Trump did a 90 minute town-hall event on ABC-TV Tuesday night in Pennsylvania. It went so badly that on Fox Laura Ingraham called it "an ambush." Sure, letting Trump speak off the cuff is always tantamount to an ambush from a right-wing perspective. He's a doofus and he sounds like a doofus. Example, he said he has absolutely no regrets for anything he's done in handling the pandemic and wouldn't have done anything differently. Fine, that alone could lose him the election. This week an intense state by state COVID survey was released by Harvard, Rutgers, Northwestern University and Northeastern University. Overall, it shows most Republican governors continuing to lose support because of the way they've handled the pandemic-- exceptions being the anti-Trump Republican governors in Vermont, Maryland, Ohio and Massachusetts.There is not one state where over 50% of voters (as of late August) approved of Trump's handling of the pandemic! Even the solid red states with large zombie Trump electorates most people do not approve of his pandemic approach. There were the 10 states that gave Trump his biggest margins in 2016 along with his pandemic approval today:
• West Virginia (68.50%)-- 48% pandemic approval• Wyoming (67.40%)-- 46% pandemic approval• Oklahoma (65.32%)-- 41% pandemic approval• North Dakota (62.96%)-- 38% pandemic approval• Kentucky (62.52%)-- 42% pandemic approval• Alabama (62.08%)-- 46% pandemic approval• South Dakota (61.53%)-- 36% pandemic approval• Tennessee (60.72%)-- 45% pandemic approval• Arkansas (60.57%)-- 44% pandemic approval• Idaho (59.26%)-- 49% pandemic approval
Those are the uncontested states that automatically wind up in Trump's column no matter how disastrous the election is for him. But what about the swing states? These are the 10 states Trump won in 2016 that he's most likely to lose in November-- along with his approval numbers for his handling of the pandemic:
• Michigan- 32% pandemic approval• Wisconsin- 29% pandemic approval• Pennsylvania- 37% pandemic approval• Arizona- 31% pandemic approval• North Carolina- 34% pandemic approval• Georgia- 35% pandemic approval• Texas- 30% pandemic approval• Montana- 32% pandemic approval• Ohio- 36% pandemic approval• Iowa- 34% pandemic approval
And the Trumpist governors who adhered most closely to Trump's partisan and ideological anti-Science approach to dealing with the pandemic are, according to the survey, are seeing their political careers evaporate. These are their approval numbers in late April to ---> late August. The Trumpist mass murderers:
• Kim Reynolds (R-IA)- 52 ---> 26%• Rick DeSantis (R-FL)- 46 ---> 29%• Doug Ducey (R-AZ)- 56 ---> 30%• Brad Little (R-ID)- 64 ---> 34%• Tate Reeves (R-MS)- 56 ---> 34%• Kevin Stitt (R-OK)- 51 ---> 35%• Greg Abbott (R-TX)- 61 ---> 35%• Brian Kemp (R-GA)- 53 ---> 36%• Henry McMaster (R-SC)- 51 ---> 36%• Mike Parson (R-MO)- 60 ---> 39%• Pete Ricketts (R-NE)- 63 ---> 40%• Bill Lee (R-TN)- 62 ---> 40%• Asa Hutchinson (R-AR)- 65 ---> 43%• Kay Ivey (R-AL)- 60 ---> 44%• Gary Herbert (R-UT)- 60 ---> 44%
Your president: "It would go away without the vaccine… but it’s going to go away a lot faster with it... with time, it goes away; you’ll develop like a herd mentality. It’s going to be herd-developed, and that’s going to happen, that will all happen... But I really believe we’re rounding the corner." His proof: "a lot of people agree with me." There were over 52,000 cases of COVID-19 reported-- a huge spike-- the same day as Trump predicted "herd mentality" would solve everything.One of my own favorite moment's was Trump blaming Biden for not instituting a national mask mandate. One of the undecided voters asked Señor Trumpanzee why he still hasn’t instituted a national mask mandate and why he has largely refused to wear masks himself even though his top public health officials urged the public to do just that. His response was classic Trumpanzee: "Well, I do wear them when I have to and when I’m in hospitals and other locations. But I will say this. They said at the Democrat convention they’re going to do a national mandate. They never did it, because they’ve checked out and they didn’t do it. And a good question is, you ask why Joe Biden-- they said we’re going to do a national mandate on masks." Biden responded on Twitter:Trump added that "a lot of people think the masks are not good." As Trump was speaking, the U.S. death toll from the Trump Pandemic crossed the 200,000 mark and now stands at 201,193. The 10 states with the most active cases right now-- in other words, states where the death tolls will be highest between now and November 3rd-- include three swing states that could be deadly to Trump's reelection hopes if votes in any of them abandon him:
• Florida- 484,263• California- 371,062• Georgia- 228,013• Arizona- 171,441• Virginia- 117,026• Maryland- 106,747• Missouri- 91,039• Alabama- 84,472• Texas- 83,477• South Carolina- 68,630
On CNN Wednesday morning, fact Checker Daniel Dale summed up Trump's town-hall performance very accurately: A firehouse of lying.