Tuesday Open Thread [5.17.16]

It’s a small sample size, so that this poll with a grain of salt, but the Fayetteville Observer reports some good news for Democrats in North Carolina: “The Civitas Institute, a Raleigh think tank that bills itself as “North Carolina’s Conservative Voice,” released a poll in late April of key statewide races…The biggest takeaway was Republican Gov. Pat McCrory trailing his Democratic challenger, Attorney General Roy Cooper, by 10 percentage points…According to the Real Clear Politics website, Cooper is leading McCrory by an average of 4 points. The average was taken from four recent polls – three in April and one in February.” Also, “In another statewide race surveyed by Civitas poll, U.S. Sen. Richard Burr, a two-term Republican, is leading Democratic challenger Deborah Ross, 37 percent to 35 percent.”

The whole bathroom debacle has really blown up the GOP in North Carolina. And they thought this would be a winning issue for them!

Michael Barbard and Megan Twohey check on how Donald Trump, world’s greatest supporter of women, treats women when he doesn’t think the world is watching.

Donald Trump and women: The words evoke a familiar cascade of casual insults, hurled from the safe distance of a Twitter account, a radio show or a campaign podium. This is the public treatment of some women by Mr. Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee for president: degrading, impersonal, performed. “That must be a pretty picture, you dropping to your knees,” he told a female contestant on “The Celebrity Apprentice.” Rosie O’Donnell, he said, had a “fat, ugly face.” A lawyer who needed to pump milk for a newborn? “Disgusting,” he said.

The New York Times interviewed dozens of women who had worked with or for Mr. Trump over the past four decades, in the worlds of real estate, modeling and pageants; women who had dated him or interacted with him socially; and women and men who had closely observed his conduct since his adolescence. In all, more than 50 interviews were conducted over the course of six weeks.

Their accounts — many relayed here in their own words — reveal unwelcome romantic advances, unending commentary on the female form, a shrewd reliance on ambitious women, and unsettling workplace conduct, according to the interviews, as well as court records and written recollections. … They appeared to be fleeting, unimportant moments to him, but they left lasting impressions on the women who experienced them.

Jonathan Chait:

Donald Trump’s refusal to release his tax returns could be seen as a process issue, perhaps even a vetting question so important that it’s “disqualifying,” as Mitt Romney has called it. But perhaps it could be something more than that. It might be the thin end of the wedge that opens up a powerful theme against the self-professed billionaire: that Trump is a total fraud.

Trump has repeatedly refused to publish his tax returns, and repeatedly lied about his intention to do so. He promised five years ago to release his returns when President Obama released his birth certificate, and reneged. He promised to release them in February 2015; again promised to do so last fall and then in January, then backed off on the grounds that he was under an IRS audit, an argument tax experts have unanimously dismissed as nonsensical. Now he insists there’s “nothing to learn from them.”

As many financial reporters have speculated over the years, based on whatever fragmentary information Trump has provided, he almost certainly has far less money than he claims. A reporter who has dug into the question estimates Trump’s actual worth at $150–250 million; Trump claims to be worth $10 billion, which is at least 40 times the journalist’s estimate. The reality of Trump’s business career is that he is not so much a great businessman but somebody who has figured out how to make money by convincing people that he is one.

There’s a line I vividly recall from the 2004 election, though I can’t find it online. An adviser to George W. Bush’s campaign explained why it was so focused on discrediting John Kerry’s character. You don’t shoot down every fighter plane launched against you, he said, you blow up the platform they’re being launched from. It’s a mistake to assume any particular political tactic works in all cases, but this approach seems to suit Trump especially well. The particulars of his day-to-day message, to the extent he has one, barely matter. His entire appeal rests on the bedrock of his identity as a successful entrepreneur. The vast wealth Trump claims to have amassed allows him to supposedly fund his own campaign, escaping the influence of fundraisers who control his opponents. His alleged deal-making skill explains why he will be able to improve every trade deal, solve every legislative impasse, and finesse every diplomatic conflict. Trump’s endlessly repeated proposition is that he will take the skills that made him so rich and generously use them to make the country rich. Without that, he’s just a dumber version of Pat Buchanan.

Meanwhile, the Trump campaign is reportedly preparing a new round of personal attacks designed to lower the level of political discourse even further. But it will most likely backfire. As Patrick Healy reports at the Times, quoting Melanne Verveer, a longtime friend and former chief of staff to Mrs. Clinton: “She is so prepared to be president, but holding her head high and staying dignified during the campaign is probably what will help her the most…Trump is yet another way she will be tested personally — one of her greatest tests yet.” Dignity could indeed be the key here, since Trump has long ago forfeited any semblance of it on the gamble that a majority of American voters are going to be able to forget his mud-wrestling by election day. Not likely in the era of facebook and YouTube.

So according to Trump, being ignorant and dumb is good. That has always been the Republican position, but Trump is the first one to say it so openly.

At The Daily Beast Betsy Woodruff has a nicely-tailored summary of one of the Trump/Priebus campaign’s worst weeks yet: “Priebus’s walk of Sunday shame came in the wake of a brutal few days for Trump. The Washington Post produced audio of Trump allegedly pretending to be his own PR flack, the New York Times released a scorching report about Trump’s creepy and predatory treatment of pageant contestants and female employees. On top of that, Trump spent the week arguing that he doesn’t have a responsibility to release his tax returns and that nobody wants to look at them anyway…The tax returns–which Trump has said he will probably release at some point–are a uniquely thorny issue. When Face the Nation host John Dickerson asked Priebus whether Trump should release his tax returns, the chairman replied that voters don’t really care either way.”

Donald Trump was named in the Panama Papers 3,540 times.

Rick Klein: “What’s new in the anti-Trump playbook? Not much, at least so far as the first major wave of anti-Trump spending from Priorities USA, Hillary Clinton’s main super PAC. Two new ads, the start of a more than $100 million-promised blitz, use Trump’s own words about women to attack him among, yes, women. The quotes in the ads are more familiar to those who paid attention to the long primary campaign than those who are just tuning in.”

“But the fact of the ad push, while pro-Trump super PACs are still forming (and fighting for legitimacy), points to one Clinton advantage at this stage. Clinton allies have enough time, and are expecting enough resources, that they can try and fail a few times in efforts to define Trump. Trump forces can’t do the same – at least by traditional metrics. Trump, though, is already a master of this kind of asymmetrical warfare: He can use interviews, Tweets, and even facial expressions to push back as necessary.”

Some clever sleuthing by Crain’s New York Business reveals that Donald Trump qualified for a tax break that requires your income be less than $500,000 a year. So either he is committing tax fraud, which is possible, or he makes $500,000 a year or less.

First Read: “Less than six months before Election Day, the 2016 presidential contest could very well hinge on who has the more debilitating problem — Hillary Clinton’s lack of a message, or Donald Trump’s poor performance among non-white males. Let’s start with Clinton’s message problem. By now, you know Trump’s ‘Make America Great Again’ slogan or Bernie Sanders’ ‘A Future You Can Believe In.’ But what is Clinton’s simple message? Her campaign says its podium-sign version is ‘Breaking Down Barriers,’ but that isn’t as central and identifiable as Trump’s and Sanders’ simple messages.”

“Meanwhile, Trump’s problem is a demographic one: According to April’s national NBC/WSJ poll, 69% of women, 79% of Latinos, and 88% of African Americans have a negative opinion of Trump, and those are the same demographic groups that Republicans insisted they needed to improve with after their loss to Obama in 2012. So that’s your ’16 contest in a nutshell: Which problem is worse to have – lacking a clear message or being toxic among minorities and women? We’ll find out in November.”

Todd Gitlin: “Early in this campaign season, Sunday morning network news hosts granted Trump the special prerogative of phoning in for interviews, off camera, making it impossible to know, in real time, if he was consulting notes or advisers during interviews. And because of an early polling lead based in large measure on his near-universal name recognition, Trump was center-stage getting most of the air time during every GOP primary debate.”

“In those debates, and in interviews, Trump regularly runs circles around interviewers because they pare their follow-up questions down to a minimum, or none at all. After 30-plus years in the media spotlight, he knows how to wait out an interviewer, offering noncommittal soundbites and incoherent rejoinders until he hears the phrase, ‘let’s move on.’ He takes advantage of the slipshod, shallow techniques journalism has made routine, particularly on TV — techniques that, in the past, were sufficient to trip up less-media-savvy candidates — but that Trump knows how to sidestep.”