The Dark Kristol and the French Connection
Over the course of the last year, Donald Trump has humiliated his foes within the Republican Party by consistently proving them wrong -- none more thoroughly than Weekly Standard editor and neoconservative stalwart Bill Kristol, whose long history of making faulty political predictions was extended by his repeated insistence throughout the primaries that we had already reached #PeakTrump.
Now Kristol has embarrassed himself in ways that go beyond luckless prognostications. Since December, he has been floating the idea of fielding an independent candidate to stand for true conservatism if Trump were to win the Republican nomination.
It became a favorite parlor game for Washington pundits: Who could this champion be? To thwart a menace like Trump, it would have to be someone with fame, or wealth, or a formidable political resume. An ideal figure would be Mitt Romney, who has all three. But while Kristol did meet with Romney about a stop-Trump effort, the 2012 Republican nominee resisted the pundit's advances. Other prominent names were bandied about: General James Mattis, former Sen. Tom Coburn, Sens. Ben Sasse and Tom Cotton. The suspense built. Last weekend, Kristol tweeted: "Just a heads up over this holiday weekend: There will be an independent candidate -- an impressive one, with a strong team and a real chance." Then Bloomberg broke the news: Kristol's anti-Trump savior was David French.
David who? Mark Halperin and John Heilemann, the veteran Bloomberg reporters who got the scoop, admitted they "hadn't heard" of French, a writer for National Review. Even in the world of right-wing journalism, French, an Iraq War vet and attorney, is an obscure figure. As of today, he has 33,600 followers on Twitter, far fewer than Kristol's 57,500. French lacks fame, wealth and any real political experience. Some, including my New Republic colleague Ryu Spaeth, wonder why Kristol didn't just run himself.
http://www.uexpress.com/new-republic/2016/6/5/the-dark-kristol-and-the-french
bemildred
(90,061 posts)From 2012:
The Republican Party will continue to lose presidential elections if it comes across as mean-spirited and unwelcoming toward people of color, Donald Trump tells Newsmax.
Whether intended or not, comments and policies of Mitt Romney and other Republican candidates during this election were seen by Hispanics and Asians as hostile to them, Trump says.
Republicans didnt have anything going for them with respect to Latinos and with respect to Asians, the billionaire developer says.
The Democrats didnt have a policy for dealing with illegal immigrants, but what they did have going for them is they werent mean-spirited about it, Trump says. They didnt know what the policy was, but what they were is they were kind.
http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2016/06/that-was-then-this-is-now-6.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+marginalrevolution%2Ffeed+%28Marginal+Revolution%29
bemildred
(90,061 posts)Yesterday I half-jokingly remarked to a reader that Donald Trump is on an "intentional suicide mission" that is, that he can't possibly want the White House. This morning, after reading Dan Balz's useful compendium of Trump's hilariously hideously horribly horrid past five weeks, I'm pretty well convinced of it.
Balz's survey of Trump's presidential politics since nomination-clinching Indiana reads like a kamikaze pilot's attack plan. There's not even a glimmer of survivability. In just over one month of what should have been a meticulous regathering of his partisan forces as well as a turn toward political ecumenicism, Trump, notes Balz, has "wasted time," has "veered sharply off message," has "shown no willingness to acknowledge" the vast chasm between the GOP base and the general electorate, has refused "to let go of any perceived slight or grievance," and "has recoiled" from any scrutiny of his record, such as it is.
The media have of late been haunting Trump and his scandalous behavior, of both ancient and recent origin. He has suffered damaging revelations about his sophomoric stunts of acting his own p.r. person, about having paid no taxes, about having donated nothing to the veterans he loves, about having educated no "university" chumps. It's been one damn thing after another, and the presumptive nominee's reaction has been uniformly inexplicable (assuming the nominee wishes a promotion): he has assembled no professional communications team, he has declared open war on the very media charged with covering him, and, perhaps most self-damagingly, he has alleged that a federal judge's ethnicity has determined the course of a case before him.
This most recent outrage caused the Republican speaker of the House to effectively condemn him, just 24 hours after endorsing him. The Senate majority leader is in similar flight from his party's nominee. Observes Balz: "[The speaker] said he would continue to take issue with Trump as necessary but added that he hopes that wont be often. The evidence suggests otherwise."
http://www.pmcarpenter.com/2016/06/trumps-knowing-suicide-mission.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+pmcarpenterscommentary+%28p+m+carpenter%27s+commentary%29
KoKo
(84,711 posts)He just liked the challenge of running and he's getting pretty bored and looking for a way out of it. If he was serious he wouldn't have challenged Hillary's hawkish national security speech by going OTT with total craziness like he did. He sounds more unhinged every day and the MSM who promoted him sees Hillary as the vanquisher and aren't hanging on his every word.
I've never been able to visualize Donald and Melania living in the White House comfortably. It's just not their style. He would want to ensconce himself in his Trump Luxury Hotel in DC and hold court and conduct Presidential business from there and there's no way that would be allowed.
He's toast. Either he drops out or the Party finds a way to remove him at the Convention. Their only hope is to get Mitt Romney in to run. Who else could they find with money and name recognition at the last moment? He's said he wouldn't run Third Party but if Trump is imploding then Romney would be seen as a savior at the Convention. But, then, this is just my wild speculation.
bemildred
(90,061 posts)And if they aren't his minders, if he didn't pick them, they better be really successful, or he better not find out, because he will try to fire them.
Edit: at this point, I would not want predict what will happen tomorrow, let alone next November or after that. Is this a well run country or what?
bemildred
(90,061 posts)On television and on the stump, at debates and in speeches, Donald Trump is reminding the American people that they are going to die.
The reminders arent explicit, and they probably arent part of an intentional strategy. All the same, much of Trumps rhetoric could have the effect of bringing his viewers omnipresent fear of death closer to their conscious minds, according to Sheldon Solomon, a psychologist at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, N.Y.
That includes his emphasis on terrorism, unsurprisingly, but also his preoccupation with immigration. This focus might be helping Trump, since Solomons recent research shows that people who are thinking about death are more likely to say they support him. Study subjects who were prompted to talk about their own death later rated their support for Trump 1.66 points higher on a five-point scale than those who were prompted to talk about pain generally.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/donald-trump-us-election-2016-why-does-republican-candidate-keep-winning-a7066011.html