US politics

Trump’s Misogyny Might Finally Catch Up With Him

Recently I had the chance to watch an online focus group of seven women from swing states who had voted for Donald Trump in 2016 but who had become disaffected with him. Convened by Sarah Longwell, a founder of Republican Voters Against Trump, the session was in some ways a deeply depressing experience.

Source : Roya-ann Miller

Several of the women said that, because they don’t believe what they hear from mainstream media, they have a hard time distinguishing truth from falsehood. One woman, in North Carolina, cited something she’d heard in a Trump ad as a reason she’s unlikely to vote for Joe Biden, and said she wished Ben Carson would step into the race.

Another from the same state said she was “scared” about the election because she doesn’t trust Kamala Harris. A woman from Florida had already voted for Joe Biden, but a few of the others were considering voting third party.

“His Twitter, his comments, things that he was recorded saying, his misogyny — I was just, like, horrified and embarrassed,” she said. Looking back, she didn’t think she knew about the “Access Hollywood” tape before she voted: “I certainly hope that I didn’t, because it was a disgusting comment. I would think that had I known that might have given me pause.” She’s now torn between voting for Biden or for the Libertarian candidate, Jo Jorgensen.

I strongly suspect she’s remembering wrong — the “Access Hollywood” story would have been very hard to miss in October 2016. But it’s telling that she can no longer quite imagine how she could have supported Trump after hearing him boast about his penchant for sexual assault. It’s another tiny piece of evidence that 2020 could be the year Trump’s misogyny finally catches up with him.

Yet their disgust with the president was palpable. A well-spoken woman with grown children from central Pennsylvania appeared to have mentally rewritten the history of the last election to justify her vote. She’d opted for Trump, she said, thinking that it would be “refreshing” to have a president with a business background. In her recollection, it was only after he won that he revealed his true character.

Four years ago, many of us were counting on right-leaning women to deliver a decisive rebuke to Trump. Lots of journalists, myself included, wrote about the group Republican Women for Hillary. After the appearance of the “Access Hollywood” tape, female Republican governors and members of Congress were far more likely than their male peers to withdraw their endorsements. Katie Packer, deputy campaign manager of Mitt Romney’s 2012 bid, imagined a reckoning in her party after Trump’s loss. “There’s going to have to be a denunciation of this guy,” she told me then.

“There’s going to have to be a denunciation of this guy”

Needless to say, there wasn’t. Most women did indeed vote for Hillary Clinton, but Trump won either a plurality or an outright majority of white women, enough to give him the presidency. There turned out to be far less of a political penalty for vulgar misogyny than some of us realized.

Four years later, it’s hard not to feel an unnerving sense of déjà vu. Once again, the polls show a potentially historic gender gap in the presidential election. Journalists are reporting on all the women Trump has turned off. Last I checked, FiveThirtyEight gave Trump a 13 percent chance of victory, almost exactly the same odds he had three weeks before the election in 2016. For America to survive as a liberal democracy, this time has to be different. Is it?

Source : Shaojie-bIm

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In Rare Move, Trump Administration Rejects California’s Request for Wildfire Relief

The state had asked last month for federal aid to help recover from six of this year’s fires, including the Creek Fire, which is among the largest in state history.

Source : Denys Argyriou

The Trump administration has rejected California’s request for disaster relief aid for six major wildfires that scorched more than 1.8 million acres in land, destroyed thousands of structures and caused at least three deaths last month.

The rejection of aid late Thursday, a rare move in cases of disasters on the scale of California’s fires, escalated a long-running feud between the Trump administration and California on the issues of climate change and forest management.

California has suffered a series of record-breaking fires since August, when freak lightning storms ignited hundreds of fires. Subsequent fires in September tore through parts of the Sierra Nevada and wine country north of San Francisco.

Judd Deere, a White House spokesman, said President Trump had already come to the state’s assistance when his administration authorized increased funding for debris removal from the fires as well as relief for the August fires.

Source : Dawn Armfield
Source : Christopher Burns

“The more recent and separate California submission was not supported by the relevant data that States must provide for approval and the President concurred with the FEMA Administrator’s recommendation,” Mr. Deere said.

California officials immediately pushed back on that assessment. Brian Ferguson, a spokesman for the state’s office of emergency services, said the state had a “strong case” that it meets the federal requirements for approval and planned to appeal the decision.

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Fearing a ‘Blood Bath,’ Republican Senators Begin to Edge Away From Trump

The statements offer an answer to the question of when Republicans might begin to repudiate the president after years of embracing him: the moment they believed he threatened their own political survival.

Source : Dalton Caraway

For nearly four years, congressional Republicans have ducked and dodged an unending cascade of offensive statements and norm-shattering behavior from President Trump, ignoring his caustic and scattershot Twitter feed and penchant for flouting party orthodoxy, and standing quietly by as he abandoned military allies, attacked American institutions and stirred up racist and nativist fears.

Source : Isabella and Louisa Fischer

But now, facing grim polling numbers and a flood of Democratic money and enthusiasm that has imperiled their majority in the Senate, Republicans on Capitol Hill are beginning to publicly distance themselves from the president. The shift, less than three weeks before the election, indicates that many Republicans have concluded that Mr. Trump is heading for a loss in November. And they are grasping to save themselves and rushing to re-establish their reputations for a coming struggle for their party’s identity.

Senator Ben Sasse of Nebraska unleashed on Mr. Trump in a telephone town hall event with constituents on Wednesday, eviscerating the president’s response to the coronavirus pandemic and accusing him of “flirting” with dictators and white supremacists and alienating voters so broadly that he might cause a “Republican blood bath” in the Senate. He was echoing a phrase from Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, who warned of a “Republican blood bath of Watergate proportions.” Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, one of the president’s most vocal allies, predicted the president could very well lose the White House.

Even the normally taciturn Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the majority leader, has been more outspoken than usual in recent days about his differences with the president, rejecting his calls to “go big” on a stimulus bill. That was a reflection of the fact that Senate Republicans — who have rarely broken with the president on any major legislative initiative in four years — are unwilling to vote for the kind of multitrillion-dollar federal aid plan that Mr. Trump has suddenly decided would be in his interest to embrace.

“Voters are set to drive the ultimate wedge between Senate Republicans and Trump,” said Alex Conant, a former aide to Senator Marco Rubio and a former White House spokesman. “It’s a lot easier to get along when you’re winning elections and gaining power. But when you’re on the precipice of what could be a historic loss, there is less eagerness to just get along.”

Republicans could very well hang onto both the White House and the Senate, and Mr. Trump still has a firm grip on the party base, which may be why even some of those known for being most critical of him, like Mr. Sasse and Senator Mitt Romney of Utah, declined to be interviewed about their concerns.

But their recent behavior has offered an answer to the long-pondered question of if there would ever be a point when Republicans might repudiate a president who so frequently said and did things that undermined their principles and message. The answer appears to be the moment they feared he would threaten their political survival.

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