Bye Bye Bully…your Bully Pulpit has been removed.
Just your ‘verbal attacks’ remain. And we’re turning the page on you.
A majority of Americans have said “Enough.”
2 Likes
3 Likes
3 Likes
3 Likes
Trump got ‘booted off the island’ so to speak but don’t tell him/us he doesn’t have power still.
Unfortunately, the R’s still give him they ring and they all kiss it.
Article compares T to a former Pope Benedict XIII who refused to concede, leave power and created a presence waaaay after he had left Rome.
“History never repeats itself; man always does,” said Voltaire, and Trump last Wednesday departed a rattled, armored Washington, pledging to “be back in some form.” Unwilling to acknowledge the legitimacy of his loss, he left town before the inauguration of Joe Biden—without having invited him to the White House, or congratulated him publicly, or even so much as mentioned his name. No longer roundly welcome in his native New York and all but chased from D.C., Trump jetted toward Florida, his habitual winter weekend getaway turned paramount political stomping grounds—the site of some of his biggest, most important wins; the bastion of a governor he helped get elected, two Republican senators and the House member who’s maybe his most fervent minion, plus a roster of media accessories and grassroots boosters; and America’s notoriously fact-flouting fantasy land, a hundred-year haven for hucksters and hustlers, outsiders, refugees and retirees, a sandy, sweaty Shangri-La of second chances, where Trump is now intent on concocting a papal-like court, a coterie of officeholders and wannabes, hangers-on and aides-de-camp, ring-kissers and the wholly beholden.
…
Benedict XIII, already in his 60s, was made a pope in 1394, by mainly French cardinals, principally because he suggested he would be willing to step aside in an effort to fix the fracture in the church. That professed selflessness subsided once he got a taste of the throne. King Charles VI of France sent envoys to Avignon to urge him to abdicate. Benedict’s retort: “I would rather be buried alive.” The king broke with him in favor of neutrality, and many cardinals and clergy followed suit, chastising Benedict for “creating and fostering schism.”The niceties of diplomacy having failed, the king ordered mercenaries to lay siege to the papal palace. It lasted a year. Benedict, trapped, was forced to eat cats, rats and sparrows. He still didn’t surrender. And ultimately, and unexpectedly to the most elite and entrenched, a substantial share of the hoi polloi and rank-and-file sided with Benedict the victim rather than the royals and their hired hands. The king grudgingly restored his backing of Benedict.
…
“There’s no one more ‘Florida Man’ than Donald Trump,” Tallahassee-based Republican strategist Slater Bayliss told me.“He is peculiarly suited for Florida,” said Mac Stipanovich, the semi-retired operative, lobbyist and all-around political fixture in the state, who shifted over these past few years from Republican to independent to registered Democrat largely on account of Trump and the ways he’s changed the GOP. Other equally or more pro-Trump states—he cited Texas or Alabama—“they’re just not,” he said, “culturally nouveau riche enough or morally louche enough to be a better fit for Donald Trump.”
“Florida is the Trumpiest state in the union,” added Joshua Karp, a Democratic consultant who’s worked there on House, Senate and gubernatorial campaigns, “and for a million reasons.”
…
Another way the state’s an apt fit for Trump: Florida exists in its present-day form because of a century of shady selling of sand and swamp—a prerequisite of the round-and-round boom-and-bust cycle, from the 1920s land frenzy on, not simply supply and demand and no income tax, but an anything-goes, devil-may-care air and a devoted indifference to history and climatic constraints. “Florida,” said Karp, “has been a state for a long time where the truth just doesn’t matter.”
But the most important reason Florida’s the ideal locale for the antipope of Mar-a-Lago is the politics. It’s “the center of America’s political universe,” said Florida Studies professor Gary Mormino.
And it’s filled with Trump fiefs.
In Tallahassee is Ron DeSantis—governor, some contend, thanks to Trump tweets. Deeper into the Panhandle is perhaps the most pro-Trump bulldog in Congress in Matt Gaetz. Also on Capitol Hill are two GOP senators—Rick Scott and Marco Rubio—who both have had to navigate Trump-entangled terrain in Washington and back home and (in the case of Rubio) the bruising ’16 campaign trail as well. The state’s vast, rural, hard-up inland areas as well as pockets of older, wealthier, overwhelmingly white conservatives—both spots are stocked with Trump supporters, broadly representative of the two main poles of his coalition. And South Florida, especially Miami-Dade County, which can feel more than anything like the Caribbean, boasts the staunchest bloc of Trump’s nonwhite support. Now it’s home, too, to his favorite child in Ivanka—rumored to be considering a primary challenge next year for Rubio’s Senate seat—and her husband, the former White House wingman Jared Kushner, and their family. Trump won Florida in 2016. He won it by even more in 2020—the 3.3-point margin a landslide by its usual razor-thin swing-state standards.
3 Likes
What the post-mortem polling shows about how Trump lost the election…
Former President Donald Trump has blamed the election results on unfounded claims of fraud and malfeasance. But at the top levels of his campaign, a detailed autopsy report that circulated among his political aides paints a far different — and more critical — portrait of what led to his defeat.
The post-mortem, a copy of which was obtained by POLITICO, says the former president suffered from voter perception that he wasn’t honest or trustworthy and that he was crushed by disapproval of his handling of the coronavirus pandemic. And while Trump spread baseless accusations of ballot-stuffing in heavily Black cities, the report notes that he was done in by hemorrhaging support from white voters.
The 27-page report, which was written by Trump chief pollster Tony Fabrizio, shows how Trump advisers were privately reckoning with his loss even as the former president and many of his supporters engaged in a conspiracy theory-fueled effort to overturn the election. The autopsy was completed in December 2020 and distributed to Trump’s top political advisers just before President Joe Biden’s Jan. 20 inauguration.
It is unclear if Trump has seen the report.
The findings are based on an analysis of exit polling in 10 states. Five of them — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania — are states that Trump lost after winning them in 2016. The other five — Florida, Iowa, North Carolina, Ohio and Texas — are states that Trump won in both elections.
The report zeroes in on an array of demographics where Trump suffered decisive reversals in 2020, including among white seniors, the same group that helped to propel him to the White House. The autopsy says that Trump saw the “greatest erosion with white voters, particularly white men,” and that he “lost ground with almost every age group.” In the five states that flipped to Biden, Trump’s biggest drop-off was among voters aged 18-29 and 65 and older.
Suburbanites — who bolted from Trump after 2016 — also played a major role. The report says that the former president suffered a “double-digit erosion” with “White College educated voters across the board.”
The picture of the election presented in the report is widely shared by political professionals in both parties, if not by Trump and his legions of his supporters. Trump never offered a concession to Biden, and up until his final days in office, he clung to the debunked idea that the election had been stolen.
Fabrizio declined to comment on the post-mortem. A Trump spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.
Trump’s personal behavior, the autopsy makes clear, contributed to his defeat. “Biden had a clear edge over POTUS on being seen as honest & trustworthy,” Fabrizio writes.
Trump’s response to the pandemic was also critical. The autopsy says that coronavirus registered as the top issue among voters, and that Biden won those voters by a nearly 3-to-1 margin. A majority registered disapproval of Trump’s handling of the virus.
Most voters said they prioritized battling the coronavirus over reopening the economy, even as the president put a firm emphasis on the latter. And roughly 75 percent of voters — most of whom favored Biden — said they favored public mask-wearing mandates.
The report also indirectly raises questions about the reelection campaign’s decision to pause advertising on TV over the summer and save resources until the fall. According to the findings, nearly 9-in-10 voters had made up their minds about whom to support by the final month of the race.
Fabrizio isn’t the only Trump adviser who has presented a post-mortem since Nov. 3. John McLaughlin, another Trump pollster, published a report on the conservative Newsmax website the week after the election.
Meanwhile, advisers to former Vice President Mike Pence brought in multiple pollsters to brief him on their conclusions after the election, according to a person familiar with the discussions. Among the takeaways was that Trump was gaining during the final weeks of the race and that his rallies had helped propel Republicans running in House and Senate races. But the pollsters also made clear that while there was substantial support for Trump’s policies, there was widespread exhaustion with the president.
Within Trump’s inner circle, Fabrizio had long espoused the belief that Trump needed to prioritize the pandemic in order to win reelection. Last summer, he penned a 79-page memo arguing that Trump needed to focus first on dealing with the pandemic rather than reopening the economy and recommending, among other things, that he should have been encouraging people to wear masks rather than mocking the practice.
2 Likes
This topic was automatically closed 15 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.