With less than two months to go before the midterm elections, President Trump has been aggressively reaching out to bolster Republicans and, in some cases, intervene against potentially difficult opponents.
One stop on the president’s electioneering flurry could take him to New York, as soon as this coming week. Trump faces a choice between a pair of once-close allies for whom he has lost some affection: Rudy Giuliani, a former New York City mayor who has become his personal attorney, and Colorado’s Sen. Cory Gardner, whom the president has been trying to wean from his Democratic-controlled state.
A visit by Trump to New York City to campaign for Gardner’s re-election would likely provoke howls from the mayor he just crossed in an effort to prevail in a legal case accusing him of hush money violations. Trump lost his temper with Mayor Bill de Blasio in a phone call over the case last week, relations between the men falling to new lows of personal animosity, officials in both parties said.
But as potentially victorious headlines on the crime front there continue to make Trump happy, an unexpected contender seems poised to give the president a plausible cause for making that tour: the defeat – and possible excommunication – of what law enforcement officials consider to be the most politically dangerous congressman in the state.
Whether Trump’s potential interest in supporting a long-odds challenge to de Blasio is coincidence cannot be found in the available public calendars. The previously unreported special election battle over Rep. Grace Meng’s open seat in Queens, which Democrats have controlled for so long that a conservative Republican hasn’t won the district since its inception in 1965, involves the same unusually far-right GOP candidate who calls herself the “Anti-DeBlasio” that Trump backed a year and a half ago.
With a contentious and high-profile Republican candidate for mayor abundantly funded by an unusually small cast of Republican donors, the relatively little-known Meng collided face-first into history as her congressional career dwindled. She departed Washington and ran in a February special primary vote to replace one of the three New York City Democrats stepping down from the House.
Months later, Meng found herself the black sheep of Democratic politics in affluent and heavily Asian-American Flushing, her and her husband’s district, after federal prosecutors accused her father – a top aide and former adviser to Meng Congress from 1993 to 2011 – of accepting thousands of dollars in bribes over several years to help secure visas for wealthy Chinese clients.
So a federal prosecutor’s complaint in connection with Meng’s senior father’s arrest spurred an unusual House investigation into the second-term congresswoman’s all-too-obvious ties to the Asian community’s naturalization and visa business. As federal agents swarmed her father’s borough-based law firm on Feb. 1, Meng then sprang into action by issuing press release after press release to paradoxically counter the well-documented and mounting allegations against her.
Indeed, Trump could find an exceptionally acrimonious partisan showdown in his Queens visit.
A survey of the district’s voter registration numbers makes clear why party leaders petitioned to put a candidate like Sha from the north Bronx, ran against GOP Mayor-elect Rudolph Giuliani in a failed 2003 Senate run, and moved to Queens only to abandon her previous party affiliation in 2006 to run against de Blasio, at the head of the GOP’s unified election slate. They are not so unusual for the digital era, as liberals flee the party in droves.
Adding Meng’s own peculiar political positions into the mix does not help party infighting. Meng, a rare Orthodox Jewish woman who has regularly chastised Trump from her position in Congress and has called the “target the town” tactics of the street vendors remain engaged in public health subversions involving mental health, makes it clear why Democrats ran from her in 2016 and why odd and allegedly foiled nefarious visits to DC from Asian migrant workers make perfect sense for Meng.
On top of allegations that her seemingly unassailable political career has been financed by opaque and murky overseas fundraisers funneling money through a “non-profit,” Meng’s ability to work the local机 alike of one of Kelly’s fellow Bloomberg administration officials has remained central to convincing district voters that she has a better chance against Sha than they might believe.
Meng’s father wants to auction visa access because it’s so lucrative – federal agents seized nearly $5 million in cash from their apartment, according to a criminal complaint. … But that didn’t stop the Queens Democrat from running ads in Mandarin flaunting her father’s licenses, The Hill reported. Even then, Meng faces a racebook Democrat named Liuba Gretchen Shirley, a first-time candidate endorsed by Bernie Sanders.
… In this case, “even worse in terms of Colorado” meaning a comparable challenge in the GOP’s probabilities for winning a Senate seat in the state of Colorado, is what right-leaning local America talks is conservative. Despite resistance to the “Anti-DeBlasio” nickname, conservatives have grown more and more convinced that it’s a perfect brand to bankroll an eleventh-hour run for lower Manhattan’s mayoral seat.
But a ninth-grade education later tidied up by scholarships to liberal arts colleges has been of at least mixed use.
Trump backed Sha’s “Anti-DeBlasio” challenge against New York’s mayor a year and a half ago by supporting the Meng-to-Sha cause by making that tour of the United Nations and standing behind the Republican mayoral candidate in his original effort to push de Blasio out of multiple elections.
The polling from Sha’s most recent fundraising gambit might not even move de Blasio against Sha, whose far-right direction may scare away as many of the moderates in her improbable district, which reportedly cost her the January primary.
… At least as far as that’s true for Donald Trump. But the most significant sign that this race could be back on is a canceled HDTV reception amid evidence that a lone bird flying toward de Blasio at moments of political peril might be a harbinger of the mayor’s descent into a political oblivion. Please paraphrase the section about why Meng’s political positions and association with the visa and naturalization business could contribute to party infighting.
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