Washington Post: From Clinton and Trump, Harshly Negative Arguments With Two Weeks to Go

By Anne Gearan, Sean Sullivan and John Wagner:

With just 15 days left until Election Day, Trump spent Monday in Florida, telling supporters that the national media has deliberately skewed polls to undermine his candidacy and that he is actually winning.

During a discussion with farmers at Bedner’s Farm Fresh Market in Boynton Beach, Fla., Trump devoted nearly half of his seven-minute public remarks to criticizing the news media.

“I believe we’re actually winning,” he said, speaking in a thatched-roof structure adorned with decorative gourds. He asserted that the majority of public opinion polls, which show Clinton leading nationally and in most battleground states, reflect the “crooked system, the rigged system I’ve been talking about since I entered the race.”

“What they do is they show these phony polls where they look at Democrats, and it’s heavily weighted with Democrats, and then they’ll put on a poll where we’re not winning, and everybody says, ‘Oh they’re not winning,’ ” he added.

His campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway, acknowledged Sunday that her candidate trails Clinton, saying, “We are behind.” But Trump said Monday that he trusts the two polls that have shown him leading — Investor’s Business Daily and Rasmussen — as more reliable.

The Full Story (October 24, 2016)

Daily Beast: Inside Donald Trump’s One-Stop Parties - Attendees Recall Cocaine and Very Young Models

By Michael Gross:

One of the two men I spoke with, a fashion photographer, requested anonymity because he has fathered several children since his Trump days and doesn’t want his past dredged up. “There’s no upside for me,” he says.

The other man… well, you’ll read his words. Both confirmed that Trump, as I’ve reported, used to host parties in suites at the Plaza Hotel when he owned it, where young women and girls were introduced to older, richer men. This is hardly aberrant behavior in the modeling business. Indeed, it is standard operating procedure.

But both men also put Donald Trump in the room with cocaine, very young women and underage girls, and rich, old men there to—pardon my language, but if the Times can say pussy on its front page, I can say this—fuck them.

I’m sorry, Ivanka, I really am, because your mother raised you well and I can’t blame you for supporting your father (even if he did give—at the least—his blessing when you were 15 and signed on as a model yourself with Elite, the hard-partying high-end agency founded by notorious teen-fucker John Casablancas) but here’s the sad truth: Your dad’s not a dog. He’s a pig.

The Full Story (October 24, 2016)

[Special] Time: Why ISIS Supports Donald Trump

By Matt Olsen:

This year, ISIS isn’t simply a passive observer of American politics. Since the group’s rapid rise in 2014, ISIS has established a far-reaching, sophisticated propaganda machine. Its members rely on social media to shape public opinion, recruit new members and mobilize followers to carry out attacks. Now, some of them are using those channels to advocate for Trump. In August, one ISIS spokesman wrote: “I ask Allah to deliver America to Trump.” Another supporter declared: “The ‘facilitation’ of Trump’s arrival in the White House must be a priority for jihadists at any cost!!!” ISIS is working to drum up support for the candidate it has called “the perfect enemy.”

That may come as a surprise to some. After all, Trump has spent this election season making a series of combative and bellicose comments on terrorism—from his pledge to kill the families of terrorists, his plans bring back torture of suspected terrorists and his call to ban all Muslims from entering the United States. But the truth is, Trump’s statements and extreme policies aren’t just contrary to our values—they play right into the hands of ISIS.

Trump’s anti-Muslim proposals are likely to inspire and radicalize more violent jihadists in the U.S. and Europe. Specifically, his calls for a ban on Muslims visiting our country and for blanket spying on mosques reinforce ISIS’s view that the U.S. is hostile to all Muslims. As a former ISIS fighter told Revkin and Mhidi: “When Trump says hateful things about Muslims, it proves that jihadists are right to fight against the West, because the West is against Islam.” As a result, his ideas fuel the group’s efforts to radicalize and mobilize its followers to take action. In fact, Trump himself has been featured in ISIS propaganda videos following the Brussels attack and the Orlando massacre.

Trump’s statements also serve to isolate and alienate the same Muslim Americans who must be our partners in this fight. They’re often on the front lines against ISIS in its effort to radicalize those who are disaffected or otherwise susceptible to its hateful message. And they are in the best position to recognize the signs of radicalization and to intervene before it’s too late. Marginalizing these Americans sows distrust of the government and law enforcement, and makes it more difficult to identify and disrupt attacks. Terrorist groups around the world are eager to capitalize on this opportunity: the al-Qaeda group in East Africa released a video quoting Trump to convince American Muslims to join the group because they are not welcome in their own country.

The Full Story (September 7, 2016)

[Special] Truth Out: Trump's Got Star Power

By Matt Bors:

The Full Story (July 6, 2016)

[Special] Twitter: Fourth Tallest

Seth Rogen:

The Full Story (October 8, 2015)

Talking Points Memo: We're in the Universal Derp Implosion

By Josh Marshal:

You'll note for starters that that the email is from 2008 and Podesta is neither the sender nor the recipient. But that's just a footnote. More importantly, what Tom Matzzie is talking about is the campaign/DNC's own polls. Campaigns do extensive, very high quality polling to understand the state of the race and devise strategies for winning. These are not public polls. So they can't affect media polls and they can't have anything to do with voter suppression.

Now you may be asking, why would the Democrats skew their own internal polls? Well, they're not.

The biggest thing here is what the word 'oversampling' means. Both public and private pollsters will often over-sample a particular demographic group to get statistically significant data on that group. So let's stay you have a likely voter poll with 800 respondents. The number of African-Americans in that sample is maybe going to be 100 people, maybe less. 800 people is a decent sample for statistical significance. 100 is not. So if you're trying to draw conclusions about African-American voters, levels of approval, degree of opposition or support of a candidate, demographic breakdowns, etc. you need to get an 'over-sample' to get solid numbers.

Whether it's public or private pollsters, the 'over-sample' is never included in the 'topline' number. So if you get 4 times the number of African-American voters as you got in a regular sample, those numbers don't all go into the mix for the total poll. They're segmented out. The whole thing basically amounts to zooming in on one group to find out more about them. To do so, to zoom in, you need to 'over-sample' their group as what amounts to a break-out portion of the poll.

What it all comes down to is that you're talking about a polling concept the Trumpers don't seem to understand (or are relying on supporters not understanding), about polls that are by definition secret (campaign polls aren't shared) and about an election eight years ago. I have no clue who this Egly guy is. But people say all sort of stupid things on Twitter. What he thinks he's found here is Mattzie calling up ABC News and saying "Hey, order from the DNC: sample way more Democrats than Republicans. Got it? Good."

Again, people say stupid things on Twitter. But from Twitter straight to the mouth of the Republican candidate.

The Full Story (October 24, 2016)

Bloomberg: Trump, Name Now Awash in Controversy, Readies Scion as New Brand

By Hui-Yong Yu and James Nash:

Since entering the race last year, Trump has offended groups including Mexicans, Muslims, the disabled and veterans. A video from 2005 that showed him bragging about making lewd advances on women prompted almost a dozen to say he’d harassed them -- claims that he strongly denies. Those associations will make corporate clients less likely to book Trump-branded properties, said Bruce Himelstein, a former chief marketing officer for Loews and Ritz-Carlton hotels.

“He’s now a polarizing figure. When he was putting his hotels together, he wasn’t,” said Himelstein, now a consultant. “There’s definitely an impact.”

His campaign has already reeled. A candidate that as recently as three weeks ago was in a close race is now waging an uphill battle to close a gap that’s grown to 5.9 percentage points nationally, according to a RealClearPolitics poll average.

Enter Scion. The new brand is planned for use at city and resort locations, Trump Hotels said when Scion was announced Sept. 28. The new hotels are intended to appeal “to a new and different type of guest in more locations around the globe,” Trump Hotels said.

The Full Story (October 24, 2016)

The Hill: Trump's Growth Projections Leave Economists in Disbelief

By Peter Schroeder:

Trump’s bold claims are eliciting scoffs from economists, who argue that such numbers are difficult if not outright impossible to meet.

“His growth expectations are not realistic. The economy's potential growth is 2 percent, and to get stronger growth will require immigration reform that provides a path to legalization for the undocumented and a significant increase in skilled legal immigration. He is strongly opposed to this,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics.

“Even then, [immigration reform] will increase potential growth to closer to 2.5 percent. We may be surprised and get stronger growth, but it wouldn't be prudent to count on it.”

Conservative economists are equally skeptical.

Stan Veuger, resident scholar at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute, said Trump is setting a “ridiculous expectation” for growth.

“He doesn’t really know what he’s talking about, and his policy platform is so incoherent that he has to make claims like that,” Veuger said.

The Full Story (October 23, 2016)

[Special] Talking Points Memo: Why Some Jihadists Consider Donald Trump To Be The Perfect Enemy

By Tierney Sneed and Lauren Fox:

In some quarters of the dark internet, where supporters of the Islamic State and other extremist groups linger, the presumptive GOP nominee has emerged a rallying point of sorts. To them, he is the “perfect enemy,” as one Islamic State defector told a researcher interviewed by TPM, and they are using his posturing to advance their own agenda, according to another analyst.

As Trump emerged as the presumptive GOP nominee -- and specifically after he called for a ban on Muslims entering the United States -- experts who monitor the activity of terror networks have raised concerns about a possible backlash driven by his rhetoric. Hillary Clinton herself said in a December Democratic debate that Trump was “becoming ISIS’ best recruiter” -- a comment viewed with general skepticism at the time and vehemently rebuffed by Trump himself.

But what has emerged instead is perhaps more complicated.

“It’s clear they find his comments, they find his demeanor, they find his approach, in some way serving the goals of ISIS in some manner, whether it be in having a ground war in Syria or weakening the United States,” Laith Alkhouri, a counterterrorism analyst and co-founder of the threat intelligence firm FlashPoint, told TPM. “They believe that with the U.S. weakening down that the Caliphate will actually rise.”

* * *

The replies that followed predicted that Trump “ will be a disaster to America,” while celebrating that he could bring the end-of-days battle in Syria that jihadists call for.

“Trump's governance will be the destroyer of America and its traitor Arab allies," one commenter said.

The Full Story (June 30, 2016)

Washington Post: Donald Trump Vows to Sue His Accusers, Lashes Out at Media

By Jenna Johnson and Jose A. DelReal:

But Trump spent the first part of his speech airing a litany of grievances. He branded as “liars” the nearly one dozen women who have come forward in recent weeks to accuse him of groping them against their will and vowed to sue them after the election. The allegations — including one from an adult film actress that was announced on Saturday — followed the release of a 2005 “Access Hollywood” recording in which Trump bragged about being able to force himself on women against their will because of his celebrity.

“Every woman lied when they came forward to hurt my campaign. Total fabrication,” Trump insisted Saturday. “The events never happened. Never. All of these liars will be sued after the election is over.” (In many cases, the women accusing Trump of misconduct have provided the publications with the names of witnesses and others who have supported their accounts.)

The nominee blasted the media and said that the women and news organizations are attempting to “poison” the minds of American voters. He also said, without providing evidence, that the accusations were the doing of the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s campaign. He added later that “we’ll probably find out about their involvement” through litigation and that he was “so looking forward to doing that.”

He also accused reporters of not sufficiently covering his crowd sizes.

The Full Story (October 22, 2016)

Washington Post: Donald Trump is in a Funk - Bitter, Hoarse and Pondering, ‘If I Lose. . .’

By Jenna Johnson:

“What a waste of time if we don’t pull this off,” Trump said. “You know, these guys have said: ‘It doesn’t matter if you win or lose. There’s never been a movement like this in the history of this country.’ I say, it matters to me if we win or lose. So I’ll have over $100 million of my own money in this campaign.” “So, if I lose,” Trump continued as the crowd remained unusually quiet, “if I lose, I will consider this —” Trump didn’t finish his sentence, but he didn’t really need to. After weeks of controversy and declining poll numbers, Trump and his campaign have settled into a dark funk. Even as he vows to prevail in the race, the GOP nominee’s mood has soured with less than three weeks to go until Election Day.

The Full Story (October 21, 2016)

[Special] Talking Points Memo: Trump - My Life Hasn't Been 'Easy,' My Dad Gave Me 'Small' $1M Loan

By Caitlin MacNeal:

During a town hall with NBC's "Today," an attendee asked Trump if he's ever been told "no."

"My whole life really has been a ‘no.’ And I fought through it," he responded.

"It has not been easy for me," he continued. "I started off in Brooklyn. My father gave me a small loan of a million dollars. I came into Manhattan, and I had to pay him back. And I had to pay him back with interest. But I came into Manhattan. I started buying up properties, and I did great."

Trump said that his father doubted him and felt his foray into Manhattan wouldn't work out.

"All my life I was told 'no,'" Trump said.

Town hall moderator Matt Lauer jumped in and said, "Let’s just put this in perspective. You said it hasn’t been easy for you, but ‘My dad gave me a million dollar loan.’ That probably is going to seem pretty easy to a lot of people."

"You’re right," Trump replied. "But a million dollars isn’t very much compared to what I’ve built."

The Full Story (October 26, 2015)

Washington Post: Taking Trump to Court - The Evidence Against a Nasty Man

By Ruth Marcus:

At the second debate, Trump claimed that his taped boasting about grabbing women without consent was just that — all talk, no action. In the 10 days before the third debate, nine women came forward to dispute that assertion.

So moderator Chris Wallace posed the key question: “Why would so many different women from so many different circumstances over so many different years . . . all make up these stories?”

Trump’s response was a characteristically repulsive stew of dishonesty, outright lies, conspiracy theorizing and blame-shifting. 

Dishonesty: “Those stories have been largely debunked,” he said. Wrong. Actually, additional corroboration has emerged.

Lies: “I did not say that,” Trump insisted, three times, after Hillary Clinton noted that part of Trump’s argument for his innocence was that the women weren’t attractive enough to merit his unwanted attention. Just go to the videotape.

Conspiracy theorizing: “I think they want either fame or her campaign did it. And I think it’s her campaign,” Trump said of his accusers. There is no evidence on either score. Indeed, a number of the accusers had to be coaxed to come forward. Some are Clinton backers; others are clear that they do not support her.

Blame-shifting: According to Trump, what we should actually be talking about is the violence at his rallies — instigated by Clinton. Or else, “her emails, where she destroyed 33,000 emails criminally, criminally, after getting a subpoena from the United States Congress.” If the debate hall were a courtroom, Trump’s answer would have been struck as nonresponsive.

The Full Story (October 21, 2016)

Washington Post: In the Debates, Hillary Clinton Showed Exactly Why She Should be President

By WaPo Editorial Board:

Why has Ms. Clinton, the “establishment” alternative facing the voters, wound up in the lead at this late date? According to much conventional wisdom, she is the beneficiary of structural factors, such as voter demographics, and of good fortune — in the form of the Republican Party’s spectacularly irresponsible choice of an incompetent nominee. No doubt a different GOP candidate might have run a stronger general-election race than Mr. Trump; anyone with a modicum of civility and political talent could have. 

Nevertheless, it is time to point out another reason Ms. Clinton is winning: She is earning it. She and her campaign have remained disciplined and even-keeled through tempests large and small — and through the tests of political communication and argument known as the presidential debates, both against Mr. Sanders and against Mr. Trump. It is not easy to stand on a stage for 90 minutes and parry words with an opponent, moderators and town-hall invitees; still less is it easy to do so while keeping one’s cool amid sleazy provocations and unpredictable insults from Mr. Trump. Through it all, Ms. Clinton has stayed focused on issues, laying out a program for the country that we don’t accept in every particular but that is well within the broad mainstream of plausible policy alternatives. 

Perhaps most important, she has kept her rhetoric civil and inclusive, in the face of an opponent bent on trashing the norms of democratic discourse. This is no mere style point. It is in a way substantive too, because this election has taken on importance beyond the already-high stakes for national policy; it has turned into a trial of our democratic culture. Certainly, Ms. Clinton has found ways to needle her opponent. But by preparing for the debates, using them to advance rational arguments and refraining from responding in kind to Mr. Trump’s lowest blows, Ms. Clinton has exemplified what’s still good about that culture. In fact, you might say she has reminded people of what’s good about “establishment” politicians — about people who understand that it takes skill to survive and advance their causes in the public square, and who make it their business to polish those skills.

The Full Story (October 20, 2016)

Washington Post: Who’s Really Rigging the Election Against Donald Trump?

By Catherine Rampell:

At Wednesday’s debate and over several previous weeks — not just coincidentally, corresponding with his downward slide in the polls — Trump has repeatedly suggested that the election results will be less than kosher.

The exact nature of this tref-ness varies. He has argued that an international pan-media-banker-Democratic-FBI-elite alliance is behind unspecified improprieties. At other times he has claimed that Mexican nationals are pouring over the border to illegally cast ballots for Hillary Clinton, and that her most loyal voter base might just be dead people.

Such charges will rile up some of his base, including those who want to “monitor” the polls so they can intimidate anyone resembling, as one acolyte put it, “Mexicans. Syrians. People who can’t speak American.” These hardly seem like idle threats; data from the World Values Survey show a correlation between belief that election officials are unfair and violence at the polls. 

But however motivating this rhetoric may be for a handful of die-hard Trump thugs, the larger effect will probably be to depress turnout among more marginal voters — who disproportionately comprise Trump’s base.  

Several recent social science studies find that belief in government corruption seems to discourage voting. An Innovations for Poverty Action field experiment in Mexico found that telling residents about the incumbent party’s record of corruption depressed their turnout rates. 

“They stayed home because they were fed up with the system,” said Alberto Chong, a Georgia State University professor who co-wrote the paper.

 The Full Story (October 20, 2016)

Washington Post: GOP Braces for Trump Loss, Roiled by Refusal to Accept Election Results

By Philip Rucker and Robert Costa:

With less than three weeks until the election, the Republican Party is in a state of historic turmoil, encapsulated by Trump’s extraordinary debate declaration that he would leave the nation in “suspense” about whether he would recognize the results from an election he has claimed will be “rigged” or even “stolen.” The immediate responses from GOP officials were divergent and vague, with no clear strategy on how to handle Trump’s threat. The candidate was defiant and would not back away from his position, telling a roaring crowd Thursday in Ohio that he would accept the results “if I win” — and reserving his right to legally challenge the results should he fall short. For seasoned Republicans who have watched Trump warily as a general-election candidate, the aftermath of Wednesday’s debate brought a feeling of finality. “The campaign is over,” said Steve Schmidt, a Trump critic and former senior strategist on George W. Bush’s and John McCain’s presidential campaigns. Calling a refusal to accept the election results “disqualifying,” Schmidt added: “The question is, how close will Clinton get to 400 electoral votes? She’ll be north of 350, and she’s trending towards 400 — and the trend line is taking place in very red states like Georgia, Texas and Arizona.”

The Full Story (October 20, 2016)

Washington Post: Trump’s Lack of Self-Control Allows Clinton to Sweep the Debates

By James Hohmann:

For the third debate in a row, the Republican nominee was calm, cool and collected — for the first 15 minutes. Then he let Hillary Clinton get under his skin.

The pivot point came during a conversation about immigration. Noting his trip to Mexico, the former secretary of state said Trump “choked” by failing to even raise the issue of who would pay for his border wall. Trump, who before that moment seemed like he had taken a tranquilizer, snapped to. In the 75 minutes that followed, he repeatedly took her bait, looking petty, small and unpresidential along the way.

Trump uttered the word “WRONG” at least six times, according to the transcript. Other times he inaudibly mouthed it under his breath.

* * *

The culmination of all this came in the final moments when Clinton, talking about Social Security, took a dig at Trump for not paying federal income taxes. “Such a nasty woman,”  he blurted out.

Clinton got under his skin again when she turned a question about her private, paid speeches to banks into an attack on Trump as a “puppet” of Vladimir Putin. “No puppet! No puppet! You’re the puppet,” he shot back. Then he questioned the judgment of the U.S. intelligence community that Russia is behind the recent hacks aimed at meddling in the U.S. election.

Again and again, he could not help himself. Polls show the economy is Trump’s best issue, but given the chance to expound on it, he decided he had to go back to a quip she had made about nuclear weapons earlier.

The Full Story (October 20, 2016)

[Special] Donald Trump - The Ugly American (With Apologies to William J. Lederer and Eugene Burdick)

By Graydon Carter:

A few years later, at Spy magazine, we were trying to develop a house style of writing. In the end it grew half out of the blithe filleting dished out by Private Eye, the British satirical fortnightly, and half out of Henry Luce’s Time-ese—the writing style from earlier days at the newsweekly that relied on, among other devices, dense, adjective-heavy epithets. We did the same and hoped they might stick. Recalling the size of Trump’s hands, we came up with “short-fingered vulgarian,” which, as I have written before, gave him absolute fits.

Not surprisingly, it being the 80s, Trump was a recurring fixture in the pages of Spy. We ridiculed not just his fingers but also his business judgment, his jaw-dropping pronouncements, his inflated wealth, his hair, and his marital situations. There was a threatened lawsuit, resulting in a lot of back-and-forth legal letters between him and me. And we printed all of those. At one point we sent checks for $1.11 out to 58 of the “well-known” and “well-heeled” to see who would take the time to endorse and deposit the checks from a firm we called the National Refund Clearinghouse. The ones who deposited the $1.11 checks were sent 64-cent checks, and the ones who deposited those were sent checks for 13 cents. This being in the days before electronic deposits and such, the exercise took the better part of a year. At the end, only two 13-cent checks were signed—and we couldn’t believe our good fortune. One was signed by arms trader Adnan Khashoggi. The other was deposited by Donald Trump.

When I came to Vanity Fair, the transactional salesman in Trump presumably figured there was no future in maintaining hostilities. He invited me to two of his weddings—I went to the Marla Maples one. It was held in the ballroom of the Plaza hotel on a weekday evening and seemed more like a product launch than anything else. He sent me a couple of Trump ties. They were a basic blue and a basic red, and they were as stiff as a child’s sword. He sent me Trump vodka, which I passed along to Mike Hogan, here at the magazine. When I bumped into Trump in Palm Beach, he invited me to join him for dinner at Mar-a-Lago. We went and had surf and turf—a dish I hadn’t eaten in 20 years.

Dinner with Trump is generally a one-sided affair. He talks so much and with such velocity that it can make your hair flutter. Whatever wife he has at the time tends to say nothing. Which made his criticism of the silence of Ghazala Khan—the mother of the fallen soldier about whom her husband, Khizr, spoke at the Democratic National Convention—seem even more curious. Family dinners at the Trumps are no different, I’m told. And as a general rule, they are over in 45 minutes. Why just 45 minutes? “Because,” a family member told a friend, “that’s how long it takes Donald to eat.”

In the early 90s, we photographed Trump and his soon-to-be wife, Marla, in Palm Beach. At one point, Marina Schiano, our style director, decided that the Loro Piana cashmere sweater she had given Trump to wear wasn’t right and asked him to take it off. Trump refused to pull it up over his head, not wanting to muss his confection of hair. So one of the assistants on the shoot had to get scissors and cut the sweater up the back.

The Full Story (published online: October 4, 2016, magazine print date: November 2016)

FiveThirtyEight: Men Are Treating 2016 As A ‘Normal’ Election; Women Aren’t

By Harry Enten

As my colleague Nate Silver has pointed out, women are winning this election for Clinton. Between the historic nature of Clinton’s candidacy, Trump’s record of misogynistic comments and now the Trump tape and allegations of sexual assault against Trump, American men and women are incredibly split on the 2016 election. But that split isn’t symmetrical. In an average of the most recent live-interview polls from each pollster to test the race in October, Clinton holds a 20-percentage-point advantage among women, and Trump is winning more narrowly among men.

* * *

The first thing to note: We haven’t seen anything like Clinton’s 20-point lead over Trump among women in decades. The last time women favored either party’s nominee by more than 20 percentage points was in 1972, when Republican Richard Nixon crushed Democrat George McGovern among both sexes. The only Democrat ever to win women by more than 20 points was Lyndon Johnson in 1964 — also in a blowout. Four years ago, President Obama carried women by only about 12 points. Even when he first won the White House, in 2008, by about double his 2012 margin, his margin among women was only 14 points.

* * *

To put this year’s gender split into a little more context: Trump’s 7-percentage-point lead among men is about how well George W. Bush did with men in 2000. If we had an average gender gap this year, we’d expect Clinton to carry women by between 5 and 10 points (given how men say they are going to vote). That kind of gap would result in a close race overall, which is exactly what the state of the economy suggests should be occurring.

Instead, Clinton is leading by about 6 or 7 percentage points nationally in the FiveThirtyEight polls-only forecast. Basically, the vote among men looks “normal”; the split among women does not. That is, the historically large gender gap this election is because women are disproportionately favoring one candidate (Clinton) — to an extent we wouldn’t expect them to in a normal election given the “fundamentals.”

The Full Story (October 17, 2016)

Washington Post: Inside Donald Trump’s Echo Chamber of Conspiracies, Grievances and Vitriol

By Philip Rucker and Robert Costa:

Many Republicans see the Trump campaign’s latest incarnation as a mirror into the psyche of their party’s restive base: pulsating with grievance and vitriol, unmoored from conservative orthodoxy, and deeply suspicious of the fast-changing culture and the consequences of globalization.

“I think Trump is right: The shackles have been released, but they were the shackles of reality,” said Mike Murphy, a veteran GOP strategist. “Trump has now shifted to a mode of complete egomaniacal self-indulgence. If he’s going to go off with these merry alt-right pranksters and only talk to people who vote Republican no matter what, he’s going to lose the election substantially.”

* * *

Trump’s strategy was crystallized by his defiant speech Thursday in West Palm Beach, Fla., in which he brazenly argued that the women who have accused him of unwanted kissing and groping were complicit in a global conspiracy of political, business and media elites to slander him and extinguish his outsider campaign.

“It’s a global power structure,” he said. Trump went on to describe himself as a populist martyr — “I take all of these slings and arrows gladly for you” — and posited: “This is not simply another four-year election. This is a crossroads in the history of our civilization that will determine whether or not we the people reclaim control over our government.”

Two days earlier, Trump was in Panama City Beach on Florida’s culturally conservative panhandle sketching out his universe. His rally was outdoors after sunset. The amphitheater’s capacity was 7,500, and there were large pockets of empty space, but a man came on the loudspeakers with an announcement: This was a record crowd of 10,000 people, with an additional 10,000 outside the perimeter.

When Trump strode out, he one-upped his announcer. “I guess we have 11,200 here, and outside we have over 10,000 people!”

The Full Story (October 16, 2016)

Rolling Stone: The Fury and the Failure of Donald Trump

By Matt Taibbi:

Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, the Mohegan Sun Arena, two days later. As he has done multiple times in the past year, Trump has seemingly rebounded from certain disaster. A second debate with Hillary Clinton did not go quite so disastrously as the first, despite horrible optics (he appeared obese from stress and stalked Clinton onstage, as if wanting to bite her back á la Marv Albert) and even worse behavior (he threatened to jail his opponent, a straight-up dictator move you'd expect from a Mobutu, Pinochet or Putin).

Whether or not he "won" the debate was immaterial. He at least impressed pious Mike Pence, Trump's sad-sack running mate, who reportedly had been considering withdrawing from the ticket over the whole pussy thing. "Big debate win!" Pence tweeted, ending rumors of an internal mutiny. "Proud to stand with you as we #MAGA!"

That's hashtag Make America Great Again, in case you didn't believe Mike Pence is hip. (The new white-power movement, like a lot of fraternities, is short on brains, but long on secret passwords and handshakes.) The man who once opposed clean needles on moral grounds was now ready to march through history with a serial groper and tit-gazer.

In Wilkes-Barre, home to a recent Klan leafleting, and a key electoral-map battleground, the turnout for Trump's rally was a vast sea of white faces and profane signage. SHE'S A CUNT – VOTE TRUMP read the T-shirt of one attendee. BILL! MONICA GAVE YOU WHAT? read the caption over a photo of a grinning Hillary, plastered on the side of one of a scary triad of 18-wheelers decked out in anti-Clinton invective. On line going into the event, some more mild-mannered visitors explained why there was nothing that could dissuade them from voting Trump. "Even if it's small, there's a chance that he's going to do something completely different, and that's why I like him," said Trent Gower, a soft-spoken young man. "And when he talks, I actually understand what he's saying. But, like, when fricking Hillary Clinton talks, it just sounds like a bunch of bullshit."

* * *

In the far-right world, every successive villain has always been worse than the last. It's quaint now to think about how Al Gore was once regarded as the second coming of Lenin, or that John Kerry was a secret communist agent. Then the race element took Obama-hatred to new and horrifying places. But Trumpian license has pushed hatred of Hillary Clinton beyond all reason. If you don't connect with it emotionally, you won't get it. For grown men and women to throw around words like "bitch" and "cunt" in front of their kids, it means things have moved way beyond the analytical.

The Full Story (October 14, 2016)

Hollywood Reporter: Central Park Five Member on Trump - "He Will Never Apologize to Us"

By Seth Abramovitch:

Hollywood Reporter: After all this evidence and being exonerated, Donald Trump is still insisting you are guilty; explain what that does to your psyche.

Yusef Salaam: You know, it is definitely very upsetting. But as Nelson Mandela said, "When you are angry and you are bitter that can metastasize into something else." [Anger] really doesn’t do anything toward the object of your displeasure, but it does bring a lot towards you in terms of bringing you down, and bringing your energy down. I look at the positive in it, to be able to really look at the Central Park Jogger case as a pivotal moment and that pivotal moment being that we want America to be great. But in the America that we live in today, a lot of black and brown people are being murdered. A lot of people are being sent to jail for crimes that they didn’t commit. And that brings us full circle.

HR: Trump is the only person still saying you may have done it, right?

YS: He’s going off of reports that the police department produced back in 1989 and 1990. And when you look at the reports you get a false impression. I was the only one that didn’t make a written or videotaped confession. But when you look at the other confessions, these things that they called "confessions" were found to be false; you find out that none of them matched anything that the others were saying. Now he’s patting himself on the back. He’s now calling himself the "law-and-order president."

Washington Post: Trump Refusal to Accept Government Assessments on Russian Hacks Dismays Former Officials

By Dana Priest and Tom Hamburger:

The former officials, who have served presidents in both parties, say they were bewildered when Trump cast doubt on Russia’s role after receiving a classified briefing on the subject and again after an unusually blunt statement from U.S. agencies saying they were “confident” that Moscow had orchestrated the attacks.

“It defies logic,” retired Gen. Michael V. Hayden, former director of the CIA and the National Security Agency, said of Trump’s pronouncements.

Trump has assured supporters that, if elected, he would surround himself with experts on defense and foreign affairs, where he has little experience. But when it comes to Russia, he has made it clear that he is not listening to intelligence officials, the former officials said.

“He seems to ignore their advice,” Hayden said. “Why would you assume this would change when he is in office?”

The Full Story (October 14, 2016)

Washington Post: Trump Says Groping Allegations Are Part of a Global Conspiracy to Help Clinton

By Philip Rucker and Sean Sullivan:

Trump’s remarks, which he read from a teleprompter, were laced with the kind of global conspiracies and invective common in the writings of the alternative-right, white-nationalist activists who see him as their champion. Some critics also heard echoes of historical anti-Semitic slurs in Trump’s allegations that Clinton “meets in secret with international banks to plot the destruction of U.S. sovereignty” and that media and financial elites were part of a soulless cabal out to destroy “our great civilization.”

“It’s a global power structure that is responsible for the economic decisions that have robbed our working class, stripped our country of its wealth and put that money into the pockets of a handful of large corporations and political entities,” Trump said.

The speech bore the imprint of Stephen K. Bannon, the Trump campaign’s chief executive, who until recently was the executive chairman of Breitbart, a conservative website that serves as the virtual town square of the alt-right movement.

Jonathan Greenblatt, chief executive of the Anti-Defamation League, tweeted that Trump “should avoid rhetoric and tropes that historically have been used against Jews” and “keep hate out of campaign.”

The Full Story (October 13, 2016)

Editor's Note: For more examples of Trump mining conspiracy theories from the racist alt-right and white nationalist fringes, please read,

• Talking Points Memo: Trump Warns Of Dark Conspiracy By Clinton, Media, And International Banks by Matt Shuham (October 13, 2016)
• Talking Points Memo: Wacky Far-Right Theory For Trump Tape Leak Gets Mainstream Play by Tierney Sneed (October 13, 2016)

Atlantic: Donald Trump's Bitter Barrage Against Republicans

By David A. Graham:

According to the well-sourced Washington Post reporter Robert Costa, Trump is holed up at Trump Tower, watching cable news. One can imagine him getting ever more agitated at the flood of condemnations from Republicans. It has become an article of faith that Trump tends to tweet the most aggressive statements, from his Android phone, while tweets from other platforms represent staffers tweeting for him. As some reporters noticed, however, one of the two Ryan tweets came from an Android and the other from an iPhone. Are Trump’s aides ready to battle the GOP, too?

The Twitter outburst drew new expressions of shock from even the most hardbitten political observers. Needless to say, a situation where a presidential nominee views his own party as a “shackle” and is praising his opponent does not bode well. (As an aside, that “shackle” word choice is peculiar. In 2012, Joe Biden was pilloried for telling a mostly black audience, “They're gonna put y'all back in chains.”)

At no time within recent memory has a candidate chosen to go to war with his own party, just four weeks ahead of Election Day. With Senator Bob Dole trailing badly ahead of the 1996 election against President Bill Clinton, the Republican Party effectively abandoned Dole to his fate, focusing on Congress, but Dole, a good soldier for the party, largely took the swipe stoically. Trump, with no longstanding links to the party and none of Dole’s stoicism, clearly has no intention of doing the same.

The Full Story (October 11, 2016)

[Special] Fortune: Donald Trump's Social Media Ties to White Supremists

By Ben Kharakh and Dan Primack:

Trump is “giving us the old wink-wink,” wrote Andrew Anglin, editor of a white supremacist website called The Daily Stormer, after Trump retweeted two other “white genocide” theorists within a single minute. “Whereas the odd White genocide tweet could be a random occurrence, it isn’t statistically possible that two of them back to back could be a random occurrence. It could only be deliberate…Today in America the air is cold and it tastes like victory.” It is possible that Trump ― who, according to the campaign, does almost all of his own tweeting ― is unfamiliar with the term “white genocide” and doesn’t do even basic vetting of those whose tweets he amplifies to his seven million followers. But the reality is that there are dozens of tweets mentioning @realDonaldTrump each minute, and he has an uncanny ability to surface ones that come from accounts that proudly proclaim their white supremacist leanings. * * * The Little Bird software analyzed Twitter content to generate a ranked list of just under 2,000 #WhiteGenocide “influencers” as of February 8. The more impactful, the higher up on the list (which, understandably, ebbs and flows a bit over time). Since the start of his campaign, Donald Trump has retweeted at least 75 users who follow at least three of the top 50 #WhiteGenocide influencers. Moreover, a majority of these retweeted accounts are themselves followed by more than 100 #WhiteGenocide influencers. But the relationship isn’t limited to retweets. For example, Trump national campaign spokesperson Katrina Pierson (who is black), follows the most influential #WhiteGenocide account, @Genophilia, which is best known for helping to launch a Star Wars boycott after it became known that the new film’s lead character was black.

The Full Story (March 22, 2016)

[Special] Los Angeles Times: Trump Backers Tweet #repealthe19th After Polls Show He'd Win Only If Men Voted

By Seema Mehta:

As polls show that Donald Trump would overwhelmingly win if only men were allowed to vote, the GOP nominee's supporters have spawned a new Twitter hashtag: #repealthe19th.

That’s a reference to the 19th Amendment, which gave women the right to vote.

The Twitter commentary began after Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight published an article Tuesday looking at men’s and women’s voting patterns.

He found that if the election only counted the male vote, Trump would swamp Clinton, 350 electoral votes to 188. A candidate must win 270 electoral votes to win the presidency.

The Full Story (October 12, 2016)

[Special] YouTube: How Donald Trump Answers A Question

By NerdWriter1: 

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/_aFo_BV-UzI" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

The Full Story (December 30, 2015)

[Special] Editorial: Trump Thinks People Like Him, Therefore Rigged Election is Only Explanation for Losing

Donald Trump, a man who has managed to say horrible things about women, immigrants, black people, Muslims, veterans...well, let's just say nearly everyone, while demonstrating an immense lack of understanding regarding foreign and domestic policy (or even the English language), while also showing he is thin skinned and wildly temperamental, assumes that the only way he can lose an election to be president of the the U.S.A. is because it was stolen from him.

Trump has been laying the groundwork for a "rigged election" for a while. During the third and final presidential debate, Hillary Clinton went through a history of Trump claiming contests were rigged against him, back through the primaries and even into the Emmys. Trump lashed out against the Emmys when his Apprentice reality show did not win an award, as is his style(1).

When the floodgates opened(2) with claims of sexual assaults against Trump, he lashed out against the media(3):

Trump, who spent the week launching tirades at Clinton, journalists and his own party, continued on Sunday to portray himself as the victim. He tweeted: “Polls close, but can you believe I lost large numbers of women voters based on made up events THAT NEVER HAPPENED. Media rigging election!”

In another post, he said: “Election is being rigged by the media, in a coordinated effort with the Clinton campaign, by putting stories that never happened into news!”

Trump's surrogates have gone out and promoted this claim as well, even as Republican officials try to downplay the storm.

[Special] Editorial: Donald Trump, A Pinnacle of Health

Donald Trump has spent a fair chunk of his campaign attacking people as being weak, lacking stamina, having low energy, and other such assertions. Trump is the master of projecting all of his insecurities, failures and weaknesses on to others, but this particular instance may be subconscious.

Julia Belluz(1) recently shared a story from one of Trump's books, wherein he shared a ridiculous diet. This was before his days of fast food indulgence like KFC.

As he wrote in the 2004 book Think Like A Billionaire, "You can’t just think like a billionaire; you have to eat like one, too." At that time, in the early 2000s, Trump’s chef at the Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, Florida, was Gary Gregson. Gregson kept Trump on a strict regimen. "We call it the Mar-a-Lago Diet, and if I didn’t adhere to it from time to time, my waistline would be an absolute disaster," Trump wrote.

Here’s a summary of that amazing diet:

1. It has to be served in a fantastic setting.
2. It has to look fantastic.
3. It has to taste incredible.
4. It cannot make you gain weight.
Wow, I'm surprised no one else thought of that. Trump truly is a genius. 

Belluz theorizes that Trump switched from fine dining to fast food as a way to relate to the average American, who apparently spend all of their time wolfing down french fries. This would not be an uncommon tactic in politics, as all of us have seen politicians awkwardly eating local favorite dishes, always with a knife and fork even when one isn't necessary or approved (such as with pizza). However, Politico's Michael Kruse and Ruairí Arrieta-Kenna(2) have another theory.

But Trump’s germophobia goes beyond an unwillingness to shake hands—an aversion he has had to forgo during his run for the presidency. Trump is also reported to have a preference for drinking with straws and eating pizza with a fork, a distaste for pressing elevator buttons and a revulsion to fans and the public getting too close to him, such as for autographs. In an op-ed for the U.K. newspaper The Independent, Gurnek Bains, author of Cultural DNA: The Psychology of Globalization and founder of a corporate psychology consultancy, suggests that Trump’s fear of communicable diseases is the root of his anti-immigrant political stances.

His obsession with cleanliness is why he prefers mass-produced or processed food. His preferences are not complicated: KFC. McDonald’s. The occasional taco bowl.

“I like See’s Candies.” “I like hamburgers.” “I’m an ice cream fan from way back.”

“I don’t like rich sauces or fine wines,” Trump wrote in his book Surviving at the Top. “I like to eat steak rather than pheasant under glass.” So long as the steak is well-done—so well-done, according to his longtime butler, “it would rock on the plate.”

His simplistic palate is a function of his desire for cleanliness. “One bad hamburger, you can destroy McDonald’s,” he explained to CNN’s Anderson Cooper earlier this year. “I’m a very clean person. I like cleanliness, and I think you’re better off going there than maybe someplace that you have no idea where the food’s coming from. It’s a certain standard.”

Regardless of the reasons why, and ignoring the fact that Trump thinks fast food is served in clean, well maintained areas, Trump likes processed food. We have seen it, and we have heard it straight from the man's mouth. Someone with a diet as poor as his must at least exercise to counter-balance the effects of same, but Trump is a man who refuses to conform to logic. From that same Politico piece: 

Trump believes the human body is like a battery. Energy used is energy lost. For this reason, he doesn’t like exercising too much, and he doesn’t like his employees exercising too much, either, according to former Atlantic City casino executive Jack O’Donnell who worked for Trump from 1987 to 1990.

“All my friends who work out all the time, they’re going for knee replacements, hip replacements—they’re a disaster,” he explained last year. 

Good to know that a flabby 70 year old man with a poor diet does not believe in exercise. Hey, maybe Republicans will vote for Trump after all, in the hope that he has a heart attack and Vice President Mike Pence takes over completely. 

(1) Vox: Donald Trump's Curious Shift From Gourmet to Fast-Food Aficionado (October 12, 2016)

(2) Politico: The 7 Oddest Things Donald Trump Thinks (October 13, 2016)

[Special] Editorial: Another Dynamic of the Trump-Russian Network

The involvement of Trump and his network to Russian interests is clear, robust and problematic in many different ways. However, recently it came of note because Trump, as is his wont, peddled false information. What makes it interesting is that the bunk story came from a Russian-only news outlet, Sputnik, and had not yet reached English-speaking media sources. As Newsweek's Kurt Eichenwald(1) explains:

This is not funny. It is terrifying. The Russians engage in a sloppy disinformation effort and, before the day is out, the Republican nominee for president is standing on a stage reciting the manufactured story as truth. How did this happen? Who in the Trump campaign was feeding him falsehoods straight from the Kremlin? (The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment.)

The Russians have been obtaining American emails and now are presenting complete misrepresentations of them—falsifying them—in hopes of setting off a cascade of events that might change the outcome of the presidential election. The big question, of course, is why are the Russians working so hard to damage Clinton and, in the process, aid Donald Trump? That is a topic for another time.

For now, though, Americans should be outraged. This totalitarian regime, engaged in what are arguably war crimes in Syria to protect its government puppet, is working to upend a democracy to the benefit of an American candidate who uttered positive comments just Sunday about the Kremlin's campaign on behalf of Bashar al-Assad. Trump’s arguments were an incomprehensible explication of the complex Syrian situation, which put him right on the side of the Iranians and Syrians, who are fighting to preserve the government that is the primary conduit of weapons used against Israel.

There is another possibility, detailed by Talking Points Memo's Josh Marshall(2): 

We might speculate that there's some kind of mole in the Trump operation. Less conspiratorially, we might speculate that one of Trump's advisors with extensive ties to Russia is feeding Trump this stuff. The second option at least seems plausible. But there's actually a simpler explanation and it's one not based on speculation at all but things we know to be facts.

News from Russian propaganda sources are pervasive in the alt-right/neo-Nazi web. As a secondary matter we know from Adrian Chen's work that there are a decent number of faux 'pro-Trump' accounts on Twitter that are actually run from troll farms operated by Russian intelligence services. By whichever path, Russian propaganda is ubiquitous on the alt-right/racist web - particularly on Twitter, Reddit, 4chan and similar sites.

It happens that we know the Trump world is awash in the alt-right/neo-Nazi web. After all, that's where all the retweeting of #WhiteGenocide accounts and the like comes from. So anything is possible. Perhaps there's a more complex explanation. But the simplest one is that it's organic. Russian propaganda stories from outlets like RT, Sputniknews and other similar sites spread freely on the alt-right/white supremacist web. And that's where the Trump camp lives. So it's entirely plausible that that's why material that appears only on these Russian propaganda sites shows up so frequently in Trump's speeches.

There is not much to add from my own perspective, except to note that Trump is a mess regardless of whether he is being corrupt or just stupid. For the sake of the country and the planet, we can only hope his downward spiral continues through election day when, of course, we will likely deal with him trying to contest the elections and claim voter fraud or a "rigged system" - which is a story for another day.  

(1) Newsweek: Dear Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, I am Not Sidney Blumenthal (October 10, 2016)

(2) Talking Points Memo: The Russia Channel (October 11, 2016)

Washington Post: Trump Declares War on GOP, Says ‘The Shackles Have Been Taken Off’

By Sean Sullivan, Robert Costa and Dan Balz:

Donald Trump declared war on the Republican establishment Tuesday, lashing out at House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (Wis.), Sen. John McCain (Ariz.) and other GOP elected officials as his supporters geared up to join the fight amid extraordinary turmoil within the party just four weeks before Election Day.

One day after Ryan announced he would no longer campaign on Trump’s behalf, the GOP nominee said as part of a barrage of tweets that the top-ranking Republican is “weak and ineffective” and is providing “zero support” for his candidacy. Trump also declared that “the shackles have been taken off” him, liberating him to “fight for America the way I want to.”

Trump called McCain “foul-mouthed” and accused him with no evidence of once begging for his support. McCain, the party’s 2008 presidential nominee, pulled his endorsement following a Friday Washington Post report about a 2005 video in which Trump is heard making vulgar comments about forcing himself on women sexually.

“I wouldn’t want to be in a foxhole with a lot of these people, that I can tell you . . . especially Ryan,” Trump said in an interview with Fox News Channel. He said if he is elected president, Ryan might be “in a different position.”

In perhaps the most piercing insult, Trump said his party is harder to deal with than even Democratic rival Hillary Clinton, whom conservatives loathe. Yet he also released a new TV ad featuring footage of Clinton coughing and stumbling during a recent bout with pneumonia — signaling that few issues are out of bounds for his scorched-earth campaign.

The Full Story (October 11, 2016)

CNN: Glenn Beck - Hillary Clinton is a 'Moral, Ethical Choice' for Republicans

By Naomi Lim:

"It is not acceptable to ask a moral, dignified man to cast his vote to help elect an immoral man who is absent decency or dignity," Beck wrote on Facebook in reference to Trump. "If the consequence of standing against Trump and for principles is indeed the election of Hillary Clinton, so be it. At least it is a moral, ethical choice."

Beck, who founded media venture TheBlaze after rising to prominence as host of his eponymous radio and TV show, campaigned for Texas Sen. Ted Cruz during the Republican primaries, and has consistently criticized Trump throughout the primary campaign and even after Cruz endorsed him.

He joined a growing chorus of conservative leaders over the weekend who are appealing to Trump to withdraw his candidacy for president, adding that a vote for the businessman was "validating his immorality, lewdness, and depravity."

The Full Story (October 11, 2016)