Paul Ryan gets grilled about Trump at the annual Mitt Romney shindig …
One of the toughest questions for Ryan came from Meg Whitman, the chief executive of Hewlett-Packard and a longtime friend of Romney’s who helped bankroll a Republican anti-Trump super PAC this spring. Whitman asked Ryan how he could endorse someone with, in her judgment, such poor character and whose campaign has been based on personal attacks and division. According to two people present, Whitman said Trump is the latest in a long line of historic demagogues, explicitly comparing him to Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini.
A special thanks to TPM Reader NS for alerting us to the situation in Siskiyou County, California that Katherine Krueger reported out in today’s feature story.
There appears to be a general consensus – met with glee by Trumpites and frustration by Democrats – that the atrocity in Orlando will be a boon to the campaign of Donald Trump. It will ‘change the narrative’ and play to Trump’s call for a ban on Muslim immigration and general claim to be the only one tough enough to protect Americans.
Put me down as skeptical about that assumption.
We’re in the thick of election coverage and on the publishing side of the organization planning coverage for the remainder of 2016 and beyond. But I wanted to take a moment to let you know about another book I read recently which I can heartily recommend. It’s called 1177 BC: The Year Civilization Collapsed.
There’s a lot here from Lauren Fox about how Trump could juice African American turnout, but this in particular is a pretty stark assessment from one GOP pollster: “Any Republican candidate who looks at their potential electorate and assumes that black turnout will be down from 2012 is making a mistake.”
In advance of his big foreign policy speech today, Donald Trump went on Fox this morning to suggest that President Obama may actually be secretly working with ISIS terrorists to facilitate attacks on the US.
We have televisions running on the cable networks throughout the day here in our office. So I get an immersive read on the conversations of the day, which today of course are about the horrific mass shooting in Orlando. As is so often the case, it is striking how much of the chatter is tied up with trying to put these mass murders into some convenient and simple bucket. Mental illness? Radical Islam? Homophobia? The product of readily available guns? It can be a cop-out to simply say all of the above. But listening to these conversations I’m left hoping that our counter-terrorism and law enforcement professionals have a more sophisticated grasp of these incidents than our political class.
One of the things people marvel at with Donald Trump is how successful he’s been over the last year with these gyres and tirades which are full not only of what are often demonstrably false claims but increasingly hyperbolic warnings about the future. In his statement yesterday Trump said “If we do not get tough and smart real fast, we are not going to have a country anymore. Because our leaders are weak, I said this was going to happen – and it is only going to get worse.”
As I’ve written, I think this was much more effective in Republican primaries than with a general election electorate. But the pattern is clearly still there. In pure Trump whether it ends up being effective or not. Some claims get dropped. Others come up repeatedly even though they’re shown to be demonstrably false. Many see this as part of Trump’s spellbinding but horrifying magic. But I hear something different, something others in business may recognize. For Trump, mass casualty terror is like a sell point in a high pressure sales pitch. Glengarry Glen Ross meets Joseph Goebbels.
TPM Reader DC checks in on how Trump’s response to Orlando plays:
In response to Josh’s thoughtful post about how Orlando and Trump’s reaction to it will not necessarily help him:
There is recent evidence for exactly this phenomenon. Remember when “Benghazi” happened, which in some ways could have been much worse politically for the incumbent party (though certainly fewer lives were lost), namely a sitting American ambassador killed by what was clearly an organized attack on our embassy in Libya. The event threatened to bespeak the weakness of a nation state, the inability to protect it’s own high-level personnel.
In his speech today at Saint Anselm College in New Hampshire, Donald Trump advocated banning Muslims from the Middle East and South Asia from emigrating to the United States. That’s a step down from his plan last December to block all Muslims from entering the United States, but it would still put the United States on a war footing with Muslims and also put the American state in the business of judging churches. In addition, Trump sounded an ominous note by insinuating (without evidence) that American Muslims were aware of the terrorists in their midst, but were not reporting them to authorities.