Donald trrump

Trump and Biden campaigns argue over rules hours before first debate

From our US edition

With less than eight hours to go before the first presidential debate in Cleveland, the Trump and Biden campaigns are still sparring over the rules for the debate. If the spats are unresolved before the 9 p.m. start time, it sets the stage for each campaign to blame the other for any faults in their candidate's performance. The latest argument, which has played out primarily through leaks and statements to the press about negotiations over debate rules, started with a Fox News report that claimed Biden's team requested a break every 30 minutes during the 90-minute debate and refused to submit to checks for electronic ear pieces.

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The Trump campaign’s best line of attack against Joe Biden

From our US edition

President Trump and Joe Biden will face off in the first of a series of presidential debates on Tuesday night. Team Trump says he has been preparing by watching videos of Biden and by regularly squaring off with unfriendly press, while Biden is reviewing Trump's tweets and engaging in practice sessions with a group of aides and strategists at his home in Wilmington, Delaware. The President's rather informal preparations have apparently worried the campaign, which is now trying to raise expectations for the candidate that they've repeatedly painted as cognitively impaired. 'We’re prepared to see the same Joe Biden who won his vice presidential debates in 2008 and 2012 on stage versus President Trump.

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Confessions of the secret suburban Trump moms: California

From our US edition

Suburban women are understood to be one of the most crucial demographic groups in the presidential election on November 3. Many pollsters currently predict that President Donald Trump will lose due to his unpopularity with that category of voters. But have the Democrats really reclaimed the suburbs? Or are there more likely Republican voters than the polls suggest? The Spectator tracked down a series of so-called ‘closet Trump’ voters, women from the suburbs who would never publicly voice their support for the President for fear of recrimination in their social circles. These are their stories.CaliforniaBefore Donald Trump arrived on the political stage, I felt like I was living in an alternate universe, politically speaking.

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Trump’s latest accuser is believable. Thanks to #MeToo, it doesn’t matter

From our US edition

Yet another woman has accused President Trump of unwanted sexual advances. Model Amy Dorris alleged in a Guardianinterview on Thursday that the President groped her body and attempted to kiss her while they attended the 1997 US Open. She provided photographs of the event that, at the very least, prove the two had some form of contact with each other, whether the President recalls it or not. Dorris provided corroboration, in that she told friends at the time who also went on record. Given the President’s reputation, his remarks on tape to Billy Bush and the photographic evidence, Dorris’s accusation is believable, if not entirely credible. There are problems with her story.

amy dorris

Scrap presidential debates — but not this year

From our US edition

The toughest moment of Joe Biden’s year arrived in May. It was harder than seeing off Bernie Sanders, harder even than picking a VP. Here was the moment that truly tested Biden’s campaigning skills, built up over so many years in public life. He was trying to address the Asian American and Pacific Islanders Victory Fund when the great test arrived. Loud noises interrupted his Zoom speech. From the green shadows of the Delaware garden behind him: violent quacks, tuneless whines, squalls, bawls and fearsome honks. What was this? A protest? Didn’t they know he’d been a lifeguard at an inner city pool back in 1962?!Biden continued with his speech… Trump… honk!… was… honk!... hateful, I mean, Orange Man… HONK!...

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allies

America’s allies don’t like Trump. So what?

From our US edition

So, the Pew Research Center polled more than a dozen allies and, guess what, the allies — from the UK and France to Germany, Japan and Australia — don’t like Donald Trump. I know, you are as astonished as I am. The Pew Research Center is reporting that people abroad — and not only people abroad, Americans, too: really everybody — dislikes Donald Trump. ‘The United States’ image has soured within the international community, hitting all-time lows among key allies,’ Business Insider reports in its précis of Pew’s findings. Other key points: ‘The results showed that people have less confidence in Trump as a leader than Russia's Vladimir Putin and China’s Xi Jinping’ — sounds bad, what?

What Bahrain’s deal with Israel really means

From our US edition

On September 15, representatives from the oil-rich Kingdom of Bahrain will meet Israeli leaders at the White House to sign a historic peace deal. It will normalize relations between the Muslim state and the Jewish one, not long after the United Arab Emirates concluded a similar pact. Expect more such 'normalization deals'. They supplement other White House initiatives, such as the deal it brokered between Serbia and Kosovo, which includes both countries establishing closer relations with Israel. The deals are significant for several reasons. First, they represent a common regional front against the Iranian threat, which has been developing beneath the surface for some time.

bahrain

Leading vs lying

From our US edition

At his short Thursday news briefing, President Trump laid out the many successes that the United States has enjoyed in its battle against the Chinese virus compared with the record in Europe and other parts of the world. Trump’s decision to end air travel between China United States at the end of January was roundly derided as overkill and 'xenophobic' by the entire Democratic establishment from Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi on down. But that decision is now widely credited with saving tens of thousands of lives.

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What the hell happened to Bob Woodward?

From our US edition

Famed reporter Bob Woodward is dropping his new book about President Trump, Rage, next week. Woodward has already leaked the book's juiciest excerpts to the media, such as the the President telling him during an interview on March 19 that he wanted to 'play down' the severity of the coronavirus in order to avoid a panic among the American people. This comment has led Trump's critics to call for his resignation or for him to be impeached a second time. Rage, however, is perhaps more revelatory about its author than its subject. Let's assume that the critics are right, and that Trump's decision to portray calm in the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic was wrong and cost thousands of lives.

bob woodward

What will happen in the debates?

From our US edition

From late September through to mid-October, Americans will get to watch Donald Trump and Joe Biden debate three times. Mike Pence and Kamala Harris will face off once. The debates may not matter, but if one candidate is going to commit a significant gaffe, it likely would occur in one of televisual spectacles. Brace yourselves. Both parties already are trying to shape expectations before the debates begin. On that front, Trump and his allies have made a major mistake. For months Americans have been inundated with claims from Trump, his son and countless media allies that Biden suffers from some type of mental deficiency such as dementia. Biden’s countless gaffes and resistance to doing unscripted interviews have fed into this belief.

debates

People trust the media less than Trump on COVID. Here’s why

From our US edition

The national media is now less trusted than President Trump to provide accurate information and analysis about COVID-19, according to a CBS poll of registered voters. Think about the sheer hubris and raw effort that must have taken! All those months of politicizing public health, downplaying the spread of the virus through protests and riots, doubting coronavirus treatments, and trying to get Anthony Fauci to bad-mouth the President, have finally paid off. Take a bow everyone. In terms of trust, the national media ranked dead last at 35 percent, behind the President, the CDC and the governors of those polled in individual states. Trump, a man who essentially suggested people go stand out in the sun for a bit to help treat a COVID infection, came in five points higher.

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legal

Courting favor: is Trump remaking the conservative legal movement?

From our US edition

President Trump announced Wednesday afternoon that he was adding 20 new names to his previous list of potential Supreme Court nominees in the event of a vacancy. The new list included three very familiar political names: Sens. Tom Cotton, Ted Cruz, and Josh Hawley. Those names alone indicated that the president is bucking his 2016 method of allowing the Federalist Society, a conservative legal group, to dictate his judicial choices. After a string of Supreme Court rulings that went against conservatives, who felt spurned that they could not get the outcomes they wanted even with a stacked court, the President is perhaps signaling to his base that he will nominate an avowed social conservative, rather than just a textualist or originalist.

Is Donald Trump really anti-abortion?

From our US edition

At the Republican National Convention last month, Donald Trump was repeatedly described as the ‘most pro-life President ever’. According to some rather sensational leaked official notes in Sunday’s Daily Telegraph, however, Trump has said he regards abortion as ‘such a tough issue’. Addressing the then British prime minister Theresa May, who is childless, Trump said in January 2017: ‘Imagine some animal with tattoos raping your daughter, and then she gets pregnant.’ Aside from the staggering crassness of this remark to a woman who is on the record about her inability to have children, it also suggests that Trump is not as pro-life as many in his party would have voters believe.

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Sources: Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg weeps in his office ‘all the time’

From our US edition

This week, the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg dropped what could be his biggest piece since he won a major award for drawing bogus links between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda. The piece claims that during a 2018 visit to France President Trump canceled a visit to an American war cemetery, dismissing the dead who lie there as 'suckers' and 'losers' unworthy of passing beneath his presidential shadow. Outsiders have expressed skepticism of the story for many reasons. For starters, in Goldberg’s account, Trump also questioned America’s pointless and enormously costly involvement in World War One. If Trump really said that, it would be an unprecedented display of historical knowledge and insight on the President’s part.

What does ‘without evidence’ mean?

From our US edition

President Trump spoke mildly in defense of Kenosha shooter Kyle Rittenhouse on Tuesday, saying that the 17-year-old seemed to be defending himself when he shot three people, killing two of them. NPR, fresh off of interviewing In Defense of Looting author Vicky Osterweil, had something stern to say about that, tweeting 'President Trump declined to condemn the actions of the suspected 17-year-old shooter of three protesters against police brutality in Kenosha — claiming, without evidence, that it appeared the gunman was acting in self-defense.’ https://twitter.com/NPR/status/1300614359236964358 Without evidence!

without evidence

Blaming Trump for the riots is a Democratic disaster

From our US edition

After months of trying to spin the nationwide unrest as 'mostly peaceful' or ignoring it entirely, Democrats have discovered some fresh messaging: the riots are violent and they're Trump's fault. Joe Biden seized on this new storyline during a campaign speech in Pittsburgh on Monday, telling voters that Trump is 'stoking violence in our cities.' 'This president long ago forfeited any moral leadership in this country. He can’t stop the violence — because for years he has fomented it,' Biden asserted. This is one of the most dastardly and dishonest schemes the Democrats have ever cooked up.

The terrifying truth — neither party cares about law and order

From our US edition

This week CNN’s Don Lemon finally made an observation that should have been obvious three months ago but somehow wasn’t: Democrats might want to stop encouraging rioters and looters in American cities. Not because they were hurting people, or risking wider political violence, or undermining public morale, or making cities uglier, but rather because it turns out nihilistic violence isn’t popular. Lemon’s remarks were quickly seized upon by the right as the gift that they were. It is not often that your political opponent openly admits to cynically evaluating an issue — not based on right or wrong, but on the RealClearPolitics polling average.

law climate

After the RNC, I am confident Trump will triumph

From our US edition

In most cases, prediction in politics is a mug’s game. Maybe that is why it is such a popular game. I forbear to speculate. But if you step back from the fray and ponder, I think you’ll agree that politics (like most human things) is so fraught with uncertainties that accurate prediction is well nigh impossible. Of course, you might be right in any given case. And if you make more than a couple of correct guesses, you can look forward to being hailed as a genius. But deep down you know that your predictions, whatever elaborate models you deployed to lend them an air of inevitability, remain but guesses.  Luck, not rational probability, is the primary motor of your success.

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trump 2020 speech

Full transcript of President Trump’s RNC 2020 speech

From our US edition

Thank you very much. Thank you very much.Friends, delegates and distinguished guests, please. I stand before you tonight honored by your support, proud of the extraordinary progress we have made together over the last four incredible years and blooming with confidence in the bright future we will build for America over the next four years.We begin this evening — our thoughts are with the wonderful people who have just come through the wrath of hurricane Laura. We are working closely with state and local officials in Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, Mississippi. Sparing no effort to save lives while the hurricane was fierce, one of the strongest to make landfall in 150 years. The casualties and damage were far less than thought possible only 24 hours ago.

Populist Trump can win

From our US edition

The Republican National Convention kicks off Monday in the hope of offering voters an alternative to the unfocused, self-serving Democratic counterpart that took place last week. President Trump's best chance of accomplishing this lies in following the blueprint of a speech he gave in Pennsylvania this past Thursday. The Democratic party's convention attempted to appeal to everyone and thus appealed to no one, stacking excessively woke and anti-American screeds in the daytime with establishment figures giving vapid, hyperbolic anti-Trump speeches during the primetime national broadcast. Missing was an expression of a cohesive policy platform, which would seem key in a year where a division between the moderates and progressive left defined the primary.

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