Delaware Liberal

This week has been pivotal. First, the revelations of the Trump University Scam and Trump's defrauding of the veterans broke. Then Trump goes nuts on the press for revealing the truth in a preview of what press conferences under a fascist dictator will look like. Then Hillary's amazing speech on Thursday. Then Trump's insane racist attacks on the Judge in the Trump University case, which he has escalated throughout the week. And then last night he sees a single African American in a crowd at his rally, and in the middle of discussing black protestors who are thugs, says "Look at my African American over there. Look at him. Aren't you the greatest?" Everywhere I go, I see people on Facebook, Twitter, in real life, on cable TV, trying to find words or reasons for all this behavior, in particular the attacks on the Judge and the comments on "my African American." Look, it is all pretty simple, and people just need to accept it rather than rationalize their way out of saying what is really going on here. And that is this: Donald Trump is a narcissistic sociopath. He is a racist. He desires to be a fascist dictator that jails his opponents and cleanses the country of the minorities he hates. Seriously. It's not hyperbole this time. The Republicans have literally nominated the heir of Adolf Hitler. The sooner you all accept it, the better off you will all be, because everything will make sense.

Eric Levitz at New York Magazine:

Hillary Clinton's argument for why she would make a better commander-in-chief than her Republican opponent is fairly simple: She is not an emotionally erratic ignoramus who has praised the Tiananmen Squarecrackdown, refused to issue any plan for combating ISIS, and called on the American military to kill more civilians. On the other hand, she was in the room when President Obama ordered the hit on Bin Laden. And she did a bunch of other great things as Secretary of State. (You've forgotten about that Libya intervention by now, haven't you?) The likely Democratic nominee laid out this case in exacting detail in San Diego on Thursday. Her campaign had billed the speech as an attempt to paint Donald Trump as "unfit for the presidency." This is not a terribly difficult task, but she accomplished it with aplomb — deploying the old rhetorical trick of reciting all the insane, mutually exclusive proposals her opponent had improvised over the course of a 12-month campaign.

Jon Favreau, the former Obama speechwriter and not the actor/director, says the coming fall campaign will be Obama's last stand:

Clinton’s primary victory will allow her to assemble a Democratic Dream Team of political talent to rally the party and take on Trump. She’ll have Bill Clinton, a popular ex-president who can testify to her character and defend her record better than anyone (his speech defending President Obama’s at the 2012 convention is the stuff of legend); Elizabeth Warren, a liberal icon in the Senate who has already begun to prosecute the party’s sharpest case against Trump; [and] Joe Biden, a beloved vice president with a working-class, tell-it-like-it-is, God-knows-what-he’ll-say kind of appeal[.] Clinton will also have by her side the best political player in the game: Barack Obama. In a few months, my old boss will hit the trail for the last time as president. He’ll do so with an approval rating that has been north of 50 percent nearly every week since March, a high he’d previously reached only in the months after his first and second elections. Political scientists point to a strong historical correlation between an outgoing president’s popularity and the final vote share of his party’s candidate. Obama’s recent surge in popularity has been driven largely by independents, young people, women, and Latinos — four groups most likely to tip the election toward Clinton. He has an 82 percent approval rating among Sanders supporters, whom he’ll work to persuade as America’s most famous Clinton convert — someone who also waged a brutal primary against her, but eventually became a friend, partner, and champion. I don’t want to overestimate the Obama effect. No one can win this for Clinton but Clinton. [...] But I suspect that the president will give this campaign all that he has and more — for Clinton, for his own legacy, and for the vision of America that he’s asked us to believe in since the night he stepped onto the national stage in Boston and delivered his 2004 convention speech, a hopeful, bighearted vision that is the antithesis of everything that Trump represents. The truth is, Obama has understood better than most the forces that gave rise to a candidacy like Trump’s.