Don’t worry. I’ll be okay. But this is upsetting: I think I have to defend Corey Lewandowski.
A couple hours ago I chatted with Bloomberg’s Josh Green for episode three of my new podcast. We talked about the now infamous Mark Penn ‘unamerican’ memo from 2008 which the Trump campaign quite clumsily tried to use to blame Hillary Clinton for birtherism and also Josh’s profile of Steve Bannon from last year. You may have missed this part of the last week’s unfolding birther news. But Josh was the one who originally got a copy of that memo and published it in 2008 as part of a lengthy post-mortem on the Clinton campaign. Fascinating conversation. As usual, whatever the news of the moment, Josh has several deeply reported articles which bear pretty much directly on it.
Episode three of my podcast should be coming on Friday.
On Friday, I wrote that there was good reason to think the Donald Trump’s surge in the polls around the time of Hillary Clinton’s ‘deplorables’ story and her health scare would prove ephemeral. I think we’re already starting to see some evidence that that’s happening.
There are two versions of a story out this morning about a terrorism assessment opened on Ahmad Rahami in 2014, after his father called him a “terrorist.” But they’re significantly, even critically different.
The Times version is that Ahmad was involved in some sort of violent domestic incident in his home. When police came to the scene, father Mohammad Rahami told officers his son was a “terrorist.” This news was relied to federal authorities. They opened an investigation. But when they returned to interview Mohammad, he recanted his earlier accusation. From the Times story, that’s where the trail seemed to end.
About an hour ago NBC’s Pete Williams had a significantly different version, recounted on air just after 12 PM.
Political scientists, public opinion analysts and pundits often make two erroneous assumptions about American politics: the first is that there is an ironclad division between red states and blue states; the second is that on the Republican side, the division is based on voters’ racism, nativism or some other “ism” – that is, on irrational prejudice that blinds these voters to their own real interests.
Words count. Listen to these words – trojan horse, cancer from within, secret constant plotting – and see if they don’t sound like speeches from the 1930s or dark words spoken before leaders do horrible things.
This is Trump from this morning on Fox and Friends.
“They’re here. And I’ve been saying. This is going to be like the Trojan horse. We’re letting tens of thousands of people flow into this country and they are bringing in, in many cases, this is cancer from within. This is something that’s going to be so tough and you know they stay together, so nobody really knows who it is, what’s happening. They are plotting. They keep plotting, and this has been going on for so long and everybody knows it and the good law enforcement, we have such great people. That’s the best thing we have going is that we have great law enforcement. They know about it.”
In case you missed it on Friday, the second episode of my new podcast is out. This week I talk to Chris Hayes about the Democratic left, the future of the Democratic party, Trump and how he became Chris Hayes.
ISIS is hoping for a Clinton presidency? Researchers who study jihadist forums and the ‘dark web’ say jihadis are actually giddy at the prospect of a Trump presidency.
If you’ve heard Donald Trump explain Obama and Clinton’s terrible decision to intervene in Libya and how he opposed it all along, watch this video. February 28th, 2011. After the jump …