White House communications director Alyssa Farah previewed how President Trump will continue doing whatever he wants during the final presidential debate on Thursday night. Continue reading “WH Says Trump Will ‘Frankly Answer The Questions He Wants To’ At Final Debate”
Trump Camp Won’t Say If POTUS Will Respect Mute Button During Debate
Trump campaign press secretary Hogan Gidley dodged on Thursday morning when asked if President Donald Trump will comply with the rules allowing each candidate two minutes of uninterrupted speaking time, which will be enforced by muting the other person’s mic, during his final debate with Democratic challenger Joe Biden.
Continue reading “Trump Camp Won’t Say If POTUS Will Respect Mute Button During Debate”
Face Off at the Last Chance Corral
Ever since the debacle of the first presidential debate we’ve been hearing that President Trump has to be nicer in the next face off and let Joe Biden (or even just the moderator) talk. Numerous articles in recent days purport to quote top Trump advisors saying this, demanding this. I have no doubt they’re saying this and may even believe it. But it seems basically a certainty that in tonight’s final debate – likely the last chance to change the dynamic of the race – President Trump will be every bit as aggressive, feral and rage-soaked as he was three weeks ago.
Indeed, we should expect it to be worse.
Trump Has Outdone Himself In False Claims, Making More Than 50 Per Day By WaPo’s Count
President Donald Trump, in a last ditch effort to throw just about anything at the wall and hope it sticks amid dwindling election prospects in the final weeks before the election, has shamelessly made more than 50 false or misleading claims a day.
That’s according to the Washington Post’s Fact Checker, which reported on Thursday that in the month of August — even before delivering a speech to accept the Republican presidential nomination — Trump made 1,506 false or misleading claims, or 56 a day.
As of Aug. 27, the Post’s database, which tracks bogus claims made by Trump, stood at a whopping total of 22,247 false or misleading claims in 1,316 days.
The number of false statements has increased drastically since the early days of his presidency in 2017, when President Trump still keeping with a penchant for mistruth, averaged six claims a day. That number increased rapidly over the past three years — spiking to 16 a day in 2018 and then steadily increasing 22 in 2019. So far in 2020, the president has averaged 27 claims a day.
Trump’s Twitter feed has been especially active lately, as he lashes out at political foes and tries to boost his electoral prospects. The President has taken to the airwaves at nearly every turn, calling into Fox News for interviews. And Trump has held a constant stream of rallies in the final days of the campaign.
Unsurprisingly, the coronavirus pandemic has risen to the top of Trump’s list of falsehoods as he repeatedly undermines science and admitted to intentionally misleading the public about the seriousness of COVID-19.
In just six months Trump has generated nearly 1,400 false claims about the coronavirus pandemic, the Post said.
The volume of misstatements has grown so rapidly that the Post’s Fact Checker team said they simply “cannot keep up.”
According to the Post, Trump has also put a new spin on an old favorite false claim about the economy. While he’s previously falsely stated that the economy under his administration has been the best in U.S. history, he’s taken to the even more inflated suggestion lately by counting among his accomplishments achieving “the best economy in the history of the world.”
Trump has repeated this wildly off base “best economy” claim more than 150 times just since the coronavirus began raging across the United States, the Post said, shredding the economy and Trump’s top pitch for his reelection bid in its wake.
Biden Pledges To Create Bipartisan Commission To Study ‘Reform’ In Court System
Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden stated that as President, he would create a bipartisan panel to determine how to fix the court system, which he said is “getting out of whack.”
Continue reading “Biden Pledges To Create Bipartisan Commission To Study ‘Reform’ In Court System”
Supreme Court Upholds Ban On Curbside Voting In Alabama
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court on Wednesday put on hold a lower court order that would have permitted curbside voting in Alabama in November.
The justices’ vote was 5-3, with the court’s three liberals dissenting. As is typical when the Supreme Court acts on an emergency basis, the justices in the majority did not explain their decision. It was not clear how many counties might have offered curbside voting, allowing people to vote from their car by handing their ballot to a poll worker.
Continue reading “Supreme Court Upholds Ban On Curbside Voting In Alabama”
‘You Know That’s Not True’: ’60 Minutes’ Reporter Calls Out Trump In Interview POTUS Has Been Attacking
Part of President Donald Trump’s “60 Minutes” interview that he reportedly cut short out of rage on Tuesday involved reporter Lesley Stahl confronting Trump on one of his many falsehoods.
National Security Adviser Says ‘Of Course’ Trump Will Transfer Power If He Loses Election
National security adviser Robert O’Brien said Wednesday that “of course” President Donald Trump will accept the results of a presidential election which is now less than two weeks away, even though Trump has signaled otherwise in recent months.
“If he loses the election, I’m certain the president will transfer power over,” O’Brien told Politico in an interview when asked about Trump’s refusal during a White House briefing with reporters last month to commit to a peaceful White House exit in the event of an electoral defeat.
He added as a caveat that it was critical to ensure there was “no fraud in the election” and that it was “free and fair” — even as the President has made efforts in court in recent months to suppress the expansion of mail-in voting which has become a critical way for voters to cast their ballots more safely amid the coronavirus pandemic.
O’Brien appeared less confident about President Trump’s chances of winning the election, suggesting when asked if he predicted a Trump victory that he “hopes” for a win.
“What I believe is he should win,” O’Brien said.
“We’re a democracy, we’ll have to see what happens,” he added, suggesting that he’s witnessed the excitement at rallies, Trump’s long preferred campaign nerve center.
“I’ve watched the rallies and people are pretty excited, but I’m not commenting from a political standpoint, but I think he has a lot of support out there and we’re certainly hoping for the best.”
O’Brien whose role in government is not supposed to be muddled up in politics, has come under fire for traveling to battleground states including, New Hampshire, Iowa and Wisconsin.
He joins a growing list of Trump administration officials who have muddied the lines between government work and political activity after Secretary of State Mike Pompeo appeared in a video clip that aired during the Republican National Convention in August and later made a fairly blatant campaign pitch to state lawmakers in a speech on China policy last month when he said that the Trump administration was “fighting to protect our wallets, hearts, minds, and our freedoms.”
Last month, O’Brien spoke on Trump’s foreign policy in remarks that took a political turn at Drake University in Iowa — a key state for Trump to win on Nov. 3. “The world is more peaceful and prosperous, we believe, because of the president’s policies,” he said, adding: “there’s more to come in a second Trump term.”
The comments toed the line of federal law — as the Hatch Act strictly limits government workers from engaging in political activity — but O’Brien contended on Wednesday that his trips outside Washington were justified because people beyond the nation’s capital “deserve to hear about the president’s national security policies and our foreign policy successes just as much as the Washington think tank class.”
Trump Mulls Ousting FBI Director For Not Delivering Damaging Investigation Into Biden
President Donald Trump, angry that he hasn’t received the damaging pre-election bombshell on Democratic rival Joe Biden that he’s been pushing for, has reportedly been discussing with aides the possibility of firing FBI Director Christopher Wray for not handing Trump said bombshell in the form of an investigation into Biden.
Fauci Suggests Downplaying COVID Contributed To ‘Building Distrust’ In Public Health Agencies
Dr. Anthony Fauci in a recent interview addressed a growing distrust in public health agencies as the coronavirus continues to rage across the country and the message from President Donald Trump remains one of almost nonchalant resignation to a virus that he has suggested will — as if by magic — disappear.
The infectious-disease expert remarked on the “building distrust” toward government health officials during a taped interview with the Council of Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency made public earlier this week and first reported by the Project on Government Oversight.
“We’ve got to admit it, those of us in government, all of us, you and I and all of the people that work for me, and all the people that work for you, that there is a building distrust now in the transparency of what we do,” Fauci told the group of government watchdogs, adding: “It’s the elephant in the room.”
Fauci said that confidence in public health recommendations depends on transparency.
“If you’re going to make scientific-based public health recommendations, everything has got to be transparent,” the public health expert said.
“Otherwise once you lose the confidence of people, they don’t believe what you’re saying or they believe you’re holding things back or they believe there’s a political motivation to things,” he added.
The comments come as President Trump has repeatedly misled the public about the severity of the coronavirus, minimizing its impact and potential dangers for months as thousands of Americans contracted and died from the virus. In an apparent effort to regain footing in the presidential election that is now just weeks away, President Trump has repeatedly sought to paint a rosier picture of his handling of a virus that has now killed more than 221,000 people in the United States.
“The issue that people say you don’t want to alarm people is totally nonsense,” Fauci said, adding: “We’re a pretty strong country. We can handle the truth.”
The remark follows repeated accusations from President Trump in July that Fauci was “a bit of an alarmist.” In September he falsely suggested that the nation was rounding the final turn on the COVID-19 crisis, even as cases continued to surge and Fauci was encouraging Americans to “hunker down” in preparation for what might be a challenging winter with cases far from contained around the country.
Even after his own diagnosis with coronavirus, Trump has peddled mistruths about the disease, suggesting after he was treated with a cocktail of steroids and experimental drugs that he hadn’t really needed them and that immunity to the virus was guaranteed after someone is infected with coronavirus and recovers.
Fauci, who has directed the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases for 36 years, has far-reaching experiences with responding to public health crises — from HIV/AIDS in the 1980s to Zika more recently.
“If you go back over outbreaks in the past, the one thing that has always prevailed as the things that make things work is when people are open and honest and don’t hold information back,” he said, later adding: “we should come back and always tell the truth.”