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George Conway

Conway: When Trump Threatens America With A Bloodbath, It's No 'Hoax'

Donald Trump and his allies devoted the bulk of their energy Monday to cleaning up his promise during a weekend rally that if he doesn't win the presidency in November, "it’s going to be a bloodbath for the country."

Trump made the remark—which has attracted a gusher of scrutiny—while stumping for Republican Senate candidate Bernie Moreno on Saturday in Dayton, Ohio. Trump had been discussing the auto industry, but when he got to the gory “bloodbath” line, he hammered it repeatedly as the notion that the auto industry would flounder if he lost in November receded into the background.

“Now if I don’t get elected, it’s going to be a bloodbath for the whole—that's going to be the least of it—it's going to be a bloodbath for the country. That'll be the least of it," Trump said, adding, "But they're not going to sell those cars."

In other words, it was a classic Trump conflation of themes, obscuring his true intent.

The media, which usually misses the big picture on all things Trump, took his comments both literally and seriously.

One New York Times headline said Trump "Predicts a 'Blood Bath' if He Loses."

Trump allies, no doubt realizing the damage done by the viral comments, began referring to mainstream coverage as the "bloodbath hoax." Trump also took to Truth Social, his social media platform, with a series of posts and reposts claiming he was merely talking about cars and that the "Fake News Media" was taking him out of context.

But the most pertinent context came via George Conway, a noted anti-Trumper and soon-to-be ex-husband of Trump ally Kellyanne Conway. He tweeted out a thread that included this observation: "I’m willing to assume for the sake of argument that he was referring to cars. And it makes no difference to his malicious intent or to the danger he and his rhetoric poses.

"What matters," Conway continued, "is that he consistently uses apocalyptic and violent language in an indiscriminate fashion as a result of his psychopathy and correlative authoritarian tendencies, and because he’s just plain evil."

Trump famously kicked off his presidency in 2017 with an inaugural address decrying "American carnage." And during his 2024 bid, he has already leaned heavily into envisioning the catastrophic aftermath for the country if he loses, promising an economic crash "like you wouldn't believe" and bedlam in the country if his criminal indictments kneecap his electoral chances.

Trump is willing chaos and violence into existence if he loses precisely because he needs that apocalyptic threat to assert that he alone can fix it.

Indeed, later in Trump's weekend rally, he forewarned, “If this election isn’t won, I’m not sure that you’ll ever have another election in this country.”

When Trump says “bloodbath,” it's because he's out for blood, plain and simple. The apocalyptic promise of violence and carnage is essential to his pitch, a self-fulfilling prophecy spoken into action.

As MSNBC's Joe Scarborough said Monday, "We are not stupid. Americans aren't stupid. [Trump] was talking about a bloodbath. Sometimes a bloodbath means a bloodbath. And when he finishes by saying, 'That's just going to be the least of it.' Seriously … we're not stupid."

The Biden campaign got the contextualization right, dropping a new ad Monday afternoon reprising Trump's entire body of work.

The spot opened on Trump's weekend remarks, then took viewers through a tour of Trump's greatest end-of-times hits, including his 2017 reference to the Charlottesville neo-Nazi marchers as "very fine people," his 2020 order to the white nationalist Proud Boys to "stand by," and his unabashed glorification of the Jan. 6 rioters.

That's the context, folks. When Trump promises a bloodbath for the country, he means it.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

Kevin McCarthy

Kevin McCarthy Is Taking Revenge -- On House Republicans

From primary challenges to getting blackballed from House Republicans caucuses, the eight Republicans who ousted former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy are feeling the blowback. His allies—and he has many of them—are making sure of that.

The Republican Main Street Caucus and Republican Governance Group have quietly booted Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina, whose attention-getting stunts seem to be wearing thin with her colleagues. “She really wants to be a caucus of one. So we obliged her,” one House Republican told CNN.

Mace is facing a serious primary challenger, as is Rep. Bob Good of Virginia, the new chair of the Freedom Caucus and one of the anti-McCarthy eight. “A well-connected GOP outside spending group is planning to play in the [primary] races,” CNN reports, and McCarthy is likely to be directly involved on behalf of the challengers as well.

Where the real hammer is falling on this eight is in their fundraising. Others, including Reps. Tim Burchett of Tennessee, Andy Biggs of Arizona, and Eli Crane, acknowledge that the big donors aren’t taking their calls anymore. Burchett told CNN’s Manu Raju that he “absolutely” had seen his donations dry up. “Some very wealthy folks, and they’ve been very kind to me in the past,” Burchett said of donors who had dropped him. “And I hope that we can mend the fences,” he added. Good luck to him on that one.

Crane of Arizona told Raju he was feeling a fundraising hit. “Yeah, that’s definitely a reality,” he said. “And I think anybody that participated in that knew that going forward.”

He’s right. They knew what they were doing, and they asked for this. Booting McCarthy meant ousting their most effective fundraiser. Ousting him meant pissing off all those big donors he’s been cultivating all these years. They’re friends of Kev, and they are happy to help him get his revenge.

Speaking of revenge, that’s what the ouster was all about. The spearhead of the chaos, Rep. Matt Gaetz, admitted it to a colleague in private correspondence obtained by The Daily Beast. According to the outlet, “Gaetz indicated to a friend that his effort to undercut, isolate, and ultimately remove McCarthy was, indeed, payback for the ethics probe.” That would be the House Ethics Committee investigation into Gaetz for alleged sex crimes, drug use, and campaign finance violations, to name a few.

Do any of Gaetz’s pals blame him for putting them in this position? Of course not. “I’m too busy working for the Lowcountry and helping elect President Trump to worry about Kevin McCarthy’s puppet,” Mace told CNN. “The DC swamp doesn’t want me back—too bad. I don’t work for them, I work for the people of the First Congressional District and no one else.”

The rest of the GOP conference loves to see McCarthy’s revenge. “If I’m those folks, one of the things that would scare the crap out of me more than anything else is an unhinged McCarthy,” a Republican lawmaker told CNN. “The guy’s the most prolific fundraiser, you’ve got a massive group of donors across the country that are pissed off about what’s happening, and you’ve got these boneheads that have caused it.”

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

Battle Begins Over Details Of Obama’s Pacific Trade Deal

Battle Begins Over Details Of Obama’s Pacific Trade Deal

By Sean Cockerham and Franco Ordonez, McClatchy Washington Bureau (TNS)

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration has revealed its trade pact with Pacific nations, a sweeping and controversial deal igniting fierce opposition from President Barack Obama’s Democratic allies.

The Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement published on Thursday has been a long-time coming, and with a brutal political fight on the horizon it could be longer still before states ever reap its touted benefits. From agriculture to intellectual property, the pact among the United States, Canada, Mexico, Japan and eight other Pacific nations affects a huge array of commodities and concerns.

It promises new markets and millions of new consumers for, say, cotton from Texas, wine from California and pork from North Carolina as tariffs and trade barriers are lowered for nations around the Pacific Rim. And it offers assurances about jobs, labor protections and the environment.

Yet the agreement has to run a gauntlet of congressional skepticism and protectionist presidential politics going into the 2016 elections, as well as the sluggishness of a political system where personality and deep ideological division have been a legislative roadblock.

“It eliminates 18,000 taxes that various countries put on American goods,” Obama wrote in a blog post on Medium. “When it comes to Asia, one of the world’s fastest-growing regions, the rulebook is up for grabs. And if we don’t pass this agreement — if America doesn’t write those rules — then countries like China will.”

The Trans-Pacific Partnership pits Obama against Democratic presidential contenders Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton, who supported the negotiations as secretary of State but has since turned against the deal. Sanders asserts it would expose American workers to competition with low-wage foreign labor, saying in a tweet Thursday that “I will do everything I can to defeat the TPP. We need trade policies in this country that work for working families, not just CEOs.”

The deal puts congressional Republicans, who have supported the negotiations, in the position of voting to give a victory to a president they loathe or going against business allies who want a trade pact.

“I continue to reserve judgment on the path ahead,” House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., said in a written statement. “But I remain hopeful that our negotiators reached an agreement that the House can support because a successful TPP would mean more good jobs for American workers and greater U.S. influence in the world.”

Obama has to wait 60 days before signing the agreement and sending it to Congress for a review, which would last another month at least. That pushes the contentious issue into a point next year where the presidential campaigns will be in full swing — Republican Donald Trump has joined Democrats Sanders and Clinton in expressing opposition to the Pacific trade deal.

It’s questionable whether Congress would act on the trade deal in such a hothouse election year, particularly with congressional campaigns ramping up. So the issue could be pushed off until the next president is in office. A Senate Republican who will be particularly influential in the debate, Orrin Hatch of Utah, is voicing skepticism about the final deal, a bad sign for Obama given the lack of enthusiasm among members of his own Democratic Party.

(Michael Doyle of the Washington Bureau contributed.)

©2015 McClatchy Washington Bureau. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Photo: Map of the U.S. trade balance with TPP countries. Tribune News Service 2015

Election Setbacks For Obama May Embolden Foreign Adversaries

Election Setbacks For Obama May Embolden Foreign Adversaries

By Paul Richter, Tribune Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON — Presidents from Harry Truman to Bill Clinton have turned to foreign policy in their final months in office when their domestic agendas have been stymied. For Barack Obama, that overseas pivot may offer little relief.

As he headed out Sunday on a weeklong trip to China, Myanmar and Australia, the stinging repudiation Obama suffered in last week’s midterm elections is likely to dishearten friends and embolden foreign adversaries, analysts say.

Come January, he will face a Republican-dominated Congress whose leaders appear determined to take foreign policy in a more hawkish, more interventionist direction.

“The pummeling he’s taking is creating the perception abroad that a president who was headed for lame-duck status is even less relevant,” said Aaron David Miller, a U.S. diplomat from 1978 to 2003, and author of “The End of Greatness,” a book about the limits of presidential power.

White House aides, in internal meetings, are mapping out plans to expand Obama’s efforts abroad in his final two years in office. They say his authority as chief executive allows him to act without a specific congressional mandate in several sensitive areas, such as easing some sanctions on Iran.

The White House has set challenging policy goals: sealing a nuclear deal with Iran, strengthening an unproven government in Afghanistan, mobilizing an international coalition against Islamic State militants, reaching regional trade deals in Asia and Europe, and turning Russia from adversary to ally.

Foreign leaders, always keenly sensitive to the political strength of U.S. presidents, took note of the White House losses last week.

Obama has evolved “from the president of hope to the president of disappointment,” Alexei Pushkov, an ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin and chairman of the foreign affairs committee in the State Duma, or lower house of the parliament, told the Tass news agency.

Putin, angry that the United States and Europe have imposed sanctions on Russia over Ukraine, has shown no sign of backing down. In recent weeks, Moscow has sent a series of provocative military flights into European airspace.

The Kremlin also said last week that it won’t take part in the 2016 Nuclear Security Summit, which seeks to strengthen international controls to prevent terrorists from gaining access to nuclear materials. Obama initiated the summits in 2010.

Because Russia is one of the largest potential sources of such material, Moscow’s boycott is a blow to the nonproliferation effort Obama hoped would be an important part of his legacy.

The election setback also did not go unnoticed in Beijing, where Obama will meet this week with Chinese President Xi Jinping.

The two leaders have sparred over cybersecurity, trade and China’s growing military assertiveness in the South China Sea, and China has criticized Obama’s efforts to boost America’s military presence in the western Pacific in a “rebalance” of U.S. forces.

The GOP success means “the lame-duck president will be further crippled,” wrote the pro-government Global Times newspaper in Beijing. “U.S. public opinion has downgraded Obama.”

The Republican sweep also could bolster Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has clashed with Obama over White House efforts to ease Israeli-Palestinian tension.

Robert Danin, a former U.S. diplomat in the Middle East, said that domestic American politics isn’t the crucial factor in Netanyahu’s calculations, but the shift in Washington’s political landscape “could embolden him.”

Republican control of the Senate also could complicate Obama’s efforts to complete a nuclear deal with Iran this month, a foreign policy goal his aides consider as important to his White House legacy as his 2010 health care initiative.

Obama has considerable leeway to work around Congress in implementing a nuclear deal, which would ease economic sanctions on Tehran in exchange for systems to ensure that Iran cannot build a nuclear bomb.

But if Congress believes the deal is a poor one, it could mobilize to block it.

Republican skeptics, including Sens. Mark Kirk of Illinois and Bob Corker of Tennessee, who is to take over the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, already are planning legislation that could threaten the negotiating effort by adding new sanctions on Iran or giving Congress more leverage over the deal.

Republican hawks also will be ascendant. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., who is expected to lead the Senate Armed Services Committee, is likely to push the White House to step up the military campaign against Islamic State, and to begin providing arms and ammunition to the government in Ukraine, among other issues.

Obama may still have the upper hand in those disputes.

But there’s likely to be an ugly fight over Obama’s request, which he announced at a news conference Wednesday, to seek congressional authorization for the bombing campaign against Islamic State militants in Syria and Iraq.

As a result, he may find it harder to persuade Turkey, Qatar and other members of the coalition battling the Sunni militants to provide money or military help.

And he doesn’t have some of the assets of previous presidents, such as strong personal relationships with world leaders, analysts say.

“The problem is with him (is) he’s just not strong on that,” said David Rothkopf, a former Clinton administration official who has written extensively on the National Security Council.
Still, Obama will have it easier in some areas.

One is the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership regional free trade agreement, another White House priority. The accord, which is still being negotiated, faces Democratic opposition in Congress. Republican leaders say they will give the deal a major push if negotiations succeed.

And analysts note that Obama’s fortunes could shift abruptly if he successfully manages a sudden terrorist danger, or manages to seal a good nuclear deal with Iran, thus neutralizing a major security threat.

That “would make a real difference for him,” said Miller, the former U.S. diplomat, who is a vice president with the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, a think tank in Washington.

AFP Photo/Brendan Smialowski

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