Conway tells GOPers to stop “pussyfooting around” with supporting Trump.
As I mentioned in my earlier post, I was in meetings in Washington for most of the day. So I checked my iPhone here and there and got a few minutes poking around on my laptop. But I saw most of the day only at a distance – enough to see that the full conflagration had finally broken out but not enough to see the details.
It’s hard to know quite what to say because in some ways this is the most obvious thing in the world. We’ve known all along that something like this could happen, indeed that it was likely to happen. As long as Trump seemed likely to win or to have a plausible chance to win, most everyone in the GOP would be happy and go along. The fact that they were happy is profoundly troubling. But that’s another story. As long as Trump seemed likely to lose without making too much of a mess that was something the party machinery could tolerate. But when things started to go badly things were likely to go bad fast – even more if something extremely toxic was revealed about Trump.
I spent most of the morning off line in meetings. I came back online about twenty minutes ago to see that we’ve got a new Khan family. And it’s the GOP!
You built this, guys.
Polls seldom show actual free fall. But this looks a bit like free fall.
Trump lays the groundwork for blaming GOP electeds for his defeat.
Newsweek’s Kurt Eichenwald has a fascinating little piece out overnight about a telling goof in the Russian propaganda channel that has played such a role in the 2016 election.
It’s a rather convoluted story – not the article but what actually happened. So let me try to summarize it briefly. We have another of those apparently Russian-sourced email thefts which ended up on Wikileaks – this time emails from Clinton campaign chair John Podesta. In those emails there’s an email from Clinton confidante Sid Blumenthal in which he appends an article by Eichenwald himself about Benghazi and other matters. When the Russia-state owned news and propaganda outlet Sputniknews got a hold of it they apparently got confused – intentionally or not – and ascribed Eichenwald’s copy to Blumenthal.
It’s just like it was in the Spring when the GOP party apparatus devised feverish plans to deny Donald Trump the nomination at the convention and then caved without a fight. The great GOP disengagement from Donald Trump, after the emergence of a video in which Trump bragged about assaulting a women, is over after little more than 48 hours.
Paul Ryan told members of his caucus a short time ago in a full caucus conference call that he would no longer defend Donald Trump and focus solely on saving the House Majority. A short time later NBC/WSJ released a poll showing Clinton with a 14 point lead over Trump in a two way race with Trump down at 38% percent support. Even the always cockeyed Rasmussen tracking poll out this morning showed showed Clinton with a 7 point lead, a huge move from Clinton’s 1 point advantage on Friday. Certainly GOP party committees and campaigns have been in the field as well showing a similar electoral earthquake.
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I am no good at deciding who won or lost debates. I react to them as a voter and not as a journalist. And I tend to fasten on things that don’t necessarily upset or thrill other voters. Here are two things that bothered me – not because they’ll determine the election, but because they could foreshadow trouble after the election.