If you don’t think Donald Trump should be within 100 feet of the Oval Office but just can’t stomach Hillary Clinton, you have the alternative of voting for someone else who shouldn’t be within 100 feet of the Oval Office. Feel better?
Watch the second interview Gary Johnson did this morning, with that steamroller of an interviewer, Mark Halperin. It’s even worse than his Morning Joe flameout.
You can ask Josh literally anything you want to ask him today at 2 PM over on Reddit. Join here.
The Trump portion of tonight’s national security forum was bracing to watch live. But when I went back and read the transcript I felt the need to commune with the words to just absorb the full measure of crazy. People are all going wild tonight about how Matt Lauer let Trump get away with murder. And I agree. But I think Trump was mainly murdering himself.
Like many of you, I just watched the MSNBC candidates’ forum and here are my thoughts, presented in bullet points.
Within days of hitting up Donald Trump for that $25,000, she delayed an execution so she could attend a campaign fundraiser. In her defense, she later apologized and promised to fight any further efforts to delay the condemned man’s execution.
Actually, I guess that’s not really a defense. But she did apologize.
As Trump gets ready to speak again on national security, I want to return to a basic point. I’ve heard numerous people – people who should know better – claiming that Trump is either critiquing Clinton from the left or embracing a non-interventionist Realist foreign policy.
This is silly.
As you’ve no doubt noticed, the big Clinton leads of early and mid-August have faded to a significantly tighter race in the beginning of September. That point was (for Clinton supporters) unpleasantly punctuated yesterday morning by a CNN/ORC poll which showed Trump leading Clinton by 1 point in a direct head to head match-up. There were actually four polls yesterday: Trump +1, Clinton +2, Clinton +3 and Clinton +6. We don’t know yet whether the CNN poll is an outlier or the trend. (Another poll out this morning has Clinton +2). But there’s another point I want to flag about the instability of the polls – specifically the big multi-state surveys from Ipsos-Reuters and WaPo/SurveyMonkey.
The TPM Electoral Scoreboard now stands at Clinton 268, Trump 186. There’s been quite a bit of volatility in the numbers of late, both nationally and statewide. At the moment, Arizona, Florida, Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin are all in the toss up category. Clinton remains in a dominant position and just shy of 270 electoral votes because she has small leads in Virginia and North Carolina, two states that weren’t even swing states before the Obama era.
Over the last few days, as I’ve been writing about the Trump/Bondi story, I’ve had a number of people tell me someone should FOIA (or its Florida equivalent) the documents about Bondi’s office’s investigation or review of Trump University. But over the long weekend, I actually found an article from June by Orlando Sentinel columnist Scott Maxwell, who’s literally been on the case from the very beginning in the fall of 2013. Back in June of this year, when the Trump-Bondi story flared up for the second time during the campaign, Maxwell put in just such a request. After a few weeks he got a big stack of paper, almost 8,500 pages, the upshot of which is that it didn’t seem like Bondi’s office had really looked into the matter much at all. In fact, most of the paper dealt with staff putting off reporters asking what her office was doing about Trump University and its collateral and related scams or telling cheated Floridians to try Google to get their money back.