We underestimated him once. Let’s not do it again.
By Matt Taibbi
Rolling Stone (11/20/18)
When I first heard Donald Trump on the campaign trail, I thought, “What a joke!”
When I last heard Donald Trump on the campaign trail, I thought, “How long will it take for my children to learn Icelandic?”
I underestimated Donald Trump once. I’ll never do it again.
If Obama voters understood “change” as a genuine call to idealism, Trump voters understood it as a chair through a plate-glass window, the start of a riot.
Don’t think Democrats regaining the House has any bearing on the 2020 presidential run, which horrifyingly is beginning right about now. Campaign-trail reporters like myself (at least, those of us who don’t do the smart thing and off ourselves before the race starts) would do well to remember the mistake we made in 2015-2016.
In a media business geared toward reassuring demographics, audiences during the Trump presidency have been deluged with stories about his vulnerabilities, leaving the impression that his disastrous presidency has fatally wounded him as a politician. We’ve been treated to a succession of wish-fulfillment exercises disguised as news features — a stream of “last days of the Trump administration” pieces reappearing across two years of scandals. These have created the expectation that not only will Trump not be re-elected, he may be dragged out of the White House at any moment. But such cheery stories run counter to reality. By any rational standard, Trump in the past two years has made huge political gains. …
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If The Democrats Run A Weak Candidate, Trump Will Win a Second Term
Dems who won this month did so in spite of the old guard hacks of the Dem Party who tried to stop them.
By Michael Moore
Michael Moore’s Facebook Page (11/23/18)
Yesterday I began an “outside the box” brainstorming conversation here about who could run and WIN for President in 2020. There was a lot of pushback against any “celebrities” running. Do people still not understand how Trump outsmarted all of us? So some of you wouldn’t consider a Michelle Obama or an Oprah because tens of millions of people love them and might vote for them? If they would run as a progressive Democrat, you wouldn’t want them to do so because their crime is that they’re so HUGELY POPULAR? To say we should never vote for a famous person again because of “look what we got with Trump,” that’s like saying “because George W. Bush was a governor, the Dems should never run a governor.” No! This makes no sense.
The progressive Dems who won this month did so in spite of the old guard hacks of the Dem Party who tried to stop them. As Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez revealed in my film, 15 minutes after she filed her petitions to run for Congress, lawyers from the Democratic leadership entered the clerk’s office and demanded to see her petitions so they could go through the names and have her prevented from being on the ballot. Fortunately she was smarter than all of them. Let’s keep brainstorming, and remember— if we run some milktoast, moderate, boring, uncommunicative candidate who refuses to campaign in Wisconsin and Michigan, Trump will get a second term. PLEASE listen to me this time.