Saturday, November 16, 2024

How America’s worst president got re-elected

 


More than 150 political analysts have determined that Donald Trump is the worst president in our country’s history:

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/historians-voted-trump-worst-president-ever/




In view of that fact, how in the world did he get re-elected?

The answer is simple:

Lies

By now, most people have figured out that you cannot believe anything that Trump says.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/01/24/trumps-false-or-misleading-claims-total-30573-over-four-years/

When The Washington Post Fact Checker team first started cataloguing President Donald Trump’s false or misleading claims, they recorded 492 suspect claims in the first 100 days of his presidency. On Nov. 2 alone, the day before the 2020 vote, Trump made 503 false or misleading claims as he barnstormed across the country in a desperate effort to win reelection.

 

This astonishing jump in falsehoods is the story of Trump’s tumultuous reign. By the end of his term, Trump had accumulated 30,573 untruths during his presidency — averaging about 21 erroneous claims a day.

 

What is especially striking is how the tsunami of untruths kept rising the longer he served as president and became increasingly unmoored from the truth.

 

Trump averaged about six claims a day in his first year as president, 16 claims day in his second year, 22 claims day in this third year — and 39 claims a day in his final year. Put another way, it took him 27 months to reach 10,000 claims and an additional 14 months to reach 20,000. He then exceeded the 30,000 mark less than five months later.

 

 https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/01/24/trumps-false-or-misleading-claims-total-30573-over-four-years/

 If you watched his debate with either Joe Biden or Kamala Harris, you may have noticed that he still has an aversion to truth. In addition, if you have been following his rallies, you will notice that that he still has trouble telling the truth.

Having said that, though, how did he get re-elected?

More lies.

This morning, the Washington Post provided more details on his victory:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/11/15/republican-ads-false-flag/

Although it is worth reading in its entirely, here are a few of the key points:

Muslims in Michigan began seeing pro-Israel ads this fall praising Vice President Kamala Harris for marrying a Jewish man and backing the Jewish state. Jews in Pennsylvania, meanwhile, saw ads from the same group with the opposite message: Harris wanted to stop U.S. arms shipments to Israel.

Another group promoted “Kamala’s bold progressive agenda” to conservative-leaning Donald Trump voters, while a third filled the phones of young liberals with videos about how Harris had abandoned the progressive dream.

 Black voters in North Carolina were told Democrats wanted to take away their menthol cigarettes, while working-class White men in the Midwest were warned that Harris would support quotas for minorities and deny them Zyn nicotine pouches.

 What voters had no way of knowing at the time was that all of the ads were part of a single, $45 million effort created by political advisers to Tesla founder Elon Musk who had previously worked on the presidential campaign of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), according to a presentation about the group’s efforts obtained by The Washington Post.

 Have you noticed that Elon Muck is suddenly “best buds” wit Trump?

Ads tested better if Muslims felt they were seeing a message meant for Zionists, “Bernie bros” felt they were hearing from the far left, and “Zyn bros” felt they were hearing from activists who wanted “a world without gas-powered vehicles,” a ban on fracking and affordable housing for undocumented Americans — policies Harris did not actually support during her campaign.

 “The worst part is Kamala Harris talks out of both sides of her mouth,” said one of the ads, which was designed by Trump supporters to look as if it was advocating for leftist priorities like “free health care” and a “break on tuition.”

 The entire effort grew out of research by Building America’s Future, a conservative political nonprofit that was founded during the first Trump administration by Republican consultants Generra Peck and Phil Cox. With others at P2 Public Affairs, Peck and Cox, former advisers to DeSantis, were top strategists for a separate effort, America PAC, the super PAC funded by Musk to support Trump. Musk donated to Building America’s Future in 2022, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal. The group’s leaders have declined to comment on their donors.


Starting in February, Ryan Tyson, a former pollster for DeSantis, began holding a series of about 25 focus groups with specific communities of targeted voters, with most of the research effort focused on likely Democrats who were uncertain about voting. The goal was to figure out how to help Donald Trump win during a campaign in which Democrats were vastly outspending Republicans on digital advertising.

 

“Clearly, you had a White liberal demographic that hated Donald Trump. That was without question. You could see that coalition everywhere. But once you get past White progressives, every other historical demographic stronghold from the Democrats just started to drop off,” Tyson said about the effort. “What did exist was a tremendous amount of voters on the left that were disaffected. And the only persuasion question was whether they could be persuaded to vote.”

 

The effort worked in concert with a separate project by the Trump campaign to depress turnout for Harris — knowing that Trump would be unlikely to drastically expand his vote totals. In 2020, Trump received about 74 million votes to Joe Biden’s 81 million votes. In 2024, Trump received a little less than 76 million votes to Harris’s 72.6 million votes. In other words, Trump’s total went up slightly, while Harris dropped about 8 million votes.

 

“The entire goal of the campaign was to push her numbers down,” said a top Trump campaign adviser, who like others interviewed for this story spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal strategy.

 

Building America’s Future tried to focus its spending where the Trump campaign’s top advisers publicly signaled an interest, investing heavily in Muslim communities that the campaign was targeting and seeking to magnify the candidate’s appearances on podcasts with significant White male audiences.

 

We studied the strategy that was put in place by Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita and James Blair very closely,” Peck said. “And we did what outside groups can do. We tried to amplify and support the direction in which they were taking the earned and paid media.”

 

They also deployed multiple brands to place the ads, concealing their common origin — Future Coalition PAC, Duty to America PAC, Americans for Consumer Protection and Progress 2028, according to people involved.

 

Democrats grew alarmed in the final weeks of the campaign as the ads started appearing on Facebook and Google. Priorities USA, a Harris-backing super PAC, made efforts to get spots taken down from both platforms because of their deceptive nature. Google eventually struck at least one spot in which one of the Building America’s Future groups took footage from a Harris ad in Pennsylvania targeting Jews and began targeting it to Muslims with the words “This is a real Kamala Harris ad” superimposed.

Other efforts to get ads taken down were not successful. Facebook, which has pared back its ad restrictions since 2020, declined to act on a number of requests to take down ads from Progress 2028 that praised the Harris agenda while also describing policies she did not support in 2024, like mandatory gun buybacks, universal health care for undocumented immigrants and “the most progressive Green New Deal yet.”

 

“There is plenty of blame to go around for another election cycle riddled with misinformation online,” Priorities USA executive director Danielle Butterfield said in a statement. “Big Tech is still unwilling to hold bad actors accountable, Congress is unwilling to step in and write new rules for the 21st century, and Republicans will continue to slander and lie to voters to make their case. Because of all of this, Democrats lose, and we need to acknowledge this reality and figure out new ways to communicate with voters on today’s internet.”

 

The Harris campaign also responded to the spots being geo-targeted to Dearborn, Michigan, where many Muslims live, by running their own digital ads showing the vice president discussing her concern about the humanitarian crisis in Gaza.

 

What we have already seen is that Trump has picked numerous people for various cabinet positions. So far, the worst possible candidate is Matt Gaetz, who Trump has nominated to be Attorney General. Unless he gets approved by a recess appointment, he has little chance of being approved by Congress – and that is a good thing. Trump’s other cabinet picks are nearly as bad.

So, what do we do know?

For starters, it would be wise to try to limit your exposure to political news, since all us are currently experiencing “battle fatigue”.

There are actually people who believe that Kamala Harris is a communist.

There are people who voted for Trump because they have ALWAYS voted for Republican, oblivious to the fact that the Republican party no longer exists because is now the party of Trump.

There are people who were unable to vote for a pro-choice candidate, ignoring that women living in states that have strict abortion laws (like Texas) are dying because they could not get the care they needed for things like sepsis as a result of miscarriages, non-viable pregnancies, and Ectopic pregnancies. Ireland now permits abortions because a female doctor named Savita Hallappanaver developed sepsis during a miscarriage, and eventually died.

There is nothing “pro-life” about strict abortion laws.

https://www.irishamerica.com/2022/06/abortion-legal-ireland/

None of the people in the examples listed above is going to change their mind – so don’t try to convince them that they are wrong.

 Avoid them if you can. If they are friends or relatives, try to stay with neutral topics.

 After all, the Superbowl is not that far away – and that is no lie.

 


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