The New York Times studied significant overlap between right wing propaganda and the El Paso shooter’s manifesto: In the four years since Mr. Trump electrified Republican voters with slashing comments about Muslims and Mexicans, demonizing references to immigrants have become more widespread in the news media… Before the first groups of Central American migrants received heavy news media coverage in 2018, words like “invaders” or “invasion” were rarely used by American outlets. In the last year, the use of such terms has surged, with references to an immigrant “invasion” appearing on more than 300 Fox News broadcasts.
Here is a story about what happened to baby Paul Anchondo’s family before and after the shooting.
Scaramucci has fully defected from Trump due to recent events where Trump has used “so charged and so divisive rhetoric,” and is doing interviews saying the Republicans need to place someone else at the top of the ticket for 2020.
There was a lot of chatter about the likelihood of a recession next year based on new economic indicators, and world wide markets slumped on Wednesday.
More recession fears, via the Times: President Trump’s on-again-off-again execution of the trade war with China and other countries has fed uncertainty into businesses’ decision-making. Corporate investment spending is softening, despite the big tax cut that Mr. Trump said would boost it. And the combination of central banks that are at the outer limits of their ability to stimulate growth, and an inward turn by many countries, could make governments less effective at responding to a downturn.
The Washington Post reports that Trump is rattled by news of a recession that will hurt his reelection chances: “Trump has sought to use his Twitter pulpit to drown out negative indicators. On Thursday, he promoted the U.S. economy as “the Biggest, Strongest and Most Powerful Economy in the World,” and, citing growth in the retail sector, predicted that it would only get stronger. He also accused the news media of “doing everything they can to crash the economy because they think that will be bad for me and my re-election.”… Trump has a somewhat conspiratorial view, telling some confidants that he distrusts statistics he sees reported in the news media and that he suspects many economists and other forecasters are presenting biased data to thwart his reelection…”
Trump convinced Israel to bar Democratic Congress members Talib and Ohmar from entering the country: “By enlisting a foreign power to take action against two American citizens, let alone elected members of Congress, Mr. Trump crossed a line that other presidents have not, in effect exporting his partisan battles beyond the country’s borders.”
Former tea party Congressman Joe Walsh published an op-ed in the New York Times calling for credible conservative candidates to primary Trump.
Immigration
The Trump administration issued new rules for who gets a green card: “Poor immigrants will be denied permanent legal status, also known as a green card, if they are deemed likely to use government benefit programs such as food stamps and subsidized housing. Wealthier immigrants, who are designated as less likely to require public assistance, will be able to obtain a green card…. immigration advocates warned that vast numbers of immigrants, including those not actually subject to the regulation, may drop out of programs they need because they fear retribution by immigration authorities.”
ProPublica has a story about ICE making false claims against asylum seekers: “the system she’d once known, as flawed as it was, had turned into a black box she no longer understood, with an ever-shifting array of rules and policies that granted untold discretion to the government. She couldn’t even get ICE attorneys to comply with a fundamental tenet of a fair system: providing proof of their case, evidence they could fight against… [Pena] and her colleagues were counting hundreds of new cases of family separation along the border that occurred after the “zero tolerance” policy supposedly ended in June 2018. But no one could track what the government was doing with every case.”
Trade War
The Trump administration announced delaying some tariffs until after the Christmas buying season so that American consumers won’t be affected when doing their Christmas shopping.
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Trump’s Job Approval: 42.1%