Dispatches

TRUMP BOILS AS KAMALA HARRIS GETS BIG CROWDS. As Kamala Harris went on tour with her new running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, filling auditoriums in swing states with newly energized supporters, it drove Donald Trump crazy, as he first accused Harris of conducting a coup in getting Biden to quit the campaign, then using AI to make it look like big crowds greeted her at the Detroit airport Aug. 7.

Trump posted on his social media: “Has anyone noticed that Kamala CHEATED at the airport? There was nobody at the plane, and she ‘A.l.’d’ it, and showed a massive ‘crowd’ of so-called followers, BUT THEY DIDN’T EXIST! She was turned in by a maintenance worker at the airport when he noticed the fake crowd picture, but there was nobody there, later confirmed by the reflection of the mirror like finish on the Vice Presidential Plane. She’s a CHEATER. She had NOBODY waiting, and the ‘crowd’ looked like 10,000 people! Same thing is happening with her fake ‘crowds’ at her speeches. This is the way the Democrats win Elections, by CHEATING — And they’re even worse at the Ballot Box. She should be disqualified because the creation of a fake image is ELECTION INTERFERENCE. Anyone who does that will cheat at ANYTHING!”

The Washington Post noted (8/11) that there were, in fact, thousands of people at the airport when Harris’ plane arrived, and there is no evidence that news organizations altered photos using artificial intelligence, just as there is no evidence that Harris, or other Democrats, have cheated to win elections, despite Trump’s repeated lies that the 2020 presidential election was “rigged.” Trump has been indicted on Georgia state charges that he engaged in a conspiracy to overturn Georgia election results and federal charges relating to the attempted insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021.

Harris’ event at an airport hanger in Detroit was live-streamed, attended by media and local news outlet MLive estimated that 15,000 people filled the hangar and spilled out onto the tarmac.

Some photos appearing on X (formerly Twitter) appear to show AI manipulation, but they may have been produced by MAGA partisans in an attempt to discredit the Harris-Walz campaign.

TRUMP CONFUSES BROWNS, HELICOPTER RIDES AND TRASH TALKING KAMALA. A reporter asked Trump at his press conference at Mar-a- Lago (8/8) if he thought Vice President Kamala Harris’s career had been helped by her relationship in the 1990s with powerful California politician Willie Brown. Trump said he knew Willie Brown very well, and “He told me terrible things about” Harris, when Brown and Trump were on a rough helicopter ride, which didn’t happen. Trump was on in a helicopter with former Gov. Jerry Brown surveying wildfire damage in 2018, but they didn’t talk about Harris and there was no near-crash. However, Trump was on a rough helicopter ride with Nate Holder, former Los Angeles City Councilman and state senator, who is now 95 and remembered the near-death experience on a flight from Trump Tower to Trump’s Taj Mahal Casino in Atlantic City in 1990.

Holden recalled being a bit worried about the helicopter ride because it came not long after five people, including three high-level executives of Trump’s casinos, were killed when their chopper crashed in 1989 over Forked River, N.J., Politico reported (8/9). Holden said the helicopter made an emergency landing at at airport in New Jersey.

“Willie is the short Black guy living in San Francisco,” Holden said. “I’m a tall Black guy living in Los Angeles. I guess we all look alike,” Holden told Politico, letting out a loud laugh.” But neither of them trash-talked Kamala Harris.

When asked about the vice president, Brown told KRON4 in San Francisco he “could not envision thinking of Kamala Harris in any negative way” and that she was a good friend.

Trump insisted that he had once been in a dangerous helicopter landing with Willie Brown, despite Brown’s denial.

In an angry phone call to a New York Times reporter as Trump landed several hours away from his planned rally in Bozeman, MT, because of a mechanical issue on his plane, Trump excoriated The Times for its coverage of his meandering news conference at Mar-a-Lago, his private club and home, during which he told of an emergency landing during a helicopter trip that he said both he and Brown had made together, The Times reported (8/9).

“We have the flight records of the helicopter,” Trump insisted, saying the helicopter had landed “in a field,” and indicating that he intended to release the flight records, before shouting that he was “probably going to sue” over the Times article.

HARRIS PULLS AHEAD OF TRUMP IN SWING STATES. Donald Trump still insists he’s “leading by a lot” in the new race with Kamala Harris, but in reality, Joan McCarter noted at DailyKos (8/8) no, he is not, as the Cook Political Report shifted its ratings for three swing states, Arizona, Nevada and Georgia, changing them from “Lean Republican” to “Toss Up”.

According to 538’s poll aggregates, Harris has an edge over Trump in the battleground states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, and she’s running neck and neck with Trump in North Carolina.

At the end of July, Harris had the lead in a dozen separate national polls, as Simon Rosenberg tweeted July 31:

Harris leads in 7 new national polls:
49%-45% (+4) Civiqs
49%-46% (+3) Leger (was +7 Trump)
48%-46% (+2) FAU (was +5 Trump)
46%-44% (+2) Econ/YouGov (was +3 Trump)
45%-43% (+2) Redfield/Wilton
44%-42% (+2) Angus Reid
47%-46% (+1) Morning Consult

Battlegrounds are better too, as Josh Wingrove tweeted July 30:

“Harris has wiped out Trump’s lead across seven swing states in the latest round of the Bloomberg News/Morning Consult poll. The poll found a big Dem lead in Michigan, a more modest Trump lead in Pennsylvania and close contests everywhere else. Dead heat.”
Arizona +2 Harris
Georgia +0
Michigan +11 Harris
Nevada +2 Harris
North Carolina +2 Trump
Pennsylvania +4 Trump
Wisconsin +2 Harris

A New York Times/Siena poll released Aug. 10 showed Harris leading in three key states:
• Michigan +4 Harris v. Trump, +5 Harris when Kennedy, Stein and West are included.
• Pennsylvania +4 Harris v. Trump, +2 Harris with Kennedy, Stein and West included.
• Wisconsin +4 Harris v. Trump, +6 Harris with Kennedy, Stein and West included.

McCarter concluded: “The surge Harris experienced after President Joe Biden stepped aside and endorsed her as the Democratic candidate wasn’t a blip or a bounce, either. It’s sustained, and it has changed this race.

“And Trump can’t take it.”

DON’T IGNORE INVESTIGATION INTO WHETHER TRUMP TOOK $10 MILLION FROM EGYPT. The Washington Post produced a deeply reported story (8/2) concerning a transfer of $10 million in small bills from the National Bank of Egypt that, through a bizarre chain of custody, wound up in service to the campaign of then-president-elect Donald J. Trump in January 2017. Charles Pierce noted at Esquire.com (8/6), “The whole thing sounds like a Donald Westlake novel—a ‘request’ comes from someone with ties to Egyptian intelligence asking the Egyptian bank to fork over most of the American currency it has on hand. This amounts to filling two large bags with 200 pounds’ worth of American greenbacks. Then four other guys show up and carry away the bags. With us so far? Good, because it gets really weird now.

“The feds got wind of this remarkable episode in banking back in 2019. As it happens, they were already investigating a case from 2016 wherein Egyptian president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi was alleged to be trying to find a way to slip a cool $10 mil to then-candidate Trump. The feds presumed this would not be so that Sisi could outfit his entire army in red ballcaps.” From the Post:

Since receiving the intelligence about Sisi, the Justice Department had been examining whether money moved from Cairo to Trump, potentially violating federal law that bans U.S. candidates from taking foreign funds. Investigators had also sought to learn if money from Sisi might have factored into Trump’s decision in the final days of his run for the White House to inject his campaign with $10 million of his own money.

“Guess what happened next? The American people installed El Caudillo del Mar-a-Lago in the White House, and he installed William Barr in the Justice Department as attorney general, and suddenly political appointees began stonewalling the investigators until Barr determined that, hey, there’s no evidence here. This set off the kind of run-of-the-mill chaos characteristic of the previous administration.”

Barr directed Jessie Liu, the Trump-appointed U.S. attorney in D.C., to personally examine the classified intelligence to evaluate if further investigation was warranted. Barr later instructed FBI Director Christopher A. Wray to impose “adult supervision” on FBI agents Barr described as “hell-bent” on pursuing Trump’s records, according to people familiar with the exchange. It is unclear what, if any, actions Wray, who was also appointed by Trump, took in response.

“Almost nobody the Post talked to about this thinks that anything but crude political meddling turned off this investigation. (Except, of course, for the officials of the former president*’s current campaign, who activated their political Tourette’s in reply. Deep state! Fake news! Trump haters! I can have cookie now, Vanky?) But the Post story appears to delineate quite clearly that el-Sisi, who’s been known to bribe foreign officials in the past, was trying to buy himself a president.

“This can’t be something that we just drop” Pierce wrote. “This can’t be something that cedes pride of place in our campaign coverage to J. Divan Vance’s gun-totin’ Mamaw and Doug Emhoff’s first marriage. If the Post investigation is correct, it sure looks like very first offense mentioned in the Constitution as grounds for impeachment. In his notes on the constitutional convention, writing as always in the third person, Mr. Madison offered an encompassing view of government corruption that did not stop at bribery, because government corruption never stops at bribery.”

NEW POLL SHOWS KAMALA HARRIS GAINING TRUST ON ECONOMY. More voters trust Vice President Kamala Harris than Donald Trump on the economy, according to a new poll. It’s the first time a Democrat has led Trump on the issue this cycle, Joan McCarter noted at DailyKos (8/12).

The new poll, conducted Aug. 1-5 on behalf of the Financial Times/University of Michigan Ross School of Business, shows that 42% of registered voters trust Harris most on the economy, while 41% trust Trump most. It’s the first time this poll has shown “the Democratic presidential candidate leading Trump on the economy since it began tracking voter sentiment on the issue nearly a year ago, the Financial Times reports.

While Harris’s lead is statistically insignificant, what is not insignificant is the change since she replaced President Joe Biden as the Democratic candidate, gaining 7 percentage points on his result in the July poll.

The economy under Biden has been doing quite well, with the strongest recovery any nation has made post-pandemic, according to the US Treasury Department.

“[T]he United States has performed better than other G7 economies (and the Euro area) with real GDP just 1.4 percent below trend,” Treasury reported last June. “The fast recovery in the United States reflects a more complete recovery in domestic consumption. In fact, US household consumption expenditures returned to their pre-pandemic trend by the second quarter of 2021.”

The Biden administration in fact oversaw substantial gains in the GDP, employment, and wage growth. In fact, earlier this year, wages finally started growing faster than inflation. Biden’s economic recovery is absolutely real, but voters have stubbornly refused to accept that as fact.

Until now, it seems.

REPUBLICANS SMEAR GOV. TIM WALZ WITH LIES. Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) faulted Gov. Tim Walz for choosing to retire from the Minnesota National Guard after 24 years of service, rather than risk being sent to Iraq in 2005.

“When Tim Walz was asked by his country to go to Iraq, do you know what he did? He dropped out of the Army and allowed his unit to go without him. … I think it’s shameful.” At a different event, Vance used the phrase “stolen valor” to describe his accusations against Walz.

Walz retired from the Minnesota National Guard in May 2005. He had submitted retirement paperwork five to seven months beforehand, Fox News reported, citing the Minnesota National Guard.

In March 2005, Walz’s battalion had been notified about a possible deployment to Iraq within two years, Walz’s congressional campaign said in a news release that month, citing the National Guard Public Affairs Office. The Minnesota National Guard said the battalion then received an official order about mobilizing for deployment to Iraq in July 2005, after Walz retired.

PolitiFact ruled (8/7) that Vance’s statement misleads by distorting the timeline. Walz had not been “asked by his country to go to Iraq,” as Vance said. He had been given a two-year window for a potential, not definite, deployment. And the official deployment notice came after Walz’s retirement.

Walz has said he retired from the National Guard to run for Congress. He filed his candidacy paperwork in February 2005, before the March 2005 notification about the potential deployment.

This is not a new line of attack. When Walz ran for a second term as Minnesota governor in 2022, his Republican opponent, who did not serve in the U.S. military, criticized Walz for leaving the National Guard before his unit deployed to Iraq.

Walz enlisted in the Nebraska National Guard on April 8, 1981, two days after his 17th birthday. In 1996, Walz transferred to the Minnesota National Guard, where he served in the 1st Battalion, 125th Field Artillery until he retired May 16, 2005, Army Lt. Col. Kristen Augé, Minnesota National Guard’s state public affairs officer, told PolitiFact.

During his service, Walz responded to floods and tornadoes, specialized in heavy artillery and was recognized for his proficiency in sharpshooting and hand grenades, Minnesota Public Radio reported.

On Aug. 3, 2003, Walz and his battalion were deployed to Italy to support U.S. operations in Afghanistan under Operation Enduring Freedom. Walz returned to Minnesota in April 2004, Augé said.

In May 2005, Walz, then 41, officially retired from the Minnesota National Guard to campaign for Minnesota’s 1st Congressional District. He filed his statement of candidacy paperwork with the Federal Election Commission on Feb. 10, 2005. Walz was elected to Congress in November 2006.

PolitiFact also declared that Donald Trump falsely claimed he called the Minnesota National Guard to protect Minneapolis from violent protests because Walz refused to do so. Walz called up the Guard Feb. 28. 2020, the day after the Minneapolis mayor requested it, but before Trump called to offer federal assistance.

Trump said during a rally in St. Cloud, MN, rally (7/27) that it was he — not Gov. Tim Walz — who ordered the National Guard to respond to Minneapolis riots in 2020.

“Every voter in Minnesota needs to know that when the violent mobs of anarchists and looters and Marxists came to burn down Minneapolis four years ago, remember me? I couldn’t get your governor to act. He’s supposed to call in the National Guard or the Army and he didn’t do it. I couldn’t get your governor. So, I sent in the National Guard to save Minneapolis.”

CNN and WCCO-TV News, a CBS affiliate in Minnesota, debunked a similar Trump statement in 2020. We found that Walz called in the National Guard hours before Trump contacted him, but Walz has faced criticism about his response’s timing.

Walz spokesperson Teddy Tschann wrote in a statement to CNN in 2020 that Walz “activated the Minnesota National Guard at the request of the Mayors of Minneapolis and St. Paul, before he talked to the White House.”

Tschann told CNN that Walz was in touch with Trump administration officials during the unrest, including Defense Secretary Mark Esper and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman U.S. Army Gen. Mark Milley. But Walz was the one who put forward the plans for the use of the guard, he said.

Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, said Walz initially hesitated to deploy the National Guard on May 27, the day the mayor first requested assistance. But Walz’s executive order shows he called up the National Guard on May 28, before Trump offered federal assistance.

PolitiFact rated as “false” Trump’s statement that Walz didn’t call in the National Guard, “So, I sent in the National Guard to save Minneapolis.”

BIDEN CRACKS DOWN ON CORPORATE TRICKS, SUCH AS HARD-TO-CANCEL SERVICES. The Biden administration launched a wide-ranging consumer protection campaign called “Time Is Money” aimed at cracking down on hard-to-cancel services, deliberately poor customer service, and other “corporate tricks” that involve overly complicated or burdensome processes, such as in the filling out of insurance claims, Edward Carver noted at CommonDreams (8/12).

The effort involves a number of agencies and initiatives, some already underway, like a proposed Federal Trade Commission (FTC) rule, first announced in March 2023 and currently under public review, that would require companies to make it as easy to cancel a subscription or service as it is to sign up. At least one regulation the administration included as part of “Time Is Money” is already final: a Department of Transportation rule on automatic refunds for airline tickets that are canceled or significantly changed.

Other changes are forthcoming, the White House says. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) will introduce a rule that would require companies under its jurisdiction to allow callers to escape customer service “doom loops” and speak to a human being by pressing a single button; the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is considering a similar initiative for cable and other communications companies, as well as a proposal like the FTC’s proposed easy-to-cancel rule.

These initiatives have come from the executive branch, making them vulnerable to reversal if Republicans take control of the White House or U.S. Congress next year. Democrats may be hoping the presumed popularity of efforts such as “Time Is Money” help prevent that from happening.

From The Progressive Populist, September 1, 2024

Populist.com