Biden Should Not Debate The Clown Unless He Provides His Tax Records...

News & Politics
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Legally, Thursday was a very bad day for Donald Trump – as the Supreme Court ruled against his efforts to block the turning-over of his financial documents to a New York grand jury, which could lead to major problems for him once he leaves office. This opinion will echo well beyond Trump’s presidency. It is a victory for the rule of the law at a time when it has been under withering attack, in words and actions, from the executive branch.

Politically, however, Thursday was a pretty darn good day for Trump – as it cemented the fact that the public isn’t going to get a look at his tax returns before the November election. The court rejected the US House’s attempt to get a look at Trump taxes, which would have ensured they would have leaked publicly and, even in the case of the New York grand jury, the court remanded it back to a lower court – meaning that Trump isn’t giving his financial records to anyone just yet.

These twin rulings avoid an election doomsday scenario for Trump: The public release of a detailed look at his financial history before he faces voters for a second time. Trump is – and will remain – the lone major party presidential candidate (or president) to release zero past tax returns. (Joe Biden released his 2017 and 2018 tax returns last summer.) Which in the live-to-fight-another-day worldview of Trump is a win. Trump has long used the legal system to delay unsavory outcomes for him. This is that.

If that seems counterintuitive, it’s largely because of the complicated nature of the two cases that the court ruled on Thursday. The cases were similar, but not the same. And they carried differing stakes for Trump. In my opinion, why would Biden debate Trump without Trump first releasing the tax returns that he promised to release when he was a candidate? Biden has released his without going to the Supreme Court in an effort to avoid disclosure. Why not accept Thomas Friedman’s modest proposal for such disclosure as a condition of debating and appoint a fact-checking group to monitor the debates and comment in real-time on the truth of the facts each debater asserts?

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He’s like all other presidents in one way: He’s not above the law.

If you’re the president of the United States, you don’t stand above the law. But if you’re a member of Congress seeking the president’s personal records in order to exercise oversight of the executive branch, you better not overreach. That, essentially, is how the Supreme Court ruled in a pair of opinions released Thursday morning. Both cases, Trump v. Vance and Trump v. Mazars, involved efforts to gain access to President Donald Trump’s tax returns, bank documents and bookkeeping records. Trump’s lawyers and the Justice Department contended that the president didn’t have to comply with the subpoenas — and could block his financial advisers from complying — because the requests were overly intrusive and undermined the sweeping immunity from criminal investigations any president should enjoy while in office.

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The Court’s 7-2 ruling in Trump v. Vance is a seminal and landmark rebuke of this imperial view of executive authority.
Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. is conducting a probe into the Trump Organization’s efforts to mask hush money paid to two women who said they had sexual encounters with Trump. The D.A. wants to explore whether, as part of those maneuvers, Trump’s team falsified business records. Trump’s lawyers argued that prosecutors like Vance should have to meet a heightened standard when seeking any president’s personal papers. Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the majority, disagreed, citing previous rulings involving former presidents Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton.

Will I see Trump’s taxes?

Maybe eventually, but not before the November presidential election. That’s for a couple of reasons. Take the congressional case — the Supreme Court said that the case has to go back to the lower courts and that Congress has to better define what it is looking for from the president.
That could mean more hearings and appeals and the case eventually finding its way back to the Supreme Court. That would certainly not happen before November.

Trump's Fortune Could Be In Jeopardy With Supreme Court Decision : NPR

Politics is about strategies.

Trump Strategy on his taxes are obvious:

There are some clues from last year’s congressional testimony from Trump’s former lawyer and fixer, Michael Cohen.
“It was my experience that Mr. Trump inflated his total assets when it served his purposes, such as trying to be listed among the wealthiest people in Forbes, and deflated his assets to reduce his real estate taxes,” Cohen said.

Biden would be a wimp if he makes the clown exploit debates for a clown show… :smiley:

The winner of the election will be declared after all the votes are counted.

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Biden is trying to avoid an ass-whopping. Asipo-attend debate it’ll be enough proof he’s a loser.

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The guy hasn’t hit the road yet yet he’s leading the polls. So how’s he a looser… trumpsters are the most narrowly misguided minds

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Watch this 9 second clip, see Biden forget how to say, “America First.” I think his best bet is to remain hidden in the bunker until election night because the more he talks, rather mumbles, the worse he comes off. He makes Trump look like Winston Churchill on steroids. I literally recoil in horror of what he’s about to say next. His eyes tell the story of man who’s lost in the hollow chambers of a decaying mind. Someone please have mercy and place this man in a nursing home or hospice for goodness sake, not the White House! Would he even survive 4 years in office or will his female (most likely) VP have to take over?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VbIgz6St9v0

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hahah anajua atanyoroshwa kama burukenge na Trump

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Trumps performance against Hilary in the Presidential debate was nothing to talk about. There is nothing he will do against Biden.

Can you imagine, Trump is now so beaten down, he is waiting on the Presidential debate to score points. A whole President. A whole incumbent.

Right now he is someone who wakes up at 6:15am and prays that yesterday’s problems took care of themselves, before he rolls to the bathroom.

If I was Biden, I wouldn’t do it either. There’s nothing to loose or gain. Why help a dying horse making its last kicks.

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Ngoja campaigns zianze

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Zilishaanza. In fact we are at the end. Ulikua wapi bana.

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A “crowd”?

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Kile ninangojea ni campaign ads from both side.:D:D:D

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Trump ah go beat them bad.

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If Joe Biden makes the mistake of debating trump, he’d have essentially taken himself to the guillotine. Trump is still sharp, witty,and cunning. He knows how to play to the crowd. Joe Biden on the other hand is so fucking slow, the old geezer can’t even read a few sentences written by his own team. Atapiwa kama brukenge.

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[SIZE=7]Trump needs to find a better nickname for Biden, and fast. :D:D:D[/SIZE]

The Trump campaign confronts a huge problem: Americans don’t have strong opinions about Joe Biden, don’t seem to want to have strong opinions about him, and aren’t paying much attention to what Republicans are saying about him. The greatest taunter in American politics, Trump swept to power by naming and degrading his opponents. ([B]This list of Trump-coined nicknames[/B] may be his greatest accomplishment.) Americans don’t like Trump, but he made us dislike his rivals more, especially Low-energy Jeb Bush and Crooked Hillary Clinton.

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Biden has so far eluded Trump’s dagger, partly by hibernating as Trump flounders through the pandemic, and partly by being a nondescript old guy. Only 28% of Americans have a strongly unfavorable view of Biden, an amazingly tiny number in this environment. And he’s way, way less unpopular than Hillary Clinton was this time four years ago. She had a minus-22 net favorability rating, while Biden is just minus-1. (Trump is minus-31!)

Trump just can’t figure out how to smear Biden because, as a boring white man, he just doesn’t set off Trump or Trump’s supporters the way Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton did. Trump has tried depicting Biden as “creepy,” but that’s not working, even with his own people. He’s tried harder to make “Sleepy Joe” stick, but that also isn’t grabbing voters. If anything, Sleepy Joe sounds like a relief. If only we had a president who was sleeping, and who didn’t wake up at 5:30 am to tweet and watch Fox.

The economy is sinking. The pandemic is raging. Trash-talking represents Trump’s best opportunity to win in November, which means he needs to figure out how to demonize Biden and fast.

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As Republican consultant Nelson Warfield told The New York Times: “I made my first negative ad starring Hillary Clinton in 1992 and I kept doing ads criticizing her across the next 24 years. And I was by no means alone. Republicans have months to do to Biden what Republicans had over two decades to do to Hillary.” — DP

But Trump and his allies have already landed on a line of attack against Biden. His alleged “cognitive decline.”

Now, it’s no secret that the former vice president has never been the most eloquent speaker, and he is 77 years old. But Biden has also spoken of a lifelong struggle with stuttering, and his campaign released a summary of his most recent medical exam in December which described him as “healthy” and vigorous."

The president, for his part, was roundly mocked last month for being unable to articulate a single ambition he wants to pursue in a second term during a Fox News town hall hosted by Sean Hannity, arguably Trump’s most prominent media sycophant.

Once again on Fox News last night, following a 70-second supercut of Biden verbal gaffes, Hannity asked Trump if he thought the Biden campaign was trying to get the candidate to back out of a debate for fear that he’d be embarrassed.

“He hasn’t taken any cognitive test, because he couldn’t pass one,” Trump said.
“I actually took one when I, very recently, when I was, you know, the radical left was saying ‘is he all there, is he all there,’
and I proved I was all there because I aced it. I aced the test. And he should take the same exact test.” — Anthony Fisher

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:smiley: He he he kuwa mpole.

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Trump is postponing his New Hampshire campaign rally scheduled for Saturday, blaming a tropical storm expected to hit parts of the East Coast, the White House announced Friday. After being forced to abandon in-person campaigning because of coronavirus, Saturday would have been his second rally since ending the hiatus. His June event in Tulsa, Oklahoma, which was criticized for relaxed safety precautions, drew a meager crowd.
Tim Murtaugh, the Trump campaign communications director, said that the event would be “postponed for safety reasons” and “a new date will be announced soon.”

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Corona pandemic season Restaurant, I’m staying put@home…

The Tulsa event, which Trump had hoped to use to make a case for the country’s readiness to reopen despite the ongoing virus outbreak, was overshadowed by smaller-than-expected crowd size and health concerns. Multiple Trump campaign staffers tested positive for the coronavirus in Tulsa and a top Tulsa health official said that the rally “likely contributed" to a dramatic surge in new coronavirus cases there.
The Tulsa event left some campaign officials scrambling to not make the same mistakes. :smiley:

“We can’t have a repeat of Tulsa,” one campaign official said to NBC News.
Fay is expected to bring 2 to 4 inches of rain, with the possibility of flash flooding in parts of the mid-Atlantic and southern New England, The U.S. National Hurricane Center said. Tornadoes and strong winds are also expected. Current forecasts do not have Portsmouth being hit directly by the storm. Trump appeared eager about the event Friday morning, just hours before the White House announced it would be postponed.
“We’re going to have a big crowd and we’re going to have a great crowd,” the president said Friday in a radio interview with “New Hampshire Today with Jack Heath.”

Meanwhile:

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[ul]
[li]President Donald Trump has commuted the sentence of the former Republican strategist Roger Stone, the White House announced Friday.[/li][li]The president’s move came after he and his allies complained for months that Stone and others were mistreated by prosecutors as part of the FBI’s investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election.[/li][li]A jury convicted Stone of seven felony counts last year: five counts of making false statements to the FBI and congressional investigators, one count of witness tampering, and one count of obstruction of justice.[/li][/ul]

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Republicans have increasingly split with Trump on a host of issues shadowing his administration, from his tone on racism and the removal of Confederate statues to wearing a face mask amid the coronavirus pandemic and questions over intelligence reports of a Russia-backed bounty program on U.S. troops in Afghanistan as they weigh their election chances in November. It’s a rare moment in the president’s three-and-a-half-year tenure, during which Trump otherwise relished in party unity on issues such as his impeachment and former special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation.

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"There’s a real disagreement between the president and his party in this election,” said Alex Conant, a GOP strategist and former aide to Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla. “I think a lot of Republicans are really fed up with the president’s divisive strategy. People are just throwing up their hands with some of the rhetoric that’s coming out of the president. It’s really unhelpful not just to his own re-election, but also to keep the Senate.”

Earlier this week, several GOP lawmakers said they plan to skip the party’s national convention in Jacksonville, Florida, where coronavirus cases have surged, leaving supporters, politicians and officials who plan to attend with the hard choice of risking their personal health or facing potential retaliation from the president.

Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, the oldest GOP senator at age 86, said Monday he would avoid the convention “because of the virus situation,” while Sens. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn.; Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska; Susan Collins, R-Maine; and Mitt Romney, R-Utah, also cited coronavirus concerns as the reason they won’t attend.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., called the convention a “challenging situation” when asked whether he plans to attend.

“We’ll have to wait and see how things look in late August to determine whether or not we can safely convene with that many people,” he said Thursday.

The Trump campaign had hoped to test those waters this weekend with a campaign rally at a New Hampshire airport hangar, but the campaign announced it would postpone the rally over the approaching Tropical Storm Fay, according to White House officials. The campaign snag comes after turnout at a June rally held inside an Oklahoma arena fell short of expectations amid an increase in COVID-19 cases across the state. Tulsa health officials said Wednesday that the rally and surrounding protests likely contributed to the city’s recent surge in cases.

New Hampshire’s Republican Gov. Chris Sununu is another GOP politician who has been willing to break with the president over his pandemic messaging when it collides with his state’s interests. Sununu has had to walk a careful line in defending the president’s rally while enforcing his own reopening guidelines. The Republican governor had planned to greet Trump in New Hampshire, but skip the rally over coronavirus fears.

The Republican party moved its convention from Charlotte, North Carolina, last month after state and local officials refused to commit to the president’s desire to hold a full convention, packed with thousands of supporters, over health concerns amid the ongoing pandemic.

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But aside from coronavirus concerns, the Republican convention may have lost its luster for some lawmakers, according to GOP strategist Matt Gorman.

“For a lot of these elected officials, it’s a chance to go there for fundraising and press attention,” he said. “And if a lot of media folks are not planning to go and a lot of donors choose not to go because in-person fundraising is a bit less prevalent, then there’s not much incentive to show up.”

Gorman said he doesn’t think the list of senators avoiding the convention will draw the president’s ire, noting that several lawmakers skipped the event in 2016 in protest – including Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., now a key Trump ally.

The president has since softened his tone about holding a traditional convention, telling television host Greta Van Susteren this week that “it really depends on timing.”

“We can do a lot of things, but we’re very flexible,” he said of convention plans.

Jacksonville has emerged as one of the nation’s biggest hotspots for the coronavirus. The Department of Health and Human Services announced Tuesday Jacksonville would be one of three cities designated for a testing “surge” to make more tests available in the hardest hit areas.

The administration’s mounting controversies have pushed even Republicans who previously refused to break ranks with Trump to begin speaking out – most notably as it relates to the dramatic uptick in coronavirus cases in the U.S.

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They have been vocal in their opposition to his refusal to wear a mask, pressuring the administration for increased testing and, most recently, some have criticized Trump for pulling out of the World Health Organization as the pandemic continues to ravage the country.

“I disagree with the president’s decision,” Alexander, a Tennessee Republican, said after the president pulled the U.S. from WHO, noting that while mistakes of the WHO should be examined, “the time to do that is after the crisis has been dealt with, not in the middle of it. Withdrawing U.S. membership could, among other things, interfere with clinical trials that are essential to the development of vaccines.”

Even some of the president’s closest allies on Capitol Hill in recent weeks have been critical as Trump’s poll numbers, already hit by the pandemic, continue to plummet amid a national reckoning over policing, race and America’s Confederate history.

Aides and allies have urged the president to change his tone as the nation both grieves the death of George Floyd after he was killed by a Minneapolis police officer, and protesters call for change to racially fraught policies. The president has instead stoked division, threatening to use the military against demonstrators and using Independence Day speeches to defend Confederate monuments and dismiss protesters as “Marxists.”

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/republicans-are-really-fed-up-gop-increasingly-splits-with-trump-as-his-polls-drag/ar-BB16BHWC?ocid=msedgntp#image=BB16BHWC_1|1

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Jul 5, 2020 - Politics & Policy

[SIZE=7]Trump’s failing culture wars[/SIZE]
https://images.axios.com/0BwHOcuMjpH_gsBiBX4qGdg7KWU=/0x0:328x328/52x0/2020/05/01/1588372004440.jpg
Shane Savitsky

https://graphics.axios.com/2020-07-02-crooked-hillary-sleepy-joe/fallbacks/2020-07-02-crooked-hillary-sleepy-joe-fallback.pngData: Google; Chart: Naema Ahmed/Axios
President Trump built his political brand by stoking the nation’s culture wars, but search data is showing us how much harder it’s been for him to replicate that success while running against another white man in his 70s — and while there’s a coronavirus pandemic.
The big picture: Google Trends data shows Trump’s “Sleepy Joe” name-calling isn’t generating nearly the buzz “Crooked Hillary” (or “Little Marco”) did in 2016. Base voters who relished doubting President Obama’s birth certificate aren’t questioning Biden’s.
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[li]Tech platforms are beginning to take more responsibility. And the coronavirus is a more unifying, longer-lasting fear than the president predicted.[/li][/ul]
Why it matters: Trump’s struggle to find a line of attack that takes off against Joe Biden may be driving him to diverge more politically.
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[li]Other factors are working against Trump’s playbook. Tech platforms are increasingly moving to shut down hate speech and flag misinformation, killing the sources of some of Trump’s favorite conspiratorial material.[/li][li]And search metrics suggest that, for the most part, a nation with more than 125,000 dead from the coronavirus has less patience for the president’s usual tactics.[/li][/ul]
Trump’s attempts to find an alternate culture-war footing with Confederate statues and police defunding — highlighted by his Mount Rushmore speech on Friday — appear to face their own limits.
[ul]
[li]Google Trends data shows that searches for “coronavirus” are far outpacing those for “statues,” “police” and “antifa.”[/li][li]The president’s disconnect with popular sentiment on two issues of the day — the virus and protests against structural racism — has led to some self-inflicted wounds, including his sparsely attended rally in Tulsa and his tweet about an elderly Buffalo protester being shoved by police.[/li][li]Trump’s continued attack line about Biden “not leaving his basement” hasn’t taken hold measurably with voters, according to the search data. Biden’s actions in terms of social distancing largely align with a majority of voters’ own anxieties.[/li][li]The Trump campaign didn’t respond to a request for comment.[/li][/ul]
Between the lines: Conspiracy theories that benefitted Trump in the past often were formed in dark corners of the internet before bubbling up to more mainstream pundits — but now Big Tech is more aware than ever of its influence on society.
[ul]
[li]The president’s earlier lever for a Biden-linked conspiracy theory revolved around son Hunter Biden’s work with the Ukrainian gas company Burisma, which Trump tweeted about last week for the first time in months.[/li][li]But Ukraine attacks present some challenges for Trump. They were publicly litigated at length during his impeachment trial — and serve to remind the public that Trump was impeached only months ago.[/li][/ul]
What’s next: Trump isn’t changing to meet the moment. He’s moving away from comprehensive police reform, digging in as a law-and-order candidate and looking for another way to mobilize against Biden that can stick.

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The following quote will give you an idea of the Democratic Party’s approach to Trump Stupidity…

[COLOR=rgb(226, 80, 65)]If you don’t want to read this, listen to someone read it for you at the bottom of the post… :wink:

[SIZE=7]‘Sleepy Joe’? Trump’s Insult May Reveal Biden’s Advantage:D:D:D[/SIZE]

“I think there’s nothing wrong with following Napoleon’s maxim, which is, when your opponent is destroying himself, don’t interrupt.”
“With three-and-half years of President Trump being as red hot as he is, and with the COVID scare underway, [COLOR=rgb(226, 80, 65)]‘sleepy’ also connotes calm, which very well may be the antidote for many voters to the Trump era.”

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In the span of one day this week, President Trump gave an interview in which he defended the Confederate flag and delivered a speech from the Rose Garden in which he accused Joe Biden of trying to make office buildings too cold.

It generated just a few of the news cycles Trump dominates in any given week.

The same day, Biden held his only in-person event in the last seven days, in his hometown of Wilmington, Del.
“I have to start by speaking about what millions of Americans know when they wake up with worry, anxiety, and fear,” he said, trying to project a steady image amid soaring COVID-19 cases. “We’re still a country in crisis.”

This is typical for Biden.
He rarely ventures beyond Delaware or Pennsylvania and rarely holds more than one or two in-person events a week.
He tries to offer advice about how to deal with the pandemic, not to be goaded by inflammatory tweets.
Occasionally, he rolls out a new plan about infrastructure or jobs.

Biden is not nearly as visible as Trump, but polling averages from RealClearPolitics show he’s leading the president in every key battleground state: Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Arizona, North Carolina, and Florida.

“The Biden campaign is playing it as safe as possible,” said Glen Bolger, a Republican pollster with Public Opinion Strategies.
“Biden’s team feels like they’re ahead by a pretty sizable margin and they don’t want to be making any mistakes …
They don’t want him to sort of lose his train of thought, and so they’re trying to make it less risky.”

By lying low, Bolger says, Biden can try to make sure this election is a referendum on the incumbent, as most reelection campaigns are.

“There is nothing playing safe about what Joe Biden is doing,” said Anita Dunn, a senior adviser with the Biden campaign.
“What he is doing is showing people what kind of president he will be.”

The Biden campaign admits that one of its most effective weapons against Trump is Trump himself, what he says and how he acts.

But Dunn says their team is also trying to articulate the clear difference between these two candidates.

“Our best counterprogramming with Donald Trump is to contrast Joe Biden’s leadership — his vision for the future, his steadiness, his experience to deal with crises — with what people are getting from their president right now,” she added.

Democrats and Republicans agree the pandemic and the president’s response make the contrast between candidates feel sharper than it did in 2016.

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“When he was just a candidate, people judged Trump the way they judged him when he was just a reality TV show. ‘Oh, look, he’s picked a Twitter war with Rosie O’Donnell.’ When you’re president and people are dying, picking a Twitter war with Bubba Wallace, the NASCAR driver, doesn’t save my mom’s life,” said Democratic strategist Paul Begala.

He thinks dominating a news cycle is traditionally important, but says the difficulty for Trump right now is that he’s dominating it with “incompetence.”

“Trump’s superpower is diversion, and it has failed him in coronavirus. It used to work all the time, it worked on me,” added Begala, who in 2016 helped direct strategy for the main super PAC backing Hillary Clinton, Priorities USA.

Begala points out that in the last century, voters have fired only three elected presidents: Herbert Hoover, Jimmy Carter, and George H.W. Bush.
In all of those cases, he said, there came a point where people just stopped listening to the president and essentially gave up on him.

“I think Biden’s strategy is to let Trump fail,” said Ari Fleischer, former press secretary to President George W. Bush.
“Make Biden as small as possible, don’t make him an issue, don’t put him in a position to say ‘You ain’t black’ to anybody else again,” referring to a controversial comment that Biden made on the popular morning radio show The Breakfast Club.

Fleischer admits that part of what makes this current campaign challenging for Trump is that he has a “shadow” opponent in Joe Biden.

In the last month, Biden held three public virtual events, seven in-person events, all in Delaware or Pennsylvania, and a total of six TV interviews.
That schedule is depriving Trump of the daily back-and-forth he craves, and Fleischer says Trump doesn’t know how to handle this low-key Biden.
For starters, Fleischer thinks the nickname “sleepy Joe” is off base.

“With three-and-half years of President Trump being as red hot as he is, and with the COVID scare underway, ‘sleepy’ also connotes calm, which very well may be the antidote for many voters to the Trump era,” Fleischer said

The president has been trying out alternative names, like “corrupt Joe,” but Fleischer recommends painting Biden as "weak."
He thinks the president should try to portray his opponent as old, prone to gaffes and someone who, even before the pandemic, didn’t campaign as rigorously as some of his primary opponents did.
Republicans also feel that Biden is benefiting by being a generic anti-Trump, someone who, in their view, is relatively undefined with voters, despite being in public life for decades. “Once he gets more defined, some Republicans who are taking a look at him will probably return home, and some of the more conservative independents will as well,” said Bolger.
Recent polls show Biden performing strongly with college-educated white voters, a demographic that for decades has favored the Republican Party.

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For now, the candidate may be focused on a “less is more” strategy, but Democrats say that their operation is bigger and better positioned than it was four years ago.
“If you were to have parachuted in at this point in 2016, I think you would have found there were probably around 20 people on the ground,” said Lavora Barnes, chair of the Michigan Democratic Party. "The difference here is that we have about 160 people on the ground.
“On the ground” is figurative. Nobody from the Biden campaign is knocking on doors, even though Trump campaign volunteers working with the Republican Party have been. Democrats say that’s foolish, given the rising number of COVID-19 cases.

They think a lot of what Trump is doing is foolish, but they just don’t see a point in picking a fight over it.
“I think there’s nothing wrong with following Napoleon’s maxim, which is, when your opponent is destroying himself, don’t interrupt,” said Begala.

Listen here:

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