Mike Pence tells young girl upset by Donald Trump’s comments about women’s bodies that he and Trump will project American power around the world.
I want to be very precise about what I say here. There’s a new conspiracy theory rapidly gaining traction among Trump supporters about the origin of the ‘Access Hollywood’ Trump tape which triggered days of new allegations about Donald Trump’s alleged history of sexual abuse. The conspiracy theory is rapidly taking on an explicitly anti-Semitic character. As far as I can see it has not been pushed by the Trump campaign itself, at least not publicly. But it’s catching fire with numerous supporters and surrogates – most notably Jerry Falwell Jr, a key Trump supporter among evangelicals and President of Liberty University, the school founded by his father.
The claim is also being pushed by Breitbart and David Duke in various neo-Nazi web forums. Notably, in recent months Breitbart, with which the Trump campaign has now effectively merged, has itself more openly embraced anti-Semitism.
Here’s our timeline of the rapidly expanding list of Donald Trump sexual abuse and assault allegations.
After not getting nearly as much sleep as I needed last night, the first thing I saw when I woke up was an alert on my cell phone that Bob Dylan had won the Nobel Prize. I was surprised, enlivened, filled with happiness and a sense of the possible. This was in stark contrast to almost everything I see in front of us today with the on-going trauma of Trumpism.
Is it desperation? The themes and instincts of the anti-Semitic radicals and extremists his campaign stews in? A “global conspiracy” of the political elites, international finance and the media who have “robbed our working class, stripped our country of its wealth and put the money in the pockets of a handful of large corporations and political entities.”
Trump attacks reporter who alleged assault, says she’s not attractive enough for him to assault.
Right now Michele Obama is giving an incredible speech. For once the word is not inappropriate. If you’re near a TV, flip on CNN or MSNBC to watch it. It’s fascinating because it’s raw and real and incredibly important. And at the same time by being apolitical it’s devastating, shattering in political terms. Her whole speech runs with the tacit statement: We’re not even going to talk about politics. We’re going to operate on the common assumption that there’s a monster loose in the country. And go from there …
Once again we have a day that knocks into pieces everything we think is within the realm of the possibly normal or conceivable in our politics. Republicans half cut Trump loose over the weekend, only to see a rapid and brutal backlash from Trump’s supporters who make up the bulk of the base of the Republican party. That they didn’t anticipate this is a measure of how much, at this late date, they still don’t quite grasp the nature of the person they are dealing with or the moment they are operating in. By Monday, the few Republicans who had explicitly jumped ship were starting to jump back on the ship. Now over the course of a single evening we have as many as a dozen new accusers – women from various walks of life, different parts of the country, different historical eras. By any remotely reasonable political, moral logic, Trump’s whole party would now desert him en masse. But it’s less than four weeks before the election. And the process of endorsing, de-endorsing, re-endorsing and more has become too much of a dark comedy to go through yet again. As I noted earlier this week, Trump is now at war with Hillary, the media and the GOP. But the GOP is the only one of those three he’s in a position to hurt. And bullies prey on the weak.
Re-watch the critical debate exchange between Anderson Cooper and Donald Trump Sunday night that opened the floodgates.
It’s October 13 and the PollTracker Average stands at Clinton 45.4 percent, Trump 37.9 percent, an 7.5 percentage-point spread
The TPM Electoral Scoreboard stands at Clinton 341, Trump 186. Only Arizona is in the Toss Up category