Connect with us

OPINION

Trump Responds to ‘Joyful Warriors’ Harris and Walz by Amping Up Lies and Fear-Mongering

Published

on

Barely two hours after Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris formally introduced her vice-presidential pick, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz early Tuesday evening to a packed rally of thousands of cheering supporters who had waited hours in Philadelphia’s 88 degree August heat, the Republican presidential nominee, Donald Trump, announced he would be interviewed on Fox News Wednesday morning.

Trump lied to Fox News viewers, saying the Harris-Walz ticket “want this country to go communist immediately, if not sooner,” and if voters elect Harris and Walz, Americans are either going to “be leaving or living like dogs,” and “our whole country” is going to “collapse.”

But when actual voters questioned Trump, he had little to offer by way of solutions. “Drill baby drill,” was his answer when asked by an older man worried about the cost of rent and food.

The “Harris/Walz rally felt like a rousing speech by Coach Eric Taylor of ‘Friday Night Lights’ combined with the front row at Coachella. The cheers were so loud that I regretted not bringing my earplugs,” Salon‘s Amanda Marcottte wrote. “The mood was jubilant, even though folks had to wait hours in the heat and humidity to even get into the place. The campaign claimed over 12,000 people showed up, which is not an exaggeration. Even as Harris and Walz gave the final speeches of the evening, the line to get into the overflow room — just to watch the event on TV — went on for multiple city blocks.”

READ MORE: Can Kamala Harris Win Florida? She’s Getting a Lot of Support – Even From Republicans

CBS News Chief White House Correspondent Nancy Cordes reported, “the line to get into the first Harris/Walz rally” stretched “more than six city blocks.”

Calling it a “rocking rollout of her running mate,” CNN‘s Stephen Collinson wrote, “Kamala Harris and Tim Walz want to make America joyful again,” in analysis titled, “Happy warriors Harris and Walz propose an antidote to Trump’s American carnage.”

Branding Harris and Walz, “Joyful Warriors,” Pennsylvania’s Bucks County Beacon reported Tuesday’s “campaign event offered a positive vision of the future for the country that secures Americans’ freedoms and protects our democracy.”

During their 51-minute rally (full video), one of the most-popular lines appeared to be Governor Walz telling Vice President Harris, “thank you for bringing back the joy.”

Wednesday morning, Donald Trump told a different tale.

The ex-president, who has whittled his campaigning down to just one rally this week, in deep-red Montana, told Fox News viewers Governor Walz has a “record with no walls, no security, let everybody in. He’s worse than they are. You know, nobody knew how radical left [Vice President Harris] was, but he’s a smarter version of her, if you want to know the truth, he’s probably about the same as Bernie Sanders. He’s probably more so than Bernie Sanders. She is more so than Bernie Sanders. That’s got to be your guide. Bernie Sanders, and that’s not a great guide,” Trump said, scrambling to position both Harris and Walz to the left of U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT).

“But this is, there’s never been a ticket like this,” Trump continued. “This is a ticket that would want this country to go communist immediately, if not sooner. We want no security. We want no anything. He’s very heavy into transgender. Anything transgender he thinks is great, and he’s not with the country is on anything. This is a shocking. This is a shocking pick, and I think it’s very insulting to Jewish people. And I think, is very insulting to people that want security. I think it was very insulting to anything having to do with making America great again.”

Trump repeated his attack on Jewish Democrats, telling Fox News, “I think that any Jewish person who votes for a Democrat, or in this case these people, who votes for a Democrat, should have their head examined.”

READ MORE: Trump ‘Too Old’ Majority Now Say as Health, Mental Fitness Increasingly Worry Voters

He claimed, contrary to reporting, that Vice President Harris did not choose top contender Josh Shapiro, the governor of Pennsylvania, because of the fact that he’s Jewish.”

It was a claim also made by others on the far-right, including pundit Erick Erickson (who has suggested he supports Christian nationalism) – which U.S. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, who is Jewish, quickly refuted.

Trump went on to call Vice President Harris “nasty,” a slur he appears to reserve for women, including former Democratic presidential nominee and former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, and the then-Mayor of San Juan, Puerto Rico, Carmen Yulín Cruz, among others.

Talking to voters assembled by Fox News, Trump was asked, “what are you going to do about bringing down the rent and things like that in the economy? Because out of eight children that I’m a father and a stepfather to, five of them are struggling, and I’m giving them part of my income on a regular basis. How are you going to make the economy not just, just the, you know, the food and electricity, but bring down the rent prices, the housing prices, so that these kids can survive without their parents help?”

“We are going to drill, baby drill,” Trump replied, a claim he has offered as a solution before. “We’re going to bring down the cost of energy. Energy is what caused the worst inflation, I think, in the history of our country.”

“We’re living horribly. We have the worst inflation we probably ever had in our country, and it started because of energy,” Trump claimed.

The current rate of inflation is just under 3%, down from over 9% two years ago. Wages continue to rise faster than inflation.

Returning to his claim that gas was $1.87 during his presidency, Trump vowed he would bring prices down to that mark again.

The average price of gas during Trump’s presidency also hit $2.90, which is just 58 cents less than the average price of gas last month, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

The price of gas in 2020 did drop substantially due to the COVID pandemic, when consumption also dropped substantially. According to the ex-president, that time of mass death was “beautiful. They were good times.”

Watch the videos above or at this link.

READ MORE: ‘Quip’: Usha Vance Lies to Try to Clean Up Husband’s ‘Childless Cat Ladies’ Attack

Continue Reading
Click to comment
 
 

Enjoy this piece?

… then let us make a small request. The New Civil Rights Movement depends on readers like you to meet our ongoing expenses and continue producing quality progressive journalism. Three Silicon Valley giants consume 70 percent of all online advertising dollars, so we need your help to continue doing what we do.

NCRM is independent. You won’t find mainstream media bias here. From unflinching coverage of religious extremism, to spotlighting efforts to roll back our rights, NCRM continues to speak truth to power. America needs independent voices like NCRM to be sure no one is forgotten.

Every reader contribution, whatever the amount, makes a tremendous difference. Help ensure NCRM remains independent long into the future. Support progressive journalism with a one-time contribution to NCRM, or click here to become a subscriber. Thank you. Click here to donate by check.

OPINION

Could RFK Jr. Be Trump’s Project 2025 Liaison? Asked to ‘Help Pick’ Government Officials

Published

on

Just days after suspending his run for the White House and endorsing Republican nominee Donald Trump, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said in an interview with Tucker Carlson he has been asked to join the ex-president’s presidential transition team and “help pick” the administration officials in charge of running the government.

Although Trump and his campaign have tried to distance themselves from the right-wing Heritage Foundation’s extremist and now-toxic Project 2025, what RFK Jr. is describing is central to what Project 2025 was designed to do: Heritage calls its nearly 900-page Project 2025 “Mandate for Leadership” a “Presidential Transition Project.”

“It is not enough for conservatives to win elections. If we are going to rescue the country from the grip of the radical Left, we need both a governing agenda and the right people in place, ready to carry this agenda out on day one of the next conservative administration,” explains The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 website. “This is the goal of the 2025 Presidential Transition Project. The project will build on four pillars that will, collectively, pave the way for an effective conservative administration: a policy agenda, personnel, training, and a 180-day playbook.”

ProPublica earlier this month explained, “The most important pillar of Project 2025 has always been about personnel, not policy. Or rather, the whole effort is animated by the Reagan-era maxim that personnel is policy, that power flows from having the right people in the right jobs. To that end, the plan’s most pertinent proposal is reinstating Schedule F — a provision unveiled near the very end of Trump’s term, then repealed by the Biden administration — which would shift as many as 50,000 career employees in policy-shaping positions into a new job category that would make them much easier to fire.”

READ MORE: Expert Predicts ‘Smith Will Win’ as Special Counsel Appeals Trump Docs Case Dismissal

Enter RFK Jr., an attorney, conspiracy theorist, anti-vaxxer, and HIV/AIDS denialist. Despite having initially launched his 2024 campaign as a Democrat, the Kennedy scion denounced by some of his family members is apparently familiar with Project 2025.

“Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a longtime Democrat populist running for president as an independent, has a copy of Heritage’s ‘Mandate for Leadership’ on his desk. He attributes his own study of Heritage’s plan as an effort to collect ‘all of these different points of view about wasteful programs in government that could be eliminated,'” Deseret News reported in December of 2023. “Kennedy denies that he’s had any conversations with Project 2025, but he left the door open.”

Last month the progressive political action committee MoveOn commented on the report, writing: “That doesn’t seem like reference material a so-called ‘independent’ candidate would need to have.” 

The progressive group’s spokesperson Britt Jacovich wrote: “RFK Jr. has told us he’s open to using MAGA’s Project 2025 playbook for inspiration. That’s troubling and disqualifying. The Trump and Heritage Foundation effort would gut checks and balances and give MAGA full rein to ban abortions and end the rule of law by allowing the Justice Department to prosecute Trump’s political enemies.”

“You either support Trump and Project 2025, or you don’t,” Jacovich added. “By spoiling the race and reelecting Trump, he’d all but ensure this hellscape would become the law of the land.”

Project 2025 also appears to be familiar with RFK Jr.

Last year in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, James Bacon, described in the WSJ as “a senior adviser to the Heritage Foundation’s Presidential Transition Project,” penned a piece titled, “2024 Presidential Candidates Against the Administrative State.”

“Trump, DeSantis and even Robert F. Kennedy Jr.,” he wrote, “recognize the need to reassert political control.”

“Robert F. Kennedy Jr.,” he added, “began his White House bid by saying he’d ‘take the CIA and shatter it into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds.'”

READ MORE: Florida in Play? Trump Campaign Just Bought Thousands in Ad Time in ‘Deep-Red’ State

Fast forward to last week.

Paul Dans, the former Heritage official who was head of Project 2025 until he “stepped down amid intense criticism including from the former president,” as CNN reported his exit at the end of July, is supportive of RFK Jr.

“I can’t tell you how many MAGA people that I work with, really the hardcore, the most based, who are huge RFK Jr. fans,” Dans said last week, Media Matters reported. “And they kind of were always kind of talking about it. But, remember, RFK Jr. went and interviewed for a job in 2016 at Trump Tower. So, you know, their relationship goes back years. Obviously there’s a lot that doesn’t — some of his positions aren’t square with America First, traditional America First. But certainly, there’s no one better, I think, in the entire country to take on the administrative state, particularly HHS.”

In his interview with far-right host Tucker Carlson, RFK Jr. says, “I’ve been asked to go on to the transition team to help pick the people who will be running the government.”

Watch below or at this link.

READ MORE: ‘Black Jobs’: Trump Clarifies What He Meant

Continue Reading

OPINION

The DNC Was a Celebration of American Values. Peggy Noonan Is Accusing Democrats of Theft.

Published

on

The four-night Democratic National Convention concluded Thursday with Kamala Harris’s speech accepting her party’s nomination for President, and a massive balloon drop, as the polls show the Vice President continuing to beat and increase her lead against her Republican opponent, Donald Trump.

After Monday night’s four-minute standing ovation of President Joe Biden, with Chicago’s United Center arena filled with thousands of cheering supporters shouting “We love Joe,” Los Angeles Times‘ columnist LZ Granderson wrote those “deafening chants” really meant, “We love American values.”

American values were the centerpiece of the Democrats’ convention.

Vice presidential nominee Governor Tim Walz “sought to turn Republican arguments on their head while making an appeal for common sense rooted in his Midwestern values,” the Associated Press wrote after the third night. “’When they were banning books from their schools, we were banishing hunger from ours,’ he jabbed.”

READ MORE: Here’s What Donald Trump Will Get When RFK Jr. Endorses Him

“The differences between Harris’ speech in Chicago and the one Trump delivered last month at the Republican convention in Milwaukee could not have been more stark — and set the stage for the sprint to the November 5 election, with head-to-head confrontations in debates yet to come,” CNN reported Friday. “Vice President Kamala Harris capped one of the most extraordinary months in modern political history Thursday night with a speech that rallied Democrats around themes of patriotism — and cast Donald Trump as the enemy of classic American principles.”

But over at The Wall Street Journal, Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Peggy Noonan, the former President Ronald Reagan speechwriter, had a different take.

“Kamala Harris’s speech was fine, and delivered with assurance. I prefer ‘Ask not what your country can do for you’ to ‘Never do anything half-assed,’ but tastes vary,” was Noonan’s opening salvo, criticizing the Vice President for sharing a direct quote from her late beloved mother, whom she and her sister had paid homage to on stage during the convention.

To her credit, Noonan’s piece is titled, “Kamala Harris Gets Off to a Strong Start,” and she offered up this comparison of Democrats vs. Republicans, or at least their parties:

“The Democratic Party has more substantial characters of recent American history to parade around on stage. The Clintons, the Obamas, Jesse Jackson, who, whatever your view of him, was there, on the balcony at the Lorraine Motel, when Martin Luther King was shot. This conveyed a party with a storied past, and if you join it you’re joining something real. The Republican Party, in its great toppling, has rejected its past. You lose something when you cast your history aside, and all you’ve got for prime time is Trump sons.”

RELATED: DNC to Showcase Next-Gen Dems, a Contrast to GOP’s ‘North Korean-Style Wasteland’: Critics

But Noonan is being resoundingly chastised for this allegation: Democrats “stole traditional Republican themes (faith, patriotism) and claimed them as their own.”

The Washington Post‘s Mariana Alfaro on Tuesday had reported: “The Democratic Party is presenting a message that there is ‘nothing more American than freedom,’ Democratic National Committee spokesman Abhi Rahman said.”

“’There’s no reason for us to be afraid of using those symbols, because those symbols are our symbols and there’s nobody that’s more proud to be American than we are,’ Rahman said.”

Mother Jones’ D.C. bureau chief David Corn responded to Noonan:”Stole? No one has an exclusive claim to patriotism.”

Former political science professor and attorney Carol Schultz Vento wrote: “My WW paratrooper dad was a patriot and person of faith and a Democrat before Peggy Noonan was born. The Republicans can no longer hijack those values from the rest of us.”

Watch the videos above or at this link.

READ MORE: Seven Swing States Now ‘Toss-Ups’ According to Polling Analysis

Continue Reading

OPINION

Here’s What Donald Trump Will Get When RFK Jr. Endorses Him

Published

on

On Friday, when the 70-year-old scion of a political family whose time in the White House was likened to “Camelot” endorses Donald Trump’s presidential bid, as expected, independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will bring with him some of his single-digit array of voters, and enough baggage that could sink the possibly-soon-to-be-sentenced convicted ex-president’s campaign.

Over the past month or so, since the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, RFK Jr. has been chatting with the GOP presidential nominee, as a recording leaked by his nephew revealed the ex-president dangling a possible position in the Trump administration to the son of the late, great U.S. Attorney General and U.S. Senator, Robert Kennedy.

“I would love for you to serve,” Trump told RFK Jr. in the July video posted and subsequently deleted by Robert Kennedy III. During that call the two men arranged to meet while Trump would be in Milwaukee for the Republican National Convention later that month. “I would love you to do stuff and I think it’d be so good for your and so big for you. And we’re gonna win. We’re way ahead of the guy,”

When the two did meet, their discussion reportedly “included possible jobs that Kennedy could be given in a second Trump administration, either at the Cabinet level or posts that do not require Senate confirmation. The discussion also included the prospect of Kennedy leaving the race and endorsing Trump,” The Washington Post had reported, citing sources.

READ MORE: DNC to Showcase Next-Gen Dems, a Contrast to GOP’s ‘North Korean-Style Wasteland’: Critics

Now, RFK Jr. has said he will make an announcement Friday afternoon, “about the present historical moment and his path forward.”

NBC News reports Trump might nominate the anti-vaccine and AIDS denialist conspiracy theorist to be Secretary of Health and Human Services.

Kennedy, NPR reported last year, “paints a dark, conspiratorial picture of the world, bristling with debunked theories, misleading claims and outright falsehoods.”

“Wi-Fi causes cancer and ‘leaky brain,’ Kennedy told podcaster Joe Rogan,” NPR added. “Antidepressants are to blame for school shootings, he mused during an appearance with Twitter CEO Elon Musk. Chemicals in the water supply could turn children transgender, he told right-wing Canadian psychologist and podcaster Jordan Peterson, echoing a false assertion made by serial fabulist Alex Jones. AIDS may not be caused by HIV, he has suggested multiple times.”

NPR also reports, “what stands out in Kennedy’s case is the sheer volume of what he has asserted over the years, from his insistence that Republicans stole the 2004 election to his claims that 5G networks are being used for mass surveillance to his belief that the CIA assassinated his uncle.”

READ MORE: ‘I’ve Heard That Said a Lot’: Fox Host Defends Trump Over Harris-Putin Lie

Kennedy’s conspiracy theories don’t end there, with NPR adding Kennedy has “compared vaccine mandates to Nazi Germany and promoted a film targeting disproven claims about vaccines to Black Americans. He touted the alternative treatments ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, which have not been found to be effective at treating COVID-19. He appeared at the Christian nationalist ReAwaken America Tour alongside MAGA stars Roger Stone and Michael Flynn and QAnon conspiracy theorists.”

“My mission over the next 18 months of this campaign and throughout my presidency will be to end the corrupt merger of state and corporate power that is threatening now to impose a new kind of corporate feudalism on our country,” Kennedy said last year.

NPR also notes, “the pandemic united anti-vaccine and anti-government groups,” and “Kennedy’s message has found fertile ground among an odd-bedfellows coalition of supporters, from vaccine opponents to far-right conspiracy theorists such as Jones, Stone and former Trump adviser Steve Bannon, to deep-pocketed Silicon Valley magnates including Musk, Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey and venture capitalist David Sacks, who hold Kennedy up as a contrarian free-thinker.”

Recently, Kennedy has embraced the crypto crowd, declaring, “Transactional freedom is as important as freedom of expression,” and claiming, “I’m going to put the entire U.S. budget on blockchain.”

David Corn, Mother Jones. D.C. bureau chief, on Wednesday noted, “If RFK Jr. endorses Trump, it will demonstrate he doesn’t care anything about climate change, clean air and water, women’s freedom, democracy, and the rule of law. Just one disingenuous conspiracy-theory-monger joining forces with another. A sad ending to a once noble brand.”

READ MORE: Seven Swing States Now ‘Toss-Ups’ According to Polling Analysis

Continue Reading

Trending

Copyright © 2020 AlterNet Media.