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The Biden Administration and All Things Politics

trump is a man of the people. As long as those people have lots and lots of money to give to him.
finance.yahoo.com

Trump’s businesses are raking in millions of dollars from Republican political campaigns – including his own

Republican candidates and political groups are on track to spend more on Trump’s businesses this year than any year since 2016, federal campaign finance data shows.
finance.yahoo.com finance.yahoo.com

Late last year, former President Donald Trump announced his endorsement of car dealership owner Bernie Moreno for Ohio’s Senate seat – elevating an untested candidate who’d never held public office over several other more prominent Republicans.
Two days later, Moreno’s campaign spent about $17,000 at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort, and then followed up by spending an additional $79,000 the next month – making him one of the Florida club’s top political spenders.

He wasn’t alone. With glitzy Mar-a-Lago fundraisers, stays at Trump’s hotels, and flights on the former president’s private jet, Republican candidates and political groups are on track to spend more on Trump’s businesses this year than any year since 2016.

Trump himself has been the biggest spender, both this year and over the last decade. Between his three presidential campaigns, Trump and associated political groups have funneled more than $28 million in campaign donations to his businesses – helping convert the enthusiasm of his political supporters into personal profit.

Other Republicans have followed suit, spending millions at Trump’s properties in an apparent attempt to curry favor with the former president and signal their allegiance to him to GOP voters.

Some of the candidates who’ve spent the most money on Trump businesses in recent years have been new politicians who won the former president’s endorsement despite a lack of past electoral experience or success, including Moreno, former Georgia Senate candidate Herschel Walker and Arizona Senate hopeful Kari Lake.

“He’s clearly now in complete control of the Republican Party,” said Daniel Weiner, director of the Brennan Center’s Elections and Government Program. “Patronizing his businesses has become one of the accepted ways that candidates and public officials express their loyalty to the party’s leader.”

Some of the biggest spenders are politicians who have never held elected office but received key early endorsements from the former president that helped their campaigns win or avoid competitive primaries.
 
Some comments about RFK decision:

"Kennedy said that he’s suspending his campaign but remaining on the ballot in several states. He also said he was offered a role in a potential second Trump administration." He's backing Trump, and then trying to split the Democratic vote. If that's the case the Democratic base doesn't need him.

The GOP has been funding him from the start...
His SuperPAC was literally 90 percent funded by donors who also gave huge amounts to Trump this election cycle.
Citizens united needs to be reversed.

05/20/2024 06:39 PM EDT

The super PAC backing Robert F. Kennedy Jr. got another cash infusion from GOP megadonor Tim Mellon in April, according to the latest campaign finance report.

Mellon is the largest GOP donor this campaign cycle to date, and has now given the American Values 2024 super PAC backing Kennedy’s long-shot independent presidential bid $25 million.

His $5 million donation also made up the vast majority of the super PAC’s haul last month, which totaled $6.1 million.
Click to expand...


So let me get this straight. He was was willing to endorse either candidate, as long as they offered him a position in their administration. How honorable.

Yep
Even his own family has said that his decision today is a betrayal of the values that our father and family hold dear. They said it is a sad ending to a sad story.
They also endorsed Harris/Walz

Let's all remember that earlier this week, he offered to endorse Harris as long as she promised him a Cabinet seat. She said, "No thank you".

Well RFK Jr basically sold his campaign to the highest bidder. I applaud Dems for not playing this game and think this simply shows Republicans lack the moral character to be leaders. It's all transactional with them.


He doesn't care who he endorses as long as he gets a job.

The Kennedy family released a statement disavowing his endorsement of Trump.

Not shocked, just more weirdness. And remember, this guy will get an important job under a Trump admin.

Doesnt matter, all 3097 people who supported him wont make a difference.

So, a rich guy from a billionaire family throwing his support behind another privileged billionaire - hmm, maybe the 30,000 page tax code needs some more loopholes for billionaires, eh? We need reform, and we need to take power back from the ultra rich political donor class so that the people in public office are working for the needs of hard working Americans making the median wage of $22 per hour. I say no to kleptocrats!

Unfortunately, RFKJr was offerings his endorsement to whoever would guarantee him a position in their administration. Dems turned him down and trump is stringing him along with empty promises and will drop him when he is no longer useful like he does everyone else. When your endorsement is sold to the highest bidder, it has no real value.

Too bad we won't know what Trump bribed him with unless Trump wins. Harris, to her credit, refused to pay to play with this peanut. This shows Trump's desperation.

He called Trump “ barely human “ and yet he endorses him. This says a lot about his character and his willingness to put country over self ambition. Good riddance!

To perfectly counteract his effect, I too will immediately suspend my campaign and endorse Harris/Walz, and hope my 2 voters do likewise.

Harris didn't give him a seat at her table so he endorsed Trump. His word and endorsement means nothing. It's empty.

RFK JR approached both candidates willing to sell his endorsement. Only one has low enough morals to take him up on that offer.
 
RFK had always endorsed Trump. It’s why he was running. He only quit the race and officially endorsed Trump because he learned that his campaign was hurting Trump more than Harris.
 
fishonjazz said:
Some comments about RFK decision:

"Kennedy said that he’s suspending his campaign but remaining on the ballot in several states. He also said he was offered a role in a potential second Trump administration." He's backing Trump, and then trying to split the Democratic vote. If that's the case the Democratic base doesn't need him.

The GOP has been funding him from the start...
His SuperPAC was literally 90 percent funded by donors who also gave huge amounts to Trump this election cycle.
Citizens united needs to be reversed.




So let me get this straight. He was was willing to endorse either candidate, as long as they offered him a position in their administration. How honorable.

Yep
Even his own family has said that his decision today is a betrayal of the values that our father and family hold dear. They said it is a sad ending to a sad story.
They also endorsed Harris/Walz

Let's all remember that earlier this week, he offered to endorse Harris as long as she promised him a Cabinet seat. She said, "No thank you".

Well RFK Jr basically sold his campaign to the highest bidder. I applaud Dems for not playing this game and think this simply shows Republicans lack the moral character to be leaders. It's all transactional with them.


He doesn't care who he endorses as long as he gets a job.

The Kennedy family released a statement disavowing his endorsement of Trump.

Not shocked, just more weirdness. And remember, this guy will get an important job under a Trump admin.

Doesnt matter, all 3097 people who supported him wont make a difference.

So, a rich guy from a billionaire family throwing his support behind another privileged billionaire - hmm, maybe the 30,000 page tax code needs some more loopholes for billionaires, eh? We need reform, and we need to take power back from the ultra rich political donor class so that the people in public office are working for the needs of hard working Americans making the median wage of $22 per hour. I say no to kleptocrats!

Unfortunately, RFKJr was offerings his endorsement to whoever would guarantee him a position in their administration. Dems turned him down and trump is stringing him along with empty promises and will drop him when he is no longer useful like he does everyone else. When your endorsement is sold to the highest bidder, it has no real value.

Too bad we won't know what Trump bribed him with unless Trump wins. Harris, to her credit, refused to pay to play with this peanut. This shows Trump's desperation.

He called Trump “ barely human “ and yet he endorses him. This says a lot about his character and his willingness to put country over self ambition. Good riddance!

To perfectly counteract his effect, I too will immediately suspend my campaign and endorse Harris/Walz, and hope my 2 voters do likewise.

Harris didn't give him a seat at her table so he endorsed Trump. His word and endorsement means nothing. It's empty.

RFK JR approached both candidates willing to sell his endorsement. Only one has low enough morals to take him up on that offer.
Click to expand...
As the Secretary of Health and Human Services under Trump, he can help save America’s children from the deadly scourge of vaccines and the evil medical science that promotes harming children that way. He’ll be able to put a stop to it, perhaps? Maybe Trump can appoint brainless idiots to all his cabinet posts.
 
Of five false conspiracy theories that Kennedy has promoted all five generated far more agreement among Trump voters than among Harris voters: that COVID-19 vaccines are more harmful than the virus itself (55% vs. 8%); that climate change is being used as a pretext for imposing totalitarian controls on society (68% vs. 7%); that Prozac and other antidepressants have led to a rise in school shootings (35% vs. 12%); that vaccines cause autism (25% vs. 5%); and that chemicals in the water supply could turn children transgender (8% vs. 4%).

So it’s no surprise that when poll respondents are asked how they would vote both with and without Kennedy on the ballot, about 55% of Kennedy’s remaining voters break for Trump, on average, and about 45% break for Harris.
That split means Kennedy's exit probably won’t affect the election in a dramatic way. If Trump were to immediately gain 55% of Kennedy’s remaining voters, explains data journalist Nate Silver, Harris’s average national lead would shrink from 2.5% to 2.1%.

In reality, the effect might be even smaller. Disaffected by definition, Republican-leaning Kennedy voters have had ample opportunity to support Trump in the past; instead of swinging his way, they could back a different third-party candidate, like Libertarian Chase Oliver. Or they could stay home in November.

Still, small margins in key swing states have decided both of Trump’s previous presidential elections. That could happen again — and if it does, Kennedy’s decision this week could make a (minor) difference.
 

"Until now, Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster has held his fire about his stint in the Trump White House. McMaster served with distinction in key American conflicts of the past decades: the Gulf War, the Iraq War, and the Afghan War, but as McMaster recounts in his new book, “At War with Ourselves: My Tour of Duty in the Trump White House,” in some ways, his most challenging tour as a soldier was his last one: serving as the national security adviser to a notoriously mercurial president.


In his blistering, insightful account of his time in the Trump White House, McMaster describes meetings in the Oval Office as “exercises in competitive sycophancy” during which Trump’s advisers would flatter the president by saying stuff like, “Your instincts are always right” or, “No one has ever been treated so badly by the press.” Meanwhile, Trump would say “outlandish” things like, “Why don’t we just bomb the drugs?” in Mexico or, “Why don’t we take out the whole North Korean Army during one of their parades?”

McMaster’s book, which focuses on Trump’s tenure as commander-in-chief, comes at a particularly timely moment, just as many Americans start to really consider whether Trump or Vice President Kamala Harris would make a better commander-in-chief.

In her acceptance speech for her nomination to the presidency at the Democratic National Convention on Thursday, Harris spent some of her speech trying to demonstrate her national security credentials. She talked, for instance, about the war in Gaza, saying that as president she would stand firm on the US alliance with Israel to “ensure Israel has the ability to defend itself.” Harris also said that the Palestinians have “their right to dignity, security, freedom, and self-determination.” With this speech, Harris was trying to thread a delicate needle between Americans who strongly oppose the war — many of them in her own party — and those who back Israel wholeheartedly.

McMaster provides unique detail on Trump’s approach to foreign policy and — similarly to his successor in the national security adviser role, former United Nations Ambassador John Bolton, who wrote scathingly about the former president in a book published in 2020 — his account is likely to do little to reassure US allies about the prospects of a second Trump term.

In addition to being a highly decorated officer, McMaster also has a doctorate in history. His first book, “Dereliction of Duty: Johnson, McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies That Led to Vietnam,” recounted the dismal history of how the top American generals told President Lyndon Johnson only what they thought he wanted to hear about the Vietnam War, rather than giving him their best military advice about how the conflict was going and the full range of policy options that were open to their commander in chief.

McMaster wasn’t going to make the same mistake after Trump tapped him to be his national security adviser in February 2017. He writes, “I knew that to fulfill my duty, I would have to tell Trump what he didn’t want to hear.” This helps explain why McMaster lasted just over a year in the job. (Disclosure: I have known McMaster professionally since 2010, when he ran an anti-corruption task force in Afghanistan).

One subject was particularly neuralgic for Trump: Russia. McMaster astutely observes, “I wished that Trump could separate the issue of Russian election meddling from the legitimacy of his presidency. He could have said, ‘Yes, they attacked the election. But Russia doesn’t care who wins our elections. What they want to do is pit Americans against one another… .’ McMaster writes that the “fragility” of Trump’s ego and “his deep sense of aggrievement” would never allow him to make this kind of distinction.


McMaster felt it was his “duty” to point out to Trump that Russian President Vladimir Putin “was not and would never be Trump’s friend.” McMaster warned Trump that Putin is “the best liar in the world” and would try to “play” Trump to get what he wanted and manipulate him with “ambiguous promises of a ‘better relationship.’”

The final straw that ended McMaster’s tenure in the White House seems to have been when he publicly said on February 17, 2018, at the Munich Security Forum — the annual gathering of top Western foreign policy officials — that the indictment of a group of Russian intelligence officers for their interference in the 2016 US presidential election was “inconvertible” evidence of Russian meddling in that election.

Trump soon tweeted, “General McMaster forgot to say that the results of the 2016 election were not impacted or changed by the Russians….” Once the commander-in-chief started publicly castigating him on Twitter, it was obvious that McMaster would not be long for the White House.


McMaster’s account of the Trump team is not pretty. Steve Bannon, Trump’s “chief strategist” early in the presidency, is portrayed as a “fawning court jester” who played “on Trump’s anxiety and sense of beleaguerment … with stories, mainly about who was out to get him and what he could do to ‘counterpunch.’”

Meanwhile, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Secretary of Defense James Mattis were often at odds with Trump, McMaster says. Tillerson, who had previously run Exxon, is portrayed as inaccessible to top officials in Trump’s administration, while Mattis is described as an obstructionist. McMaster writes that Tillerson and Mattis viewed Trump as “dangerous” and seemed to construe their roles as if “Trump was an emergency and that anyone abetting him was an adversary.” Trump himself also contributed to the dysfunction: “He enjoyed and contributed to interpersonal drama in the White House and across the administration.”

Also, McMaster wasn’t on the same page as his boss on some key foreign policy issues. McMaster enumerates those issues as “allies, authoritarians, and Afghanistan.” Trump denigrated American allies whom he saw as “freeloaders”; he embraced authoritarian rulers who McMaster despised; and while Trump largely believed Afghanistan was a lost cause, McMaster thought there was a path forward for the country, and he pushed for a more significant US commitment there, while simultaneously blocking a cockamamie notion by Bannon to turn the conduct of the Afghan war over to American private military contractors.

McMaster does give Trump his due for some sound foreign policy decisions. Unlike President Barack Obama, who had dithered over his own “red line” when the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad used chemical weapons against civilians, Trump acted decisively when Assad used chemical weapons in early April 2017, killing dozens of civilians. Trump responded by ordering airstrikes against the Syrian airbase where the chemical weapons strike was launched from.

And on the most important foreign policy issue, China, McMaster concluded that Trump made the right decisions. McMaster oversaw Trump’s 2017 national security strategy document, which took a tougher public stance on China than previous administrations, calling the Chinese out for stealing US intellectual property every year valued at “hundreds of billions of dollars” while noting that China “is building the most capable and well-funded military in the world, after our own.” Briefed by McMaster on the new national security strategy, Trump responded, “This is fantastic,” and asked for similar language in his upcoming speeches.

The assault on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, seems to have marked a decisive break from Trump for McMaster, who, in a previous book published in 2020, “Battlegrounds: The Fight to Defend the Free World,” had avoided direct criticisms of his former commander in chief.

By contrast, in his new book, McMaster writes that in the aftermath of his 2020 electoral defeat, Trump’s “ego and love of self… drove him to abandon his oath to ‘support and defend the Constitution,’ a president’s highest obligation.” McMaster adds, “The attack on the US Capitol stained our image, and it will take a long-term effort to restore what Donald Trump, his enablers, and those they encouraged took from us that day.”

So, what might this all mean for a second Trump term, if there is one? The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 outlines plans for Trump loyalists to replace numerous career foreign service officers and intelligence officials. Those loyalists would likely tell Trump precisely what he wants to hear rather than give the president their unvarnished assessments of the national security challenges facing the US, which is the proper role of American national security professionals.

Trump has tried to distance himself from Project 2025, but the fact that CNN found at least 140 people who worked for Trump are involved in the project speaks for itself. And in a second Trump term, there would likely be no McMasters to tell Trump what he doesn’t want to hear; in fact, that’s kind of the whole point of Project 2025, which would replace as many as 50,000 workers in the federal government with Trump loyalists."


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