Trump is running on an explicitly transactional platform planning to enact draconian tariffs on virtually everything because he thinks he can strong arm other countries into doing his bidding — which would crash the world economy and provoke hostility among friends and foes alike. I don’t think that’s what most of the country means when they say we should engage with the world. Here’s what German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said about Biden over the weekend: “I think that Joe Biden is someone who is very clear, who knows exactly what he is doing and who is one of the most experienced politicians in the world, especially when it comes to international politics. In a difficult situation like this, where a war is taking place right here in Europe, after Russia invaded Ukraine, where many, many other conflicts are raging around the world, this is an asset, a good thing, and therefore I can only say that this is a man who knows exactly what he is doing.” Or we can have an ignorant, malevolent, pathological liar in charge. That’s the choice.
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This tactic is used by many rich people but very few have used it as liberally as Donald Trump: The IRS plans to end a major tax loophole for wealthy taxpayers that could raise more than $50 billion in revenue over the next decade, the U.S. Treasury Department says. The proposed rule and guidance announced Monday includes plans to essentially stop “partnership basis shifting” — a process by which a business or person can move assets among a series of related parties to avoid paying taxes. Biden administration officials said after evaluating the practice that there are no economic grounds for these transactions, with Deputy Treasury Secretary Wally Adeyemo calling it “really just a shell game.” The officials said the additional IRS funding provided through the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act had enabled increased oversight and greater awareness of the practice. “These tax shelters allow wealthy taxpayers to avoid paying what they owe,” IRS commissioner Danny Werfel said.
The biggest mistake the Dems ever made was letting the right own Epstein theories. pic.twitter.com/Z6TCcJAKTs — Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) June 17, 2024 This should be on tik-tok. (It may be for all I know but I do hope so…) There are a lot of young women who need to see it as well as plenty of decent young men who might be skeeved out by grandpa Trump macking on young women like this. It’s very creepy and he’s still doing it. This video (referenced briefly in that series above) is recent: You know what is creepy? Adjudicated Rapist Donald Trump sexually harassing a young woman at Turning Point pic.twitter.com/skEE0F6kQG — Barbara Sobel (BarbaraJ.Sobel on Threads) (@Momof4Cats4) June 15, 2024 With the way the Trump campaign and Rupert Murdoch are pushing doctored videos of Biden every day, I think it’s only fair to spread real videos of Donald Trump’s grotesque behavior. People may have accepted it to some degree but they certainly don’t want to be reminded of it. They should be. They have to be.
Remember when the Republic ans spent an entire year wailing that refrain over Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky? By the way, just the other day…
US House races. When asked about their House district race, likely voters choose the Democratic over the Republican candidate by a wide margin (62% to 36%). In the 10 competitive districts (as defined by the Cook Political Report), support is higher for the Democratic candidate than for the Republican (59% to 39%). Nine in ten or more Democratic and Republican likely voters would choose their party’s candidate, while independents are more divided. Across demographic groups and in the coastal regions, majorities favor the Democratic candidate over the Republican. Preferences in the US House race were similar in April (60% Democrat, 38% Republican). Thirty percent of likely voters are “extremely” or “very” enthusiastic about voting for Congress this year. Fewer than four in ten across parties, regions, and demographic groups hold this view. In the competitive House races, 37 percent are “extremely” or “very” enthusiastic about voting for Congress this year. Congressman Ted Lieu tweeted this out saying that Democrats are going to flip the House . If this holds up they may very well.
The kitchen table is on fire Lewis Rothschild : People want leadership, Mr. President, and in the absence of genuine leadership, they’ll listen to anyone who steps up to the microphone. Donald Trump steps up to the microphone a lot. But to Americans too busy to listen, too overworked to devote their precious free time to political news, they hear only the loudest voices and feel how the world feels. To them. They’ll be asked this fall to hire leaders. From the president on down to the local school board. What they want in their leaders are people who will fight for them. It’s not just what you say. Words are cheap. It’s what you do. And voters need to see you doing it. Anat Shenker-Osorio had a long essay in Rolling Stone yesterday, not so much about messaging (her specialty) but about voter attitudes she sees in her focus groups: If my colleagues and I took a shot everytime someone in these groups decried the Democrats as doing nothing on the fascism front, we’d have cirrhosis. As one disaffected Democratic white woman from Arizona said in April, “I don’t think any of them care really.
The only thing Trump gets in return is destruction of America’s alliances a nuclear arms race and possibly Europe. Win-win for both parties I guess: Former U.S. President Donald Trump on Saturday blasted the scale of U.S. support for Ukraine and said that if he is reelected in November he would immediately “have that settled.” At a campaign rally in Detroit, Trump criticized Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, calling him “the greatest salesman of all time” for Kyiv’s push to secure U.S. support in its effort to defend Ukraine against Russian aggression more than three years after Moscow’s all-out invasion. “He just left four days ago with $60 billion, and he gets home, and he announces that he needs another $60 billion. It never ends,” Trump said. “I will have that settled prior to taking the White House as president-elect,” said Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee in the U.S. election. Trump said again the other day that he would also have secured the release of Evan Gerskovich as president-elect.
The Dems are playing Axios reports: The desperate scramble by Republicans to rationalize what he said tells the whole story. They know that Wisconsin is key. And they are freaking out about Trump insulting the state like this, especially since theb local news was all over it across the state: “He was talking about how terrible crime and voter fraud are,” said campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung. In another statement, the campaign wrote that it was a “total lie” that Trump called Milwaukee a “horrible city.” However, they went on to add, “President Trump was explicitly referring to the problems in Milwaukee, specifically violent crime and voter fraud,” suggesting he did make comments about the city, just not in the way some were interpreting it. The campaign then includes a series of tweets from Republican members from Wisconsin inside the room who agree with the campaign’s description that Trump was not making a blanket disparaging statement about the city.
I have mentioned this before but I want to put it out there again in case some of you missed it. This issue in The New Republic on what an American fascism would look like is a must read. It’s worth the subscription. Here’s an excerpt of editor Michael Tomasky’s intro which begins by noting that there is a lot of reluctance in our political discourse to draw this comparison as if it’s hysterical to acknowledge the threat: We have trouble seeing the hysteria. We chose the cover image, based on a well-known 1932 Hitler campaign poster, for a precise reason: that anyone transported back to 1932 Germany could very, very easily have explained away Herr Hitler’s excesses and been persuaded that his critics were going overboard. After all, he spent 1932 campaigning, negotiating, doing interviews—being a mostly normal politician. But he and his people vowed all along that they would use the tools of democracy to destroy it, and it was only after he was given power that Germany saw his movement’s full face. Today, we at The New Republic think we can spend this election year in one of two ways.
Move over, Guy Fawkes Post by @lobotany_ View on Threads ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● For The Win, 5th Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV planning guide at ForTheWin.us.