Donald Trump is facing a tectonic movement which is gaining momentum with each news cycle dampening his presidential hopes that seemed so certain just one month ago. Frank Luntz the famed Republican pollster, who conducts focus groups, maintained that that he had never seen anything like this in his thirty years in the business. On top of all that what is really rattling the reality TV star of yore’s cage is his sentence hearing in September which will confirm his 34 convictions. While his base will wallow in paranoia and martyrdom with him the whole scene is very unlikely to win him swing voters.To add to the former President’s misery he has to live through a week of the Democratic Convention. In between this avalanche of tragedy, he is running his bonkers and scary campaign.With regard to the latter the “GOP” legislators are strangely silent. Only Fox News is begging him to stick to policy.
The "GOP" candidate is campaigning with two strategies.
TRUMP CAMPAINING PLANS A AND B
Trump campaigns using two strategies, Plan A and Plan B. The former is a small dose of conventional politicking, a big dollop of lies particularly relating to "that the world is letting loose the scum of the earth on America” and the populists’ central play, smear your opponent. KamaLA who is “lyin, laughin, not smart” etc etc.
Plan B is that if he loses the election it is “rigged”. This strategy was evident in 2016 and 2020 and now in 2024. The Plan has evolved and metastasized. In 2016 even though he won he was so miffed at losing the popular vote that he fantasized publicly that millions of illegal immigrants had pulled the lever for “crooked” Hillary. In 2020 he cooked up a multi layered seditious conspiracy which resulted in an insurrection in order to remain in power. He still claims Biden is illegitimate. In 2024 he is screaming that Harris’s candidature is “unconstitutional”. He claims that her game plan is to use artificial intelligence to show that thousands attend her rallies. Even more ominous is that in the swing states he has had 2020 election deniers appointed to electoral boards. The latter is a serious threat which is not garnering enough media coverage who rather concentrate on the “horse race”.
Having outlined Plan B which is part of every appearance, Jay H. Ell will join everyone else and concentrate on Plan A which is bonkers.
THE TRUMP CAMPAIGN IS BONKERS
In reality the Trump/Vance ticket is all over the place. But it is fair to say his central thrust is the Democrats should fight fair, bewailing that Joe Biden had his candidature stolen from him, running against Barack Hussein Obama, who definitely is not in the frame ,and belittling the"try for black KamaLA".
The Trumpian response to his happy go lucky opponent is laced with the usual doses of misogyny and racism. He plaintifully argues that America needs to go back to the good ole days when the white male property owners ran the show. His sidekick JD Vance’s thrust is to pillory the military service record of the 24 year stint of the Democratic Vice Presidential candidate, Walz. Vance emphasizes his belief daily, in way or another, that a woman’s place is barefoot, pregnant and in the kitchen and when she is postmenopausal looking after her grandchildren.
Trump is desperately trying to grab the microphone as he is being upstaged by the rollicking Harris campaign. With several public appearances that either shocked or bored audiences to death, he returned to his shtik, “the disastrous economy, the fact that Vice President Harris was allowing in those released from mental institutions and jails and that he would create camps and deport millions and the election in 2020 was stolen”.
Trump’s love affair with the billionaires is well known. His signature tax bill in 2017 was a tax break for the rich. He confirmed his bias towards the ‘bosses” in his technically challenged interview with Elon Musk. He cheered Musk on his Union busting behavior, laughingly congratulating him for responding, “You are all gone” to his employees trying to organize joining a Union.. He reassured billionaires at a fund raiser that they will pay little tax.This is all totally nuts as the MAGA newest best friends are the workers. They invited the head of The Teamsters Union to address the Republic National Convention. Vance has made a big deal that his is the party that represents the workers. Wonder when they are going to drop this campaign line.
Trump’s most difficult challenge is on abortion. He secured the substantial Evangelical Christian vote by promising to deliver judges that would axe the Constitutional right to abortion. He has bragged that he delivered. This issue together with reproductive rights generally looms even larger than immigration as the central issue in this election. Every State, including blood red ones, that has conducted referenda on the issue, has come down on the side of women’s rights. Trump is now talking out of the other side of his mouth and has changed his line from a national abortion ban to each state must decide.
Well there are 11 additional states that are having referenda on the right of women to choose which by the way will help bring out the vote for Harris et al. One of the States is Florida where Trump is a registered voter. To date he has refused to say how he will vote. He is being hammered by the coalition fighting against abortion for backtracking. The Evangelicals are not much interested with his argument that he,”needs to win elections”. In fact an Evangelical group have featured an ad dumping on his candidacy.
With regard to immigration he is promising all the goodies that he promised in 2015 and did not get around to carry out. The wall is still to be built. The spiel on that varies from he needs to complete it, or, that he has already completed it. He obviously has forgot that Mexico has to pay for it as he doesn’t mention it anymore. He waxes on about the millions of lunatics, criminals, rapists, drug lords all of whom are taking black jobs.
Trump's economic plan is going to be as great as it was back when America was great in 2017. His parameter of greatness is the stock market which according to him is going gangbusters because the electorate know he is going to be President. He makes one proviso to that analysis, the reason it dropped 5 percent on one day was on that day they thought he was going to lose.
He has three planks to his economic agenda no taxes on tips, no tax on social security benefits and decrease in taxes for everyone this time. Approximate cost probably close on a trillion dollars. He has no suggestion as to how pay for this all unless he probably believes that his 10 percent surcharge on all imported goods will cover it. The latter being a sales tax that would disproportionately affect the average American although he steadfastly claims that China will pay for it. Presumably the same way Mexico paid for the wall.
Just in case anyone has forgotten that he confided to his generals that the American war dead were "losers", in another of his low energy appearances he told his largest donor by far that the Presidential Medal of Freedom that he had awarded her was even more meritorious than the military Medal of Honor because most of those that received this were either dead or riddled with bullets.
Then there is Hannibal Lector, electrocution versus being eaten by sharks, bird cemeteries, that if the wind doesn’t blow you can’t turn on the lights, he is more beautiful than KamaLA and “drill baby drill”.
What he is not running on is Project 2025.
TRUMP IS NOT RUNNING ON PROJECT 2025
Biden literally in the dying moments of his debate with Trump threw out “What about Project 25”. Trump from then went on denying that he had anything to do with the plan to remake America in a manner that would be the envy of Erdogan, Orban and Modi combined. He knew nothing about it. As Shakespeare himself once said, “The lady doth protest too much”. Only it was Trump not the "Indian lady” that was doing the protesting. By so doing he made the issue a cause celebre.
Then the damn burst one revelation after another. Trump was pictured with the principal author Kevin Roberts of the Heritage Foundation. The latter promptly resigned in a vain attempt to make it all go away. It was then revealed that good old JD Vance, who had been cheerfully just muddling along, had written a Forward to Robert’s new book. The digital medium, “ProRepublica” plonked training tapes into the world wide web which explained how to carry the whole project out. Ninety percent of the presenters were in Trump’s inner circle. Just in case that wasn’t enough co author Russell Voigt spilled the beans in a sting by British journalists that Trump was just denying his knowledge for campaign reasons. Voight was Trump’s Director of the Office of Management and Budget and reportedly is Trump’s 2025 pick for his Chief of Staff.
For those who haven’t read all the 900 pages this is Trump’s attempt to create his own “Dark State”. Every career civil servant will be fired and replaced by Trump loyalists. Departments such as Education, and Environmental Protection Agency would be axed. Centralized power to the Presidency. “Barefoot, pregnant and in the kitchen” codified, no abortion, no In Vitro Fertilization no Contraception.
There is every reason to believe that plenty more will be heard about Project 2025
AT THE END OF THE DAY
For the moment Harris and Walz are on a roll and Trump and Vance have been rolled over.
"Republicans for Harris" has to be a growing concern.
It’s never over till the Congress ratifies the election results.
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