Tag: Doug Jones

Trump Urges Voters to Pick Roy Moore Instead of ‘Liberal Jones’

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With a little more than two weeks until a special election for the Senate in Alabama, President Trump on Sunday doubled down on his criticism of the Democratic nominee, Doug Jones, and reiterated his support for Roy S. Moore, the Republican candidate, who has been accused of sexual misconduct by a number of women.

“The last thing we need in Alabama and the U.S. Senate is a Schumer/Pelosi puppet who is WEAK on Crime, WEAK on the Border, Bad for our Military and our great Vets, Bad for our 2nd Amendment, AND WANTS TO RAISES TAXES TO THE SKY,” Mr. Trump tweeted on Sunday morning.

“Liberal Jones would be BAD!” he tweeted less than an hour later.

In response, the Jones campaign said Mr. Jones’s record as a prosecutor “speaks for itself.”

“Roy Moore was unfit for office before nine Alabama women served as witnesses to all Alabamians of his disturbing conduct,” Sebastian Kitchen, Mr. Jones’s spokesman, wrote in an email. “Doug Jones is continuing to focus on finding common ground and getting things done for real Alabamians.”

During the Alabama Republican primary, Mr. Trump endorsed Senator Luther Strange on Twitter, then deleted some of those tweets after Mr. Strange lost the runoff in September.

On Sunday, the president claimed that after he had supported Mr. Strange, the candidate “shot way up in the polls” — a claim he also made in September — but “it wasn’t enough.”

It has been widely reported that Mr. Strange did not advance in the polls after Mr. Trump’s endorsement.

The latest poll numbers indicate that Mr. Moore is in a tight race. Alabama historically votes Republican but the allegations against Mr. Moore have taken a toll.

Most of the women who have accused him of sexual misconduct said it occurred when they were teenagers and Mr. Moore was in his 30s. He has denied the allegations.

“I don’t remember ever dating any girl without the permission of her mother,” Mr. Moore told the Fox News host Sean Hannity.

High-ranking Republicans have not been convinced.

“I believe the women,” Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, has said.

Mr. Trump, however, has remained skeptical.

“Forty years is a long time. He’s run eight races, and this has never come up,” Mr. Trump said on Tuesday. “He says it didn’t happen.”

[The New York Times]

Trump: Vote For an Alleged Sexual Predator Because He’s Tough On Crime

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Doug Jones is a career prosecutor, famous for his role in convicting Ku Klux Klan members and terrorists. Roy Moore is a theocratic demagogue, famous for nullifying court orders and (allegedly) sexually harassing and assaulting so many teenage girls, he got himself banned from the Gadsden Mall.

On Tuesday, president Trump suggested that Alabamians should vote for Moore over Jones in the state’s upcoming special Senate election – because the alleged sexual predator’s rival was “soft on crime.”

“He’s terrible on the border, he’s terrible on the military,” Trump said of the Democratic Senate Tuesday. “I can tell you, you don’t need someone who’s soft on crime like Jones.”

Sometimes, it feels like the Trump administration’s overriding ambition is to prove that every liberal “caricature” of the American right was correct. With its health-care and tax plans, the White House confirmed that fiscal conservatism isn’t driven by a desire to reduce the deficit, but by a passion for increasing inequality. Meanwhile, with his vulgarity and (alleged) sexual predation, Trump has validated the notion that (much of) American religious conservatism is less concerned with upholding traditional sexual morality than subjugating women.

And now, with his remarks on the Jones-Moore race, the president has affirmed the left’s decades-old contention that “law-and-order” conservatism isn’t animated by a reverence for the rule of law, so much as reactionary rage at challenges to the social order – which is to say, the social hierarchy, (which is to say, in most cases, white supremacy).

Trump had already lent credence to this argument, when he pardoned Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Arizona, after Maricopa County’s favorite proto-fascist had directly subverted law and order, by refusing to honor a legally-binding court order. But at least in that case, there was a halfway coherent (if completely wrong and racist) argument that the Arpaio’s refusal to abandon racial profiling was motivated by a concern for countering violent crime.

But now, Trump has shed that fig leaf. If the president believes that an alleged, serial sexual abuser of teenage girls (who wants to deport law-abiding undocumented immigrants) is “tougher on crime” than a lifelong prosecutor (who has little interest in deporting law-abiding, undocumented immigrants) than what, do you suppose, he means by crime?

[New York Magazine]

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