 years), while with Trump it improved 1.6 points before the pandemic, but I digress.
With Trump trailing Biden by double digits, and barely breaking even in former GOP strongholds like Texas and Florida, the GOP is starting to worry.
And they should.
Grassley also railed about Trump’s interview with Sean Hannity the other night where he rambled incoherently when he was asked what he planned for his “2nd term.”
Even though they do excellent reporting the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page is still under the thumb of Rupert Murdoch, and the message they have for Trump isn’t good.
“Mr. Trump’s base of 35 percent or so will never leave, but the swing voters who stood by him for three and half years has fallen away in the last two months,” the editorial stated. “This includes suburban women, independents, and seniors who took a risk on him in 2016 as an outsider who would shake things up. Now millions of Americans are close to deciding that four more years are more risk than they can stand.”
Trump may still have his base, but he’s losing the swing voters that put him over the top. The former Bernie and Obama voters who decided to take a chance on Trump for their own economic interest in 2016 are finding they aren’t willing to roll the dice again in 2020.
This shouldn’t be surprising though, right? Everything Trump touches dies. We already knew this after Trump Shuttle, Trump Vodka, Trump Steaks, six bankruptcies and Trump University. The man is grossly incompetent. He survived in the 80’s because his father bailed him out, then in the 90’s and 2000’s because the Russian mob bailed him out.
Collusion or not, President Trump and the Russians are thick as thieves.
What I mean is that for more than three decades, at least 13 people with known or alleged links to the Russian Mafia held the deeds to, lived in or ran criminal operations out of Trump Tower in New York or other Trump properties. I mean that many of them used Trump-branded real estate to launder vast amounts of money by buying multimillion-dollar condos through anonymous shell companies. I mean that the Bayrock Group, a real estate development company that was based in Trump Tower and had ties to the Kremlin, came up with a new business model to franchise Trump condos after he lost billions of dollars in his Atlantic City casino developments, and helped make him rich again.
Yet Trump’s relationship with the Russian underworld, a de facto state actor, has barely surfaced in the uproar surrounding Russia’s interference in the 2016 campaign. That oversight may be explained in part by journalist Michael Kinsley’s long-held maxim: The real scandal isn’t what’s illegal; it’s what is legal.
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As Oleg Kalugin, a former head of counterintelligence for the KGB, told me in an interview for my book “House of Trump, House of Putin: The Untold Story of Donald Trump and the Russian Mafia,” the Mafia amounts to “one of the branches of the Russian government today.” Where Americans cracked down on the Italian American Mafia, Putin dealt with the Russian mob very differently. He co-opted it. He made it an integral part of his Mafia state. Russian gangsters became, in effect, Putin’s enforcers. They had long and deep relationships. According to a tape recording made by former Russian agent Alexander Litvinenko a year before he was fatally poisoned in London, Putin had close ties to Semion Mogilevich, a top mobster, that dated to the early 1990s.
Longtime Trump associates Felix Sater and Michael Cohen both have ties to the Mogilevich crime family that go back decades. For the record.
Trump has now shown he cares more about inanimate statues than he cares about American citizens, so why should he care that Russia has been paying the Taliban a bounty for killing American soldiers at the same time he’s been trying to negotiate a “peace treaty” with them.
The news late yesterday was chilling: Russians have been paying Taliban militants to kill Americans in Afghanistan even as peace talks with the Taliban were under way, intelligence sources told The New York Times.
And Donald Trump has known about this intelligence since the beginning of March and has done nothing about it.
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The Toimes said U.S intelligence has evidence that a Russian military spy unit has been paying Islamic militants linked to the Taliban to target Americans and other coalition troops. Just why Russia is doing this remains murky: Perhaps Russia wanted to break up peace talks with violence against Americans, perhaps it was in retaliation for a U.S. attack in Syria that unintentionally killed Russian soldiers.
Whatever it was or is, no one knows how many of the 20 Americans killed last year in Afghanistan were targeted this way. It’s a different picture than Trump appearing with U.S. troops for a celebratory photo.
So that means that Trump has blown the war with Afghanistan. This in addition to blowing the response to Covid-19, blowing the response to Black Lives Matter as police reform legislation works it’s way through congress, blowing the economy, blowing the creation of American jobs as unemployment hovers deep in double-digits, blowing his relationship with China, and blowing his relationship with North Korea.
Joe Biden has hardly begun to campaign so far, and frankly he doesn’t need to, just leave Trump on the stage alone a bit further an he’ll keep tripping over his own shoes.
According to a report from POLITICO, a Senate committee is targeting former Obama administration officials once again in an investigation targeting Joe Biden’s son, demanding transcribed interviews and documents.
“The renewed scrutiny from the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee comes amid intensifying efforts by President Donald Trump to target Biden, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, over what the president and his allies portray as a corruption scandal that disqualifies the former vice president,” POLITICO reports.
Hunter Biden is a dry hole. He was the lawyer for Burisma advising them on abiding by U.S. laws — or at least looking like they were. They put him on their board to do the same thing. He was there to “Keep them honest” and burnish their reputation not help them do more corruption. They’re going to find nothing. This is a Hail Mary play to save Trump’s ass.
It’s not likely to work. It’s not likely to stop Trump’s worst enemy from continuing to destroy his reputation. That enemy, is Trump himself.
Here are the remaining events for this week: