Friday, April 03, 2020

Trump Keeps Saying The Quiet Part Out Loud

Donald Trump went on Fox News this week to complain about the efforts of Democrats to secure funding for election assistance in the Covid-19 relief package.
The things they had in there were crazy. They had things, levels of voting that if you'd ever agreed to it, you'd never have a Republican elected in this country again.
I have no idea what "levels of voting" could possibly mean. You look at the ballot (or you get a ballot) and you make a choice. That's it. It's only one level.

And, once again, Trump says the quiet part out loud. He fears that if the United States had a fair voting system, Republicans wouldn't stand a chance. That might be true, but millions of people would still choose the party that would do them the most harm, even if voting rolls were not purged and the votes were properly counted.

Republicans are making sure that the next crooked election in the US is crooked in their direction. As Politico reports:
In the past several weeks, the reelection campaign and the Republican National Committee have helped to oversee maneuvering in a handful of battleground states with an eye toward stopping some Democratic efforts to alter voting laws, and to bolster Trump. The mobilization is being closely coordinated with Republicans at the state and local levels.

The Trump campaign and RNC are actively engaged in litigation in Wisconsin, where the parties are at loggerheads over an array of issues including voter identification, and in New Mexico, where the battle involves vote-by-mail. The skirmishing has also spread across key states like Pennsylvania and Georgia, where the well-organized Trump apparatus has fought over changes that could sway the outcome of the election.

The enterprise — which includes more than two dozen GOP officials, including lawyers dedicated entirely to litigation — shows how completely the pandemic has upended the 2020 election. While litigation over voting issues is not uncommon, the coronavirus — and the likely obstacles it will create for voting in November — has brought the issue to the forefront of the campaign.
I can't be the only person who has wondered in the last four weeks if a key benefit to ignoring all the explicit warnings about this virus and then delaying and obstructing the relief effort and wanting to prematurely end the safety guidelines is to cause such turmoil and sickness and death that the election will have to be "postponed".

Whether that is true or not, Trump certainly does not want any investigation into what he has done surrounding this disaster. He wants everything he does as president to remain top secret. The people have no right to know anything.
I want to remind everyone ... that this is not the time for politics, endless partisan investigations, here we go again. ... You see what happens, it's a witch hunt and witch hunt after witch hunt and in the end the people doing the witch hunt have been losing. They've been losing by a lot. And it's not any time for witch hunts, it's time to get this enemy defeated. These partisan investigations, in the middle of a pandemic, is really a waste of vital resources: time, attention. ... Everyone knows it's ridiculous.
It's not the time for politics. Nope. It's the time to plunder the shit out of this country because I might be gone in seven months and a financial opportunity like this will never come again.

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