With this in mind, who’s gets rattled more easily, who’s cooler under pressure: Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump?
No, this isn’t some highly integrated scam ad telling you to click because something’s wrong with your computer. This is an actual post. (No, TPM really hasn’t been hacked.) Even though you don’t come to TPM for information about Mac operating systems, I wanted to share this unfortunate experience with the Mac users in our audience.
The short version is there seems to be some fairly major issue with the new Desktop/Document iCloud backup system if you try to use the backup service with more than one Mac (which is to say, more than one desktop computer as opposed to iOS device.)
Here’s the longer version.
So US intelligence agencies are investigating whether Carter Page, Trump Russia/Europe foreign policy advisor, has opened up backchannels to Russian officials close to Vladimir Putin.
If you’ll remember, in the post I wrote in late July (“Trump & Putin. Yes, It’s Really a Thing“) Carter Page was #5 on the list of seven reasons why Trump and Putin was a real issue that needed more scrutiny.
We’re just days away from the first presidential debate and the final sprint of the 2016 campaign. There’s no better time to subscribe to TPM Prime. Seriously, this is a great time to join TPM Prime. Not just because you get our digital magazine The Arch, my new podcast, fewer ads, full RSS feeds and lots of other cool stuff but because Prime is a critical part of keeping TPM thriving, growing and vital. If you feel like you need TPM then TPM definitely needs you. Join us.
So it turns out treating a charitable foundation like your personal piggy bank is frowned upon. Who knew!
Tierney Sneed talked with experts in the legal and tax implications of Trump’s self-dealing, and this stuff is so out of bounds, so beyond the norm, that it could put the tax-exempt status of the foundation in jeopardy and incur serious financial consequences for Trump himself.
Worth your read this morning.
If I had to bet on this election, I’d still put my money on Hillary Clinton. But there is a big question about why she is not doing better. When presidential candidates face opponents who can’t even command the support of their party’s leadership and leading interest groups, it’s usually landslide time. Think of Lyndon Johnson against Barry Goldwater in 1964, and Richard Nixon against George McGovern in 1972. And Trump has less support in his party’s leadership than either Goldwater or McGovern had. Yet if the polls are to be believed, the race between Clinton and Trump is close.
As I noted earlier this evening, I was wrong about what I thought would happen when Steven Bannon took a leave from Breitbart News and took over the Trump campaign. I assumed that formally teaming up with Bannon would mean Trump finally ditching even the pretense of a ‘pivot’ and doubling down on a 90 day primal scream of rage and derp. It is still largely rage and derp. But Bannon brought a discipline to Trump’s operation that his two predecessors never could. Yes, yes, the bar is so low it might simply be a painted over part of the floor. But recognize the difference. Bannon kept Trump on the teleprompter mainly. He limited the Curiel/Khan type debacles. And yet even with the Bannon/Conway leadership, two people Trump seems largely to trust and work with, it is amazing the degree to which the campaign remains a war between a semblance of strategy and management and Trump’s instinctive drives and arrested emotional development.
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.