So, there’s a new conservative take .. http://tinyurl.com/jnkkapm .. on who’s to blame for Donald Trump — and the answer, it turns out, is liberal commentators, and me in particular. Yep, by denouncing the dishonesty of people like Mitt Romney, I was crying wolf, so that voters paid no attention to warnings about Trump.
Actually, even if you leave aside the substance, this is bizarre. Do you really think that the fraction of the Republican primary electorate that selected Trump cares what New York Times columnists, me in particular, have to say — that they would have been warned off if only I had been nicer to establishment Republicans? That doesn’t even rise to the level of a joke.
But anyway, let’s talk about what I said about Romney. (By the way, I don’t think I referred to him as a “charlatan” — I used that word to refer to supply-side economists, because that’s what Greg Mankiw, who was advising his campaign, called them.) Here’s a key passage .. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/24/opinion/krugman-romneys-economic-closet.html :
-- Every one of the Romney campaign’s major themes, from the attacks on President Obama for going around the world apologizing for America (he didn’t), to the insistence that Romneycare and Obamacare are very different (they’re virtually identical), to the claim that Mr. Obama has lost millions of jobs (which is only true if you count the first few months of his administration, before any of his policies had taken effect), is either an outright falsehood or deeply deceptive. Why the nonstop mendacity? --
Is there anything wrong with that passage? The “apology tour” thing was a constant refrain, even though Politifact declared it pants on fire .. http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2012/oct/17/mitt-romney/mitt-romney-says-barack-obama-began/ . So were the Romneycare not Obamacare and job loss things, which were equally false. So what is the assertion here? That I should not have called Romney out on lies, because that would undermine my authority when a much bigger liar came along?
How about a different hypothesis: the foundations for Trumpism were laid in part by conservatives who made dishonesty about policy a routine part of Republican politics, and also both-sides-do-it journalists who enabled that culture of lying. This left the Republican establishment helpless in the fact of someone who lied as much in a day as they did in a week, because they couldn’t credibly make the case that policy dishonesty was disqualifying.
Actually, I don’t fully believe in this hypothesis either; mainly, Trumpism is the GOP’s id triumphing over its weak superego, which was probably destined to happen regardless. But it’s a lot more plausible than blaming little old me.
Trump is the triumph of uncoordinated instinctual events.
"According to this model of the psyche, the id is the set of uncoordinated instinctual trends; the super-ego plays the critical and moralizing role; and the ego is the organized, realistic part that mediates between the desires of the id and the super-ego. The super-ego can stop one from doing certain things that one's id may want to do" .. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Id,_ego_and_super-ego
Michele Bachmann Says She’s Advising Trump On Foreign Policy, Because Why Not
Former Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn) says she is advising GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump on foreign policy. J. Scott Applewhite/Associated Press
Last month, she warned that Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton would create “certain destruction” and “catastrophic decline” if elected president. She also celebrated Trump for his “1950s sensibilities” and “1950s common sense,” and argued that because he “gets and understands religious liberty,” people of all faiths will be allowed to say “Merry Christmas [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/michelle-bachmann-donald-trump-christmas_us_5786ea72e4b03fc3ee4f478f ]” during a Trump presidency.
Iraq hangs 36 men for Camp Speicher massacre Islamic State militants filmed soldiers they captured in Tikrit, prior to their killing Iraq has hanged 36 men convicted over the massacre of hundreds of soldiers near the city of Tikrit in June 2014. 21 August 2016 http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-37148060
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Rudy Giuliani Claims Online Videos Show Hillary Clinton Is Mentally Ill
In Reversal, Trump Indicates To Hispanic Leaders Openness To Legalization For Immigrants The Trump campaign disputes that Donald Trump is open to legalization after members of his Hispanic advisory council said he suggested he is open to figuring out a humane and efficient manner to deal with undocumented immigrants already in the country, ahead of a major immigration speech this week. Aug. 20, 2016 https://www.buzzfeed.com/adriancarrasquillo/in-major-reversal-trump-indicates-to-hispanic-leaders-openne [with comments]
Donald Trump, a ‘Rigged’ Election and the Politics of Race
A rally last week in Philadelphia, where Hillary Clinton said voter registration efforts were the best tactic against Donald J. Trump. Ruth Fremson/The New York Times
By MAGGIE HABERMAN and MATT FLEGENHEIMER AUG. 21, 2016
As he seeks to revive his embattled candidacy, Donald J. Trump [ http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/us/elections/donald-trump-on-the-issues.html ] has seized on a new argument to rally his supporters and to explain away a possible defeat in November: that Democrats are preparing to exploit weak voter identification laws to win a “stolen election” through fraudulent voting.
The claim has spurred outrage among Democrats and has alarmed some Republicans who worry his tactics will backfire, angering minority voters and threatening the party’s chances in close races down the ballot.
Since 2010, Republican governors and Republican-held state legislatures have fought for stricter voter identification laws, which Democrats argue are intended to hinder turnout by the poorest voters, many of them black and Hispanic, who tend to vote Democratic.
But Mr. Trump’s language has moved beyond his party’s call for rigid identification requirements and the unfounded claims that polls are “skewed” to predictions of outright theft of the November election [ http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/04/upshot/trump-strategy-win-3-key-states-and-warn-about-rigged-election.html ]. And his warnings have been cast in increasingly urgent and racially suggestive language, hinting that the only legitimate outcome in certain states would be his victory.
Nonetheless, Mr. Trump has said the race could be snatched from him there. His campaign is urging people to sign up as election workers to watch voters as they cast their ballots on Nov. 8, fueling concerns about voter intimidation on Election Day.
“The only way we can lose, in my opinion — I really mean this, Pennsylvania — is if cheating goes on,” Mr. Trump said at a rally on Aug. 12 in Altoona. A local Republican official introducing Mr. Trump was more specific, pointing to Philadelphia, a city with a large African-American population. That came days after Mr. Trump told a rally in Wilmington, N.C., that without strict voter identification laws, people would be “voting 15 times for Hillary.”
Last week, Mr. Trump hired as his campaign chief Stephen K. Bannon [ http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/18/us/politics/donald-trump-stephen-bannon-paul-manafort.html ], the executive chairman of Breitbart, a conservative news website that has frequently given voice to Mr. Trump’s claims of a manipulated process, holding forth on perceived voter fraud and “propaganda polls” showing Mrs. Clinton ahead.
Election law officials have expressed concern that Mr. Trump’s incendiary words will create a self-fulfilling prophecy, all but ensuring claims of fraud from his poll watchers and a delegitimization of the election results should Mrs. Clinton win.
“It went from being laughable to be what I consider to be dangerous,” said Richard L. Hasen, a professor and election law expert at the University of California, Irvine, School of Law.
Concerns about a rigged election have periodically gnawed at American politics but were most pronounced after the 2000 presidential race. In that race, the popular vote winner, Al Gore, a Democrat and former vice president, was separated from George W. Bush, a Republican, by a few hundred votes in Florida. The United States Supreme Court ultimately settled the election in Mr. Bush’s favor.
After the 2012 presidential election, some conservatives made claims of voter fraud in Pennsylvania that were never substantiated. Mark Braden, a Republican election lawyer, said that while there had been cases of voter fraud over decades, “the election system in the United States generally works extremely well, and fraud, although real, is modest.”
Demonstrable episodes of widespread individual fraud have been hard to come by. According to a study by the nonpartisan Brennan Center [ https://www.brennancenter.org/publication/truth-about-voter-fraud ] in 2007, “by any measure, voter fraud is extraordinarily rare.”
Mr. Trump’s assertions echo a theme he has increasingly pursued in recent weeks: that the political system is “rigged” — he points to the lack of charges against Mrs. Clinton over the use of a private email server while serving as secretary of state — and that the news media is tilting its coverage to benefit Democrats.
Mr. Trump in Altoona, Pa., this month. No Republican presidential candidate has won the state since 1988. Mark Makela for The New York Times
But his suggestions that voting itself will be tainted could have a longer-term resonance. Since 2000, some Republicans have pointed to an increased use of electronic voting machines to suggest that results could be subject to tampering. Roger J. Stone Jr., an informal adviser to Mr. Trump, wrote in The Hill [ http://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/presidential-campaign/291534-can-the-2016-election-be-rigged-you-bet ] that electronic voting machines could be “manipulated.”
“We are now living in a fake reality of constructed data and phony polls,” he added.
Marc Elias, the main counsel to Mrs. Clinton’s campaign and a lawyer involved in cases against a string of strict voter identification laws in states such as North Carolina and Virginia in recent years, called such talk fear-mongering aimed at depressing minority turnout.
“It’s a sad day when Donald Trump and the Republicans have to rely on scaring people out of voting to try to achieve their electoral aims,” Mr. Elias said.
After years of conspiracy theories about President Obama’s birthplace — propagated by Mr. Trump [ http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/03/us/politics/donald-trump-birther-obama.html ], among others who have sought to delegitimize the president’s rise to power — Democrats fear that the voting claims could resonate among opponents of Mrs. Clinton long after Election Day, should she win.
Last week, Mrs. Clinton took her campaign to the heart of a neighborhood that election conspiracy theorists have viewed suspiciously: West Philadelphia, a predominantly black area where, in 2012, Mr. Obama captured 100 percent of the vote in some precincts.
Speaking last Tuesday at a high school gymnasium, across from a strip of moldering rowhouses with windows that occasionally featured Clinton signs, Mrs. Clinton steered clear of Mr. Trump’s claims, at least directly, making the case that relentless voter registration efforts were the best defense against his tactics.
“We know what we need to do,” she told the crowd. “The question is whether we will do it.”
Mr. Trump’s charge of prospective fraud has rankled black voters and Democratic leaders, by turns calling to mind a painful history of racially charged voter intimidation and inspiring bemusement at the notion that Mr. Trump thinks he might be able to win the support of minorities on the merits — if only he could root out the chicanery.
“If he thinks that Obama winning North Philly and West Philly was rigged, he should come out himself and speak to every voter and see exactly who they voted for,” said James Walton, 30, from North Philadelphia, another largely black area of the city.
Darrell L. Clarke, Philadelphia’s City Council president, said the racial overtones of Mr. Trump’s remarks were clear.
“When you talk about ‘certain areas’ in Pennsylvania, we all know what that means,” he said. “He’s talking about Philadelphia and some of the urban areas.”
The Trump campaign recently started a website [ https://www.donaldjtrump.com/lp/volunteer-to-be-a-trump-election-observer ] urging people to sign up as election watchers. All campaigns bring on poll watchers, but they are required to go through extensive training about what crosses the line into intimidation.
The Republican National Committee has been operating under a consent decree for more than three decades, after claims that members of the committee intimidated minority voters at the polls in the 1970s and 1980s. Mr. Trump’s campaign, according to committee officials, is not bound by that document, despite the intermingling of its resources with the committee’s.
The consent decree is set to expire soon, but not before the election. Republicans have fretted that Mr. Trump’s bombast could invite Democrats to fight to keep it in place.
Mr. Braden, the Republican election lawyer, said that sweeping talk about fraud could backfire in tight Senate races in which Republicans end up ahead by a slim margin.
“From my perspective, no, it is not helping,” he said. “A more measured, thoughtful discussion of the issue, which is worth discussing, would be helpful.”
“But that,” he added, “does not seem to be his style.”
Virtually every category of receipts shows a decline this year. Contributions from individuals where the amount given is less than $200 (the “unitemized” category) is less than half what it was in July of 2004, 2008 and 2012. There is a similar decline in direct contributions of larger amounts where specific information about the donor is included in the report. These itemized contributions total much less than July 2004 and 2008 and are even smaller than July 2012 when joint fundraising became much more important.
These joint fundraising efforts where the presidential campaign works together with the national party and state parties around the country are increasingly important, and the RNC total from those efforts also lags in July compared with 2012 and 2008. The Trump campaign has talked about huge joint fundraising successes, but neither the campaign nor the RNC has received all that much from this process so far comparatively.
People often look at cash balances and the end of the month to get a feel for how a committee is positioned for future spending. Here too, the RNC on July 31 was strikingly short of its own status on the same date in past campaigns. At a time when $70 to $90 million is the norm, the RNC finds itself with only $34.5 million in the bank.
The Trump campaign bragged about their uptick in fundraising, but a deeper look inside the numbers shows that the RNC only has $15 million in usable cash. That is $15 million for every race, data operation, voter registration, and get out the vote effort in the country. Donald Trump’s refusal to build a campaign operation in all 50 states has resulted in the RNC having to spend their resources. Trump doesn’t have a data operation, so the RNC is using party resources for that too.
Donald Trump is bleeding the Republican Party dry. It is no surprise that a man who has built his career on bankruptcy and debt is mooching off of the Republican Party. What is shocking is how quickly Trump has pushed the RNC towards insolvency.
The money that the RNC isn’t raising because of Trump matters because that means that there will be less money to go around for other candidates. Republicans could lose close House and Senate elections because RNC Chair Reince Priebus threw precious party resources down the Trump sink hole.
Don’t believe the Trump created hype. Trump may play a billionaire on reality television, but as a presidential nominee, he is a deadbeat eating all of the RNC’s food while crashing on their couch.
.. not bad for a guy who started out boasting how he was funding his own campaign .. then again he has form about sending his own companies into bankruptcy, and his contractors into financial hardship, all the while raking the bucks in for himself ..