2020 Election Campaign

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Over the weekend Politico published details of a 57 page Republican party attack memo, which advised GOP candidates to aggressively target China in their public remarks on the coronavirus pandemic. From the report:

The memo includes advice on everything from how to tie Democratic candidates to the Chinese government to how to deal with accusations of racism. It stresses three main lines of assault: That China caused the virus “by covering it up,” that Democrats are “soft on China,” and that Republicans will “push for sanctions on China for its role in spreading this pandemic.”

The reporting adds to the increasingly clear picture that Republicans will target China throughout election season. A pro-Trump super Pac has already released advertising attacking Joe Biden for his comments on Trump’s decision to ban some travel from the country at the start of the outbreak. More from the report:

The document urges candidates to stay relentlessly on message against the country when responding to any questions about the virus. When asked whether the spread of the coronavirus is Trump’s fault, candidates are advised to respond by pivoting to China.

Coronavirus US live: Dr Birx declines to criticize Trump's disinfectant remarks | World news | The Guardian

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A row between Donald Trump and his election campaign manager, Brad Parscale, over a recent drop in the president’s poll numbers resulted in Trump threatening Parscale with a lawsuit. The argument reportedly happened last Friday, as the US death toll from the coronavirus pandemic reached 50,000 in three months and the fallout continued from Trump’s suggestion at the White House the night before that taking disinfectant internally could be examined as a possible treatment for coronavirus, even though it is potentially lethal.
But the blow-up was just the latest in a series of tense moments between Trump and his 2020 re-election team, according to reports from multiple outlets including the Washington Post, the Associated Press and CNN..

Trump erupts over poll slump and threatens to sue campaign manager | US news | The Guardian

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Attorney General William Barr announced the “resignation” of the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York. Geoffrey Berman had prosecuted Trump associates and brought to light much Trump wrongdoing, including important elements of the quid-pro-quo scheme with the Ukrainian state that got Trump impeached in 2019.

That same Friday, BuzzFeed won a freedom-of-information lawsuit to obtain redacted portions of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report. Mueller’s report had concluded: “Beginning in June 2016, former Campaign member Roger Stone forecast to senior Campaign officials that WikiLeaks would release information damaging to candidate Clinton.” But the details supporting that charge were suppressed. Now we have them, and it looks as though Trump personally directed his campaign chair Paul Manafort to keep in touch with Stone for advance details of WikiLeaks.

Finally, also yesterday, The Washington Post reported that fewer than 200 polling places will be open for the Kentucky primary on June 23, rather than the usual 3,700. Kentucky’s vote-by-mail system is breaking down under the weight of requests for advance ballots. The impending chaos will bear especially heavily on Kentucky’s African American voters. Voters in Louisville—a 20 percent black county—will all have to vote at one polling station, the city’s convention center, likely to face crushingly long lines. The primary is not a formality: Kentucky Democrats face a contentious Senate choice. Louisville is the city where police killed Breonna Taylor. Anger about that shooting has propelled the rise of a competitor to Amy McGrath, the candidate favored by national Democrats. If McGrath, who is white, defeats State Representative Charles Booker, who is black, in a primary marred by obstacles to black voting, that could well splinter Kentucky Democrats, demobilize the state’s black vote in November, and assure the easy reelection of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.

These three developments suggest the three components of the Trump endgame for 2020:
1) Attack the independence and integrity of the legal system;
2) benefit from foreign help and trust that by the time the help is proved, it will be stale news of scant interest to anybody; and
3) benefit from voting obstacles, particularly those that will impede black voting, and super-particularly those that will wedge apart the Democratic coalition on racial lines. (The Trump administration is not directly to blame for the coming mess in Kentucky—states manage elections—but it clearly relishes such situations.))

Trump’s 3-Point Plan to Win in 2020 - The Atlantic

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It might have been one of the ugliest political events since, well, if I’m being honest, a much darker time in the middle of the last century. Political punters nonetheless think Donald Trump nailed it with the Republican Convention. A horrifying thought? Indeed. But the American electorate dances to the beat of its own drum and political punters know that. The latter’s assessment of what the electorate made of it all has moved them to put a ton of money on the US president. The betting markets have moved decisively in the wake of the convention. The Democratic challenger, Joe Biden, was the clear favourite going into it, but most bookies now have the two candidates level-pegging at 10/11. You can still find Trump at evens in one or two places, though you have to look hard to find the price. The same is true on Betfair, where Trump’s implied probability of victory enjoyed an eight-point, convention-driven bump, surging from 41 per cent to 49 per cent. That’s a record.

The Republican Convention has driven the election odds towards a Trump victory. But it’s not over yet | The Independent | Independent

• A carnival of nonsense, division and lies, and what happens? His chances of reelection shoot up..
  

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Donald Trump’s presidential re-election campaign has repeatedly produced manipulated online content over the past week. The Trump campaign published a set of Facebook ads that featured the president’s Democratic rival Joe Biden looking older than the 77-year-old former vice-president is. The ads fall in line with one of the president’s favorite attack lines for Biden: that he’s too old and infirm to run for president. (Trump is 74 years old.) The Facebook ad read: “President Trump knows that the Fake News Media will NEVER report accurately on his standings in the polls against Sleepy Joe. We want the truth, and we need to hear it directly from REAL Americans, like YOU.” The pictures, analyzed by HuffPost, show a picture of Biden had been edited to make him look older, by darkening his skin and emphasizing imperfections. On Monday the campaign’s Trump War Room Twitter account tweeted a manipulated video that appeared to show Biden saying, “You won’t be safe in Joe Biden’s America.” The video was labelled “manipulated media” by Twitter. The video was actually a clip of Biden quoting the Trump campaign.

Donald Trump campaign repeatedly doctoring videos for social media ads | US news | The Guardian

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To quickly recap the latest in Giuliani's impotent machinations: Steve Bannon, the former Trump strategist currently indicted on federal money laundering and obstruction charges, tips off the New York Post that the former NYC mayor has had in his possession what they claim are emails from Biden's son, Hunter Biden. Giuliani's story of how he got these emails is, to put it charitably, implausible. He says they were obtained from a computer supposedly left at a Delaware repair shop which the owner then turned over to him, for some reason. Perhaps a likelier explanation, as New York magazine's Jonathan Chait suggests, is that the emails may have been sourced from Russian agents that Giuliani knows.

The emails, which have not been independently verified, purport to show the younger Biden trying to set up a meeting between his father, who was vice president at the time, and executives at a corrupt Ukrainian energy firm, Burisma, where he served on the board of directors. Joe Biden's schedule shows he did not attend such a meeting, and the campaign says the Post didn't ask for comment on that allegation. But this is supposed to be evidence that Joe Biden is corrupt. There's every reason to be suspicious of this weak attempt at an October surprise. It's important to remember that Trump got impeached because he tried to conjure up false evidence for these same bogus accusations by blackmailing the Ukrainian president into announcing a fraudulent "investigation" into Biden.

Moreover, it's a matter of record that Joe Biden's only involvement with Burisma was working with international authorities to fire a corrupt Ukrainian prosecutor who had failed to investigate Burisma. So even if there was an effort made by Burisma to corrupt Joe Biden, it failed. The emails, even if they're real, just prove he refused to get involved. And so the efforts to pump this up into a big deal are failing. But without impeachment, there's a very good chance that Giuliani's gambit would have worked as intended, which is to flood baseless insinuations across the mainstream news media, including the New York Times.

How Democrats guaranteed Rudy Giuliani's 'October surprise' would backfire spectacularly - Alternet.org

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So it's very important to keep in mind that the "scandal" is supposed to be that then-Vice President Joe Biden pushed for the removal of Ukraine's top prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, to stave off an investigation into Burisma Holdings--the Ukrainian gas company whose Board Hunter sat on--in order to protect his son. It is supposed to be a story about conflict of interest--of the elder Biden using the office of the Vice Presidency to help his son.

There is not a shred of truth to those claims. The effort to get Shokin fired "was prompted by a push for anti-corruption reforms developed at the State Department and coordinated with the European Union and the International Monetary Fund," The Washington Post[/url] reported. And [url=https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2019/10/03/politics/gop-senators-echoed-biden-on-ukraine-reforms-kfile/index.html]according to CNN, a bipartisan "letter from 2016 shows that Republican senators pushed for reforms to Ukraine's prosecutor general's office and judiciary, echoing calls then-Vice President Joe Biden made at the time."

Shokin was corrupt, and that was a problem. Vitaliy Kasko, a former deputy of Shokin's who resigned over his boss's habit of stymieing corruption probes, told Bloomberg that Shokin was not investigating Burisma during the period in question. "There was no pressure from anyone from the U.S. to close cases against" the firm or its owner. "It was shelved by Ukrainian prosecutors in 2014 and through 2015," Kasko said. And Daria Kaleniuk, a prominent Ukrainian anti-corruption crusader, told The Washington Post that "Shokin was fired not because he wanted to do that investigation, but quite to the contrary, because he failed that investigation.""

Here's the simple truth about the fake Hunter Biden scandal Team Trump wishes was a 'smoking gun' - Alternet.org

• Desperate efforts to pull a dead horse..
  
• The real scandal is that Trump bribed the Ukrainian President, withholding military aid, and got away with it.
  

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President Donald Trump on Monday accused the American media of trying to illegally interfere in the 2020 presidential election by accurately report on the novel coronavirus pandemic. "We have made tremendous progress with the China Virus, but the Fake News refuses to talk about it this close to the Election," the president wrote. "COVID, COVID, COVID is being used by them, in total coordination, in order to change our great early election numbers. Should be an election law violation!" The president's accusations against the news media comes as the average number of new COVID-19 infections hit a record high over the weekend.

Trump accuses media of ‘election law violation’ for reporting on COVID pandemic - Alternet.org

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The unusual finding underscores some of the little-known ways in which Trump’s social media army — composed of devoted followers and likely assistance from software that artificially boosts his content — has helped him develop one of the world’s most powerful political megaphones, unlike any other in the English-speaking world. That megaphone has become a frequent source of misinformation, some of it so toxic that Harvard researchers recently dubbed attacks on mail-in voting by Trump and right-leaning leaders “a highly effective disinformation campaign with potentially profound effects ... for the legitimacy of the 2020 election.”

Trump’s singular ability to spread his messages, often disseminating false or unsubstantiated information, comes from his prominence as president and the relentless clip of his tweeting to his 87 million followers. He is also aided by a vital feedback loop — often discussed but poorly understood — among the president, high-profile influencers and rank-and-file followers that both push messages in his direction and promote every online utterance..

His feedback loop, according to several new and forthcoming studies, has become a leading threat to the integrity of political debate in the United States, with an impact that to date appears far more damaging than the efforts of Russian operatives or other foreign adversaries.

A study released Thursday by the Election Integrity Partnership, a consortium of misinformation researchers, found that just 20 conservative, pro-Trump Twitter accounts — including the president’s own @realDonaldTrump — were the original source of one-fifth of retweets pushing misleading narratives about voting.

“Trump is hands down the most significant accelerant and amplifier for disinformation in the election,” said Graham Brookie, director and managing editor of the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, a branch of the prominent nonpartisan think tank that is a leading source of research on foreign and domestic disinformation. “The scale and scope of domestic disinformation is far greater than anything a foreign adversary could ever do to us."

Trump’s viral megaphone fueled by Twitter army in lead-up to election - The Washington Post

• Must read article about the dark forces on social media coming from the top
  

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Election officials in dozens of states representing both political parties said that there was no evidence that fraud or other irregularities played a role in the outcome of the presidential race, amounting to a forceful rebuke of President Trump’s portrait of a fraudulent election.

The Times Called Officials in Every State: No Evidence of Voter Fraud - The New York Times