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)