Pence got permission from Trump before doing it. Yesterday we were treated to the disgusting spectacle of Mike Pence being forced to ask for Donald Trump's permission to endorse Paul Ryan for re-election. Paul Ryan would be the guy who is the Speaker of the House and under our Constitution the senior elected Republican in the entire nation as he's third in line for the presidency. As Leon said This is one of the more degrading things I have seen a politician subjected to. Here is Mike Pence explaining that he endorses Paul Ryan, and he has to say that he went out and got Trump's permission to do it, because that makes Trump sound better and magnanimous (I guess?). Ridiculous.While Trump was willing to allow a little rebellion from Pence, he obviously wasn't allowing more than a little. As you know, Trump has been carrying out a war of words against Arizona Senator John McCain and New Hampshire Senator Kelly Ayotte. Trump's spat with McCain is of little consequence, but the war with Ayotte is serious if the GOP is to have any hope of retaining control of the Senate. The latest polling shows that Ayotte has lost over 10 points since Trump was nominated and though she leads Trump she is now behind her Democrat opponent. Like a good little puppy.
IMHO Trump is a symbol of the desperation of the electorate. .......anything but the status quo.... The electorate has been the victim of Tweedism for many decades. Tweedism be damned, for better or worse, he took the party by storm. What is a die hard republican to do? What is the party leadership to do? They fear Trump, and what his success represents, but have no clear course of action. I suspect that they will flounder about for awhile sputtering and resisting the urge to spit if they should mention his name, and shaking in their impotence.
Well then, it's beginning to look like they just might have a strategy. It really did seem like "shoot from the hip" for awhile.
The Party "leadership" should kiss Trump's hand and line up with Chris Christie - why not? He's their Party and represents the voters they claim to serve. Are they ashamed of their constituency, the American people they represent? Anyone still a die hard Republican but still "undecided" about Trump should simply pretend it isn't happening and wait for the rewrite of history to emerge - same as they've been doing for forty years now.
This is a strategy? They are not endorsing people from their own party because they might not win? This could be because of a few reasons at this point. Their endorsement could damage McCain and Ayotte and recognising that just shows how toxic their campaign is. Alternatively, they are in such a weak position at present that they might feel that endorsing candidates who are likely to lose might damage their already tenuous position at present. McCain has the choice to un-endorse Trump, thereby increasing his re-election chances in the election, since his endorsing Trump damaged his chances, but that would damage the party brand that has Trump on it in the Presidential election. I don't think this is strategy. I think it is pure desperation. One Republican is running a campaign ad, promising his Republican voters that he will stand up to Trump: As many Republicans delicately distance themselves from Donald Trump’s erratic candidacy, one prominent Republican is going further — launching a face-to-camera television commercial in which he promises to “stand up” to the GOP nominee. The commercial, from GOP Rep. Mike Coffman of Colorado, represents the first time a House Republican has used explicitly anti-Trump messaging in paid advertising. It comes as many in the Republican Party — concerned about Trump’s impact on down-ballot races — are grappling with whether to take further measures to repudiate their presidential nominee after a string of controversies including an attack on a Gold Star family and his refusal to endorse House Speaker Paul Ryan in his primary. The 30-second ad opens with a shot of Coffman, a 61-year-old Army and Marine veteran who fought in Iraq, looking directly at the camera. “People ask me, ‘What do you think about Trump?’” he says. “Honestly, I don’t care for him much.” A few moments later, he says: “I’m a Marine – for me, country comes first. My duty is always to you. So if Donald Trump is the president, I’ll stand up to him. Plain and simple.” The commercial, which is set to begin airing on Friday, is an unusual one: Rarely do incumbent members of Congress finance commercials in which they launch attacks on presidential nominees of their own party. But for Coffman, a fourth-term lawmaker who represents a suburban Denver district that is one of the most politically competitive in the country, the move may be one of necessity. As with many other imperiled Republicans, Democrats have been eager to tie Coffman to Trump’s candidacy. The ad is uncommon for another reason. With an eye toward assuaging Latinos — many of whom have been alienated by Trump’s tough-on-immigration posture — Coffman will also release a version of the commercial which features him speaking Spanish. Latinos comprise around 20 percent of the district’s population. As Republicans struggle to maneuver around Trump, Coffman’s ad could signal to other party figures in hard-fought races that they’re free to criticize Trump — and that doing so may help their election bids. This is unheard of. Perhaps this is what McCain should now do to give him a better chance of winning. But Trump is so god damn awful that members of his own party are having to campaign against him and his policies to try to win their seats. It has become a farce. Now issues with his wife's migration to the US are also raising eyebrows, which are being drowned out by her husband's campaign imploding.. There is no strategy. There is absolute chaos. I don't even think he is shooting from the hip anymore. It looks more like someone being fired from a canon that is pointing straight to the ground. The only thing now is how big a crater he will make in the ground and the fallout to the party itself.
- your link When Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act... https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-pres...-lbj-presidential-library-civil-rights-summit The R Party has continued to spiral down the racist hole ever since. I think the author of the article nailed it. The R Party has become the White Nationalist Party. They were already doomed demographically and they knew it. Trump has now cinched their reputation as the party of racists. Note that even the one top advisor to Bush [or perhaps Christie... two just left the party] said she can't look her children in the eyes and say she's a Republican.
Much as guys like Avik Roy would like to forget the fact, there is absolutely nothing new about Trump except the vulgarity of his - very effectively communicating - speech. Nothing. Trump "clinched" nothing at all. The Republican Party of Trump is the same old, same old, GOP that we liberals have been dealing with since about 1980, consolidated and given its current monstrous shape around 1994 with the Gingrich Purge. It hasn't changed a bit. The fundies and bigots have been the Republican voting base for forty years. Neither of those (overlapping) groups have been "with" the fanciful and ivory tower conservatism Roy claims to have espoused, at any time in Roy's life. Trump has yet to say anything that would have seemed at all unusual said by Rush Limbaugh ten years ago, for example. Rush hit the airwaves as the dominant Republican public voice in 1992. Rush has been the central and most influential Republican intellectual, his audience the core electoral base of any national Republican politician, and famously so, for Avik Roy's entire adult life and career as a political advisor. Meanwhile, Roy is now getting paid large sums of money and given broad national platforms to repeat - as new insight - what everyone with a lick of sense has been saying about Republicans and their Party since 1980 at the latest. But those people were, y'know, "liberals", so they don't get large sums of money for saying those true things all those years Roy was fronting respectability for the same Republican Party we see before us today, and they don't get national TV platforms to point out that when they said that stuff all those years they were right all that time - only the Roys of this world, the Andrew Sullivans, get those platforms; first to be wrong for decades while promoting bad guys and horrible politics, now to point out how stuff really was and how bad those guys were without ever actually, like, owning up to their own role in all that. Or heaven forbid give a share of the money they made to the people who were right all that time, whose rightful chairs and paychecks they usurped.
Aha, the reason for Donald Trump's rise, is that he's the best bullshitter to come along, for a while, and manage to ride a wave of bullshit (the teaparty conspiracist one) into a presidential campaign. But he hasn't been able to moderate his bullshitting style--bullshit all the time, claim to know things about whatever the subject at hand is, don't look like a loser--because he has some kind of OCD. Or he's just an asshole. Ok, he's a rich asshole. Some bullshit amount rich.
Yeah, that is about when they went over a cliff. Trump has shown how bad it is. But I'm not saying he changed the party. He just exposed it. So much so that even key party players are starting to leave.
An 11 year old boy asked Pence today if his job in the administration will be to run around cleaning up Trump's speech. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
One aspect Americans will never reconcile is that the correlation between Donald Trump's spectacular bullshit business success, the MBA-obsessed eighties, and the Reagan economy all overlap as they do. Mr. Trump is the excrement that floated to the top of that cesspool.
He seems to be saying that that outcome did not come to pass. I find that it has (within limits -is work its own reward or should we aim for total ease supplemented by our idle curiosity?)
Okay, Evan McMullin for President. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/cia-...ndependent-presidential-bid/story?id=41201256
Illustrative quote: So given a choice between an ordinary not-overwhelmingly-wonderful politician who would at a minimum at least appoint decent and reasonable Supreme Court justices (her record supports that probability), and an incompetent con man who has signed on (to the extent one can rely on anything he says) to a program of packing the Court with the kind of Justices who have given us the Citizens United ruling, and whom he agrees is a direct and immediate threat to the governance of the country as a whole, an emergency of a kind, he draws the standard "both sides" bs equivalence, provides ideological cover for the forces and factions that brought us the direct and immediate threat, and amplifies as well as promulgating the least credible and least legitimate attacks on the ordinary and sensible - and sole - alternative to that threat.
The Wall Street Journal just issued an opinion piece calling for Trump to either change his campaign tactics, or to drop out and let Pence run in his place. Just reported on CNN. It hasn't hit the internet yet. [well... I guess it has now! Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!] I guess people just could write in Pence for President. Trump doesn't actually have to drop out. I hadn't thought about the possibility that people could just write in a name. This doesn't require a third-party challenge and the RNC doesn't have to approve it. Everyone could simply agree to write in Romney, or whatever.
