It is Donald Trump’s worst nightmare: giving his acceptance speech in front of a half-empty arena, facing an audience whose faces are covered in masks, muffling their cheers and chants. But it is exactly what he may be facing if last month’s edict from authorities in Jacksonville, Florida, mandating masks for all indoor gatherings remains in effect through late August.
Elections are often lagging indicators that the unrealised ambitions of bungled administrations allow presidential winners to right the ship by riding the swing of public sentiment from trough to peak. For the next U.S. president, however, it may be a trough-to-trough tenure.
The CIA’s first-ever covert action program was an operation to manipulate Italy’s 1948 election. American intelligence officers spread incendiary propaganda, bankrolled their preferred candidate, and orchestrated grassroots initiatives—all to advantage Italy’s centrist forces over their leftist competitors.
Joe Biden says he, like many white people, was wrong about racism in America. “I thought we had made enormous progress when we finally elected an African American president,” he told voters in a livestreamed “Young Americans Town Hall” last week. “I thought you could defeat hate, you could kill hate. But the point is, you can’t.”
Donald Trump’s election victory as US president four years ago owed largely to two things that may be missing today. This therefore seems to have changed the alchemy of American power and puts US international policy in a delicate position.
The lines of demarcation between the nation’s cities and their suburbs have faded in the decades since Richard M. Nixon courted the “Silent Majority” that elected him to the White House. With his law-and-order, tough-on-protesters rhetoric, Donald Trump is betting his presidency it still exists.
That Trump—in the throes of the worst public health crisis in more than a century and the most devastating economic downturn since the Great Depression—is writing rosy history long before it has actually happened might seem audacious… But this is a page from a playbook Trump has used many times before.
Photo courtesy: White House/Flickr
The fundamental pillars of Donald Trump’s presidency — a hot economy, strong job growth and a rocking stock market — are all being smashed to splinters by the ravaging coronavirus, which has shuttered much of the nation and now officially ended a streak of 113 months of job gains dating back to the end of the Great Recession a decade ago.
Trump has time on his side, with the coronavirus spreading early in the election cycle. This week, the Republican president adopted a more somber tone, and some Democrats are beginning to worry that he could mould the narrative to his benefit. A massive stimulus, including direct payments to Americans, could help him in November.
He has the same thing in common with Hillary as every other Democrat does: his party affiliation. To be sure, that is one thing that distinguishes him from Sanders and many of Sanders’ voters.
