June 21, 2018 at 6:05 am EDT By Taegan Goddard

Washington Post: “Throughout his public life, Trump has pitted one group of Americans against another and inserted himself in racial controversies… As he leads his party into the potentially perilous midterm election five months from now, Trump is trying to make cultural identity a central theme of the Republican pitch to voters. His messages have been amplified by his surrogates as well as by friendly broadcasters on Fox News Channel and elsewhere in the conservative media.”

“Trump is calculating that by playing to people’s fears and anxieties he can maximize turnout among hard-core supporters to counterbalance evident enthusiasm on the Democratic side. Fueling Trump’s approach, advisers say, is an unremitting fear of his own: that his base could abandon him if he is deemed too weak on immigration, which was a centerpiece of his 2016 campaign.”

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https://politicalwire.com/2018/06/21/stoking-racial-tensions-is-trumps-survival-strategy/

By Dan Merica, CNN

Updated 1131 GMT (1931 HKT) June 20, 2018

Minneapolis (CNN)President Donald Trump is ramping up his political travel ahead of the midterm elections, eying November as the most potent referendum on his presidency even as he faces widespread condemnation over his administration's "zero tolerance" immigration policy.

Trump's focus on the midterms, which Republicans believe will come with an invigoration of the President's loyal base, is welcome news for some Republicans focused on keeping their majority in the House. But those same operatives admit it also comes with significant political risk: Trump's presence fires up Democrats, puts every race in a national context that can be detrimental to Republican candidates and risks knocking campaigns off message by forcing them to take on sticky issues like immigration.

As Trump has increased his focus on the midterms, he has made clear this week that he plans to make immigration central to his messaging this campaign season. Revisiting the anti-immigrant attacks that animated much of his 2016 campaign, Trump pledged that the United States "will not be a migrant camp and it will not be a refugee holding facility" and argued that undocumented immigrants "pour into and infest our Country."
"Democrats are the problem," he said stridently on Tuesday.

Armed with that messaging, Trump will embark on a week-long sprint that will take him to five key states -- Minnesota, Nevada, South Carolina, North Dakota and Wisconsin.

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https://edition.cnn.com/2018/06/20/politics/trump-midterms-travel-ramps-up/index.html

June 21, 2018 at 7:09 am EDT By Taegan Goddard

Playbook: “This package of bills could easily go down. Meadows and his group control the House of Representatives on most days, and no matter what the leadership or Trump do, that’s the reality. If these bills fail, GOP leadership will take solace in the fact that they killed the bipartisan effort to vote on the Dream Act — a bad vote for many Republicans, they say — and gave the vulnerable members an immigration vote they needed.”

“President Trump’s ability to sway lawmakers is up for a test on the House floor today. For reasons unclear to many in the White House and some in leadership, Trump got involved in the House’s immigration process.”

“But sure… It would be embarrassing if the president is unable to corral his party around an immigration bill.”

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https://politicalwire.com/2018/06/21/house-will-vote-on-immigration-bills-today/

Source: Reuters




JUNE 20, 2018 / 10:15 PM / UPDATED 6 HOURS AGO

Reuters Staff

DULUTH, Minn. (Reuters) - President Donald Trump said North Korea had returned on Wednesday the remains of 200 U.S. troops missing from the Korean War, although there was no official confirmation of the move from military authorities.

“We got back our great fallen heroes, the remains sent back today, already 200 got sent back,” Trump told a crowd of supporters during a rally in Duluth, Minnesota.

U.S. officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said on Tuesday that in coming days North Korea would hand over a “sizeable number” of remains to United Nations Command in South Korea, and they would then be transferred to Hickam Air Force Base in Hawaii.

Trump met with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un at a historic summit last week in Singapore, and said in a news conference afterwards that Kim had agreed to return the remains of U.S. soldiers.





Read more: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-northkorea-usa-remains/trump-says-north-korea-has-returned-remains-of-200-u-s-war-dead-idUSKBN1JH05L

I'm just posting two links to articles about Fonda's disgusting comments:


Actor Peter Fonda Says Barron Trump Should Be ‘Ripped’ From Mother ‘Put in a Cage With Pedophiles'
https://www.mediaite.com/tv/actor-peter-fonda-says-barron-trump-should-be-ripped-from-mother-and-put-in-a-cage-with-pedophiles/


Melania Trump Called the Secret Service Over Peter Fonda’s Threatening Tweet About Barron
https://lawandcrime.com/high-profile/melania-trump-called-the-secret-service-over-peter-fondas-threatening-tweets-about-barron/

Judge Napolitano on Political Fallout From Migrant Family Separation: The ‘Democrats Have Captured the Day’

by Ken Meyer | 1:13 pm, June 20th, 2018

As Donald Trump seems about ready to reverse on his administration’s policy on the southern border, Judge Andrew Napolitano says the president seems to have lost the politcal battle on this issue.

The Fox News senior judicial analyst was today’s #OneLuckyGuy on Outnumbered, and his conversation with the ladies gravitated around the long-term connotations of Trump’s policy separating migrant children from their families. As Napolitano talked about how Trump and his political opponents have used the migrant situation as a negotiation point, he said that the White House’s current trajectory shows that they’ve realized the current controversy is too politically damaging to sustain.



As the discussion turned to what Congress needs to do to follow up on Trump’s executive actions here, Napolitano said POTUS will defuse the worst of the blowback to himself by showing “compassion” at this moment. He particularly expressed support for the bill Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) proposed earlier this week to change the immigration system and keep families together.

more
https://www.mediaite.com/tv/judge-napolitano-on-political-fallout-from-migrant-family-separation-the-democrats-have-captured-the-day/

Source: Yahoo News



David Knowles, Yahoo News•June 20, 2018

American democracy still has a glaring propaganda problem. Automated bot accounts that spread disinformation and sowed disgust and confusion among voters during the 2016 presidential election are poised to wreak havoc again in this year’s midterm elections, according to a leading expert.

“I think that it’s too late for 2018. I hate to be a pessimist,” Samuel Woolley, research director of the DigIntel Lab at the Institute for the Future, said in the inaugural episode of Yahoo News’ “Bots & Ballots” podcast. “It’s good that we’re seeing some action around this stuff, but I don’t think we have our arms around the problem in any significant way.”

Woolley has studied the rise of bot accounts and the “fake news” they generate for the past six years, focusing on how that propaganda affects U.S. elections.

“I can conclusively say that bots changed the flow of information during the 2016 election — yeah, absolutely, a hundred percent,” Woolley said. “These bots had an absolute effect upon the conversation in American politics. When you have the president of the United States retweeting or re-messaging or interacting with bot accounts, that affects public opinion. That affects communication.”



Read more: https://www.yahoo.com/news/expert-bots-poised-wreak-havoc-2018-midterm-elections-090048965.html

A growing urban-rural divide has put the state on the president’s radar.

By CHRISTOPHER CADELAGO and DAVID SIDERS 06/20/2018 05:09 AM EDT

The last Republican presidential candidate to win Minnesota was Richard Nixon nearly a half century ago, sweeping the famously populist state on his way to one of the largest landslides in U.S. history.

Now, President Donald Trump, who finished fewer than 45,000 votes behind Hillary Clinton in Minnesota despite a threadbare effort that saw him visit the state only once, is intent on mining an urban-rural divide to capture the state in 2020.

It’s an ambitious expansion of the electoral map but Trump last summer confided to aides and state GOP officials in an Oval Office meeting that he regretted not campaigning more aggressively in Minnesota, suggesting he would have won had he held a second rally there. In the months since, Republicans have come to see the state Democratic Party’s increasing embrace of liberal candidates and policies as an opening for them to attract voters from rural, outstate districts who may be pro-union, and support abortion or gun rights.

“Whereas a lot of people around the country look at 2016 as, ‘wow, we really accomplished something,’” said Chris Hupke, a 2016 senior adviser to Trump in Minnesota, “(party activists) are viewing it as just the beginning.”

The latest sign of Trump’s growing optimism to turn the state red comes tonight, when he travels to Duluth to rally supporters of Republican Pete Stauber in one of the nation’s most competitive congressional districts. Organizers moved the event to a larger venue as demand for tickets soared, after the president’s campaign signaled it would make a serious play for the state in 2020.

more
https://www.politico.com/story/2018/06/20/trump-2020-minnesota-election-655488

The family separation controversy is sparking tensions inside the White House and among Trump’s allies.

By ANDREW RESTUCCIA 06/20/2018 09:32 AM EDT

The furor over President Donald Trump’s decision to forcibly separate thousands of migrant children from their families reached new heights on Wednesday after news broke that the administration is placing babies and toddlers in “tender age” shelters.

The revelation, published late Tuesday night by the Associated Press, capped a grim 24 hours that stood out as a low point even for a White House that long ago grew accustomed to operating in a perpetual state of crisis.

With cable news flashing images of migrant children in cages and lawmakers’ offices facing a flood of angry phone calls, the president and his allies looked increasingly disconnected from the uproar over the policy, which a recent poll showed was deeply unpopular across the country.

On Tuesday night, shortly before the AP story broke, Trump attended a $100,000-plus-per-person fundraiser at his hotel in Washington, D.C. Before that, he met with House Republicans at the Capitol, where he sounded off on everything from trade to fighter jets, while only briefly acknowledging the outcry over the situation at the U.S.-Mexico border.

more
https://www.politico.com/story/2018/06/20/im-ashamed-of-what-theyre-doing-backlash-grows-for-trump-and-his-aides-655498

Source: Politico




By LOUIS NELSON 06/20/2018 10:49 AM EDT

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo marked World Refugee Day Wednesday with a statement “commemorating the strength, courage, and resilience of millions of refugees worldwide” as the Trump administration continues to defend its policy of separating children from parents who bring them into the U.S. illegally seeking asylum.

“We join the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and our international partners in commemorating the strength, courage, and resilience of millions of refugees worldwide who have been forced to flee their homes due to persecution and conflict,” Pompeo said in a statement. “The United States will continue to be a world leader in providing humanitarian assistance and working to forge political solutions to the underlying conflicts that drive displacement.”

The secretary of state’s statement comes amid boiling outrage directed at the Trump administration over its policy of prosecuting everyone who enters the U.S. illegally, a practice that has resulted in thousands of children being separated from their parents after crossing into the U.S. Outcry has risen in recent days, fueled by images of children kept in cages and audio of them crying and wailing after being separated from their parents.

Many of those seeking asylum in the U.S. are migrants from Central American nations where violence is nearly ubiquitous and criminal gangs exert significant control.

Read more: https://www.politico.com/story/2018/06/20/pompeo-world-refugee-day-655500