This is hilarious. I can’t believe they gave this guy the green light for this speech. Evidently they made him cut the shirtless dance bit he had planned but they let him keep the rest.


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Trump promised to scrap climate laws if US oil bosses donated $1bn – report​

Didn't see a thread, the locals ay all be out of power. My mom (no pics) is in Spain but her house seems to be fine.

Any idea who the "couple" are? I don't think he's talking in a general sense.

The portal is open until April 30.

Check this out & watch:

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Bayou Barbie has declared for the WNBA draft today. Guess she had a change of heart. Last I heard, she was incensed at being ranked #8 in their draft.

By Michelle Goldberg
Opinion Columnist
In a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland this week, the Republican senator Josh Hawley demanded a federal investigation into dark money groups subsidizing “pro-terrorist student organizations” holding anti-Israel protests on college campuses. He cited Politico reporting linking big liberal philanthropies to some pro-Palestinian organizers. Open Society Foundations, for example, founded by the oft-demonized George Soros, has given grants to the anti-Zionist Jewish Voice for Peace, which has an active university presence. Hawley noted that an I.R.S. ruling denies tax-exempt status to organizations that encourage their members to commit civil disobedience, calling nonprofit funding for the groups behind the anti-Israel demonstrations “almost certainly illegal.”
Even if Garland doesn’t act on Hawley’s request, the attorney general in a second Donald Trump administration probably would. That’s one reason I fear that the backlash to the pro-Palestinian campus movement — which includes lawsuits, hearings and legislation — could help Republicans wage war on progressive nonprofits more broadly.
If they do, the right would be following a well-worn authoritarian playbook. In addition to repressing critical voices in academia and the media, the autocratic leaders Trump admires have regularly tried to crush the congeries of advocacy groups, think tanks, humanitarian organizations and philanthropies often referred to as “civil society.” Hungary, for example, passed what it called the “Stop Soros” law, which criminalized helping refugees and migrants apply for asylum. More recently, Hungary enacted a “sovereignty law,” which, as a report from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace put it, “offers the ruling party and the Secret Service vast powers to accuse and investigate any groups or individuals that influence public debate and may have had foreign training or contact for any part of their work.”
That Carnegie report, written by Rachel Kleinfeld and published in March, offers a stark warning that something similar could happen here. In fact, Kleinfeld argues, it’s already started.
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Titled “Closing Civic Space in the United States,” the report describes a wide array of efforts to curb organizing and assembly. Kleinfeld criticizes the left as well as the right, citing, for example, the pandemic-era rules that kept churches closed even after bars had reopened. But as she writes, “the vast majority of efforts to close space currently come from the illiberal right,” which is integrated into the Republican Party, and thus into government, in a way that has no analogue on the left.
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Texas’ Republican attorney general, Ken Paxton, for instance, has targeted a network of Catholic migrant shelters called Annunciation House, accusing them of abetting human smuggling. He also opened an investigation into the liberal watchdog Media Matters for America, accusing it of manipulating data in an investigation into Nazi content on the social media platform X. Both these crusades have been blocked by courts, but they demonstrate the right’s ambition to use state power to hound nonprofits that oppose its agenda in ways that recall Hungary under Viktor Orban.

Anti-Israel protests have given Republicans a pretext to strike at liberal donors and organizers the way they’ve already struck at university presidents. As Kleinfeld wrote, authoritarians typically persecute the most controversial activists first: “Illiberal actors choose issues involving unpopular groups and cases with the most morally murky facts to create a permission structure that allows them to shut down a much broader set of activities.”
Demonstrations that seem to lionize revolutionary violence have stoked anxiety and outrage among many Democrats, and they’re often full of rhetoric that’s hard to defend. Some readers, I imagine, would be thrilled to see Students for Justice in Palestine’s resources cut off. Whenever I write about the troubling civil liberties implications of attempts to rein in anti-Israel activism, my inbox fills up with furious insults, as well as thoughtful, plaintive emails from people who feel that the climate in academia has become intolerable for many Jews.
But it’s precisely because the protests regularly transgress mainstream sensitivities that the right finds it useful to target them as part of a broader political project. That’s particularly true at a time when so many left-leaning organizations have aligned themselves with the pro-Palestinian movement. As one consultant who works with progressive nonprofits put it to me, careless activists have given Republicans “a Hamas-sized terrorist wedge to go after our entire infrastructure.”

​

Republicans seem to be laying the foundation to do just that. Last week, James Comer, chair of the House Oversight Committee, announced an investigation into the “money trail” behind the campus protests. “It appears global elites are funding these hateful protests and pop-up tent cities,” he said. “These are the same groups that fund other radical agendas, including diminishing America’s energy production and pushing soft-on-crime policies that harm the American people.”
Meanwhile, the House recently passed, 382-11, a bill that would allow the Treasury secretary to revoke the tax-exempt status of “terrorist-supporting organizations.” Providing material support to terrorism is, of course, already illegal, and nonprofits that violate those laws should be shut down. But the House bill gives the executive branch the power to make these determinations unilaterally, and the measure is clearly aimed at funding for campus protests.
A November hearing of the House Ways and Means Committee at which the bill was discussed was full of dark insinuations about the forces behind Students for Justice in Palestine, which was presented as a terrorist front brainwashing naïve young Americans. An Arizona Republican, David Schweikert, spoke about the need to look at the tax code to ensure that “charitable giving, pretax monies,” are “doing good in the world and not ultimately financing evil.”
None of us, presumably, want to finance evil. The question is whether you want the government, particularly one controlled by Trump’s Republican Party, deciding what evil is. Mike Johnson, the House speaker, recently suggested that the F.B.I. investigate Soros’s role in the protests. A Trump F.B.I. wouldn’t need to be asked twice.

Thanks, biden voters!!

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Questions
1. What is the wide receiver depth chart?
2. Will we get a portal wide receiver?
3. Will any running backs or other players be moved to wide receiver?

When he first announced his candidacy for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination, Donald Trump’s pitch was centered on his wealth. He was so successful in business that it meant he knew how to run the country. He was so rich that it meant he didn’t need to take donations. He was so savvy that he knew how to work the systems of which he had been a part.


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Eventually, as his candidacy flourished, people got around to asking what now seems like an obvious question: Well, what happens to the company if you win?
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During a debate in January 2016, after Trump was already the front-runner for the nomination, the subject was raised by Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo. If elected, would he put his business in a blind trust as others had before him?

“If I become president,” Trump insisted, “I couldn’t care less about my company. It’s peanuts. I want to use that same up here” — he pointed at his head — “whatever it may be, to make America rich again and to make America great again.”


Bartiromo tried to clarify: So a blind trust?
Trump wasn’t sure about the structure, he said, but anticipated that he “would probably have my children run it with my executives and I wouldn’t ever be involved because I wouldn’t care about anything but our country, anything.”
A year later, he was poised to be inaugurated as president. He held a news conference, his first in months, to present how he would be separating his business from his new position.

The plan — handing over control of the company to his sons and Trump Organization CFO Allen Weisselberg — was outlined by attorney Sheri Dillon.

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“President-elect Trump wants there to be no doubt in the minds of the American public that he is completely isolating himself from his business interests,” Dillon said. “He instructed us to take all steps realistically possible to make it clear that he is not exploiting the office of the presidency for his personal benefit.”


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“As president, I could run the Trump organization, great, great company, and I could run the company — the country,” Trump himself said. “I’d do a very good job, but I don’t want to do that.”

Or did he?
On Thursday, former White House aide Madeleine Westerhout was called to the stand in Trump's criminal trial in Manhattan. Westerhout was Trump's central point of interaction with the outside world during the first two years of his presidency — a role that, she testified, included frequent interactions with the Trump Organization.
Westerhout would regularly ask questions of Trump Organization employees and vice versa, she said. She coordinated with Trump's Trump Organization assistant, Rhona Graff, on Trump's schedule, calendar and personal mail. She said that, at first, she and Graff spoke weekly, if not daily.


But there were also lots of checks. Westerhout testified that the business would FedEx checks to Keith Schiller, who'd come to the White House from the Trump Organization, and Schiller would give them to her to have Trump sign. Sometimes, there were invoices attached to the checks. This happened a couple of times a month, she estimated.

Not that he just signed the checks, mind you.
“I think I remember, maybe, a couple times,” Westerhout said, “him having a question about a check and then calling Allen Weisselberg or somebody else in the Trump Organization to ask for clarification.”
Trump’s businesses continued to make money during his presidency and, therefore, so did he. He would regularly decamp from the White House to a Trump Organization property, including ones where dues-paying members had the opportunity to influence executive actions. A couple of his properties alone generated millions in income from foreign interests.


Since he’s left office, questions about how his political and economic interests collide have only expanded. His son-in-law has received billions of dollars from foreign partners. He and the Trump Organization have been working with LIV Golf, backed by the Saudi Arabian government, in a deal the details of which remain undisclosed. If Donald Trump wins reelection, there is no reason to think that his administration would be any more differentiated from his now-more-complicated business.

When Dillon was outlining back in January 2017 how rigorous the barrier between Trump’s business and his presidency would be, she asserted that the president-elect had “directed that no communications of the Trump Organization, including social media accounts, will reference or be tied to President-elect Trump’s role as president of the United States or the office of the presidency.”
After he left office, however, Trump integrated the presidential seal into his activities — including parts of an LIV Golf tournament hosted at his club in New Jersey.
The Westerhout testimony made explicit what was already obvious: Trump’s pledge to set his business aside while he ran the country was never implemented. The two were intertwined and remain intertwined as he seeks reelection.

Also this is 100% discrimination lol

Part deux.

Anyone who grew up in the 70's and 80's new the Muppet TV show. I loved it.

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Hawaii’s Mauna Loa’s Observatory just captured an ominous sign about the pace of global warming.
Atmospheric levels of planet-warming carbon dioxide aren’t just on their way to yet another record high this year — they’re rising faster than ever, according to the latest in a 66-year-long series of observations.

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Carbon dioxide levels were 4.7 parts per million higher in March than they were a year earlier, the largest annual leap ever measured at the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration laboratory atop a volcano on Hawaii’s Big Island. And from January through April, CO2 concentrations increased faster than they have in the first four months of any other year. Data from Mauna Loa is used to create the Keeling Curve, a chart that daily plots global atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration, tracked by Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California at San Diego.




For decades, CO2 concentrations at Mauna Loa in the month of May have broken previous records. But the recent acceleration in atmospheric CO2, surpassing a record-setting increase observed in 2016, is perhaps a more ominous signal of failing efforts to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions and the damage they cause to Earth’s climate.
“Not only is CO2 still rising in the atmosphere — it’s increasing faster and faster,” said Arlyn Andrews, a climate scientist at NOAA’s Global Monitoring Laboratory in Boulder, Colo.
A historically strong El Niño climate pattern that developed last year is a big reason for the spike. But the weather pattern only punctuated an existing trend in which global carbon emissions are rising even as U.S. emissions have declined and the growth in global emissions has slowed.



The spike is “not surprising,” said Ralph Keeling, director of the CO2 Program at Scripps Institution, “because we’re also burning more fossil fuel than ever.”

Why carbon dioxide levels keep rising​

Carbon dioxide levels naturally ebb and flow throughout each year. At Mauna Loa, they peak in April and May and then decline until August and September. This follows the growth cycle of northern hemisphere plants: growing — and sequestering away carbon — during the summer months and releasing it during fall and winter as they die and decompose.
Once CO2 makes it into the atmosphere, it stays there for hundreds of years, acting as a blanket trapping heat. That blanket has been steadily thickening ever since humans turned materials that were once dense stores of carbon — oil and coal, primarily — into fuel to burn.
That means the Keeling Curve reaches new heights each May, forming a new peak in a sawtooth-like pattern.


The chart originated when Charles David Keeling, Ralph Keeling’s father, started recording atmospheric concentrations of CO2 atop the Mauna Loa volcano in the late 1950s. It was the first effort to measure the planet-warming gas on a continuing basis and helped alert scientists to the reality of the intensified greenhouse effect, global warming and its impact on the planet.



Each annual maximum has raised new alarm about the curve’s unceasing upward trend — nearing 427 parts per million in the most recent readings, which is more than 50 percent above preindustrial levels and the highest in at least 4.3 million years, according to NOAA. Atmospheric CO2 levels first surpassed 400 parts per million in 2014. Scientists said in 2016 that levels were unlikely to drop below that threshold again during the lifetime of even the youngest generations.
Since that year, carbon dioxide emissions tied to fossil fuel consumption have increased 5 percent globally, according to Scripps.

Why annual increases vary​

The increase in carbon dioxide from year to year is not precisely consistent. One factor that tends to cause levels to rise especially quickly: the El Niño climate pattern.



El Niño is linked to warmer-than-average surface waters along the equator in the eastern and central Pacific. That warmth affects weather patterns around the world, triggering extreme heat, floods and droughts.
The droughts in particular contribute to higher-than-normal spikes in atmospheric carbon dioxide, Keeling said.
Tropical forests serve as reliable stores of carbon because they don’t go through the same seasonal decay as plant life at higher latitudes. But El Niño-linked droughts in tropical areas including Indonesia and northern South America mean less carbon storage within plants, Keeling said. Land-based ecosystems around the world tend to give off more carbon dioxide during El Niño because of the changes in precipitation and temperature the weather pattern brings, Andrews added.

That can allow CO2 concentrations to rise especially quickly on the tail end of El Niño events — such as the current one, which NOAA scientists said Thursday is likely to end this month.


The increase observed at Mauna Loa over the past year is some five times larger than the average annual increases seen in the 1960s, and about twice as large as in the 2010s, according to NOAA data.

A record surge in early 2016 was also at the end of a historically strong El Niño.

Why carbon matters​

It will take some four decades to stop the annual growth in CO2 concentrations, even if all emissions began declining now, Andrews said. Because Earth’s carbon cycle is so far out of its natural equilibrium, plants, soils and oceans would give off stores of extra CO2 in response to any reduction in humans’ emissions, she said.

And for CO2 concentrations to fall back below 400 parts per million, it would take more than two centuries even if emissions dropped close to zero by the end of this century, she added.


In the natural carbon cycle, the element passes through air, soil and water, and plants and animals, eventually making its way into deep ocean sediments and fossils deep underground. Carbon’s movement throughout Earth systems helps regulate our planet’s temperatures — unlike on Venus, for instance, where CO2 accounts for most of the atmosphere, making that planet’s surface hellishly hot.
But human emissions of CO2 throw that system out of balance. It’s like adding more and more trash to a dump, Andrews said. Even if each load of trash gets smaller, “it’s still piling up.”

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Another beautiful "success" by the most useless administration in US history. Maybe the missing money is with the billions in homeless funding that Newsom/CA leftists "misplaced" recently.

Government efficiency at its finest lmfao

Legendary Okie State head wrestling coach John L Smith retired last month, opening up one of the biggest jobs in the sport. This week we found out who's replacing him:

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It's a big swing -- Taylor's credentials as an athlete are unimpeachable -- Olympic gold medalist, World Champion, 2-time NCAA champion, 4-time NCAA finalist, etc. -- but he's never even been an assistant coach before.

Taylor is bringing in a familiar face as one of his assistants too -- Thomas Gilman.

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Gilman had an excellent career at Iowa and has had a lot of freestyle success as well. A lot of his freestyle success came after he (in)famously moved to State College and joined the Nittany Lion Wrestling Club a few years ago. He recently lost to Spencer Lee in the Olympic Team Trials as they both fought for the 57 kg spot.

He's also adding Jimmy Kennedy, another former PSU wrestler, to his staff.

My take? It's definitely a gamble for Okie State since this staff doesn't have a lot of coaching experience, but if they're able to recruit well (and there's not much reason to think that they won't be VERY good at recruiting) then they could definitely have Okie State as a significant power player in the college wrestling world sooner rather than later. On one hand, they might be able to cut into PSU's dominance by attracting some of the talent away from State College. On the other hand... they're going to make it harder for the Hawkeyes to recruit as well and will be another formidable challenger on the national level. It will be interesting to watch and see how things pan out.

Yes parents are always right. 🙄 why is it bad to test homeschooled kids or even check up on their welfare. Or heaven forbid a background check of the parents https://www.kansascity.com/news/nation-world/national/article288415375.html

A desire for jobs and better career opportunities are the main factors fueling Iowa's brain drain.
https://www.kcrg.com/2024/02/24/iowa-college-graduates-leaving-state-better-career-opportunities/

Where would you rank them in your greatest bands list?

After a meeting that lasted for hours, the Shenandoah County school board voted early Friday morning to restore the names of three Confederate officers to schools in the district.
With the vote, the district appears to be the first in the country to return Confederate names to schools that had removed them after the summer of 2020, according to researchers at the Montgomery, Ala.-based Equal Justice Initiative.
The vote rolled back a decision made four years ago, when the killing of George Floyd prompted nationwide demands for a racial reckoning. At a virtual meeting in July 2020, the summer of pandemic and protests, the board voted 5-1 to drop the names of two schools — Ashby-Lee Elementary and Stonewall Jackson High — that it deemed incompatible with a recently passed resolution condemning racism. The schools were renamed the next year as Honey Run and Mountain View.

But a fury had been unleashed in the rural county in the mountains of Virginia. People crowded into school board meetings, denouncing the naming process as secretive and rushed, and voicing deeper resentments about cultural changes they saw as being foisted upon them.
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After a re-vote ended in a tie in 2022, the name changes stood. But opponents swore that Stonewall Jackson would be revived. And on Friday, he was.
“When you read about this man — who he was, what he stood for, his character, his loyalty, his leadership, how Godly a man he was — those standards that he had were much higher than any leadership of the school system in 2020,” said Tom Streett, one the board members. Then he and four of his five colleagues voted to bring Jackson and the other names back.

U.S. President Joe Biden has marginally widened his lead over Donald Trump ahead of the November presidential election as the Republican candidate prepares for the start of the first of four upcoming criminal trials, a new Reuters/Ipsos poll found.




Some 41% of registered voters in the five-day poll, which closed on Monday, said they would vote for Biden, a Democrat, if the election were held today, compared with 37% who picked former President Trump. That 4 point lead was up from a 1 point lead Biden held in a Reuters/Ipsos poll in March.





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The survey has a 4 percentage point margin of error for registered voters and many voters remain on the fence seven months before the Nov. 5 election.

Some 22% of registered voters in the poll said they had not picked a candidate, were leaning toward third-party options or might not vote at all.





While nationwide surveys give important signals on American support for political candidates, just a handful of competitive states typically tilt the balance in the U.S. electoral college, which ultimately decides who wins a presidential election.

Both candidates carry significant liabilities ahead of what is expected to be a close race and the first U.S. presidential election rematch in nearly 70 years.

Trump is due to appear in a Manhattan courtroom on April 15 for the start of the first of four pending criminal trials.

The trial in Manhattan involves accusations Trump covered up a payment to an adult film actress before the 2016 presidential election in exchange for the actress' silence about an alleged sexual encounter she had with Trump. Trump has pleaded not guilty to the charges and denies any such encounter.

The other trials involve charges Trump tried to overturn his 2020 election defeat or that he mishandled sensitive documents after leaving the presidency in 2021. Trump has pleaded not guilty to all charges.




Biden's liabilities include concerns about his age - 81 - as well as strong criticism from a slice of his Democratic Party over his support of Israel's war on Hamas militants.

The poll, which surveyed adults nationwide, included many ways to measure support for Biden and Trump, 77, and most pointed to a close race.

Biden had a smaller lead - just 1 percentage point - among all respondents, but his lead among registered voters was significant because people who are already registered to vote are more likely to do so in November. Only two-thirds of eligible voters turned out in the 2020 presidential election in which Biden defeated Trump.

Trump led among respondents without a college degree while Biden led among those who had one.

The Reuters/Ipsos poll included responses from 833 registered voters who were surveyed online nationwide. It had a margin of error of about 4% for registered voters.

Israel-Gaza war: Four soldiers killed in Kerem Shalom rocket attack​

Donald Trump’s 2020 campaign called itself a “juggernaut” in May of that year, on par with a planet-destroying “Death Star” that was “firing on all cylinders.”
Trump’s 2024 campaign has traded Star Wars metaphors for talk of a “leaner” and “more efficient” operation, with less real estate, fewer employees and greater dependence on outside groups.


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“We’re focused on quality over quantity. I mean, how novel a concept,” top strategist Chris LaCivita told the crowd of top donors May 4 at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Fla., according to attendees.
The shift comes as President Biden’s campaign and its allies, buoyed by incumbency, have been moving in the opposite direction, building a more expansive operation sooner than in 2020. Strategists for both major parties expect Democrats to raise and spend more than Republicans over the coming months, a dynamic that has been magnified by the significant legal costs Trump’s fundraising apparatus has absorbed to defend him in state and federal courts.



The situation has alarmed GOP officials in key states like Arizona, Georgia and Michigan, who have yet to receive promised funding, staff or even briefings on the new plans since the Trump team took control of the Republican National Committee in March. An earlier party blueprint for a general election build-out has been discarded, party officials say. Plans to open new offices have been scuttled. Hiring has been slowed.
“In order to win close elections in Georgia, you have to have a ground game that emphasizes turning out early votes and absentee votes,” said Cody Hall, a senior adviser to Gov. Brian Kemp (R). “I have seen no evidence of them having any of that. The Trump campaign has a consultant in Georgia, but there is nothing else that I can see. … Everyone is generally concerned.”
The original RNC plan for the state of Georgia, reviewed by The Washington Post, called for hiring 12 regional field directors in April and 40 field organizers by the end of May, in addition to eventually opening 20 offices and a community center in the College Park, a mostly Black suburb of Atlanta. Arizona was slotted to receive six regional field directors, seven offices and 23 field organizers by the end of May. Party leaders had drafted similar road maps for other battleground states before Ronna McDaniel was replaced as chairwoman.
The RNC’s plan at the start of this year was also focused on early voting, the plans show, though the Bank Your Vote website — once the centerpiece of the effort — has been offline for weeks as the party retools the program. “It is full speed ahead,” said James Blair, the national political director for both the Trump campaign and the RNC. “Stay tuned for more on the program.”


Arizona GOP chairwoman Gina Swoboda called RNC Chairman Michael Whatley on Monday to raise concerns that Arizona was not getting enough resources, according to three people familiar with the call, who like others for this article, spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal discussions.



Top party officials reassured her that resources would be coming to the state. “The AZGOP and the RNC are joined at the hip. Together, we are 110% focused on sending President Trump back to the White House and saving our country,” Swoboda said in a statement Tuesday.

Others in the state remain concerned.
“There is no sign of life,” said Kim Owens, a Republican operative and public relations professional in Arizona. “Especially in a state that Trump lost so closely last time, you’d expect to have more of a presence. I would think, ‘Let’s step it up.’ I think it’s a terrible mistake.”
In Michigan, some of the state’s operatives and Republican lawmakers have grown concerned about a lack of an operation there, according to four people familiar with the matter, even as they feel generally bullish about the state. Pete Hoekstra, the chairman of the state party, declined to discuss staffing and hiring but praised Trump’s team overall. “We are light-years ahead of where we were in 2016,” he said.



Trump’s top advisers say concerns over their plans are unfounded and uninformed.
“It’s a different operation that is built by people who win races and have won races,” LaCivita said in an interview. “As it relates to 2020, they did things their way. Some worked. A lot didn’t. But that was then, and this is now.”
Since taking over the party in March, Trump’s new team says it has reviewed the 2020 operation to identify waste and redundancies. Officials say they have decided not to hire separate political, communications and research operations at the campaign and the national party — complaining that in 2020, the RNC and campaign clashed — and said the RNC has improved the data operation to better target voters.

Trump’s aides say they will build a more narrowly targeted volunteer field program — using their successful effort in the Iowa caucuses as a template — while taking advantage of a recent Federal Election Commission ruling that will allow them to directly coordinate message and script plans with outside groups who have paid canvassing such as door-knocking. The operation is being run by LaCivita, Blair and Alex Latcham, a former White House deputy political director for Trump.


LaCivita and other advisers have previously mocked groups like Never Back Down, a super PAC that supported the campaign of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) in the Republican primary, for doing so much paid door-knocking.
LaCivita has also told other Trump advisers that he sees less value in “brick and mortar” — or opening as many offices — and wants to have a largely volunteer-driven strategy similar to the precinct captain strategy they ran in the primaries.

Trump advisers have also warned others against attempting to brand GOP efforts with terms like “Death Star” or ORCA, the name of a glitchy turnout operation that advisers to Mitt Romney built for the 2012 campaign.
“The prism, if you will, of how we see this race is built on three things,” LaCivita said of how the Trump team was planning to build contrast with their Democratic opponent. “It’s built on strength versus weakness, success versus failure and the complete dishonesty of the Biden administration.”


Biden campaign spokesman Ammar Moussa responded in a statement. “Donald Trump’s campaign is, in fact, built on three things: an extreme and unpopular agenda that has proven to be a consistent loser at the ballot box; a battleground state infrastructure that is nonexistent; and a candidate who, when he is willing to campaign, is only shouting about his own personal grievances,” Moussa said.

Trump’s team has also argued that it doesn’t have the same need for a massive field operation as Biden, who is suffering from lower-than-expected support in early public polls among core Democratic groups such as Black and younger voters. Meanwhile, the Biden operation says it has already opened more than 150 offices across nine state and hired over 400 people, many of whom gathered last week in Wilmington, Del., for a strategy session.
“Joe Biden is a guy whose coalition is fractured and at war with itself on a good day,” Blair said. “Much of the rest of his base is unmotivated to turn out to vote.”


Trump himself has echoed that view in conversations with multiple top advisers, according to people familiar with the conversations. He has told people in charge of the RNC to focus on election security more than field programs, because he believes he will be able to personally motivate his voters to the polls in the fall, these people said.

In private conversations with both Whatley and McDaniel, Trump told them to not worry about getting out the vote since he could do it himself. He told them to “focus on the cheating.” Party leaders say they are planning a massive operation around “election integrity,” with tens of thousands of volunteers who will monitor precincts and vote-counting across the country.
Trump has also complained that the 2020 effort was too big and that “I don’t even know what some of these people do,” according to an adviser. “He liked the feel of 2016 better,” this person said.


Brian Seitchik, who was Arizona state director in 2016 and regional political director in 2020 for the Trump campaign, said the “footprint this cycle is certainly smaller than in the 2020 cycle. But I’m not sure how much it matters.”
“Donald Trump is the greatest vote motivator for the good and the bad in modern American political history,” he said.


Trump’s team, as in 2016, is running without the structural benefits of incumbency. Trump had controlled the RNC for three years before 2020, raising enormous sums of money that could be spent on his reelection effort. At the end of March 2020, the combined Trump operation boasted $244 million in cash on hand after raising $220 million in the first quarter of the year.

This year, the Trump team only started taking control of the RNC in March. His reelection machine had $102 million in cash at the end of that month and had raised just $147 million in the past three months, though advisers say fundraising has picked up since then.

The Los Angeles Times reports:

What are the chances that the noted anti-vaxxers Donald Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. would make common cause to undermine Americans’ health in their pursuit for the presidency? It didn’t take much hindsight to say the answer is 100%. But there’s no need to speculate any longer — not since this weekend, when Trump and Kennedy both associated themselves with policies that would bring vaccine-preventable diseases such as polio back to the United States.
Children’s Health Defense, the anti-vaccine organization Kennedy founded and chairs, last week platformed a fatuously inaccurate 2013 book claiming that polio isn’t caused by a virus and that the polio vaccine “doesn’t work.” The book was conclusively debunked long ago. But last Tuesday, the organization published an interview with its co-author Suzanne Humphries, in which she repeated her claim that polio is caused by toxins, not the virus.

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