Monday Open Thread [8.10.15]
A defiant Donald Trump “suggested on Sunday that he had been singled out for attacks by the hosts of last week’s widely watched Republican presidential debate and again threatened a third-party White House bid if he was not treated “reasonably fairly” by party leaders,” the New York Times reports.
Wall Street Journal: “Trump struck a defiant tone Sunday, making clear he isn’t about to exit the Republican Party presidential primary nor retreat from remarks about a Fox News debate moderator that have drawn a torrent of criticism. The choice now for his 2016 rivals is whether to take him on and risk an unending series of attacks from the real-estate developer, or try to maneuver around him.”
Politico: “Three weeks after two of his rivals demanded he quit the race for the GOP presidential nomination and three days after a record 24 million viewers tuned in to the GOP debate in Cleveland that many establishment Republicans predicted might be the beginning of the end for him, Trump is still center stage.”
“It’s just like driving by a car wreck without rendering aid. Donald Trump is an out of control car driving through a crowd of Republicans and somebody needs to get him out of the car. I just don’t see a pathway forward for us in 2016 to win the White House if we don’t decisively deal with this.”
— Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), in an interview with the Washington Post.
Dan Balz on whether the GOP field will take on Trump:
“Tentativeness has marked the candidates’ strategy in dealing with the Trump phenomenon. You could see their hesitation during the debate Thursday. No one really came to Cleveland with the goal of taking on Trump. Not one of the other nine candidates on stage came to Kelly’s defense when Trump went after her for asking him about derogatory comments he has made about women in the past.”
“It’s not in the nature of candidates to defend debate moderators from criticism, so their non-response was perhaps understandable. But as Bush said Saturday, standing silent as the leader in the polls for the GOP nomination attacks someone who is part of the 53 percent majority of the population is hardly a winning strategy.”
Nate Silver on why Trump cannot win a war with Fox News:
“Donald Trump is a master at playing off the public’s distrust for the news media, portraying every negative story as a needless distraction from his quest to ‘Make America Great Again.’ You’d think this strategy would become tiresome, but there’s a market for it, especially among Republicans, who are more distrustful of the mainstream media than Democrats.”
“But one exception to this distrust is Fox News, which hosted the first GOP debate in Cleveland last night. According to a March Quinnipiac poll, 80 percent of Republicans say they trust Fox News either ‘a great deal’ or ‘somewhat,’ as compared to 16 percent who say they trust the network ‘not so much’ or ‘not at all.’”
Joe Conason at TruthDig writes about why Israel’s Security Experts support the Iran Deal and Iran’s Hard-Liners don’t:
As Congressional Republicans seek to undermine the nuclear agreement between Iran and the international powers, they assert that hardline Islamists in the Islamic Republic are delighted with the deal while Israelis concerned over their country’s security are appalled. The same theme is now repeated constantly on Fox News Channel and throughout right-wing media.
But that message is largely false—and in very important respects, the opposite is true.
In arguing for the agreement at American University last Wednesday, President Obama noted that the most hostile factions in the Tehran regime aren’t celebrating this agreement—as the cover of The New York Post suggested. “In fact, it’s those hardliners who are most comfortable with the status quo,” he said. “It’s those hardliners chanting ‘Death to America’ who have been most opposed to the deal. They’re making common cause with the Republican caucus.” […]
In Israel, meanwhile, the alarmist criticism of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—a sage whose confident predictions about Iran, Iraq, and almost everything else are reliably, totally wrong—has obscured support from actual military and intelligence leaders. Like experts in this country and around the world, the best-informed Israelis understand the deal’s imperfections very well—and support it nevertheless.
“There are no ideal agreements,” declared Ami Ayalon, a military veteran who headed the Israeli Navy and later oversaw the Jewish state’s security service, the Shin Bet. But as Ayalon explained to J.J. Goldberg of the Forward, this agreement is “the best possible alternative from Israel’s point of view, given the other available alternatives”—including the most likely alternative which is, as Obama explained, another extremely dangerous Mideast war.
E.J. Dionne Jr. at The Washington Post writes Obama vs. the Republican Cavaliers:
Anyone who still thinks the president has any chance of turning the opposition party his way after watching the candidates (or listening to Republicans in Congress) no doubt also believes fervently in Santa Claus. In fact, the case for Santa — made so powerfully in “Miracle on 34th Street” — is more plausible.
The candidates gathered together by Fox News in Cleveland suggested that the hardest decision the next president will face is whether killing Obamacare or voiding the Iran deal ought to be the first order of business. All who spoke on foreign policy sought to paint the “Obama-Clinton” international strategy as “failed” and “dangerous.”
Obama does not need any private briefings on how Republicans are thinking. He realizes, as everyone else should, that there’s only one way to save the Iran accord. Republicans will have the votes to pass a measure disapproving it, and he needs to keep enough Democrats on his side to sustain his veto.
Jonathan Chait has a perceptive summation the Trump threat to the GOP’s 2016 prospects:
“…The significance of his performance lies in his deadly serious threat to run a third-party campaign, siphoning off the immigrant-haters and amorphously angry blue-collar whites the actual nominee will need for himself. The intense barrage of pointed questions displayed how seriously Roger Ailes takes Trump’s threat to hijack the GOP for his own end. It failed to reckon with the other threat: that the Republican plan to drive Trump from their party might instead work all too well.”
