During RTÉ Radio One’s Late Debate show coverage of the US election results, I challenged #Trump supporter and American Greatness editor Chris Buskirk on his bizarre assertion that the violence we have seen on US streets over recent months has been caused by anti-Trump groups alone. His claim that shops and offices in Washington, New York and other big cities were being boarded up beacuse they feared violence by anti-Trump protesters has been proved untrue in recent days with the arrest of several armed pro-Trump supporters at various count centers – AP News.
Pic via Arjen van der Horst on Twitter, taken in Washington DC 5 days before polling day:
This week’s column is a bit longer than usual as it looks at two separate topics that are only connected by timing. This piece appeared on Broadsheet.ie yesterday (Monday Nov 2nd) as two columns. The first was on the allegations of leaking that beset the Tánaiste: https://www.broadsheet.ie/2020/11/02/derek-mooney-best-practice/ and the second as an eve of polling day assessment of the US presidential election with a guide to the key states to watch out for on the night:https://www.broadsheet.ie/2020/11/02/a-referendum-on-trump/
NB Since I wrote this column Prof McDonald has revised his estimate of the total voter turnout to 160.2 million (67%)
Store windows in downtown Washington DC being boarded up last week in anticipation of violence as the results emerge – Pic via Arjen van der Horst on Twitter
Late last Friday I pulled together some quotes and stats in anticipation of today’s column being just about the US presidential election. Then came Saturday morning and that Village magazine exposé. So, while today’s piece will still consider the U.S. election, I will first address the domestic elephants in the room.
The allegation that Leo Varadkar leaked a confidential government document to a friend is serious. Very serious. To describe the leak as “not best practise” is akin to Sinn Féin saying three £10,000 office grants ended up in their bank accounts “in error”. Using passive language does not make it better.
If anything, it makes it worse. It is like a poker player’s tell that shows the miscreant knows they did wrong, no matter how much they tell themselves otherwise.
To their credit – and this is not a phrase that flows easily from my keyboard – Sinn Féin have tried to deflate their problems with resignations from four party officials, including a Senator and an MLA.
This column appeared on Broadsheet.ie on Oct 12th 2020. Here I take my courage in my hands and predict – three weeks out from the official US Presidential polling day – that Joe Biden will win the presidency… and win it comfortably.
This is less based on polling, though national polls continue to show Biden with a clear 7 – 9 pt lead over Trump, and is more predicated on the evidence from the Trump side that it knows its man is beaten and is now focused on challenging the authenticity of the result. The Trump campaign is spending billions so Trump can sit in his Maralago golf resort this time next year and tell himself: I didn’t lose, I was robbed!
When trying to forecast an election result a few weeks out from polling day political pundits protect themselves by saying well, this would be the result if people were voting tomorrow, but there are still a few weeks to go and anything could happen.
But, when it comes to this American presidential election, people are voting tomorrow, just as they were voting today, yesterday, last week and even back to mid-September.
According to Vote.org, 27 States are already voting in person and/or have totally mail-in ballots. 9 out of the 50 States have been open for early voting from six weeks before the November 3 polling date, including Pennsylvania, Illinois, Virginia and New Jersey. Early voting started in California a week ago.
Over 9 million Americans have already voted, this is 8 – 10 times as many as voted this early in 2016. In five states the number of ballots already returned is more than 20% of the 2016 turnout.
This column first appeared on Broadsheet.ie early on Monday March 23rd and looks at how President Trump narrow politicking by refusing to call the Covid19 Coronavirus by its name is, conversely, distracting from the responsibility the authorities in Beijing should be bearing for their negligence in allowing the global spread of the pandemic.
According to the haggard old proverb: “even a stopped clock is right twice a day.”
The current U.S. President can only dream of attaining even this level of accidental consistency. After months of denying the threat posed by Coronavirus, even to the point of putting the blame for its arrival in the U.S. on “the Democrat policy of open borders” (See this NYTimes timeline of Trump’s statements) the current U.S. President seems, finally, to have had the realisation imposed upon him that Coronavirus is a real and present danger.
Not that something as hazardous or deadly serious as the worst global pandemic in a century is going to stop Trump from scoring political points. Along with changing his messaging, Trump has also changed his language. Up to two weeks ago – when he was still denying the seriousness of the situation – he was content to call the threat by its proper name: Coronavirus or Covid19.
No longer. Now that the public spotlight has turned on to the weeks and months of his administration’s negligence and indifference Trump has found a new name for the disease: the Chinese Virus.
Postscript: Perhaps a better way of summing up the Clinton/Trump debate is to say that she didn’t do much to reduce her unfavourable while Trump did a lot to increase his….
Here are a couple of random, even disconnected, thoughts on tonight’s U.S. Presidential Debate, posting at approx 5:30 am (Irish Time).
The first is just how shockingly poor Trump’s performance really was. While many pundits were predicting that he would do badly, especially as news emerged of how little debate prep he was doing, I hadn’t imagined it would be THAT bad.
“Donald Trump looks as if he was playing a President in a porn movie.” This was Scottish comedian Frankie Boyle’s scathing put down of the Donald on BBC radio four’s News Quiz last Friday.
Maybe it is something to do with the Donald’s addiction to calling everything ‘huge’ (or as he says it: huuuuuge ) and lauding his own achievements with outlandish superlatives but Boyle’s taunt perfectly captures Trump’s OTT and hammy public appearances.
Trump’s emergence as a real contender for the White House has surprised most pundits including – if one of his former publicists is to be believed – himself.
How could this gauche, egotistical, property dealing demagogue tear up the US presidential campaign playbook and beat a string of long established Republican hopefuls?
Hard though we may find it to comprehend from this side of the Atlantic; but part of the Trump phenomenon is that he has teed-up this US presidential election to be a fight between the Washington insider: Hillary Clinton and the outsider: Trump.
Postscript: Perhaps a better way of summing up the Clinton/Trump debate is to say that she didn’t do much to reduce her unfavourable while Trump did a lot to increase his…. 
Here is my Broadsheet column from June 7th 2016. Published online here: 
derekmooney.ie 