One of the many fascinating things to come out of my chat with Josh Green (for Episode 3 of the podcast) was the still largely unappreciated role of Steve Bannon looming over the 2016 race.
Obviously, being Trump’s campaign chairman in itself is a very big deal. Kellyanne Conway is the nominal campaign manager. But Bannon seems to be the top executive in the operation. And to the surprise of many (including myself), rather than signaling Trump going finally totally off he rails, Bannon is the first of Trump’s three campaign chiefs to bring some level of discipline to the operation. Not a high bar. But it’s been real and important. So that’s point one.
The latest national premium phone poll has Clinton up seven percentage points among likely voters.
We’ve been seeing over recent days that Donald Trump and members of his family not only treat the Trump Foundation as a sort of personal piggy bank but actually think that’s how it’s supposed to work. Well, it seems like that may be the case. A longtime Trump family aide, Tracey Patton, told The Des Moines Register today that some of the Trump Foundation money actually is Trump’s personal money and he can do anything he wants with it.
Fascinating little nuggets of information from searching the Trump Tweet Archive.
1. Trump has used the word “neurotic” three times since he opened his account. Once about Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, once about Mika Brzezinski, once about Maureen Dowd.
As I said earlier, it really, really pains me to have to argue Corey Lewandowski’s case here. But here goes.
In lots of press reports, emailers, folks on Twitter saying that Lewandowski is now being paid for “strategy consulting” rather than simply a severance. He’s also being paid to his company, Green Monster Consulting, LLC. So basically he’s back on the payroll.
I’m surprised this is only getting attention now. It’s not just that Donald Trump essentially ripped off his own Foundation to settle business disputes – and in doing so cheated taxpayers who give his Foundation preferential tax treatment. The nature of one of the disputes itself is almost as amazing. This isn’t just some prosaic or mundane legal dispute. It’s a classic Trump cheat.
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.