RUMP'S LATEST AND SLEAZIEST TRICK YET...HE'S A TOTAL PIG

 I was sent this by a friend:

I did not write this, but knew exactly what was happening last night!
>
Please read!  I didn’t write it, but I love it   Just read this:

 Joe Biden is a stutterer.  Like many others, he has overcome the disability by understanding it and exercising extraordinary perseverance and discipline.  If you know and love a stutterer and you watched the presidential debate last night, within minutes it became obvious what was going on.  Abusive tone of voice, rapid fire interruptions,  zigzagging change of topic, personal insult and humiliation, and family pain are all tripwires that scramble a stutterer's ability to speak.   There was nothing unplanned or spontaneous in the President's strategy.   The bastards did not prep him to attack Joe.  They prepped him to attack Joe's disability hoping that by triggering his stuttering they might deceive an audience unfamiliar with the disability into thinking that Joe was stupid, weak, uncertain, confused, or lost to dimentia.

If you have ever gotten in the face of bully on the playground protecting a stutterer that you love, the game being played last night was nakedly and painfully obvious.  If you watched with glee while it happened, then you haven't made much progress since the playground.

However,  the stutterer that I love taught me early on that he did not so much need my protection.  He fought back by owning and integrating his disability into who he is.  He learned how to stand his ground as master of perseverence, knowledge, and empathy.  Without his example, I would not have recognized the game that was being played last night.  I would  not have been able to recognize the subtle but intense struggle against  the disability that Joe was winning at the same time he was struggling  to advance his positions on the issues in the midst of a rhetorical shit  storm.

But, like the stutterer that I know, Joe didn't need any help on the playground.  I was proud of him.

The President flushed his family fortune down a gold-plated toilet and somehow wants us to believe that he is the poor victim of mean people. Then he tries, and fails, to beat up a kid with a disability on the playground.

> I'm done with this, guys.  I want my country back. 

> Thanks, Joe.

NO WONDER THAT SCUMBAG RUMP DIDN'T BOTHER WITH DEBATE PREPARATION - HE PLANNED TO CHEAT ALL ALONG AS HE HAS DONE IN EVERY STAGE OF HIS LIFE. 

TRUMP CAN'T STOP LYING

 

Republicans distanced themselves from Trump for failing to denounce white supremacy, and the president scrambled to defend himself.

Republicans distanced themselves Wednesday from President Trump over his failure to unambiguously condemn white supremacists during the presidential debate the night before, as Mr. Trump faced a torrent of criticism including a rare rebuke from the Senate’s top Republican.

The president scrambled to defend himself on Wednesday afternoon, falsely claiming that he had “always denounced any form” of white supremacy. And after saying at the debate that the Proud Boys, a far-right group that has endorsed violence, should “stand by,” Mr. Trump asserted on Wednesday that he didn’t even know who the group is.

The president’s continued efforts to sow doubts about the integrity of the vote, both at the debate and on Wednesday, alarmed election-monitoring experts who said that they feared that he was laying the groundwork to delegitimize the election results. And his raucous, interruption-filled debate performance led the Commission on Presidential Debates to say Wednesday that it would make changes to the format of this year’s remaining debates.

Taken together, the developments suggested that the debate was shaking up the campaign with a little over a month left until the election.

00:00

0:53

The president’s comments on Wednesday came after Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, the chamber’s only Black Republican, said that “white supremacy should be denounced at every turn. I think he misspoke, I think he should correct it. If he doesn’t correct it I guess he didn’t misspeak.”

Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader and a close ally of the president’s, told reporters Wednesday that he agreed with Mr. Scott, sharply rebuking Mr. Trump’s refusal to categorically denounce white supremacy during the presidential debate Tuesday night.

“With regard to the white supremacy issue, I want to associate myself with the remarks of Tim Scott,” Mr. McConnell said. “He said it was unacceptable not to condemn white supremacists and so I do so in the strongest possible way.”

Other Senate Republicans on Capitol Hill largely sought to distance themselves from the president’s remarks at the debate, and urged Mr. Trump to clearly denounce white supremacy.

Senator John Thune of South Dakota, the No. 2 Republican, said Mr. Trump should “clear it up.” Senator Bill Cassidy, Republican of Louisiana, told reporters “he should unequivocally condemn white supremacy.” Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, told reporters “it was the least educational debate of any presidential debate I’ve ever seen” and said that Mr. Trump should “absolutely” condemn white supremacy.

So on Wednesday Mr. Trump addressed the issue, retreating from his debate night comments that the Proud Boys, a far-right group that has endorsed violence, should “stand by.” Speaking to reporters as he left the White House for a campaign trip to Minnesota, he said: “I don’t know who Proud Boys are, but whoever they are, they have to stand down, let law enforcement do their work.”

But the president once again quickly added that left-wing violence was “the real problem” and falsely accused former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. of refusing to say the words “law enforcement” during Tuesday night’s presidential debate.

Mr. Trump has often been criticized for failing to denounce racist, white supremacist and violent right-wing groups. After a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017 turned deadly, the president did not initially specifically criticize white supremacists or the neo-Nazi slogans that were chanted, blaming “hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides.”

And at the debate on Tuesday, Mr. Trump diverted a question about whether he would condemn white supremacists and militias into an attack on left-wing protesters.

“Are you willing, tonight, to condemn white supremacists and militia groups and to say that they need to stand down and not add to the violence in a number of these cities as we saw in Kenosha and as we’ve seen in Portland?” Chris Wallace, the moderator, asked the president.

“Sure. I’m willing to do that,” said Mr. Trump, but quickly added, “Almost everything I see is from the left wing. Not from the right wing.”

When Mr. Wallace pressed on, the president asked, “What do you want to call them?”

“White supremacists and right-wing militias,” the moderator replied, as Joseph R. Biden Jr. mentioned the Proud Boys, a far-right group that has endorsed violence.

“Proud Boys, stand back and stand by,” Mr. Trump said. “But I’ll tell you what. I’ll tell you what. Somebody’s got to do something about antifa and the left because this is not a right-wing problem. This is a left-wing problem.”

When Mr. Biden pointed out that Mr. Trump’s own F.B.I. director, Christopher A. Wray, had said that antifa was an idea, not an organization, the president replied, “Oh, you’ve got to be kidding.” (Mr. Wray also said this month that “racially motivated violent extremism,” mostly from white supremacists, had made up a majority of domestic terrorism threats.)

The president’s words prompted celebration by members of the Proud Boys.

Mr. McConnell said Wednesday that he didn’t believe any Republican Senators would be hurt by Mr. Trump’s bombastic performance during last night’s presidential debate.

“I don’t know any of my colleagues who would have problems because of that,” Mr. McConnell said.

— Michael D. Shear, Luke Broadwater, Michael Cooper and Emily Cochrane

 

 

Joe Biden is a stutterer.  Like many others, he has overcome the disability by understanding it and exercising extraordinary perseverance and discipline.  If you know and love a stutterer and you watched the presidential debate last night, within minutes it became obvious what was going on.  Abusive tone of voice, rapid fire interruptions,  zigzagging change of topic, personal insult and humiliation, and family pain are all tripwires that scramble a stutterer's ability to speak.   There was nothing unplanned or spontaneous in the President's strategy.   The bastards did not prep him to attack Joe.  They prepped him to attack Joe's disability hoping that by triggering his stuttering they might deceive an audience unfamiliar with the disability into thinking that Joe was stupid, weak, uncertain, confused, or lost to dimentia.

If you have ever gotten in the face of bully on the playground protecting a stutterer that you love, the game being played last night was nakedly and painfully obvious.  If you watched with glee while it happened, then you haven't made much progress since the playground.

However,  the stutterer that I love taught me early on that he did not so much need my protection.  He fought back by owning and integrating his disability into who he is.  He learned how to stand his ground as master of perseverence, knowledge, and empathy.  Without his example, I would not have recognized the game that was being played last night.  I would  not have been able to recognize the subtle but intense struggle against  the disability that Joe was winning at the same time he was struggling  to advance his positions on the issues in the midst of a rhetorical shit  storm.

But, like the stutterer that I know, Joe didn't need any help on the playground.  I was proud of him.

The President flushed his family fortune down a gold-plated toilet and somehow wants us to believe that he is the poor victim of mean people. Then he tries, and fails, to beat up a kid with a disability on the playground.

THE ORANGE MONSTER IS NOW RACING TO TRY (HALF-HEARTEDLY FOR SURE) TO TAKE THE DOG WHISTLE BACK

 

Media Mistakes and False Equivalencies

 

The media keeps making these cringeworthy mistakes

 

 

Opinion by 

Jennifer Rubin

Columnist

September 30, 2020 at 11:19 a.m. CDT

In the aftermath of President Trump’s unhinged, embarrassing and frightful performance Tuesday night, we are told “the debate” was a dumpster fire, “the debate” was a low point in American politics, “the debate” was incoherent. The worst appearance by a U.S. president in history is magically transformed into a non-personified event — the debate itself. Why do so many headline writers, anchors and pundits fall into this trap?

 

This poor sense of “balance” still afflicts too many journalists, who become nervous that by reporting what is plain to see, they’re taking “sides.” But the only side they would be taking is that of truth: The president lacks impulse control. When threatened, he lashes out and blusters his way past scrutiny. The president is a racist (telling a white-supremacist group to “stand back and stand by” should be disqualifying in and of itself), an authoritarian bully (inciting his followers to intimidate voters at the polls) and untethered to reality. He was not “too hot” as Trump apologists claimed; he was too nutty.

 

If false balance was the major defect running through post-debate commentary, it was not the only one. Sadly, many of these media mistakes have gone unaddressed since Trump rode down his fake-gold escalator five years ago.

 

The compulsion to attribute intentionality to Trump’s behavior leads to ludicrous explanations. Pundits, for example, too often claim that Trump tries to scare suburban women, a large and critical part of the electorate, so that he can pump up his base — White males who have never abandoned him. This is irrational, but worse, it is almost certainly false. Trump does what he does because he cannot help himself. Does anyone really believe that he looks at polls objectively? It seems he cannot plan a day ahead — let alone a month ahead. He certainly cannot control the impulse to insult and degrade others. His narcissism and lack of conscience — not calculation — lead him to do things that are self-destructive. There was no benefit for Trump in refusing to denounce white nationalists at Tuesday’s debate. That moment was about Trump refusing to be told to denounce racists.

 

Likewise, many pundits were compelled to give former vice president Joe Biden the nonsensical advice to not show up for more debates, even though his lead is steadily building and instant polls suggest he clobbered Trump. Granted, none of us wants to watch another debate, but that does not mean it is in Biden’s interest to avoid giving Trump every opportunity to offend voters and depress Republicans. It has become a running joke that practically everything conventional-wisdom-spouting pundits say is bad for Biden — e.g., Trump’s rushing through a Supreme Court nomination, Biden’s decision to respect covid-19 precautions while campaigning — turns out to be a positive for him. Polls show large majorities of Americans want the next president to nominate the new justice, favor Obamacare (which Judge Amy Coney Barrett has said is unconstitutional) and oppose reversing Roe v. Wade.

 

As a corollary to the habitual bad advice syndrome, I would suggest much of the fault lies in the media image of “voters” as White men. The nondescript voter in the Rust Belt or in suburbia is a woman, statistically speaking. Women will likely make up 52 to 54 percent of the electorate. Rather than ask how their prototypical White male would feel about confirming a justice who would likely allow abortion to be criminalized, they would do well to ask a suburban mom or a 30-something single, working woman. It does reorient one’s thinking.

 

Finally, as poll after poll shows Biden with a commanding lead in the three critical Blue Wall states he must win (Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania) and stunning success in states no Democrat has won in decades (e.g., Georgia, Arizona), the best-kept secret in media coverage seems to be that the race is not close and has not been for months.

 

Granted, everyone is skittish after 2016, but when national polls, a wide array of state polls, absentee-ballot requests, early-voting statistics and anecdotal evidence (e.g., public vigils for the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg) all point in one direction, it behooves the media to say so.

 

Trump has been behind for months and has done nothing but alienate the groups he cannot afford to lose (e.g., White women, college-educated voters, older voters).

 

It is only once one recognizes the near-certainty of Trump’s defeat that his plans for disrupting and discrediting the election can be seen as the last gasps of a desperate man who has neither the capacity nor the will to avoid proving his own unfitness to lead.

 

The media’s preference for a horse race needs to give way to a preference for the unvarnished truth.

 

 

Trump’s message to wavering voters: Go ahead and vote for Biden

 

Opinion by 

Paul Waldman

Columnist

September 30, 2020 at 11:42 a.m. CDT

The day after President Trump and Joe Biden met for their first debate, no one in the United States is happier than the Proud Boys. But when Trump gave them a hearty shout-out, he also sent a message to wavering Republican and independent voters, particularly those who may like some of what Trump has done but are having trouble with either of their choices in this election.

 

This is what Trump is saying to them: You can vote for Joe Biden even if you don’t like everything he believes in, or if you have doubts about him. I’ll make this easier for you.

The debate was not quite like the movie climax when the villain rips off his mask and shocks the clueless characters by showing them his true nature. We know Trump’s true nature. But he is making it clear that for the next six weeks, he won’t let anyone forget it, or cast their vote with any delusions.

 

The debate was a horror show from start to finish, so much so that even many Republicans are expressing their displeasure at Trump’s performance. But nothing was more appalling than this moment, when the question of Trump condemning white supremacists came up:

 

TRUMP: What do you want to call them? Give me a name, give me a name. Who would you like me to condemn? Who?

 

CHRIS WALLACE: White supremacists and right-wing militia.

 

BIDEN: Proud Boys.

 

TRUMP: Proud Boys, stand back and stand by. But I’ll tell you what, I’ll tell you what. Somebody’s got to do something about antifa and the left.

 

In case you aren’t familiar with them, the Proud Boys are a far-right “Western chauvinist” organization that specializes in xenophobia, anti-Semitism and all manner of other hatreds; their primary mode of political action is showing up heavily armed at protests in an attempt to provoke violence.

 

According to the Anti-Defamation League, “the Proud Boys bear many of the hallmarks of a gang, and its members have taken part in multiple acts of brutal violence and intimidation.” As the group’s founder once said, “We will kill you. That’s the Proud Boys in a nutshell.”

 

Within moments of Trump’s comments, the Proud Boys were celebrating their victory online. The president of the United States had given them a virtual thumbs-up and an instruction: Stand by, because you’re going to be needed to “do something.”

 

They were so pleased that they’re literally putting Trump’s words on T-shirts.

 

This is hardly the first time Trump has been asked about a fringe group and given them what amounts to an endorsement, whether it’s QAnon or the “very fine people” at a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville. But doing it in front of the largest audience he’s likely to have in this campaign, as we begin the home stretch of the election, sends a particularly important message.

 

And that was only one of the appalling things that happened in Tuesday’s debate. Others included Trump attacking Biden’s children and all but promising to promote chaos and confusion during the election’s vote-counting.

 

For those who are still considering voting for Trump but aren’t quite sure, the truth is unavoidable. Trump is not just the worst of us — corrupt, petty, vindictive, ignorant, dishonest — he also wants to bring out the worst in all of us.

 

Four years ago, there were plenty of voters who decided that he was worth a shot. Sure, he was rough around the edges, but maybe he’d shake things up in a positive way.

 

Maybe he’d grow into the job, become presidential, reach out to all Americans.

 

Trump simply will not let anyone believe that anymore. As we get closer to the election, there will be no new tone and no reaching out. He will only become more what he is.

 

For those wavering voters, Trump’s unadorned awfulness offers a kind of liberation. They don’t have to struggle with cognitive dissonance, or labor to convince themselves that the truth might be something other than what is staring them in the face. Trump will not allow it.

 

Are you a moderate suburban woman who has voted Republican before? Trump tells you that the reason you should vote for him is to protect your “property values” from nonwhite people. He offers a version of “law and order” based on violence and brutality. He promotes white supremacists.

 

In other words, he won’t let you vote for him for noble reasons; he only wants your vote for the worst reasons. That’s because, as we all should understand by now, Trump believes that we’re all as despicable as he is.

 

When he appeals to racism and xenophobia, it’s because he thinks we’re a nation of racists and xenophobes who will respond with cheers. When he says you’d have to be a sucker to pay your taxes, it’s because he thinks we’re all as selfish and unpatriotic as he is. When he undermines the integrity of our elections, it’s because he thinks that like him, we don’t care whether democracy works or even survives.

 

With each step he descends down into his particular moral sewer, the easier it should be for wavering voters to turn away from him.

 

There will be no shame for them in voting for a Democrat — even if it’s just this once — if it means rejecting what Trump wants them to be. He is offering them permission to vote for Biden. Now all they have to do is accept.

 

 

EARLY VOTING SUGGESTS BIDEN IS GOING TO ANNIHILATE TRUMP, AND THE GOP IS SOILING ITSELF

The president’s attacks on mail-in voting are backfiring spectacularly. 

 

BY BESS LEVIN

SEPTEMBER 30, 2020

If you’ve turned on a TV, radio, phone, or computer in the last several months, odds are you’ve heard Donald Trump ranting about how mail-in voting is rife with fraud. Obviously he’s taking this approach not because he actually thinks that’s the case—he and the first lady requested mail-in ballots to vote in Florida’s primary—but because he’s trying to sow fear in the system and undermine the election. And so far, it’s working! While Republicans once had an edge in requesting mail-in ballots, the president seems to have successfully scared off his own supporters. Now, Democrats’ ballot requests are reportedly surging ahead in key battleground states, making Republicans more than a little bit anxious.

The Washington Post reports that the Democratic voters who have requested mail-in ballots and sent them back “greatly outnumber Republicans” in states such as Florida, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Maine, and Iowa. A similar trend is apparently occurring in Ohio, Minnesota, New Hampshire, and Wisconsin, and GOP leaders and strategists are freaking out. The disparity has reportedly been “the subject of urgent discussions” among GOP officials, who are “stunn[ed]” by the margins and fear the news is not just bad for Trump but for other Republicans on the ballot. While the party is said to be focused on voter turnout on Election Day itself, Whit Ayers, a longtime Republican pollster, told the Post the fear is that older voters, who typically support Republicans, are concerned about being infected with COVID-19 and could choose to stay home if the pandemic intensifies in the run-up to November 3 (which would be yet another reason not to cast a ballot for Trump, whose handling of the crisis has been shambolic at best).

While they’d likely never say it in public, privately, officials know they have the president to thank for the skewed numbers when it comes to mail-in ballots, and Republicans have spent the last few months frantically trying to clean up the mess:

...several Republicans acknowledged privately that there is little upside for their party in the numbers—and said they are working feverishly to reverse the trend with a last-minute press with voters. “It’s astronomical,” said one Republican strategist involved in Senate races who said he was “horrified” by the discrepancy and, like others interviewed for this report, spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal concerns. “You see these numbers in a state like North Carolina, and how can you not be concerned?”

The issue is reportedly of such concern that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has twice met with Trump to urge him to shut the hell up with his talk of fraud and rigged elections. And while he’s clearly been unable to get through to the guy, Republicans have a not-so-secret weapon they’re prepared to deploy should Biden’s edge continue through election day:

Republicans are...planning to wage a massive post-Election Day legal battle to challenge ballots that are missing witness signatures, or an outer envelope, or that arrive with no postmark. Democrats acknowledge that an electorate largely unused to mail voting could make mistakes that lead to ballots being rejected in numbers that could make a difference in states where the contest is close. Election officials are already flagging ballots for such errors. In North Carolina, for instance, about 5,800 out of roughly 281,000 submitted ballots have been set aside, the vast majority because of a witness signature deficiency, according to state data.

“The peril we worry about is what Trump’s going to try to do if there are a lot of ballots still to be counted on election night,” said Terry McAuliffe, the former governor of Virginia and a Biden surrogate. “He’s going to try to say they’re fraudulent.” And, as Trump suggested during the first presidential debate, he won’t hesitate to enlist his army of violent supporters to help him stay in power by whatever means necessary.

 

How Big...?

 

The Rump Shit Show

The whole thing was hard to follow, and nearly unwatchable, as if you’d stumbled into a family’s dinner-table fight over politics, and Trump was the drunk, belligerent uncle who would just not stop talking but could not make a coherent point. With such tumult, of course, neither candidate was able to communicate much about his plans for the country, which seemed to be Trump’s point.

 

Four years ago, Trump survived ‘Access Hollywood’ — and a media myth of indestructibility was born

 

By 

Margaret Sullivan

Media columnist

September 26, 2020 at 6:00 a.m. CDT

In the warped sense of time born of the Trump presidency and the pandemic pause, it seems both eons ago and only yesterday that the “Access Hollywood” story rocked the media sphere.

 

In fact, it was just about four years ago, on Oct. 7, 2016, that The Washington Post first published the 2005 recording of Donald Trump casually bragging about how easy it was for him to sexually assault women.

 

“I don’t even wait,” the reality-TV star told NBC host Billy Bush, suggesting he might start kissing the actress he was about to meet for the first time. It would be no big deal, since “when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. . . . Grab them by the p---y. You can do anything.”

 

In that more innocent time, some people thought these revelations would capsize Trump’s presidential ambitions. A number of top Republicans distanced themselves; members of the religious right claimed to be appalled; and his campaign seemed to teeter. But Trump and his allies dismissed it as “locker room talk” and quickly seized the opportunity to remind voters of the women problems of his opponent’s husband. And he rolled on to victory.

 

From 2016: A political bombshell was right under NBC’s nose. What took the network so long?

 

Since then, there’s been one blockbuster scandal after another. The reports that his campaign had welcomed Russian interference in the election, the playing-up to authoritarian world leaders, the Ukraine “quid pro quo” that resulted in impeachment, the racist attack on four non-White congresswomen known as “The Squad,” and the deadly and deceptive mismanagement of the coronavirus pandemic.

 

And yet, none seemed to threaten Trump’s substantial base — the roughly 40 percent of the country who continue to support him. Trump knows full well some of them will never abandon him; cue the “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody” tape.

Mainstream journalists — striving for fairness, constantly in a defensive crouch about being portrayed as “radical left” — have tried to analyze this loyalty. It’s economic anxiety in the heartland, some say. Or it’s under-the-radar White supremacy. It’s indoctrination by Fox News. It’s deep-seated hatred of the elite. It’s resentment; it’s fear; it’s misinformation; it’s Mitch McConnell.

 

We the media have never stopped trying to get it.

 

And so we head out to another Midwestern diner to interview Trump voters about whether they still support him. Or hang around a rally to politely ask members of the gathered throngs why they think it’s fine to congregate maskless in enclosed spaces in the middle of a pandemic.

 

This kind of pointless inquiry should have stopped a long time ago.

 

For several months this summer, I lived in Trump Country — specifically, in the reddest congressional district in New York state, represented by Chris Collins, the first member of Congress to endorse Trump’s 2016 presidential bid, until he resigned in disgrace last year while pleading guilty to insider trading.

 

I would drive the short distance to the grocery store a couple of times a week, always passing a Confederate flag flying proudly on my left, while to the right, two huge Trump flags waved from porches. Nailed to a tall tree along the way, a hand-lettered sign urged: “Keep America ‘Great’ 2020.” (I never failed to ponder those quotation marks.)

 

A neighbor told me he couldn’t countenance Trump but disliked Hillary Clinton so much he voted for Jill Stein. A woman in the supermarket ranted to me that the mandatory-mask order made her feel like she was living in China. A Republican friend insisted that if Joe Biden chose Elizabeth Warren as his running mate, he would feel compelled to vote for Trump even though he doesn’t like his behavior.

 

I come away from all of this — the past four years of shocking scandals and constant lies, the conversations with voters, the media’s beating-our-heads-against-the-wall coverage of Trump voters who still like Trump — with a changed viewpoint about the needle that supposedly doesn’t move.

 

Actually, it does move.

 

In looking back at the “Access Hollywood” episode, I came across an academic study published this year by scholars from the University of Massachusetts and Brandeis University that cuts against conventional wisdom. Entitling their paper “Just Locker Room Talk?,” the political scientists concluded that the revelations did make a difference, finding “consistent evidence that the release of the tape modestly, though significantly, reduced support for Donald Trump during the 2016 campaign.” These effects were similar among men and women, but noticeably larger among Republicans compared with Democrats.

 

Trump’s misdeeds do matter, and they do have a cumulative effect, which is why Republican pollster Frank Luntz has said the election is Biden’s to lose, and why Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight gives Trump only a 1 in 4 chance of winning reelection.

 

(Which, of course, is roughly where things stood four years ago, sounding a cautionary note about polls and probability.)

 

Yes, Trump has his core loyalists who don’t budge, no matter how many outrages the news media reveals, nor what their hero does.

 

But not everyone holds firm. Not endlessly.

 

To use the medical metaphor, when it comes to changing their minds about Trump, a lot of Americans may be resistant. But they aren’t immune. The long-term effects of “Access Hollywood” — and everything that followed — are still playing out.