Russ Buettnet and Charles Bagli have written a blockbluster story this at the New York Times:
The Trump Plaza Casino and Hotel is now closed, its windows clouded over by sea salt. Only a faint outline of the gold letters spelling out T-R-U-M-P remains visible on the exterior of what was once this city’s premier casino. Not far away, the long-failing Trump Marina Hotel Casino was sold at a major loss five years ago and is now known as the Golden Nugget.
… even as his companies did poorly, Mr. Trump did well. He put up little of his own money, shifted personal debts to the casinos and collected millions of dollars in salary, bonuses and other payments. The burden of his failures fell on investors and others who had bet on his business acumen.
Mr. Trump assembled his casino empire by borrowing money at such high interest rates — after telling regulators he would not — that the businesses had almost no chance to succeed. …
During a decade when other casinos here thrived, Mr. Trump’s lagged, posting huge losses year after year. Stock and bondholders lost more than $1.5 billion.
All the while, Mr. Trump received copious amounts for himself, with the help of a compliant board. In one instance, The Times found, Mr. Trump pulled more than $1 million from his failing public company, describing the transaction in securities filings in ways that may have been illegal, according to legal experts.
More on this from Matt Yglesias:
Russ Buettner and Charles V. Bagli have a fantastic, in-depth, 5,000-word account of Donald Trump’s business dealings in Atlantic City for The New York Times that is full of lurid details but that amount to this core point — Trump’s New Jersey casinos were never successful operating businesses, but they did make a lot of money for Donald Trump personally because he tunneled assets out of the enterprises into his own pockets.
While the sheer range of businesses Trump has been involved with over the years — real estate development, casinos, suits, reality television, steak, water, a “university,” books, presidential politics — may offer the superficial appearance of a broad range of mastery, the story of Trump’s adventures in Atlantic City reveal something else.
Across these ventures Trump has mastered essentially a single skill — structuring deals to be financially beneficial to him personally regardless of whether the underlying business is successful. Rather than creating wealth for his business partners, Trump took advantage of investors who believed in him in order to benefit himself personally — just as he did years later with the “students” at Trump University.
The Washington Post has its criteria for selecting Clinton’s veep.
We have an idea: How about picking someone who is fully prepared to be president? This should narrow Ms. Clinton’s list significantly. …
Mr. Sanders, for example, has displayed a simplistic, closed policy mind ill-suited for the presidency, misleading voters about the true cost of his many promises. Ms. Warren is proving her adeptness on the attack, going after Mr. Trump with flair. But she has yet to show that she understands the other side of the political coin: working with those who have deep disagreements and encouraging supporters not to make the ideologically perfect the enemy of good policy.
This does not mean that Ms. Clinton must pick a moderate to whom progressives would strongly object. Sen. Timothy M. Kaine (D-Va.), for example, is a principled liberal who backed then-Sen. Barack Obama early in his presidential campaign, when Mr. Obama was an anti-Clinton progressive insurgent. But Mr. Kaine also has years of executive experience and a record of working with the other side to get things done. Nor is Mr. Kaine the only one who illustrates this key point: that passion for the cause does not have to accompany contempt for the politics of compromise and accomplishment.
Elizabeth Warren is very progressive, yes. But she is not purist who refuses to compromise. If she was, I would not support her since I dislike purists as much as any Republican. So I disagree with the Post’s analysis. It seems almost contrived in order to dismiss her. I have nothing against Kaine. He is the safe, Plan B pick. But he doesn’t add anything to the ticket.
Carl Cannon asks whether Trump wants to lose?: “I’ve only met the man once, and if one of my friends wrote this column, I’d tease him about going all Gail Sheehy — I don’t usually cotton to journalists who psychoanalyze their subjects. But I believe that Donald Trump, the man who famously disparages ‘losers,’ knows deep down he isn’t equipped to be president.”
“Let’s call this more reflective subconscious entity ‘Don Trump.’”
“Donald Trump loves winning and hates losing, while Don Trump knows that running a smart campaign and beating Hillary Clinton means he’d inherit a job he has neither the qualifications nor the temperament to perform successfully. Don Trump wants to lose. He wants this campaign to be over so Donald Trump can go back to doing what he’s good at: promoting his personal brand and counting his money.”
“There’s no question in my mind, he will never release his tax returns. He will follow one excuse after another to say why he can’t.” — Mitt Romney, quoted by The Hill, insisting there is a “bombshell” in Donald Trump’s tax returns.
Donald Trump “has hired a new pollster to help him capture an elusive Republican victory in New York,” the New York Times reports.
“The pollster, John McLaughlin, will be focusing exclusively on New York, polling to determine what type of climb Mr. Trump would face in a state that hasn’t voted for a Republican in a presidential race since Ronald Reagan in 1984. Mr. McLaughlin’s role was described by two campaign sources briefed on the move, who were not authorized to speak publicly.”
LOL! We go now to the Clinton campaign for reaction:
Stuart Rothenberg: “Unless you are Ronald Reagan running for re-election (‘It’s morning again in America’), most competitive presidential campaigns are about a single objective: making the race a referendum on the opponent, particularly if he or she is a long-time politician who has high negatives.”
“That’s how Barack Obama won a second term. He defined Mitt Romney and ran against that caricature he created (with Romney’s help, of course).”
“But whether it’s because he really doesn’t understand campaigns, or more likely, that his obvious narcissism makes it impossible for him to see that any topic could be more interesting than himself, Donald Trump continues to make the 2016 election a referendum on his accomplishments, his past statements and his beliefs.”
Associated Press: “In the dozen or so states most likely to determine the race, Trump has made little progress building a campaign operation to match Clinton’s sophisticated get-out-the-vote machine. At the same time, he’s created new problems in Florida, Colorado and Nevada with comments that Republican leaders decry as racist.”
“There is a path for the billionaire real estate mogul and reality TV star to find his way to 270. But it’s narrow, given the map’s opening tilt toward the Democratic Party, and hinges on Trump’s ability to continue to defy political norms.”
“Trump will need to turn out white voters in the Upper Midwest in numbers that far exceed those in past presidential elections. Even if that happens, he’s still likely to need to convince women in swing-voting suburbs that he has the temperament to be commander in chief. And he must stop his party from losing more ground among minorities, particularly Hispanics.”
Sen. David Perdue (R-GA) joked at a conservative Christian event that he prays President Obama’s days will be “few,” the Huffington Post reports. Said Perdue: “We should pray like Psalms 109:8 says. It says: ‘Let his days be few and let another have his office.’”
Perdue did not continue, but Psalm 109 is a death wish for one of David’s enemies. It continues: “Let his children be fatherless; and his wife a widow. Let his children wander about and beg; and let them seek sustenance far from their ruined homes. Let the creditor seize all that he has; and let strangers plunder the product of his labor. Let there be none to extend lovingkindness to him; nor any to be gracious to his fatherless children. Let his posterity be cut off; in a following generation let their name be blotted out.“
Hey Republicans, you want to know why Trump “happened” to you, it is because you act like Senator Perdue. Trump happened because you all are Trump.
There’s good reason for that concern: Trump’s tribal, racial appeal threatens the GOP in both the near and long term. Yet it’s also understandable that Trump seemed blindsided by the heated Republican reaction to his attacks on the Indiana-born Curiel as a “Mexican” who cannot judge him impartially—and his indication on Face the Nation that he might not get a fair hearing from a Muslim judge either. (It’s reasonable to ask: would a President Trump demand that Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor recuse herself from all cases involving his administration because of her Hispanic heritage?)
Trump has reason to be surprised because until now, Republican leaders have mustered no more resistance to his provocations than momentary grumbling, followed by capitulation. Trump personally demeaned Marco Rubio during the campaign as contemptuously as one presidential candidate has ever belittled another; yet Rubio compliantly endorsed him. Ryan criticized Trump over his Duke remarks and his proposal to temporarily ban Muslim immigrants. But then, after briefly withholding his endorsement, he too fell into line (if perhaps only temporarily).
Throughout, even the Republican leaders most uneasy with Trump have recoiled from confronting him partly because he has demonstrated how much of the GOP coalition responds to a racially barbed message of defensive nationalism.
“Mitt Romney laid into the large and rambunctious group of 2016 Republican candidates here on Saturday, arguing that they deserved a share of blame for the rise of Donald Trump,” Politico reports.
“By spending months attacking each other and ignoring Trump, he argued, they made a severe tactical error that allowed Trump — who Romney has criticized as a ‘con man’ and a ‘fraud’ — to escape unharmed.”
Said Romney: “Their biggest failure was attacking each other and not the frontrunner. Just politically, I thought that move was not right for them.”
So both campaigns this year need to carry out a two-track strategy. First, they need to convince people who might otherwise vote the other way that their opponent is corrupt and dangerous and should not be allowed on a White House tour, let alone to sit in the Oval Office. At the same time, they need to get out their base and win over people who don’t loathe their candidate. This is not much different from any campaign, but we will see the strategies more vividly this time round.
What has to concern Republicans is that there is no there there in the Trump campaign—no organization, no analytics, few voter lists. It will be a campaign overwhelmingly dependent on the Republican National Committee for organization and money. Meanwhile, Clinton has a hybrid operation, staffed by stars from her previous campaign and many of the best from President Obama’s runs.
For now, we just wait to see if Clinton gets the same bounce from her nomination as Trump enjoyed after his, with Democratic partisans coming home and lining up behind her. If they do, she could surge to a comfortable lead in what is now a neck-and-neck race.