Author: PolitCens

President Donald Trump says he intends to ban the operation of TikTok in the U.S.Trump said Friday he could take action as soon as Saturday to stop the operation of the popular video-sharing social media app in the U.S.“As far as TikTok is concerned, we’re banning them from the United States,” he told reporters traveling with him Friday from Florida.He said he would likely use an executive order to prohibit the app.Trump does not support a deal that would allow a U.S. company to buy TikTok’s American operations.The app is extremely popular in both the U.S. and around the world. It has already been downloaded 2 billion times worldwide, and 165 million of those downloads were in the U.S.The app features not only entertainment videos, but also debates and takes positions on political issues, such as racial justice and the coming U.S. presidential election.U.S. officials are concerned that TikTok may pose a security threat, fearing that the company might share its user data with China’s government. However, TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, has said it does not share user data with the Chinese government and maintains that it only stores U.S. user data in the U.S. and Singapore. TikTok also recently chose former Disney executive Kevin Mayer as its chief executive in a move seen as an effort to distance itself from Beijing.Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin said earlier this week that the U.S. government’s Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, an interagency group led by the Treasury Department, would be looking into TikTok.CFIUS’s job is to oversee foreign investments and assess them for potential national security risks. It can force companies to cancel deals or institute other measures it deems necessary for national security.  
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Young voters span two generations — older Gen Z voters and younger Millennial voters. 
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With several polls showing Democratic presumptive nominee Joe Biden leading the U.S. presidential race nationally, in battleground states and among key demographics, President Donald Trump’s campaign is seeking a more effective strategy to win over voters.After spending weeks pushing to reopen the economy, the president now appears to be acknowledging the coronavirus pandemic will continue to drive news cycles through the final 100 days of the campaign.Here are a few key takeaways from Trump’s evolving re-election strategy.President Donald Trump wears a face mask as he participates in a tour of Bioprocess Innovation Center at Fujifilm Diosynth Biotechnologies, Monday, July 27, 2020, in Morrisville, N.C.Refocus on pandemicPolls indicate that public approval for the U.S. President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence, left, along with members of the coronavirus take force meet with pharmaceutical executives in the Cabinet Room of the White House in Washington, March 2, 2020.Renew push on vaccines and therapeuticsBoth Trump and Vice President Mike Pence visited vaccine development facilities this week as the White House pressed its message that the nation is close to defeating COVID-19.During a coronavirus press briefing on Wednesday, Trump said the U.S. is on track to “rapidly produce” 100 million doses as soon as a vaccine is approved “which could be very, very soon.” He said 500 million doses will be available “shortly thereafter.”There are currently more than 100 scientific groups around the world trying to make vaccines, including Pfizer and BioNTech which have started large-scale trials in the United States. But most experts agree that having a safe and reliable vaccine available before the November election is unlikely.“There is progress on a number of fronts,” said William Schaffner, professor of infectious diseases at the Vanderbilt University Medical Center. “We’re optimistic, but everything has to go well in vaccine development.”While a vaccine is under development, the president is still pushing other treatments aimed at reducing the severity of COVID-19. This week he again championed hydroxychloroquine — an anti-malaria drug that Trump and his allies have been pushing as a COVID-19 treatment.So far there is no evidence that hydroxychloroquine helps to prevent COVID-19 infection, said former Food and Drug Associate Commissioner and co-founder of the Center for Medicine in the Public Interest, Peter Pitts. However Pitts told VOA recent studies have shown that it may help shorten hospital time for patients who suffer from serious manifestations of the virus.Analysts say that Trump advisers see messaging on vaccines and therapeutics as the quickest way to restore confidence in the president.“The plan is to present certain drugs that are unproven as useful therapeutics until they have a vaccine,” said Larry Sabato from the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics to VOA.Sabato said the lack of scientific data to support the claim is immaterial. “For Trump supporters, he is their source of information.”A crowd gathers during a Black Lives Matter protest at the Mark O. Hatfield United States Courthouse, July 30, 2020, in Portland, Ore. After days of clashes with federal police, the crowd outside of the federal courthouse remained peaceful.Continue “law and order” approach to US protests With Black Lives Matter rallies and protests continuing in many cities across the United States, the vast majority of them peaceful, the president has also sharpened his attacks on what he has called “radical left anarchists” and the danger they allegedly pose to the country.“This bloodshed must end, this bloodshed will end,” Trump said.In Portland, local officials blamed the presence of federal law enforcement officers for worsening conflicts with protesters. After days of clashes, the city struck an agreement for the federal troops to withdraw.But analysts see the larger standoff continuing, with the Trump campaign arguing that cities with regular protests are in fact in chaos and need a “law and order” commander in chief, said Omar Wasow, a professor of race and ethnic politics at Princeton University.“Trump is working in a tradition that we’ve seen internationally, of using conflict as a way to try and mobilize your side,” Wasow told VOA, pointing to Trump campaign advertisements using footage of the protests to portray Biden as soft on crime.“Clearly, they think it’s a good campaign issue for them,” Wasow said.Democratic presidential candidate former Vice President Joe Biden speaks at a campaign event at the Colonial Early Education Program at the Colwyck Training Center in New Castle, Del., July 21, 2020.Settle on a Biden Strategy Traditionally, presidential campaigns kick into high gear and intensify attacks on their opponents after the Republican and Democratic conventions in August, and as the candidates meet on the debate stage.“Biden has his share of controversies and he’s been around a long time, but he is not a clear image in the minds of most voters,” said Larry Sabato. “Trump’s goal in the debates and in his advertising, is to dirty up Biden, to make him appear as unsavory as Donald Trump appears to be unsavory to millions of people.”So far there are two main attack themes; that “Sleepy Joe” Biden is mentally unfit to be president and that he won’t keep Americans safe against crime and lawlessness.A recent poll finds that 52% of voters are somewhat confident that Biden  has the mental and physical stamina to carry out the job of president compared to 45% for Trump. However, more are likely to say they feel very confident about Trump (33%) than Biden (23%).“Biden hasn’t developed the kind of adulation among his base that Trump can count on from his supporters. This seems to be a fairly common trend in the campaign so far and is at least partly due to the Democrat being out of the public eye during the pandemic,” said Patrick Murray, director of the Monmouth University Polling Institute.But the strategy of a 74-year-old incumbent attacking his 77-year-old challenger is risky particularly among seniors, a key demographic group of Trump supporters. Biden leads Trump among voters 65 and older in several national polls.At the same time, Trump seeks to link Biden to more liberal elements of the Democratic Party such as the “defund the police” movement. Biden has said he supports redirecting some police funding to address mental health or to change the prison system.Joe Biden says police have “BECOME THE ENEMY” and calls for CUTTING police funding: “Yes, absolutely!” pic.twitter.com/PKXvz3zobe
— Trump War Room – Text TRUMP to 88022 (@TrumpWarRoom) July 8, 2020 The gambit is part of Trump’s larger “culture war”  against what he describes as a push by American political liberals to wage a “merciless campaign to wipe out our history, defame our heroes, erase our values, and indoctrinate our children.”Another attack line likely to pick up steam closer to the election is to raise fears about what a “Biden, Pelosi, Schumer America will look like,” said Arizona-based Republican strategist Chuck Coughlin to VOA, referring to Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer.“The European style of democracy has historically been unpopular across the U.S. and I believe he will begin to compare how a Biden presidency will change America for the worse forever, and that he is the only man left to defend American-style capitalism,” Coughlin said.Campaigning on “us vs them” to a nation highly polarized around party ideology can be a very powerful way to mobilize your base, said Omar Wasow of Princeton. But while Trump is masterful at harnessing identity politics, stoking both fear and national pride, his political base in 2020 may not be large enough to carry him to victory. “If he doesn’t do some outreach to some of the moderate swing voters, there’s a reasonable chance he’ll lose,” Wasow said.The past three months of national turmoil have shown much can happen between now and the election.“An October vaccine discovery would be the ultimate October surprise,” said Wilson, referring to the possibility that a last-minute development will sway the early November election. “If unemployment dips back into single digits, if you have the Dow above 30,000 — all those things would create and completely change the scenario of what we’d be looking at in the fall.”Wilson said that any of those scenarios can happen, and it would probably take a combination of them to ensure a Trump victory. “But that’s historically the case with any presidential election.” 
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In a fiery eulogy for longtime U.S. Representative John Lewis on Thursday, former President Barack Obama took a series of thinly veiled shots at the actions of his successor that he said tore at the legacy of the Black civil rights icon being laid to rest.  
 
The funeral for Lewis, who played an instrumental role in passing the Voting Rights Act of 1965, came on the same day Republican President Donald Trump suggested the Nov. 3 election could be delayed. Trump has also waged a war against mail-in ballots, a tactic critics say is aimed at suppressing votes.
 
“We no longer have to guess the number of jelly beans in a jar in order to cast a ballot,” Obama said in the eulogy, referring to one way Black people were once disqualified at the ballot box.
 
“But even as we sit here, there are those in power doing their darnedest to discourage people from voting by closing polling locations and targeting minorities with restrictive ID laws and attacking our voting rights with surgical precision.”
 
Obama also referred to reported moves to undermine “the postal service in the run-up to an election that could be dependent on mail-in ballots so people don’t get sick.”
 
Obama, joined at the funeral by two fellow former presidents, Republican George W. Bush and Democrat Bill Clinton, spoke of Lewis’s rise from humble beginnings on a Troy, Alabama, farm to become a leader of the 1960s struggle for equal rights for Black Americans. Ultimately, the man known as the “conscience of Congress” never gave up his drive to make “good trouble” in the cause of justice, Obama said.
 
Obama and others spoke or sang in front of his casket draped in the American flag at the historic Ebenezer Baptist Church, where the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. once preached. King, who was assassinated in 1968, had been a mentor to Lewis.
 
Lewis, who was first elected in 1986 to represent Georgia in the U.S. House of Representatives, died on July 17 at age 80 after a battle with pancreatic cancer. His death came at a time of reckoning across the United States over racial injustice ignited by the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis on May 25.  
 
Obama – a Democrat who was the nation’s first black president and who awarded Lewis the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2011 – argued that the man whose sharecropping parents “picked someone else’s cotton” now should be counted among the Founding Fathers.
 
“America was built by John Lewis. He as much as anyone in our history brought our country closer to its highest ideals,” the Democratic former president said.
 
In his speech, Bush remembered joining Lewis in Selma, Alabama, for the 50th anniversary of the watershed 1965 march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge. “The story that began in Troy isn’t ending here today, nor is the work.”
 
The funeral capped a week of memorial services. Lewis’s coffin was escorted across the bridge on Sunday, decades after his beating there drew a national spotlight to the struggle for racial equality, including suppression of the Black vote in the South. And on Monday his casket was taken to the U.S. Capitol in Washington where it lay in state through Tuesday.
 
Eric Terrell, 65, of Atlanta, sat outside the church in his wheelchair, in the heat and thick air of an Atlanta summer morning, waiting to get a glimpse of former Presidents Clinton and Bush, but especially Obama. He was camped out before 6:30 a.m. so he could bow his head as Lewis’s funeral procession rolled by.
 
And he held his homemade sign until his arms got tired. It read, “Get your ass out and vote.” “He put his life on the line in Selma so we could vote,” said Terrell, who is Black. “So we better do it,” he said before joining the throng of onlookers outside the church watching the services on a Jumbotron.
 
In an essay written shortly before his death and published in the New York Times on Thursday, Lewis called on the younger generation to get into “good trouble,” using perhaps his most famous utterance about the importance of challenging inequality.
 
“In my life I have done all I can to demonstrate that the way of peace, the way of love and nonviolence is the more excellent way,” he wrote, before invoking a famous line from King: “Now it is your turn to let freedom ring.”
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