In 2016 the Democrats lost the election despite their constant attacks on Donald Trump's personality. Over the last four years they continued those attacks with Russiagate and impeachment nonsense. Trump turned each of the attacks into a win for himself. Unfortunately that pattern continues.
Over the last two days the Joe Biden campaign made a rather hapless attempt to smear President Donald Trump over allegedly negative comments about previous wars and dead soldiers. The attack was launched with a Jeffrey Goldberg piece in the Atlantic headlined: Trump: Americans Who Died in War Are ‘Losers’ and ‘Suckers’
When President Donald Trump canceled a visit to the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery near Paris in 2018, he blamed rain for the last-minute decision, saying that “the helicopter couldn’t fly” and that the Secret Service wouldn’t drive him there. Neither claim was true.
Trump rejected the idea of the visit because he feared his hair would become disheveled in the rain, and because he did not believe it important to honor American war dead, according to four people with firsthand knowledge of the discussion that day. In a conversation with senior staff members on the morning of the scheduled visit, Trump said, “Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers.”
None of what those four anonymous sources claimed is true according to on the record quotes from people who were there:
Several White House officials at the time said the decision not to take Marine One to the Belleau Wood cemetery was made by Zachary Fuentes, a close aide to Mr. Kelly, without consulting the president’s military aide. Others argued that a trip by road would have taken too long, at roughly two hours.
Administration officials said then that Mr. Fuentes had assured Mr. Trump it was fine to miss the visit.
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More than a half-dozen current and former aides to Mr. Trump backed him up with Twitter messages and statements disputing that part of the Atlantic article. “I was actually there and one of the people part of the discussion — this never happened,” wrote Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who was then the White House press secretary. “This is not even close to being factually accurate,” added Jordan Karem, the president’s personal aide at the time.
John Bolton, who at that time was National Security Advisor but has now fallen out with Trump, describes the cancellation in his tell-all book as solely weather related.
Yesterday he reconfirmed that:
Mr. Bolton said he was in the room at the ambassador’s residence when Mr. Trump arrived and Mr. Kelly told him that the helicopter trip had to be canceled. A two-hour motorcade would have put him too far away from Air Force One and the most capable communications array a president needs in case of an emergency, per usual protocol, Mr. Bolton said. “It was a straight weather call,” he said.
The next day Trump visited a different military cemetery in France.
The quotes in the Goldberg piece may be correct but are most likely not what Goldberg claims them to be:
Glenn Greenwald @ggreenwald – 12:45 UTC · Sep 4, 2020
It's obviously believable Trump said this, but the last person I'd trust to interpret is Goldberg. Why aren't these brave sources willing to speak publicly? …
Michael Tracey @mtracey – 23:29 UTC · Sep 3, 2020
That story reads like snippets of Trump expressing derision toward the idea of US troops getting sent off to die in pointless wars, such as World War I, which when filtered through the prism of neocon-lite Jeffrey Goldberg becomes a “Trump mocks US war dead for some reason” story
No one should be surprised that a Jeffrey Goldberg piece turns out to be a bunch of lies. After Goldberg volunteered as concentration camp guard for the Zionist colony in Palestine he made a career as a war mongering journalist:
Goldberg’s career will be remembered primarily for a long, award-winning reported piece from Iraq that ran in The New Yorker in March 2002, at the height of the post-9/11 jingoistic fervor, which informed that magazine’s readership that Saddam Hussein had both an active WMD program and ties to Al-Qaeda. Goldberg endorsed George W. Bush’s catastrophic war of choice in an article for Slate later that year, in which he wrote, “I believe that the coming invasion of Iraq will be remembered as an act of profound morality.”
Goldberg has since fallen upwards and is now the editor of the Atlantic. Over the last year the majority owner of that outlet, Laurene Powell Jobs, has given more than $1.2 million for Biden's and other Democrats' campaigns.
The publishing of the smear piece seems to have been well coordinated. The Democratic lobbying group Vote Vets was running an advertisement with quotes from the Atlantic piece the morning after it was published. There was also a rare Biden press conference designed to amplify the topic:
Biden, who took questions for the second time this week after going approximately a month without holding a single press conference, spent much of his time blasting President Trump over a report in The Atlantic magazine that he disparaged fallen World War I soldiers during a trip to France in 2018.
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The first question, posed by Atlantic staff writer Edward-Isaac Dovere, was about the magazine's bombshell report."When you hear these remarks — 'suckers,' 'losers,' recoiling from amputees, what does it tell you about President Trump's soul and the life he leads?" Dovere asked.
The Atlantic piece was designed to lower the military and veteran support for Trump. He has responded with a move that will earn him some gratitude from those groups:
US President Donald Trump has said his administration will not be shutting down a renowned military newspaper, following outcry from lawmakers.
Stars and Stripes, an independent military newspaper had been expected to end this month after the Pentagon decided in February to cut its funding.
The US government "will NOT be cutting funding to @starsandstripes magazine under my watch," Mr Trump tweeted.
The next two month will of course see more such attacks from both sides and about different issues. If I had a vote in the election I would give it to neither of the parties or candidates. But it is somewhat disappointing how little the Democrats have learned about how Donald Trump's campaigning works and how attacks against him are only helping him to make his case. As Matt Taibbi analyses in a must-read piece:
The elite misread of Trump is egregious because he’s an easily familiar type to the rest of America. We’re a sales culture and Trump is a salesman. Moreover he’s not just any salesman; he might be the greatest salesman ever, considering the quality of the product, i.e. himself.
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Ever since Trump jumped into politics, the pattern has been the same. He enters the arena hauling nothing but negatives and character liabilities, but leaves every time armed with winnable issues handed to him by overreacting opponents.
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His schtick is to provoke rivals to the point where they drop what they’re doing and spend their time screaming at him, which from the jump validates the primary tenet of his worldview, i.e. that everything is about him. Political opponents seem incapable of not handing him free advertising. They say his name on TV thousands of times a day, put his name on bumper stickers to be paraded before new demographics (e.g. “BERNIE BEATS TRUMP”), and then keep talking about him even off duty, at office parties, family dinners, kids’ sports events, everywhere, which sooner or later gets people wondering: who’s more annoying, the blowhard, or the people who can’t stop talking about the blowhard?
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Trump’s argument is, “They lie about me.” He attracts so much negative attention, and so completely dominates the culture, that the line between him and the country that elected him becomes blurred, allowing him to make a secondary argument: “They lie about you.” This incantation works.
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The Democratic Party has no message — literally none — apart from him.
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It feels like a co-dependent relationship, and the tightening poll numbers in battleground states make me wonder about self-sabotage. He’ll likely still lose, but this is all beginning to feel like a slow-motion rerun of the same car crash from four years ago, when resentment, rubbernecking, and lurid fascination pulled him just across the finish line. People claim to hate him, but they never turn off the show in time, not grasping that Trump always knows how to turn their negative attention into someone else’s vote.Isn’t four years of this enough?
The current attack on Trump, especially as it is based on weak anonymous sourcing, is exactly what Trump needs to gain more voters and a higher turn out.
Instead of talking about real issues the Democrats have fallen back on attacking Trump's personality. That method has failed for more than four years of Russiagate and impeachment blubber but it continues.
Why does anyone believe that such attacks will suddenly have a different outcome than to help Trump win another election?