Trump

A post-verdict Morning Consult poll has bad news for Trump. Among the poll’s findings: 

• A clear majority, 54%, approve of the jury’s decision to convict Trump on 34 felony charges for his 2016 hush money scheme with adult actress Stormy Daniels. If the poll is accurate, that means that for Trump to win, he would have to win the votes of people who think he’s a criminal, and are happy he was convicted.
• Only 34% “strongly” or “somewhat” disapprove. That is, the Republicans losing their minds over the conviction are only a third of voters, a distinct minority. 
•  The pollsters says that “just 15% of Republican voters nationwide want Trump to drop his White House bid, a bit higher than the 8% of Trump supporters who said the same.”
•  A whopping 49% of independents think he should end his campaign.
•  The question of prison time is more polarizing: Just 44% think he should go to prison, while 49% would prefer probation.
•  The poll continues to have the race tied: Biden 45, Trump 44. Do some math—54 approve of the conviction, which means that Trump has perhaps two more points to grow, assuming people who consider him a criminal and are happy he was convicted don’t end up supporting him. What percentage of the vote did he get in 2020? 46.8%. In 2016 he got 46.1%. That means he’s still capped at around 46%.

CNN - Former President Donald Trump has joined TikTok, the fast-growing social media platform with ties to China that Trump has publicly embraced even though he railed against it as president. 

ABC News - A plurality of Americans, 50%, think former President Donald Trump's guilty verdict on all 34 counts in his hush money trial was correct, a new ABC News/Ipsos poll finds, and almost as many, 49%, think he should end his 2024 presidential campaign over the result.

Politicususa -  Trump claimed on Sunday that he supports climate change because rising seas create more beachfront property.Trump said:

The single biggest threat, not global warming, when they say that the seas will rise over the next 400 years, one eighth of an inch, you know, which means basically have a little more beachfront property. Okay. Think of it. The seas are going to rise. Who knows? But this is the big threat. I watched Biden the other night. It’s the greatest existential. He loves that word because it’s a big word. And he thinks, you know, he thinks he knows he doesn’t even know what the hell the word means. He goes, it’s the greatest existential threat to our country. Global warming. 

According to a 2022 NASA study, sea levels are projected to rise at least a foot over the next 20-30 years in the US. The rise will be even higher in Southeast and along the Gulf Coast. The country is not going to have more beachfront property. The country will have what is described as catastrophic flooding. 

NBC News - Former intelligence officers are panicking that spy agencies could suffer if Donald Trump wins a second presidential term. Given Trump’s track record during and after his first term, including his public remarks around the intelligence services, his alleged mishandling of classified information, and his vows to seek vengeance against his political opponents, former intelligence officers worry that Trump will weaponize U.S. spy services against his domestic political enemies and skew findings in favor of authoritarian leaders. NBC News spoke with more than a dozen former intelligence officers — many of whom worked in the Trump administration and had face-to-face meetings with him — as well as members of Congress and Western officials.

Foreign allies already are worried about the implications of a second Trump term and could scale back how much information they share with their U.S. counterparts about intelligence gathering methods, former officials and lawmakers said. Washington relies heavily on its foreign intelligence partners to help track terrorist threats, navigate international crises and prepare for possible conflicts.But Trump’s return to the White House could jeopardize those relationships, former officials said.