On today’s BradCast, Trump turns to a Rightwing ‘news’ blogger with no experience in national elections to help him save his campaign, and North Carolina Republicans further reveal their desperation to keep Democrats away from the voting booth this November. [Audio link posted at bottom of article.]
But first, California continues to pay the huge, early costs of climate change as brand new wildfires explode in bone-dry Southern California, leading to evacuations of more than 80,000 residents today and the destruction of an untold number of structures, including at least one Route 66 landmark.
Then, Donald Trump responds to plummeting poll numbers with a staff shake-up that taps a Rightwing media huckster with no political experience, from far-right propaganda/conspiracy website Breitbart ‘News’, to head up his campaign. Eric Boehlert from Media Matters joins us to explain how the GOP establishment’s demand that the Republican nominee begin running a more traditional campaign has been answered by Trump’s decision to do the complete opposite, as illustrated by the new hires.
“This is someone who has no campaign experience,” Boehlert, a longtime Breitbart watcher explains, describing Trump’s new campaign chief Stephen Bannon. “The Trump campaign, which has been hit hard for being amateurish, for having no ground game, for having no advance teams, poor fund-raising, no surrogate operation — they decided what they really need is someone at the top of the campaign who’s never been on a campaign, let alone a presidential campaign.”
“There’s already this raging civil war within the conservative media. We’ve never seen anything like it,” he says. “In terms of that civil war, people were already pointing to Breitbart as the problem. So, for Trump to now go to Breitbart to get a new campaign chief, for the rest of the conservative movement, it’s just proof positive that everyone in the Trump campaign is just completely off the rails and have no idea what they’re doing.”
“There’s going to be so many reckonings after November,” Boehlert predicts. We’ll see if he’s right about that.
In the meantime, desperate North Carolina Republicans have now filed an emergency petition asking the U.S. Supreme Court to help them keep the state’s “racially discriminatory” voter suppression law in place through November, even as GOP officials around the state work to adopt new restrictions on voting in lieu of the sweeping election law recently struck down by the U.S. 4th Circuit Court of Appeals for having “target[ed] African-Americans with nearly surgical precision”.
At this point, for unpopular Republicans in NC — and, similarly, around much of the rest of the country — voter suppression may be one of just a very few ways they have left to save their bacon this November.
Finally today, we say “Bye-Bye!” to legendary broadcaster John McLaughlin, who changed the political media landscape (for both better and worse), following news of his death this week at age 89…
What if Trump’s end-game all along was to lose the election? Through that lens, this shake-up would imply that everything is going as planned.
Thinking McLaughlin might be still alive but it turned out I was wrong.
The only decent one was Elanor Clift. I’m sorry John passed away,but he was too loud and obnoxious.
Isn’t it rich?
Isn’t it queer?
Losing my timing this late in my career
And where are the clowns?
Quick, send in the clowns
Don’t bother, they’re here*
STEPHEN SONDHEIM
*Barbra Streisand got his permission to change this line which originally was “Well, maybe next year.”
In refusing to file the “emergency petition” to the Supreme Court and in responding to McCrory’s criticism for his refusal to do so, Roy Cooper, the Democrat who has served as North Carolina’s attorney general since 2001, said:
I want to kick that little dog too!
russians hacked Dnc, DCCC, Pelosi’s PC, Soros’s OSI boxen, and an sloppy NSA warez site
Guccifer2 is an “Romanian Hacker” I mean “Russian terrorist.”
Soros isn’t supporting Nazi’s in Ukrain, he’s supporting the Church in Ukrane