During the White House press briefing on Tuesday, April 7, Trump was asked about mail-in voting. He answered

President Trump: "I think mail-in voting is horrible, it's corrupt."

Reporter: "You voted by mail in Florida's election last month, didn't you?"

Trump: "Sure. I can vote by mail"

Reporter: "How do you reconcile with that?"

Trump: "Because I'm allowed to." pic.twitter.com/Es8ZNyB3O1

— MSNBC (@MSNBC) April 7, 2020

Early this week, the Supreme Court had rejected a request to extend the mail-in ballot deadline for Wisconsin's primary election. With coronavirus shelter-in-place policies in effect, in-person voting is potentially dangerous, especially for people who are already immunocompromised. As a result of the chaos of the last few weeks, people who requested mail-in ballots may not have received them; and some ballots that were mailed ahead of time may not have reached polling office in time, thanks to the general shipping slowdowns affecting everything right now.

In the Press Room exchange, Trump said:

Mail-in voting is horrible. It's corrupt. […] You get thousands and thousands of people sitting in someone's living room signing ballots all over the place. No, I think that mail-in voting is a terrible thing.

In reality, mail-in voter fraud like the kind that Trump described is only slightly more common than in-person voter fraud, which has by all estimates happened less than 100 times total in the last 20 years. Across all elections, across the entire country. Which makes it pretty much a moot point. Individual people are not directly frauding elections; and considering that only about 60% of people even vote in US Presidential elections, there is absolutely no logical reason to make it even harder to get people to vote, "just in case" these next-to-never instances of so-called voter fraud ever actually occur. Read the rest

Salon's Heather Digby Patron summarizes the consensus opinion that the Republican party is responsible for his "creation"—but also suggests that it still doesn't understand him and enjoys little prospect of stopping him.

The assumption among the establishment types is that if only Cruz, Kasich and Carson would get out of the way, all those voters would go to Rubio and they could finally knock out Trump and carry on with the plan. Unfortunately, even if they were able to finally get Rubio a free lane in which to run, there’s no guarantee that he would be the beneficiary of all those freed up votes. That’s because Trump draws from every demographic.

Trump isn't consistently right-wing, after all. In practice, he's a mix of centrist vacillations and a few extremist stunt positions. He panders to an angry middle of people with inane and self-absorbed media-fed beliefs about politics they never cared to understand in the first place: "it doesn’t matter what he says, as long as he delivers his lines with that big swinging attitude of his."

Think of tired boomers drifting into shitty retirements and angry adolescents drifting into shitty adulthoods, and you get Trump. Say another Hitler joke. And another. And another for the road. Read the rest