Enjoying our coverage of the craziest campaign ever? Why not take a moment to support our independent journalism and the team that brings it to you every day. Become a subscriber to TPM Prime. You get lots of benefits, access to The Hive, long form articles and dramatically fewer ads (no ads at all on your smart phone). But most of all you become part of our team, making what we do possible. We need you. And it’s just $4.99 a month. No more than an overpriced cuppa coffee. Interested? Just click right here.
This may technically be illegal. But surely it’s just an example of the Trump campaign’s epic incompetence. Members of the House of Commons (that’s the UK, yes, at least for now) have been bombarded for the last week by fundraising emails from Trump and Trump Jr asking for money for his campaign.
There’s a campaign dynamic now coming into view which under other circumstances might only be a matter of trash talk or taunt. In this unique campaign cycle, however, it will likely be a driving issue. Put simply, as Donald Trump’s poll numbers continue to fall (or more likely become more anchored in a position with him clearly behind) he is himself being lowered onto his own personal kryptonite: Loserdom.
This one charge, taunt, attack will rile and unhinge him more than any other. That he’s a loser. At the moment, the facts leave little question that that is what he is.
Perhaps I’m late to this story, what with so much else going on. But apparently just recently Donald Trump accept Jesus as his savior and is now a born-again Christian.
This is what Dr. James Dobson is telling fellow evangelicals. And it is apparently what Trump told him. Dobson even knows the businessman who recently led Trump to Christ. And it all came out at that big evangelical shindig Trump held a week ago in New York City.
Said Dobson:
He did accept a relationship with Christ. I know the person who led him to Christ. That’s fairly recent.
Today’s Supreme Court decision on abortion suddenly puts abortion restrictions in a bunch of other states in potential legal jeopardy. Here’s the rundown.
I hadn’t taken Obama’s statement that a post-EU UK would have to go ‘to the back of the line’ for trade negotiations that seriously. I’d seen it as more a nudge to ward off any expectation that trade relations with the US would be instantly restored on some crash course negotiation. But the possibility of the break-up of the UK itself (which seems like a very real possibility to me over the 4 to 5 year time horizon) hadn’t occurred to me as a drag on potential negotiations.
Overall, I liked your post about Brexit. I will have to say though that I’m doubtful the US will make a deal with the UK outside the EU a priority.
We are told we are entering a period of economic nationalism and right wing populism. We see it in the UK with Brexit, in the USA with Trumpism and in other nations and regions with their own unique inflections. From others we hear this is simply a tantrum or irrationality, perhaps a generalized breakdown of trust in elites. These are each true to a degree. But I think they are each also quite misleading. I see a very different or much more specific pattern in the country whose politics I know best, the USA, and the demographics and the voting parallels seem evident enough in Britain as well.
One source of comic relief this morning is watching American conservatives take a Brexit victory lap. They feel and sometimes say explicitly that leaving the EU is Britain ticket to reemerging as a great power. As I noted below, it’s far more likely that Brexit is Britain’s ticket to reemerging as England. But that’s another matter.
If you’ve read my editors’ blog posts over the years, you likely know that I am at heart a small-c conservative and instinctive institutionalist. There are up and down sides to that way of approaching the world. But it’s a posture that colors my reactions to most things. On that front, last night’s events in the UK fill me with no little foreboding. Sure, the pound was in free fall over night. The British equities market is getting hammered. Those are likely transitory events – at least the instability, if not the absolute values. But look a bit further down the road.
Look at the map.