“There used to be some things that were sacred in American politics, that you don’t do, like criticizing the parents of a fallen soldier, even if they criticize you. If you’re going to be leader of the free world, you have to be able to accept criticism, and Mr. Trump can’t.”
— Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), quoted by the New York Times, adding that “unacceptable” doesn’t even begin to describe Donald Trump’s behavior.
NATIONAL–PRESIDENT–RABA Research—Clinton 46, Trump 31, Johnson 7, Stein 2
NATIONAL–PRESIDENT–PPP–Clinton 46, Trump 41, Johnson 6, Stein 2
NATIONAL–PRESIDENT–Reuters/Ipsos–Clinton 40, Trump 35
CALIFORNIA–PRESIDENT–PPIC–Clinton 46, Trump 30, Johnson 7, Stein 6
MISSOURI–PRESIDENT–St. Louis Post-Dispatch–Clinton 41, Trump 40, Johnson 9, Stein 1
PENNSYLVANIA–PRESIDENT–Suffolk University–Clinton 46, Trump 37, Johnson 5, Stein 3
DELAWARE–PRESIDENT–News Journal/PublicMind–Clinton 42, Trump 32
From the PPP poll, it seems the DNC repaired Hillary’s favorability rating by 9 points:
Clinton’s net favorability improved by 9 points over the last month. She’s still not popular, with a -6 net favorability at 45/51, but it’s a good deal better than the -15 spread she had at 39/54 a month ago. The gains are particularly attributable to Democrats increasing in their enthusiasm for her, going from giving her a 76/15 rating to an 83/12 one. Trump, on the other hand, is at a -22 net favorability with 36% of voters seeing him favorably to 58% with a negative one. That’s barely changed at all from the 35/58 standing we found for him in late June.
Donald Trump was interviewed by George Stephanopoulos on ABC News:
TRUMP: Michael Bloomberg has wanted to run for president for probably as long as you have known him and guess what? He never had the guts to do it. And now I see this guy up on stage saying negative things. He knows nothing about me. He’s never been to my office. I don’t know him well.
STEPHANOPOULOS; You played golf together.
TRUMP: Maybe once.
STEPHANOPOULOS: Here’s what he hit you on in the speech….
TRUMP: And I hit the ball a lot longer, and a lot better.
My God, what a petulant small little man.
Ezra Klein says his attack on a grieving Gold Star Father and Mother is an example of Donald Trump’s greatest weakness:
Trump is easily baited. He couldn’t swallow his hurt and anger over the Khan’s speech, he had to lash out, to fight back, to smear them in response. This doesn’t make sense if you understand the goal of an election as getting elected, but it does make sense if you understand the goal of an election as playing out an endless series of dominance games.
This is a point TPM’s Josh Marshall has repeatedly made about Trump. A need for dominance, Marshall writes, “is the key to understanding virtually everything Trump does. Whatever is actually happening he tries to refashion it into a dominance ritual or at least will not engage before performing one. You saw that in those numerous examples where he said he would participate in a debate but only after the other party wrote a major check to charity. It’s primal.”
The Khans’ speech hurt Trump. He watched it. He read the coverage of it. He felt slighted, inferior, humiliated. And so he needed to rebalance the scales. He needed to regain his dominance. He seems confused that anyone faults him for this — isn’t it obvious that they attacked him, and so he should get to attack them back?
This is the logic of a schoolyard bully, which Trump is. But it’s a dangerous mindset for a president.
Putting Trump in the Oval Office would open a huge vulnerability in our national security. It’s much easier to bait Trump than it is to attack the United States. Our enemies’ aim is often to provoke us into overreacting and overcommitting abroad because they can’t hope to seriously hurt us here. With Trump in control of the armed forces, the path to manipulating us into that kind of overreaction would be clear.
[Hillary] stood up with scorn, wit, and no-holds-barred verbal fisticuffs to Donald Trump. The Trump section of her speech makes you long for the debates, not least because she indicated that one of her implicit goals is to provoke him into losing his cool onstage. Never in the history of presidential politics in the age of television have there been two major-party contenders so antithetical in every way, from their worldviews to their intellects to their psyches to their rhetorical styles to, of course, their genders. What voter would not watch?
The speech also reflected just how much an impact Bernie Sanders has had since his movement caught fire. Clinton, who at her worse equivocates on tough issues or dodges them altogether, took unequivocally progressive stands on causes that Sanders advanced in the primary, and even sounded somewhat convincing railing against the one-percenters in her own donor camp.
Various commentators, including Joe Klein and Jonathan Chait, have noted that the Democratic convention is much less about what’s wrong with America, whether that’s rising income inequality or the climate crisis or police violence or our foreign policies, than it is about the progress we’ve made during the Obama administration and more generally over the last century or so.
Part of this is simply that Donald Trump isn’t your typical Republican and there’s a huge opening and also a basic responsibility to disqualify him from holding the highest office in the land. But part of it is that the Obama administration really has been enormously successful and the Democratic Party has become much more ideologically coherent during his presidency.
The progressive coalition is feeling confident, not least because they’re celebrating the nomination of a woman as a major party candidate. The LGBT community has enjoyed a stunning string of successes in the Obama years. People of color have never had more of a presence on the stage, nor have they ever had their concerns more seriously respected in the platform or in the mouths of top Democrats. Tim Kaine didn’t worry about who he’d alienate by speaking Spanish during his speech last night. Even the ideological left represented by Sanders has never been as influential, as seen by the ways the Clinton campaign has bent over backwards to accommodate them and adopt chunks of their agenda as their own.
Democrats are clearly eager to take the risk, careful threading a rhetorical needle. The party believes there are plenty of Americans who may ordinarily be inclined to support the Republican ticket, but who are looking for an excuse not to under the circumstances.
And with that comes an opportunity. With his unhinged extremism, Trump has created an ideological chasm, making it possible for Clinton and her convention to present ideas that appeal to Bernie Sanders and his supporters, while presenting themes and emotions that reassure centrists and Trump’s Republican skeptics.
Kevin Baker and Jack Hitt at the New Republic:
On its last night, the Democratic convention came together, as it so often does, in a celebration of diversity. This is the party that looks like America, and it has been for a long time. This year it came off with an almost runaway momentum.
The Reverend William Barber’s magnificent, rolling cadences, and then speeches from the survivors of slain police officers sought to unify a country divided by racial tensions. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar showed how comfortable Democrats have become as the party of America’s diversity, introducing himself as “Michael Jordan” because Donald Trump “wouldn’t know the difference.” He introduced a Muslim-American father, who movingly eulogized his son, Capt. Humayun Khan, who gave his life for his country in Iraq. At one point he pulled out a pocket copy of the U.S. Constitution to school Donald Trump. “You have sacrificed nothing,” Khan reminded the Republican draft-dodger. “And no one.” A retired Marine general, John Allen, literally marched onto the stage to a martial drumbeat, surrounded by a phalanx of incredibly diverse veterans, one even wearing a Sikh turban, and thundered out a vow of victory over ISIS, while the crowd went wild, waving American flags and chanting, “USA!”
This display of patriotism, predictably, brought about a Berner retort of “No more war!”—even through the following testimony of Captain Florent Groberg, as he described how he won his Medal of Honor and lost part of a leg, saving his fellow soldiers. But it was too late. The crowd had turned, buoying a determined, well-delivered, even eloquent acceptance speech by Hillary. There were intermittent chants and shouts even then, but the Democrats were off and running out of Philly, having out-hustled the outraged and the outrageous, at least for now.
We now have 4 polls with data from after the Dem convention. Heres the trend for all of July https://t.co/q24YnhQ7Nl pic.twitter.com/7MFGBdQ3Yk
— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) July 31, 2016
Every word of @SenatorReid’s statement is unobjectionable. There is no valid, on-the-level rebuttal. pic.twitter.com/fuC0uWbNgP
— Brian Beutler (@brianbeutler) July 31, 2016
This is how we will get a massive blue wave that sweeps all Republicans from office: if the GOP doesn’t reject Trump when it is clear he must be rejected.