Monday Open Thread [9.5.2016]

NEW HAMPSHIRE–PRESIDENT–UNH–Clinton 43, Trump 32
PENNSYLVANIA–PRESIDENT–CBS News/YouGov–Clinton 45, Trump 37
NORTH CAROLINA–PRESIDENT–CBS News/YouGov–Clinton 46, Trump 42
PENNSYLVANIA–SENATOR–CBS News/YouGov–McGinty 39, Toomey 39
NORTH CAROLINA–SENATOR–CBS News/YouGov–Ross 41, Burr 40

Josh Marshall on the press’ noncoverage of the Trump-Bondi Bribery scandal:

Yesterday I pressed the point of the wildly dissimilar campaign coverage of Trump and Clinton, particularly the continuing saturation coverage of Clinton ‘scandals’ in which she’s actually being exonerated and virtually no coverage of a pretty cut and dry pay-for-play story with Trump, his foundation and his efforts to protect himself legally from the fallout of the exposure of his real estate seminar scam business, ‘Trump University’. But the case with Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi is more serious than that. We usually use the phrase ‘pay-to-play’ when talking about money for access, money for government contracts or friendly interventions in the legislative process. The Trump-Bondi case looks like money in exchange for killing an investigation and possible lawsuit against Trump. It would be like Hillary Clinton making a cash payment to Loretta Lynch or James Comey during the email probe.

First, a small point: In the context of chatting about this on Twitter and with colleagues, I took the step of searching The New York Times website to see how much they’d written on the Trump-Bondi story. It first got attention in March and then again in June. So I figured at least a couple short mentions. It turns out the Times, at least according to a full search of “Trump University” and “Pam Bondi”, has literally never published anything on the topic at all. […]

The AG’s office was investigating Trump University and considering joining a lawsuit with other Attorneys General. Bondi asked Trump for money. Trump sent money. The investigation ended. The arrival of Trump’s check just four days after her office publicly announced their inquiry tells quite a tale. […]

That seems like a real problem.

Wayne Barrett on the strange ties between Rudy Giuliani and Donald Trump: “Rudy has actually been more visible in his buddy’s campaign than he was at times in his own $50 million presidential attempt in 2008, when he managed to convert the months-long top ranking in the polls into a single delegate. The imperial 2016 candidate who hates losers, especially ones who wind up in Vietnamese prisons, has instead embraced an epic dud, his solitary act of empathy in a campaign of callousness. He could’ve trashed Rudy like he did John McCain: ‘I like people who weren’t caught with their command center down.’

“But the onetime comb-over twins just had too much in common. Though bombs-away hawks today, they got multiple draft deferments during the Vietnam War, with athlete Donald citing bad feet as his excuse and Rudy using an ear defect to sidestep his ROTC obligations.”

“Then there’s the wife trifecta. No one in American public life, other than perhaps their kindred spirit Newt Gingrich, has ever mastered the art of a bad divorce like Rudy and Donald, carrying on as if spousal humiliation was the point.”

Politico: Is Rudy Giuliani losing his mind? Lost? You cannot lose something you never had.

Politico: “Both Hillary Clinton’s and Donald Trump’s teams see September as the month that will make — or break — their candidate’s case for the White House. A confident Clinton fighting to keep expectations in check will ratchet up her get-out-the-vote operation while courting more Republicans to her camp. A defiant Trump will double down on the America-first message that he thinks got him this far in the first place. The Democrat’s allies will continue to blanket the battleground airwaves with stinging attacks on Trump’s character. And three weeks into the month, early voting periods will open, state by state.”

“But nothing is more crucial for either contender than Sept. 26, when Clinton and Trump will meet at Hofstra University for the first presidential debate. Both campaigns have come to the conclusion that for the Republican nominee to compete in the home-stretch, he needs a shock to the system and the Hempstead, New York forum offers his best opportunity.”

Donald Trump “has run an unusually cheap campaign in part by not paying at least 10 top staffers, consultants and advisers, some of whom are no longer with the campaign,” Reuters reports.

“The New York real estate magnate and his allies have touted his campaign’s frugality, saying it is evidence of his management skills. His campaign’s spending has totaled $89.5 million so far, about a third of what Democratic rival Hillary Clinton’s campaign has spent. But not compensating top people in a presidential campaign is a departure from campaign finance norms. Many of the positions involved might typically come with six-figure annual paychecks in other campaigns.”

The RNC had high hopes that Donald Trump “would deliver a compassionate and measured speech about immigration on Wednesday, and prepared to lavish praise on the candidate on the party’s Twitter account,” the New York Times reports.

“So when Mr. Trump instead offered a fiery denunciation of migrant criminals and suggested deporting Hillary Clinton, Reince Priebus, the party chairman, signaled that aides should scrap the plan, and the committee made no statement at all.”

“The evening tore a painful new wound in Mr. Trump’s relationship with the Republican National Committee, imperiling his most important remaining political alliance.”

The Commission on Presidential Debates announced the list of moderators for the 2016 presidential and vice presidential debates on Friday. The moderators include NBC News’ Lester Holt will do the first debate, ABC News’ Martha Raddatz and CNN’s Anderson Cooper will do the Town Hall Debate, Fox News’ Chris Wallace will do the final Presidential debate and CBS News’ Elaine Quijano will moderate the VP debate.

First Read: “More than two months before Election Day, it’s already happening: Downballot Republicans and top GOP leaders are dumping Trump. There was no public memo or major announcement in August — just actions…”

“But here’s the bad news: After Labor Day, almost every single Democrat in a House and Senate race will be tying their GOP opponent to Trump. So up and down the ticket, hundreds of millions of dollars in Democratic messaging will be ‘Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump.’ And when there’s been that kind of disparity in messaging when one party is talking about one thing and the opposition is talking about everything else — see 2006 and 2008 (‘Bush, Bush, Bush’) or 2010 and 2014 (‘Obama, Obama, Obama’) — there’s been a wave. November is going to go one of two ways. One, this kind of GOP separation from Trump is going to work like we saw in 1996. Or two, the bottom is going to fall out for the Republican Party.”

A new Latino Decisions poll finds Hillary Clinton leads Donald Trump by 70% to 19% among Latino voters. Clinton has a 68% to 29% (net +39) favorability rating while Trump has a 21% to 74% (net -53) favorability rating.

Mother Jones on what could be Trump’s back up plan for when he loses in November: “This spring, as Donald Trump battled Ted Cruz in the heated Republican primary campaign, the mogul was also tending to his day job, with his business empire staking a claim to some new corporate territory. On April 11—a day when media reports noted Trump had been oddly silent and out of sight following his recent defeat in the Wisconsin primary—a Trump-owned company applied for a trademark on a brand new hotel concept. It was dubbed ‘American Idea.’”

“According to the trademark filing made by DTTM Operations LLC, a Delaware-based company Trump set up in January to manage his trademarks, the GOP nominee was reserving ‘American Idea’ for use in an unspecified hotel services, spa, and/or personal concierge business. Could it be that the candidate running under the banner of ‘Make America Great Again’ was devising a plan to capitalize on Trump-style patriotism for a new hotel or chain of hotels with some sort of America theme? Was this Plan B? A way to convert his campaign into a commercial success, if voters fail to elect him the nation’s next CEO?”

“Donald Trump, as a builder in New York and Atlantic City decades ago, sometimes dealt with people who had ties to organized crime,” the Wall Street Journal reports. “They included a man law enforcement called an agent of the Philadelphia mob; a gambler convicted of tax fraud; a union leader found guilty of racketeering; and a real-estate developer convicted in a stock scheme that involved Mafiosi.” Trump said he either had only cursory relationships with them or wasn’t aware of their ties at the time, calling himself “the cleanest guy there is.”

In his New York Times column, Thomas B. Edsall sheds some interesting light on New Hampshire politics during his recent visit to a Trump rally in Manchester, including how Sen. Kelly Ayotte’s re-election prospects are being held hostage to her two-faced support for Trump: “Senator Kelly Ayotte, elected in the Tea Party wave of 2010, was nowhere to be found in Manchester. She has distanced herself from the Trump campaign as her convoluted equivocation — “While he has my vote he doesn’t have my endorsement” — has drawn national attention, and, in some quarters, ridicule…Facing a tough challenge from Maggie Hassan, the Democratic Governor, Ayotte, who campaigned long and hard for Mitt Romney in 2012, has tried to describe what she calls a “big distinction.”…On one hand, she said “Everyone gets a vote, I do too.” On the other, “an endorsement is when you are campaigning with someone.”…While this is just the kind of distinction without a difference voters are suspicious of, Ayotte is very clearly not campaigning with Trump…Maggie Hassan repeatedly links Ayotte to Trump. In one recent week, Governor Hassan issued eight Ayotte/Trump press releases, starting with “In Just One Interview, Ayotte Praises Trump, Doubles Down on Raising Social Security Eligibility Age & More” and moving on to “In Two Interviews, Ayotte Refuses Multiple Times to Say Whether She Trusts Trump with Nuclear Arsenal” by the end of the week.”

.@armandodkos on understanding what's in the FBI Clinton report https://t.co/Bdxmyd2ilK

— Greg Dworkin (@DemFromCT) September 2, 2016