So today is the big day: Donald Trump meets Paul Ryan and Republican Senators who are afraid to endorse him. From a historical viewpoint it occurred to me that Ryan’s encounter with Trump is all vaguely reminiscent of when the caretaker head of state who the Shah left behind had to hang with the Ayatollah Khomeini when he returned in February 1979. A great moment in history. In any case, the first meeting seems to have gone reasonably well. Trump and Ryan just released a joint statement which essentially says that their differences are outweighed by their common views and the need to defeat the evil Hillary Clinton.
The latest right wing freak out about Facebook is reverberating in some interesting places: in a sports radio conversation about UFC and eSports. As Colin Cowherd puts it, maybe conservatives should have created Facebook or Silicon Valley or any of the other dynamic new parts of the economy which have such a dominant sway over the culture.
Of course, it doesn’t really seem like Facebook was ‘suppressing’ conservative views at all. So there’s that too.
Because of the seriousness of the issue, I’m taking the rare step of posting to the Editor’s Blog a twitter poll I just posted on my Twitter account.
To be clear, I don’t buy that there’s any real tightening in the race between Clinton and Trump. But TPM Reader BL still has a point …
I agree that the shift in the polls, though it may not prove durable, should not be dismissed out of hand. Quite possibly, we are seeing the readiness of a large swathe of white Americans to vote for literally anybody. Under these conditions, the future course taken by Bernie Sanders becomes more important than ever. His supporters, in my view, have seriously damaged Clinton, not by supporting Sanders, but by flooding social media with claims that she is corrupt. By doing so, they have amplified her negatives. Nonetheless,Clinton is still virtually certain to become the nominee. If Sanders really supports her, she should win. If he withholds real support, he greatly increases the chances of a very close election and of a political catastrophe of unfathomable dimensions.
A few thoughts on Trump and his tax returns. He now says he’ll never release them – November means never, in political terms. So what’s the deal?
A few thoughts.t
Yesterday Quinnipiac came out with batch of swing state polls showing Donald Trump near even or ahead in three key swing states – Florida, Pennsylvania and Ohio. In recent cycles, the Q poll has tended to be Republican friendly at least in part because it models the electorate with fewer college educated voters and fewer minority voters than other pollsters; indeed, fewer than the number who’ve shown up in recent presidential elections. But this morning Reuters/Ipsos released its latest weekly poll which shows Trump just 1 point behind Clinton at Clinton 41, Trump 40. The same poll showed Trump 9 points back just one week ago.
That’s a big big move and from a poll that hasn’t shown a clear GOP lean.
So what’s up?
House Speaker Paul Ryan just took a small number of questions about Donald Trump and his efforts to genuinely unify the GOP for the November election. It was notable what he did and did not say.
The gist of Ryan’s remarks is that there are different wings in the GOP, as there is in any national political coalition, and they need to unify around a common message while accepting existence of different wings, different policy positions, etc. Secondly, it’s been a deeply bruising primary. Simply on an interpersonal level, it takes a while to absorb and get past that.
Trump campaign capo Paul Manafort says GOP convention will be “the ultimate reality show.”
The Trump campaign is now saying its decision to include a prominent white nationalist on its California delegate slate was the result of a “database error.”
And no. That does not make any sense.
Paul Ryan’s spokeswoman pleads with reporters to stop asking questions about Donald Trump.