After it became clear in mid-April that his administration’s response to Covid-19 was threatening his reelection, President Donald Trump considered a leadership shake-up within a health department whose rivalries and battles with the White House had hampered efforts to contain the virus.
Instead, Trump made a different move: He personally intervened to place his campaign aide Michael Caputo — a confidant of disgraced operative Roger Stone who had himself come under scrutiny for his ties to top Russian officials — as assistant Health and Human Services secretary for public affairs. Trump — not HHS Secretary Alex Azar — approached Caputo about the job, and Caputo has repeatedly emphasized that he works for the president, health officials told POLITICO.
Biden's up 52% to 42% over President Donald Trump among likely voters nationally, and he has a 50% to 44% edge over Trump in the key battleground state of Wisconsin as well.
Biden's 10 point and 6 point advantages are the exact same they were when CBS News/YouGov polled the contests before the party conventions.
The polls are reflective of a race that barely budges even after two conventions, protests and unrest in some cities over police brutality and as the nation navigates the coronavirus pandemic. Indeed, the stability of this race is record breaking when looking at polling dating back to 1940.
Strzok was at the center of a number of white-hot cases over his career and would have had ample material for a book even before his path crossed with that of Donald J. Trump.
That, however, is what fate had in store, and for as much as Strzok and his publisher may want this book to be about Trump or the counterintelligence business, it clearly can't avoid being about him.
Can a gumshoe privately contemptuous of the Republican politician he's investigating and who's violating his marital vows and leaving evidence of the foregoing on a U.S. government-issued electronic device also work by the book in his capacity as a top FBI investigator?
No, Trump and his supporters have fulminated, and they've sought to cast Strzok and Page as the faces of an ostensible conspiracy within officialdom out to get Trump.
One outside adviser to the president’s 2020 campaign said the goal is to equip Trump with ways in which he can box in Biden on policy matters by forcing him to either disavow his party’s most controversial positions on immigration, taxes, abortion or the "Green New Deal," a move that would enrage his progressive base, or alternatively, force him to embrace positions that alienate moderate voters and would fit into the Trump campaign’s “radical leftist” narrative about him. Trump will also go after Biden’s 47-year record in Washington in the Senate and as vice president.
Well, the 2020 national political conventions are over.
The Republicans wrapped up Thursday night, and there was a lot to digest, not least a clearer sense of what the post-Labor Day sprint is going to look and sound like.
Even before the Republican National Convention began, government ethics experts warned that hosting campaign events from the White House South Lawn and the Rose Garden could violate federal ethics law.
But in the convention's first two days, Trump has gone even further — wielding the powers of his office and the federal government to promote his reelection campaign.
As part of Tuesday night's prime-time convention programming, Trump granted a presidential pardon from the White House. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo appeared from Jerusalem, where he was on official state business, to make a campaign speech with the Old City as backdrop. First lady Melania Trump delivered a speech from the White House Rose Garden. And acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf performed a naturalization ceremony on television as Trump looked on.