Good look at how Trump’s war against Judge Curiel has basically shattered the fragile unity Republicans were able to muster after Trump clinched the nomination.
Bernie Sanders may win California today, but whether or not he does, he won’t have enough delegates to deny the nomination to Hillary Clinton. But Sanders says he is going to carry the fight to the convention, and his campaign talks of prying loose super-delegates and waging platform battles. I voted for Sanders in the primary, so perhaps I can offer advice that rises above the partisan clamor: drop out of the race, give Clinton your full support, and train your sights on Donald Trump, who thinks a judge whose parents were from Mexico, and who was born in Indiana, is not an American.
Sanders had a commendable political agenda, and he can return to it with some authority after November if Clinton wins and he becomes the Budget Chair. But a convention
Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi personally hit up Trump for a major contribution (she received $25k) shortly before nixing a consumer protection lawsuit against Trump University.
There are two things Donald Trump is notorious for in the business world – one is simple bullying as a business tactic, another is cheating people out of money they’re owed and then making the ‘deal’ stick by grinding the counter-parties down with the promise of endless litigation. As Times columnist Joe Nocera puts it, in the business world Trump “is notorious for refusing to pay full price to contractors and vendors after they’ve completed work for him. And he basically dares the people he has stiffed to sue him, knowing that his deep pockets and bevy of lawyers give him a big advantage over those who feel wronged by him.” Both traits or patterns of behavior are surprisingly good guides to Trump’s presidential campaign.
Today we are excited to announce a new feature series on privatization, one of the most significant, far-reaching and little understood trends in American politics, society and economics of the last half century. As we did in our earlier series on the rise of inequality, we’ve commissioned four in-depth articles looking at the issue from numerous of vantage points: the history of privatization, including its political and ideological origins, a look at key privatized industries like the so-called “corrections industry”, public-private partnerships and more. Here’s my introduction to the series. We look forward to your feedback and hope you enjoy it.
The start of the week brings us a raft of latter-day Trump endorsers who now have the look of a base-runner caught between 1st and 2nd after a miracle line drive catch. They already committed; no easy way back.
Part of this is the reaction to Trump’s escalating round of racist tirades against the federal judge presiding over the complex, far-ranging and increasingly damning fraud lawsuits brought against him. But there’s another part of the equation garnering much less attention. Just after Trump clinched the nomination, his head to head poll numbers against Hillary Clinton surged. May horse race polls are erratic and often misleading. We shouldn’t read too much into them. But people do read a lot into them. And there’s little doubt that seeing Trump go from what seemed like a sure loser to a maybe winner helped a lot of Republican elected officials get over the hump and come out in favor of Trump as their nominee.
Almost a month ago, I brought you the news that – rather bizarrely for a purported billionaire – Trump receives a tax credit in New York which is restricted to married couples making less than $500k a year. The news is based on the on-going reporting of Aaron Elstein of Crain’s New York Business. Trump’s folks insisted it was a mistake and said, well of course Trump’s makes more than a half million dollars a year. But now Elstein reports that Trump got the deduction again this year? Brand new documents!
When the Huffington Post decided last year to demote Donald Trump’s campaign to the entertainment section, I advised my friends there to take a look at Italian politics, where the second largest party in the country, the Five Star Movement, was founded and is headed by a standup comedian, Beppe Grillo. Yesterday, Virginia Raggi, a 37-year-old lawyer who is the Five Star Movement’s candidate for mayor of Rome – one of the top political jobs in the country – came in first with 37 percent of the vote and has a good chance of winning a runoff on June 19.
Grillo’s Five Star Movement is part of a wave of populist, Euroskeptic movements in southern Europe. Grillo was inspired by Howard Dean’s campaign and Moveon.org to
I want to tell you about an article that you simply must read. It’s about Trump University. But it’s a part of the story I at least was not at all familiar with – how what we now know as the Trump University real estate seminar scam grew out of a licensing deal Trump struck with one of the most notorious late night informercial get-rich-quick scammers of the early aughts. The article was published at the end of April in Ars Technica. Even though Ars is widely read and extremely well respected, it’s in the tech and science rather than the news and politics space. So that may account for what seems like relatively little discussion of this aspect of the story.
In any case, here’s the gist.