2 bullshit artists the public is done with Ultimately, Trump will lose in less than two weeks because most Americans are sick of him (some literally with COVID and some just of his rotten persona) and because we're in serious times and serious times call for... well, not a self-serving clown. His non-response to a pandemic that has sickened over eight-and-a-half million Americans and killed over 227,000 of us has made most voters sit up and take notice. But there are other factors that have played into what is shaping up to be the biggest repudiation of an incumbent president since Herbert Hoover. Some of those reasons are big-- like the unemployment number and Trump's inability to force McConnell and the Republican Senate to agree to a pandemic relief bill. Or how Trump's own campaign attorneys have contributed tens of thousands of dollars to the Biden campaign-- and just $50 to the Trump campaign. Others are, by themselves, barekly a blip on the radar-- like Trump's latest bankruptcy: his campaign. Mike Murphy is a well-known GOP political operative who worked for John McCain, Jeb Bush, Mitt Romney, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Lamar Alexander to name a few, In an interview with NBC News about how Trump wasted a billion dollars of his contributors' money yesterday, Murphy noted that the Trump campaign "spent their money on unnecessary overhead, lifestyles-of-the-rich-and-famous activity by the campaign staff and vanity ads way too early. You could literally have 10 monkeys with flamethrowers go after the money, and they wouldn’t have burned through it as stupidly.” Then there's the whole "strategy" behind Trump's desperate super-spreader rallies. side from the fact that he should eventually be charged with negligent homicide, the whole endeavor is a tragic joke. Nancy Cook gave away the punchline at Politico yesterday. With the Orange Blob yearning for "the magic of his 2016 upstart campaign: the multi-rally days, crisscrossing the country in a Trump-branded plane, the screaming crowds... he’s designed a 2016 redux in 2020 to recapture that spirit, casting off the constraints of a pandemic, his own presidency and even the advice of some of his own advisers."
Trump views rallies in battleground states as the linchpin of his closing argument, a means to excite his supporters and ensure they vote on Nov. 3. But many Republicans close to the White House, former senior administration officials and political advisers say the rallies are largely a way to keep the unscripted and undisciplined president occupied, since they do little to persuade new Trump voters. Rallies, they note, do not woo senior citizens, independents or suburban women, many of whom have moved away from the Trump ticket this election cycle. Most of Trump’s rallies are no longer televised nationally as they once were. And with coronavirus infection rates climbing, the Trump rallies often draw negative headlines in local news markets because the packed events defy public health guidelines, featuring few masks and almost no social distancing. After Trump’s recent rallies in Bemidji and Duluth, Minnesota-- both in counties the Trump campaign hopes to win-- local health authorities connected roughly 24 new Covid-19 cases to the rallies and protests outside of them. ...[T]he rallies offer the president his own form of soothing, along with a major ego boost in the middle of a tough campaign, said aides, advisers and allies. Trump feeds off the energy of a crowd regardless of whether the appearance makes the most political sense or can help him make gains against Biden in states like Florida, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Georgia. “Trump thinks, ‘I have the rallies to prove that I am the greatest. No one can attract crowds like me,’” said Tony Schwartz, the author and Trump critic who ghost wrote The Art of the Deal and just published a memoir titled Dealing with the Devil: My Mother, Trump and Me. “It is like taking a shot of testosterone to pump himself up, particularly now.”
One of the funniest, though, is how the planned October surprise-- a Trump-Putin-Giuliani con-job of a Ukraine scandal that is the defining moment in American politics on the right-wing fringe, but not taken seriously by any normal people-- went awry. The cooked-up evidence is likely to wind up on a rap sheet when Giuliani is eventually prosecuted. And it has already spun off an hilarious sub-plot: Giuliani the Trump-like pervert. Catherine Shoard exposed the latest Giuliani caper for Guardian readers. Borat is in the house-- and Rudy missed the chance to sneak out the back door! Giuliani's reputation of is already in tatters, to put it mildly, but Shoard contends that it "could be set for a further blow with the release of highly embarrassing footage in Sacha Baron Cohen’s follow-up to Borat." The film is being released Friday and in it, Rudy "is seen reaching into his trousers and apparently touching his genitals while reclining on a bed in the presence of the actor playing Borat’s daughter, who is posing as a TV journalist."
Following an obsequious interview for a fake conservative news programme, the pair retreat at her suggestion for a drink to the bedroom of a hotel suite, which is rigged with concealed cameras. After she removes his microphone, Giuliani, 76, can be seen lying back on the bed, fiddling with his untucked shirt and reaching into his trousers. They are then interrupted by Borat who runs in and says: “She’s 15. She’s too old for you.” ...Word of the incident first emerged on 7 July, when Giuliani called New York police to report the intrusion of an unusually-dressed man. “This guy comes running in, wearing a crazy, what I would say was a pink transgender outfit,” Giuliani told the New York Post. “It was a pink bikini, with lace, underneath a translucent mesh top, it looked absurd. He had the beard, bare legs, and wasn’t what I would call distractingly attractive. “This person comes in yelling and screaming, and I thought this must be a scam or a shakedown, so I reported it to the police. He then ran away,” Giuliani said. The police found no crime had been committed. Giuliani continued: “I only later realised it must have been Sacha Baron Cohen. I thought about all the people he previously fooled and I felt good about myself because he didn’t get me.” Viewers may be less convinced that Baron Cohen, reprising his role as the bumbling reporter Borat Sagdiyev, and Maria Bakalova, who plays his daughter, Tutar, had no success. In the film Borat is dispatched by the Kazakh government back to the US to present a bribe to an ally of Donald Trump in order to ingratiate his country with the administration. After the monkey earmarked for the gift is indisposed, Borat’s supposedly underage offspring becomes the replacement present. Even before he reaches into his trousers, Giuliani does not appear to acquit himself especially impressively during the encounter. Flattered and flirtatious, he drinks scotch, coughs, fails to socially distance and claims Trump’s speedy actions in the spring saved a million Americans from dying of Covid. He also agrees-- in theory at least-- to eat a bat with his interviewer. Giuliani has become a key figure in the late stages of the US presidential election after obtaining a laptop hard drive purportedly belonging to Hunter Biden and left at a repair shop in Delaware. His efforts to unearth political dirt on Trump’s rival for the White House mean that the film’s mortifying footage can be seen as an attempt to undermine Giuliani’s credibility. The film, released on Amazon Prime less than a fortnight before the election, ends with an instruction for viewers to vote.
