Tag: Donald Trump

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Newsmax Host: Media Timed Biden Win For When Trump Was On Golf Course

Reporting from the corner of Cynicism and Bitter… A talking head at the far-right leaning streaming website Newsmax tried to insinuate all of the mainstream media (including Fox News Channel) colluded with the state of Pennsylvania to wait for Donald Trump to take his 284th trip to play golf before projecting former Vice President Joe Biden as the next president of the U.S.

“The timing on of all this, Emerald, certainly fascinates me. We talk a lot about media collusion with the Democratic Party and here we have the president just leaving the White House to go to his golf course to play a round of golf and he deserves to be able to do that.”

“We have the press conference that Rudy Giuliani is going to hold in Philadelphia happening. And at the very same time, all of all sudden, all of the networks, with the exception of Newsmax, decide that this is the time that they’re going to call the election. We are, here at Newsmax, not calling the election.”

Check out the creepy laugh when he says “He deserves to be able to do that…” Practically everyone with an interest in the election returns figured out the result would probably be announced today. Why would Trump even play golf today? And then, of course, there’s the fact that Trump lied to the American people four years ago and said there “wouldn’t be time for golf” if he was elected in 2016. It’s almost Shakespearean that Trump learned he lost the race on a golf course.

(h/t JoeMyGod)

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News Round-Up: November 6, 2020

Juan Melecio (image via Twitter)
Some news items you might have missed: • Edge Media: Juan Melecio (above), better known as gay porn star Antonio Biaggi, finished 5th in a field of 6 candidates for two city commissioner seats in gay-centric Wilton Manors, Florida. • The Advocate: The GOP failed in its attempt to derail the campaign of Democrat Roger Montoya by shaming him over a gay porn past nearly 40 years ago. Montoya triumphed in his New Mexico race for House District 40, besting Republican opponent Justin Salazar-Torrez 56.8 percent to 43.2 percent. • Victory Fund: Todd Gloria has won his race to become the next Mayor of San Diego, California. He is the first openly LGBTQ person and first person of color to be elected to the office. • New Music: Australian superstar Kylie Minogue drops some super-cute disco beats with her latest single, “Where Does The DJ Go?” The pop diva will also be streaming a live 50-minute performance – Kylie: Infinite Disco – around the globe on Saturday, November 7.

• NBC News: Defense Secretary Mark Esper has prepared a letter of resignation, according to three current defense officials. Defense officials say Esper prepared his letter because he is one of the Cabinet officials long expected to be pushed out after the election. • Vox: Georgia now has two Senate runoffs, both to be decided on January 5, 2021, as Sen. Kelly Loeffler (R) and Democrat Rev. Raphael Warnock failed to cross the majority threshold in Georgia’s special election Senate race.  Sen. David Perdue (R) and Jon Ossoff (D) are headed to a runoff as well as neither were able to clear the state’s 50 percent threshold. • Washington Examiner: Amid reports Donald Trump might not concede the election, a spokesman for Joe Biden’s campaign, Andrew Bates responded: “The American people will decide this election. And the United States government is perfectly capable of escorting trespassers out of the White House.”

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Election Update: November 6, 2020

L-R Donald Trump, Joe Biden (screen capture, campaign photo)
As of 10 am today, this is the state of play in the race for the presidency via the New York Times:

Mr. Biden, who was winning the popular vote by more than four million votes and has already won 253 electoral votes, pulled ahead of Mr. Trump in Pennsylvania by about 12,000 votes on Friday afternoon. If his lead holds — and it is expected to — the state’s 20 electoral votes would vault him past the threshold to win the election.

In Georgia, his lead was so narrow that state officials said a recount was inevitable.

In Arizona, Mr. Biden maintained his lead as election officials continued to plow through tens of thousands of ballots from Phoenix and its sprawling suburbs. His advantage shrank slightly, but not by as much as Republicans had hoped.

In Nevada, Mr. Biden nearly doubled his lead Friday to around 20,000 votes.

Mr. Biden had already begun to project the image of a man preparing to assume the mantle of office on Thursday, meeting with his economic and health advisers to be briefed on the coronavirus pandemic. He also urged the public on Thursday to show a “little patience” as the vote-counting in battleground states continued.

Note – one media outlet, Business Insider (working with Decision Desk HQ) has called the race for Joe Biden.

(graphic via NY Times)
(graphic via NY Times)

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Greetings From Nevada: Biden Expands His Lead Over Trump

New numbers were finally reported today from the presidential race in battleground state Nevada showing former Vice President Joe Biden expanding his lead over Donald Trump. From the Las Vegas Review-Journal:

In the latest results released by the Secretary of State’s office at 9 a.m. Thursday, Biden built on the 7,600-vote lead he held when counting stopped on Election Night, a 0.6 percentage point advantage over Trump in a race with more than 1.2 million votes cast. Biden now leads Trump by 597,353 votes, 49.50 percent, to Trump’s 585,311 votes, 48.50 percent.

Nevada will continue to count ballots and update at least once daily.

Secretary of State Barbara Cegavske, in a statement released late Wednesday, said that the remaining ballots were mail-in ballots received on or after Election Day and ballots from voters who registered at the polls on Election Day, as permitted by state law.

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A Tale Of Two Candidates (In Two Tweets)

L-R President Donald Trump, former Vice President Joe Biden
A tale of two candidates… As Joe Biden called for unity and declaring the office of the presidency “demands a duty of care for all Americans,” Donald Trump was retweeting his demands that states “STOP THE COUNT!”

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Low Energy Trump Calls In To ‘Fox & Friends’ As Biden Makes Final GOTV Push

It’s finally Election Day! And according to ABC News, early voting across the country hit record highs as over 97 million Americans cast their vote before today. Prior to this morning, voters had cast more than 70% of the total ballots counted in the 2016 general election, when 166 million Americans voted. In 2016, there were just under 43 million early votes. Former Vice President Joe Biden attended a church service before heading out to final ‘get out the vote’ appearances in Pennsylvania.

Donald Trump called in to his own place of worship – Fox & Friends. Sounding a bit low energy, Trump spoke about how “mean” people had been to him, bragged about the size of his campaign rallies, threw some predictable shade at Biden, and then turned on – of all outlets – Fox News Channel. “Fox has changed a lot,” whine Trump. “Somebody said ‘What’s the biggest difference between this and four years ago?’ I said Fox, it’s much different, you know. Fox is a much different place in terms of politics.” “In the old days, [Fox] wouldn’t put on sleepy Joe Biden every time he had opened his mouth. They had other networks for that, frankly. It’s a much different operation, I’m just telling you. It’s much different.” Trump also complained about the democratic process itself again moaning that all ballots won’t be counted by the end of tonight. As I’ve reported yesterday, every state has its own rules for cutting off accepting ballots and when to begin processing and counting them. Trump criticized American voters saying, “There’s no reason why they couldn’t put the ballot in 2 weeks earlier.” Some of those ballots include military service members overseas who have little control over when their ballots arrive.

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Trump: ‘It’s Terrible When A State Can Tabulate Votes For A Long Time’

Speaking to reporters during a campaign stop in North Carolina, Donald Trump railed against the idea that ballots – specifically mail-in ballots preferred by Democrats in this presidential cycle due to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic – would be counted past election night. Basically, Trump is arguing that millions of voters be disenfranchised by having their ballot thrown out if it’s not counted by midnight on Election Day. “I think it’s a terrible thing when a state can tabulate ballots for a long time after an election is over. Cause it can only lead to one thing and that thing is very bad. I think it’s a very dangerous terrible thing. And I think it’s terrible when we can’t know the results of an election the night of an election in a modern-day age of computers. Trump also warned that he plans on going into states “the night of, as soon as that election is over, we’re going in with our lawyers.” He added, “If people wanted to get their ballots in, they should have gotten their ballots in long before that.” As everyone knows at this point, every state sets its own rules for when a ballot can be accepted and counted. Some states have laws allowing a ballot to be counted as long as they are postmarked the day of the election and received within a certain number of days. In other states, the ballot has to be received by Election Day. Plus, some states (Arizona, Florida, Nevada) begin processing mail-in ballots before Election Day but others (North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Michigan) won’t begin to tabulate those ballots until November 3. Here’s a breakdown of when key states will begin to start counting ballots as well as their cutoff dates for receiving those mail-in votes.

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Bloomberg: ‘Cash-Poor’ Trump Campaign Pulls Ads In Florida

Trump walks past reporters with no comment

Trump walks past reporters with no comment
Donald Trump (image via public domain/White House)
Bloomberg News reports Donald Trump’s campaign has “all but pulled its advertising out of Florida, as it stakes its relatively small bank account on the industrial northern states that carried him to victory in 2016.” Team Trump reportedly canceled $5.5 million in ad spending in the Sunshine State although there is still about $350,000 in ad spots still scheduled to run before Election Day. The Trump campaign contends its “organizational strength” will carry the day to victory in Florida. “Trump is now placing his final bet on just 4 battleground states: Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio & Pennsylvania,” reports Bloomberg. The media outlet adds that since Labor Day the president has scaled back campaign ad spending by $24 million. At the same time, former Vice President Joe Biden has been outspending Trump at a ratio of 3-1 as he added $197 million to his ad budget.

Update: After I shared this post this morning, Thea McDonald, Deputy National Press Secretary for the Trump Campaign, reached out this response from Tim Murtaugh, Trump 2020 communications director:

“The Bloomberg story is horribly wrong and should never have been written. The campaign, with the RNC coordinated buy, is up with a seven figure buy in Florida on broadcast TV alone. In addition in Florida, we are up with six figures in local cable, six figures in Spanish language, and six figures on radio. Our ad buying week by week in the state has been consistent, and the reporting on this issue demonstrates a clear misunderstanding of how ad buying works (and in some cases a misunderstanding of simple addition and subtraction). Last week we announced a $55 million buy over the final two weeks, which is a 40 percent increase over our previous levels. Just yesterday we added $6 million on top of that for the final week. Including Florida, the Trump campaign is on television in 12 states and also nationally. This is sloppy reporting at the highest level.”

Bloomberg has updated their report adding details and quotes of advertising strategy.

The RNC is picking up some of that slack, buying $4 million in ads beginning last week. It’s now airing an ad in Florida attacking Biden on Medicare, falsely claiming that the Biden health care plan would eliminate private health insurance.

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Report: Trump Already Planning Post-Election List Of Firings

Donald Trump

Donald Trump (photo: Gage Skidmore/Flickr – CC License)
Should Donald Trump win reelection he’ll move to immediately fire FBI Director Christopher Wray and also expects to replace CIA Director Gina Haspel and Defense Secretary Mark Esper reports Axios.

Wray and Haspel are despised and distrusted almost universally in Trump’s inner circle. He would have fired both already, one official said, if not for the political headaches of acting before Nov. 3.

Why it matters: A win, no matter the margin, will embolden Trump to ax anyone he sees as constraining him from enacting desired policies or going after perceived enemies.

As for Wray, whose expected firing was first reported by the Washington Post, Trump is angry his second FBI chief didn’t launch a formal investigation into Hunter Biden’s foreign business connections — and didn’t purge more officials Trump believes abused power to investigate his 2016 campaign’s ties to Russia.

Trump also grew incensed when Wray testified in September that the FBI has not seen widespread election fraud, including with mail-in ballots.

Trump soured on Esper over the summer when the Defense secretary rebuffed the idea of sending active-duty military into the streets to deal with racial justice protests and distanced himself from the clearing of Lafayette Square for a photo op at St. John’s church.

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SNL: ‘The Village People’ Sing Musical Cease & Desist To Trump Campaign

(screen capture)
‘The Village People’ (Kenan Thompson, Mikey Day, Beck Bennett, Chris Redd, Bowen Yang) stopped by SNL’s Weekend Update to address Donald Trump using their music at his rallies. Earlier this week, video clips of the Trumpster ‘dancing’ (kinda, sorta, ish) to their disco hit “YMCA” made their way onto the interwebs becoming a source for numerous viral memes. For months now, recording artists like Bruce Springsteen, The Rolling Stones, Phil Collins and even Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber have publicly asked the Trump camp to stop using their music at campaign rallies. Tony Award-winner Betty Buckley recently fired off an epic takedown of the Donald after learning her recording of “Memory” was being played at Trump events.