“I Don’t Know Where Donald Trump Is Coming From”: Top Trump Ally Distances Himself From Presidential Candidate
Way back in February, when most congressional Republicans were still hoping Donald Trump’s presidential campaign would collapse, Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.) became only the second federal lawmaker to throw his support behind the controversial candidate.
“We don’t need a policy wonk as president,” Hunter said at the time. “We need a leader as president…. I don’t think Trump wants my endorsement. And that’s one reason why I like him.”
Yesterday, the California Republican said something a little different.
“I am not a surrogate. I am a congressman. I can’t speak for anybody else but me,” Hunter told The Hill later Thursday, explaining his comments to the reporters.
“Everybody’s asking me to explain all these things that he said,” Hunter added. “Some of these things, I don’t know what Donald Trump is thinking. … I don’t know where Donald Trump is coming from.”
The Hill’s report added that Hunter said he was confronted by “like seven reporters” after leaving the House floor yesterday. “I just said, ‘Time out. I am a congressman. I am done talking [about Trump].’”
Under the circumstances, that’s a curious message. Hunter not only endorsed Trump, the congressman is literally the co-chair of Trump’s U.S. House Leadership Committee, serving as a liaison between the presumptive nominee’s campaign and Capitol Hill.
In fact, The Hill’s report said Hunter took it upon himself to lead Trump’s outreach efforts to Congress and currently “feeds national security information to the Trump campaign.”
The Washington Post recently described Hunter as one of the six members of Congress Trump trusts most.
When this guy is telling reporters he can’t explain what Trump is thinking, doesn’t know where Trump “is coming from,” and is “done talking” about Trump, it’s evidence of a presidential candidate who’s even left his allies stumped.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, June 17, 2016
“Dump Trump!”: Trump Winning Could Do More To Destroy The Republican Party Than A Messy Convention Fight In Cleveland
Have you noticed Donald Trump isn’t bragging about his poll numbers anymore?
With Trump down 12 points to Hillary Clinton in the latest Bloomberg poll, all of the clever-dick theories about the strength and momentum of the Trump campaign are disintegrating one after the other. There is no evidence that Trump is changing the configuration of the electoral map. There is no evidence that he is bringing in a huge new bloc of previously disaffected voters — instead it’s just the opposite. The theory that a terrorist attack would help Trump? Refuted when his polls continued to tank after the most deadly mass shooting in American history. Even the core “Trump voters,” non-college-educated white men, are turning on him. In a recent Washington Post/ABC News poll, 53 percent of them rated Trump unfavorably. Trump has to do light years better than Mitt Romney among this group to win. He’s failing, and he’s failing faster than any major party nominee in modern history.
The Republican Party should seek to deny him their nomination in Cleveland. Even if it means a messy convention fight in prime time. Even if it hobbles the nominee that eventually replaces Trump.
Their nominee is already hobbled, because he is Trump. Since Hillary Clinton secured the Democratic nomination, it turns out that it was not just a few right-leaning ideologues and scribblers who think Donald Trump is unfit to be president. A significant portion of the GOP’s traditional coalition simply will not let Trump represent them. Many elected Republican officials think Donald Trump cannot be trusted with the awesome powers of the presidency. Trump’s disloyalty to Republican orthodoxy and the cartoonishly aggressive style that made him electrifying to his core group of primary supporters turn out to be enormous general election liabilities.
Some Republicans are quietly hoping Trump loses in November, and loses badly enough that the party can just move on afterward. But there’s a problem with this line of thinking. Trump has shown himself willing and able to inflict more damage on the party even after securing its nomination. He still refuses to bury the hatchet with Paul Ryan and other leaders. He will drag other Republicans to defeat with him, and he will wreck the party’s image for years to come.
Besides, there is still a minor risk that some other exogenous event makes Hillary Clinton unelectable. Say a terrorist attack happens featuring weapons from former Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi’s unsecured stash. Or Clinton has a debilitating but not fatal stroke weeks before election day and simply disappears from the campaign trail. If his past is a preview of his presidency, Trump winning could do more to destroy the Republican Party than a messy convention fight in Cleveland.
Stopping Trump before the convention may not just be the civic-minded thing to do, it may be in the best interests of the Republican Party long term. If Clinton’s campaign somehow fails, Trump’s failures as president will still belong to the GOP.
Of course, a convention coup is likely to fail. Republicans have been notoriously slow-footed and uncoordinated in responding to Trump. And there are two major obstacles to its success. The first is the moral obligation that convention delegates feel to vote for the winner of their state or district. Trump may have only won a plurality of primary voters, but even if the Rules Committee unbinds the delegates, many will still feel morally obligated to vote for him on the first ballot. If that’s the case, Trump will be close enough to prevailing that the effort to deny him may stall out immediately.
The second obstacle is more familiar. His name is Ted Cruz. The Texas senator will come in with the biggest anti-Trump weapons, the loyalty of delegates who are pledged to him and the many party activists who admire him even if they are bound to Donald Trump. Cruz would be essential to organizing any coup at the convention. And as the next leading vote-getter, he would have demands — possibly including the nomination itself. While Cruz may be more electable than Donald Trump, it is by a margin so slim that the risks of a convention coup and riot in Cleveland may not seem worth trying. Many elected Republicans and big GOP donors view Cruz as treacherous and repellent. They won’t give his candidacy much more support than Trump’s.
Republicans will have to regroup as a party after 2016 anyway. The Trump challenge showed the deficiencies of Republican orthodoxy, and those must be addressed. But in the meantime, the best thing that the party can do is send Trump back to what he does best, welching on his creditors and selling over-priced garbage with his name on it.
By: Michael Brendan Dougherty, The Week, June 16, 2016
“Remembering The GOP Before Its Radicalization”: The List Of Officials Quitting The Republican Party Keeps Growing
Two weeks ago, an Iowa state senator who’s had a lengthy career in public service as a Republican announced he just couldn’t take it anymore: citing Donald Trump as a contributing factor, the lawmaker quit the GOP and changed his voter registration to “no party.”
A few days later, the Republican mayor of Hackensack, New Jersey, announced he too is giving up on the GOP, and he was joined by his deputy mayor. Both mentioned Trump in their statements and both switched their registration to “independent.”
Over the weekend, the Charleston Gazette-Mail in West Virginia reported on another joining the club.
Charleston Mayor Danny Jones, who has been a Republican for 45 years and has been elected mayor four times as a Republican, has left the party.
Jones announced Friday that he has switched his party registration to “unaffiliated.” He pointed to multiple factors, specifically the social conservative bent of the West Virginia House of Delegates and the rise of Donald Trump as the party’s presidential nominee.
In addition to his opposition to Trump’s candidacy, Jones noted the “obsession” among West Virginia Republicans to allow private-sector discrimination again LGBT Americans as one of the reasons he’s walking away from the party.
Jones, the mayor of West Virginia’s largest city, added, “I plan to complete my current term, and have no plans to run for any office ever again. I am not trying to pick a fight with anyone.”
It’s important, of course, not to overstate matters based on a handful of examples. Four local officials do not necessarily a trend make.
But every time I read about someone like Danny Jones, I wonder how many other Danny Joneses there are out there: Americans who’ve long considered themselves Republicans, who remember what the GOP was like before its radicalization, and who may be tempted to give up on the party in light of Trump’s nomination and antics.
It’s just not common for elected officials to abandon their party in an election year. The fact that these folks have abandoned the GOP this year probably isn’t a good sign.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, June 20, 2016
“Asking Trump To Repent”: Rove Horrified Trump Might Not Wage Ad War
There are obviously a lot of Republicans who are publicly and privately upset with how Donald Trump is handling the transition from primary to general-election candidate. Most of them are unhappy with his aggressive support for religious and ethnic profiling and his modeling of prejudice in the Gonzalo Curiel incident.
Leave it to Karl Rove to get mad at Trump for how he’s running his campaign, not what he’s saying.
Specifically, Rove is furious that Trump has disrespected the importance of paid media in presidential campaigns. As someone who has devoted his career to raising and spending megabucks for mostly negative political ads from the day he left the White House, Rove probably regarded Trump’s contempt for this part of politics as blasphemy. So, the Boy Genius repaired to the L’Osservatore Romano of the devotees of the green god of political money, The Wall Street Journal, asking Trump to repent.
Mr. Trump believes that fundraising and TV advertising are overrated. “I just don’t think I need nearly as much money as other people,” he told Bloomberg. “I get so many invitations to be on television.” But consider a hypothetical: Say Hillary Clinton runs a week of TV spots in Tampa/St. Petersburg, a key media market in Florida, and Mr. Trump counters by appearing on cable shows.
Counting only adults, 314,000 viewers might see a Clinton ad during “60 Minutes” on Sunday, according to Nielsen data. Nearly 190,000 would see one during “Dancing With the Stars” on Monday; 248,000 during “NCIS” on Tuesday; and 120,000 during “Hawaii Five-0” on Friday.
Mr. Trump’s appearances on Fox News would reach only a fraction of those numbers: 82,000 adults for a segment on “The O’Reilly Factor” and 61,000 for one on “The Kelly File.” An appearance on CNN’s best-viewed evening program would reach 33,000.
So the moral is clear: Raise the money, run the ads, amen.
But Rove has more heresy to root out. He’s also upset that Trump is offloading the “ground game” to the RNC. Team Clinton, he warns, is prepared to outgun anything the national party can do unless the nominee raises some serious jack to help pay to keep up with the donkeys.
And so:
Mr. Trump’s decisions — to forgo ads, abandon his self-funding pledge and accept a big financial deficit, and turn the ground game over to the RNC — are unprecedented challenges to conventional wisdom. In 21 weeks, we will know if they were smart bets.
It should be noted that Trump’s belief that paid media and money generally are overrated in presidential (as opposed to down-ballot) general elections (as opposed to primaries) is shared by many political scientists, thanks to the massive earned media presidential candidates receive. Because nobody’s ever been better at the earned media game than Trump, it’s hardly surprising he figures that might be his best asset.
But if he’s right, there’s not much of a role in national politics for people like Karl Rove, is there? And that would be blasphemy for sure.
By: Ed Kilgore, Daily Intelligencer, New York Magazine, June 17, 2016
“Lying About Native Americans”: ‘Pocahontas’ Isn’t The Only Native American Trump Has Offended
Donald Trump’s rumored meeting with members of the Navajo Nation during his swing through Arizona will not occur, a staffer for the nation said Friday.
And that may be just as well, given Trump’s history of disturbing and offensive statements about Native Americans.
The Associated Press previously reported that the Trump campaign had reached out to the nation for a potential meeting Saturday.
It was not meant to be.
“There was never a commitment to visit… it’s not happening,” the staffer, who asked not to be identified, told The Daily Beast.
Like on many other matters, Trump has a long track record of distasteful statements and gestures towards Native Americans. It’s another signal of why Republicans who hope he will change are likely to be left wanting. Trump’s campaign did not respond to request for comment.
Trump has raised eyebrows recently with his derisive references to Sen. Elizabeth Warren as “Pocahontas,” which many Native Americans find abhorrent. When she ran for office, Warren was criticized for identifying as a minority during her academic career, citing Native American heritage. Warren, an outspoken critic of Trump, has been unable to provide evidence of her purported Cherokee ancestry, nor could genealogists.
Trump’s hostile relationship with Native Americans appears to have begun with his involvement in the casino industry, when his gaming businesses competed with tribe-owned casinos in the 1990s and 2000s.
His competitors, unlike him, operated tax free—something he objected to strenuously.
“I think I might have more Indian blood than a lot of the so-called Indians that are trying to open up the reservations,” Trump said in June 1993, on shock jock Don Imus’s radio show.
He later questioned whether some of the people who had opened casinos which competed with his were actually of Native American heritage: “I think if you’ve ever been up there, you would truly say that these are not Indians.”
“Organized crime is rampant on Indian reservations,” Trump bellowed during testimony before Congress a few months later, according to a contemporaneous report. “It’s going to blow. It’s just a matter of time.”
In many ways, his rhetoric before that House subcommittee in 1993 mirrors that of his views on Muslims today.
Referring to crime on Native American land, Trump said he refused to be “politically correct” and added, “What is happening on the Indian reservations is known by the Indians to a large extent.
“If you knew some of the characters that you are dealing with, I think they would be afraid to do anything about [organized crime],” Trump added, implying that Native Americans didn’t have the backbone to stand up to criminals.
For good measure, he implored the overflow crowd of onlookers: “Go up to Connecticut,” he said, “and you look” at the Mashantucket Pequots.
“They don’t look like Indians to me,” he remarked, according to the Hartford Courant.
“In my 19 years I have been on this committee, I have never seen such irresponsible remarks,” shot back Rep. George Miller, a Democrat from California. “You have cast on the Indians in this country a blanket indictment that organized crime is rampant. You don’t know this; you suspect this.”
An FBI section chief who appeared at the same hearing said his office found no evidence of criminal activity in Indian gaming. And other federal law enforcement officials said they had found no evidence that organized crime had infiltrated Indian gaming operations.
In 2000 Trump and his aides acknowledged that he had been the financier behind newspaper ads railing against casino gambling in New York, as the state considered a proposed Indian casino. The businessman agreed to pay $250,000 in penalties, and was forced to issue a public apology after failing to disclose to the state lobbying commission that he had financed seven advertisements that appeared under the auspices of the plainly-named Institute for Law and Society.
“Under a dark photograph showing hypodermic needles and drug paraphernalia, the newspaper advertisement warned in dire terms that violent criminals were coming to town,” The New York Times reported.
Trump also railed against the name change to the nation’s tallest mountain: in 2015, President Obama restored the historical name of Denali to the mountain formerly referred to as Mount McKinley. Trump called it a “great insult to Ohio,” since President William McKinley had hailed from that state. Denali had been the name that Alaskan Natives had originally called it.
The Navajo Nation may have initially reasoned that a visit could temper Trump’s worst instincts. But if history is any guide, Trump will be Trump—with all the ugliness that entails.
By: Tim Mak, The Daily Beast, June 18, 2016
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