Donald John Trump proves to be childlike and dangerous again 👨🏼💼
I can’t believe that the President could even hesitate to say that he wouldn’t voluntarily step down if the election doesn’t go his way. While any close election has its questions on which ballots are counted and disputes over the law, when ultimately an election is finalized, it is final and we must all accept it. That’s not saying that people shouldn’t lobby for policies they support or even campaign for the next election for their preferred candidate but we all live under the system put forward by our elected officials, like it or not.
No votes have been counted in the election of 2020, but a battle is already raging over the integrity of the tally and the process that will follow.
President Trump suggested he might not accept the election results if Democratic nominee Joe Biden is declared the winner.
"We're going to have to see what happens. You know that," he said on Wednesday evening in response to a question about whether he would commit to a peaceful transfer of power.
Now the Trump campaign is said to be considering another, even more outrageous approach: In a thorough and deeply disconcerting piece about the constitutional crisis that may await us between November 3 and the inauguration in January, the Atlantic’s Barton Gellman reports that the Trump campaign has been discussing “contingency plans to bypass the election results and appoint local electors in battleground states where Republicans hold the legislative majority.” Citing the president’s baseless claims of fraud, Team Trump could ask GOP-controlled state governments to choose electors, completely ignoring an unfavorable or uncertain popular vote, state and national Republican sources told Gellman.
In your guts you know he's nuts. Can you imagine the political backlash if a state even tried to do that? Or the court challenges that would raise? That power may exist but I can't imagine anybody wanting to touch that.
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.