Found this on DeviantArt. Amazing. Artist unknown.
Politico: “While Trump’s insurgent candidacy has spurred record-setting Republican primary turnout in state after state, the early statistics show that the vast majority of those voters aren’t actually new to voting or to the Republican Party, but rather they are reliable past voters in general elections. They are only casting ballots in a Republican primary for the first time.”
“If Trump isn’t bringing the promised wave of new voters into the GOP, it’s far less likely the Manhattan businessman can transform a 2016 Electoral College map that begins tilted against the Republican Party. And whether Trump’s voters are truly new is a question of urgent interest both to GOP operatives and Hillary Clinton and her allies, who have dispatched their top analytics experts to find the answer.”
Last year was the first year that more than 90 percent of Americans had health insurance, new federal data shows. Thanks, Obama.
Paul Krugman explains why Trump is far more vulnerable in the general election than he was in the primary:
First, he’s running a campaign fundamentally based on racism. But Republicans couldn’t call him on that, because more or less veiled appeals to racial resentment have been key to their party’s success for decades. Clinton, on the other hand, won the nomination thanks to overwhelming nonwhite support, and will have no trouble hitting hard on this issue.
Second, Trump is proposing wildly irresponsible policies that benefit the rich. But so were all the other Republicans, so they couldn’t attack him for that. Clinton can.
Third, Trump’s personal record as a businessman is both antisocial and just plain dubious. Republicans, with their cult of the entrepreneur, couldn’t say anything about that. Again, Clinton can.
Amanda Marcotte’s take on Trump’s fake publicist interview:
Many of us have long assumed that Trump’s belligerence isn’t the sign of confidence, as he would have us believe, but instead a paper-thin cover for what is, in fact, his overwhelming insecurity. Pretending to be his own publicist in a pathetic bid to trick people into thinking he’s more sexually desirable than he clearly is? That’s the wealthy man’s version of a high school nerd telling everyone he has a Canadian girlfriend he met in summer camp. There’s no need to speculate anymore about Trump having severe emotional issues that lead him to act out the way he does. We now know it, beyond any shadow of a doubt.
The Washington Post editorial board lashes out at Trump and, more importantly, the Republicans who support him:
Taking on false identities may be merely weird; flat-out lies are more disturbing. As is so often the case, Mr. Trump asks voters to ignore evidence and reason based on nothing more than his say-so.
Similarly, Mr. Trump has said that he would release his tax returns, but he routinely evades questions about when that will happen. He told the Associated Press last week that he feels no obligation to release them before the election, and when asked what tax rate he paid, he told ABC News last Friday that it is “none of your business.” Presidential candidates’ tax information has been the public’s business for decades.
Rudimentary adherence to the truth and respect for openness matter. Mr. Priebus and his confederates in amorality dismiss or excuse Mr. Trump’s mockery of these precious political values because they believe politics matters more than principle. Mr. Trump’s campaign will end, one way or another, in November. The disgrace of the Republicans who have supported him will not.
Today is quite a good day for the Democrats. Why? Because it shows how easy it was for Priorities USA, the pro-Hillary SuperPac (originally a pro-Obama SuperPac), to hurt Trump with a very focused strike on his immense vulnerability with women. But more than that, they clearly got under his skin. Trump’s been on Twitter raging non-stop all morning about how he was “misquoted” in the Priorities attack ad. I discussed whether he was ‘misquoted’ here. Basically he wasn’t. But, Good Lord buddy, good luck with whining about a SuperPac being mean.
Trump and Trump’s campaign know that he’s toxic to women for numerous reasons. Getting hit on this gets him mad – mad and undisciplined. No one likes a whiner. I suspect that SuperPacs in Hillary’s orbit, seeing this, will run more ads which are a bit unfair, which push the margins, just to get inside Donald’s head like this.
Note that everyone and I mean everyone in Trump’s entourage, even his official ‘supporters’ who show up on the cable networks, calls him “Mr Trump”. Who else gets referred to like that? Someone who demands that kind of fealty and subservience never handles criticism well. It also undermines his core political strength, dominance politics.
I am glad I am not the only one who has noticed the Mr. Trump thing. I agree completely. They would only do it if it was an explicit order from Donald himself.
Last week Jonathan Chait wrote that the rise of Donald Trump surprised us because we underestimated how many Republican voters are idiots. Gene Demby penned a thought-provoking response with the title: It’s Gotten A Lot Harder To Act Like Whiteness Doesn’t Shape Our Politics.
It’s telling that Chait finds it easier to imagine that huge swaths of Republican primary voters are childlike and naive, rather than folks who quite rationally dig Trump’s direct appeals to their interests — their racial interests. Among Trump’s most notorious policy proposals is a moratorium on Muslims entering the country. He has called Mexican immigrants “rapists.” Maybe we should concede that these declarations are not incidental to his appeal among his supporters, but central to them. Calling them “idiots” posits that they’ve been duped, when perhaps Trump is saying precisely what they want to hear.
A new Public Policy Polling survey in Arizona finds Sen. John McCain leading a multi-candidate primary field with 39%, followed by Kelli Ward at 26%, Alex Meluskey at 4%, Scott McBean at 3%, and Clair Van Steenwyk at 2%. Another 27% are undecided.
In a head-to-head match up, McCain and Ward are tied at 41%.
Key finding: “Only 35% of GOP voters approve of the job McCain is doing to 50% who disapprove.”
First Read: “Donald Trump last night reached a joint fundraising agreement with the Republican National Committee, allowing him to collect checks as large as $449,000 to benefit his campaign and party. But consider this: Hillary Clinton reached her own joint fundraising agreement with the DNC in August of 2015 — so almost a year ago. And when you throw in the fact that Trump just hired a pollster and that there still isn’t a designated pro-Trump Super PAC, you see how late of a general-election start Trump is getting, all less than six months before Election Day 2016.”
Matt Taibbi asks if this is the end for Republicans: “If this isn’t the end for the Republican Party, it’ll be a shame. They dominated American political life for 50 years and were never anything but monsters. They bred in their voters the incredible attitude that Republicans were the only people within our borders who raised children, loved their country, died in battle or paid taxes. They even sullied the word ‘American’ by insisting they were the only real ones. They preferred Lubbock to Paris, and their idea of an intellectual was Newt Gingrich. Their leaders, from Ralph Reed to Bill Frist to Tom DeLay to Rick Santorum to Romney and Ryan, were an interminable assembly line of shrieking, witch-hunting celibates, all with the same haircut – the kind of people who thought Iran-Contra was nothing, but would grind the affairs of state to a halt over a blow job or Terri Schiavo’s feeding tube.”
“A century ago, the small-town American was Gary Cooper: tough, silent, upright and confident. The modern Republican Party changed that person into a haranguing neurotic who couldn’t make it through a dinner without quizzing you about your politics. They destroyed the American character. No hell is hot enough for them. And when Trump came along, they rolled over like the weaklings they’ve always been, bowing more or less instantly to his parodic show of strength.”
Robert Kagan on how fascism comes to America: “The Republican Party’s attempt to treat Donald Trump as a normal political candidate would be laughable were it not so perilous to the republic. If only he would mouth the party’s ‘conservative’ principles, all would be well.”
“But of course the entire Trump phenomenon has nothing to do with policy or ideology. It has nothing to do with the Republican Party, either, except in its historic role as incubator of this singular threat to our democracy. Trump has transcended the party that produced him. His growing army of supporters no longer cares about the party. Because it did not immediately and fully embrace Trump, because a dwindling number of its political and intellectual leaders still resist him, the party is regarded with suspicion and even hostility by his followers. Their allegiance is to him and him alone.”