Donald Trump’s new campaign chief says Trump’s actually winning because pollsters can’t find the “undercover Trump voter.”
Alt-title: There are still votes to count in Unicorn County.
It now seems that the next several days of the campaign cycle will be about whether anyone can figure out what Donald Trump’s immigration policy is. Mass expulsions, compulsory taco salads, expelling the bad people, letting the models stay, Obama’s awesome after all. Trump’s new mantra is that “we will follow the law,” which – let’s not be ungenerous – is a good place to start but of course tells us nothing. This isn’t a pivot. It’s an effort to sow confusion. Because there’s no tenable place for Trump to be on this issue.
9:05 PM: Watching Trump rally as he tries to explain how he’s jettisoning his entire campaign agenda 80 days out from the election.
The Trump campaign can’t decide whether to jettison its signature policy initiative – mass expulsion. The conflagrations and controversies are coming at us at a blinding speed. We’re keeping you up to speed on all of them. But did I mention we really need you to sign up for Prime? If you absolutely need TPM, then we absolutely need you. Please take a moment right now and join us as a Prime subscriber. It’s important; it’s awesome, you will be supporting our independent journalism and you’ll be very glad you did. Just click right here.
To hear the mainstream media tell it, Donald Trump has spent the last week in a stumbly and maybe not terribly effectual outreach to black people. As I noted over the weekend, Republican faux-outreach to African-Americans with the goal of mollifying moderate or educated white voters is a tried and true political move. There’s nothing remotely new about it. The problem for Trumpers, as I noted in this piece, is that they have a hard time even staying in character, randomly blurting out angry slurs while trying to execute their faux-outreach. But there’s something a deeper and darker going on with Trump himself. It’s not just off-tone. It’s not just rants at African-Americans from lily-white suburbs. What Trump’s doing amounts to trying to rebrand dehumanization verging on hate speech as ‘outreach’.
According to the TPM Electoral Scoreboard, the race now stands at Clinton 326, Trump 154 as Missouri moves from Trump to Toss Up.
Also notable, Clinton currently has a lead of at least 10 points in states that account for 298 electoral votes. Those states include Pennsylvania, Virginia and Florida.
Join us in The Hive for a live chat with Amanda Bellows, the author of the latest TPM Longform on the mysterious black filmmaker Oscar Micheaux. Micheaux’s films were one of a kind and his work paved the way for African Americans in Hollywood — check out the piece here, and drop in your questions at or before 1 p.m. EST on Friday, August 26!
As I noted in my earlier post, the Trump camp, trying to right its ship, has now found itself either embracing President Obama’s deportation policy or claiming that they’re now just starting to deciding what their policy should be. It’s hilarious. And it’s important as citizens and Americans that we laugh at their nonsense. But we should also keep in mind the following point.
We have more evidence this morning that the Trump campaign is trying to pull off a painful and likely impossible pivot from the mass deportation of 3% of the US population with an Einsatzgruppen-sounding thing called the “deportation force” to something like exactly what Trump and Republicans have been railing about for years: the deportation policy followed by President Barack (oh hell, let’s just say it Hussein!) Obama.
In a series of interview last night Donald Trump appeared to embrace Barack Obama’s policy on deportations, just “perhaps with a lot more energy.”
The mix of lying, bad faith, and actually for the first time figuring out how immigration law works is quite a thing to behold. I remain pretty confident in what I wrote last night about this being why that Thursday speech got cancelled.
I think next we’re going to have a roll out of the Trump Taj MaWall that is based on the Stonehenge bit in Spinal Tap.