In his press conference just a short while ago President Obama chastised Donald Trump for trying to discredit the US election process and went through the facts about the falsity of claims that US elections are affected by voter fraud. David gets at the deadly seriousness of the situation and the points Obama was making. But the juiciest parts came when Obama – clearly warming to the subject – taunted Trump for being a coward and a whiner (emphasis added for peak trolling moments) …
“It doesn’t really show the kind of leadership and toughness that you would want out of a president. If you start whining before the game is even over, if whenever things are going badly for you and you lose you start blaming somebody else. Then you don’t have what it takes to be in this job because there are a lot of things — times that things don’t go our way, or my way. That’s okay. You fight through it. You work through it. You try to accomplish your goals … And so I would advise Mr. Trump to stop whining and make his case to get votes .”
President Obama was mostly light-hearted and jokey in his Rose Garden press conference a few moments ago, clearly relishing how easy it is to get under Donald Trump’s skin. Child’s play, really. But don’t let the tenor of his remarks obscure the underlying seriousness of the moment. A president of the United States was just urging the nominee of the leading opposition party to preserve America’s democratic tradition of peaceful transitions of power.
Not literally. We don’t need your organs. But this is important. You can see our feature story today about voter intimidation in open-carry firearms states. I just mentioned below that Trump has hired one of the top voter suppression charlatans as his head ‘elections monitor’. This story is going to emerge down at the ground level around the country, with local party operations setting up vigilante ‘vote monitoring’ efforts. But it won’t only be official party operations, just as much or more it will likely be individuals or small groups doing what Trump is telling them to do: go to minority neighborhoods and look for evidence of ‘vote fraud’. In the great majority of cases, that’s illegal. But it is happening. We want to track examples not just on election day but as they take shape over the next three weeks. So if you see things in your local paper, websites, TV, on social media, anywhere, let us know. Send a note to our main comments email address which is linked just below the TPM logo at the upper left of the site and use the subject line “Trump Suppression.” Thanks.
Trump hires leading voter suppression bamboozler to head up his vigilante ‘elections monitoring’ effort.
It’s October 18 and the PollTracker Average stands at Clinton 49.2 percent, Trump 41.5 percent, a 7.7 percentage-point spread
The TPM Electoral Scoreboard stands at Clinton 334, Trump 183. Alaska and Ohio are in the Toss Up category.
Barring some sharp change in the course of the presidential race, it now seems very likely that Hillary Clinton will be become the 45th President of the United States next January. So attention now turns to what political landscape she’ll face. That means the composition of the Congress. The outlook on that front is complicated by a number of factors.
Let’s take a look.
This is a critical issue we should all be watching closely. Under Donald Trump’s encouragement, voter intimidation is intersecting with open-carry gun laws. Here’s what we’re looking at on November 8th and what the law says.
Trump-supporting Mayor ousted over racist Facebook posts says he has no regrets.
I mentioned on Friday that after the election we plan to expand our team and focus that expansion on more original reporting. Our iterative style of reporting is the centerpiece of what we do. But more staff capacity will allow us to go deeper, dog more stories at once. Building our Prime membership is a critical part of allowing us to do that. On Friday, we were coming up on 15,000 subscribers. With your help, we pushed through that milestone and now have 15,127, as I write.
We’ve set ourselves an extremely ambitious goal of getting our subscriber base to 20,000 and we hope to do that by the end of the calendar year – a very tall order but not an impossible one. To get there, we are going to shoot for getting to 16,000 by next Monday. So if you’re a regular reader and ready to join us, get a better TPM experience and make it possible for us to expand our operation, please take a moment to join us right now. Just click here.
Late Update: Now at 15,170. Just thirty more to get to 15,200 tonight!
In her first post-sexual assault story interview, Melania Trump ventured out of the Fox News safe space and on to CNN to tell Anderson Cooper that the ‘grab’ tape was Billy Bush’s fault.
I will say that if this were the Clintons and there was any analogue, the idea that Trump or the Trump campaign sent Melania out to clean up Trump’s sexual assault mess … well, we’d never hear the end of it.