Ask a Donald Trump supporter why, and one of the answers almost sure to come out – right up top – relates to the candidate’s image and things he has said about himself. It goes something like this: “He’s paying for his own campaign, so he’s not in anybody’s pocket. He’s not beholden to anybody. He can say exactly what he thinks, and he does.”

And every time he says something that make many people gasp, the point seems driven home all the deeper.

But the premise – that the campaign is completely self-financed – isn’t true, and never has been. And as for non-campaign financial obligations, Trump is deep in the hole. The truth is the exact opposite of Trump’s carefully-crafted image.

It is true that much of the money for the campaign in the primary season came out of Trump’s pocket. What many supporters didn’t realize was that he listed it on campaign finance reports as a loan, which means that contributions in the future could be used to pay him back. When headlines about that started to hit, he said he would change that designation from “loan” to “contribution”, so that he could not be repaid. Problem is that the paperwork to accomplish that apparently has never been filed with the Federal Elections Commission. That presumably means any contributed money (from other contributors) left unspent could wind up back in Trump’s own accounts. We’ll eventually see how all that settles out.

On March 7, Trump said, “I’m self-funding my campaign. I’m not taking money. … I’m not taking. I spent a lot of money. I don’t take.” But according to federal reports, as of January 31, his campaign had in fact pulled in $7.5 million in non-candidate donations, and that was just the beginning.

Moving into the general election season, his campaign finances and those of the national Republican Party have become increasingly intertwined. In itself, that’s not unusual in either party, but it means Trump’s boasts about self-funding have become meaningless. Tens of millions of dollars have been raised in the last three months – the Trump campaign has become a substantial fundraiser – and it has become an increasingly conventional one. Trump may hate the work of fundraising, but his campaign has been pulling it in much the same way other candidates do. He’s not really any different.

Other than that, because of concerns that Trump might drag down other Republicans, the national Republican leadership has been (according to numerous recent reports) redirecting a lot of the pooled money toward congressional and other races, and away from Trump’s. The risks are high in either actually doing that or not doing it, and the issue isn’t settled. But increasingly, many of the people who thought they were donating to support Trump’s presidential campaign may find some of their dollars went to other purposes. Trump’s campaign finances have become a more complex problem than for any presidential candidate in decades. So much for the simplicity of self-funding.

And that’s just the campaign finance.

Last weekend the New York Times released results of an extensive investigation into Trump’s finances, and found he owes the staggering amount of at least $650 million, more than twice the debt listed on his personal disclosure form filed with the Federal Election Commission.

After spending more than a year blasting the economic and lobbying practices of China and the Wall Street firm Goldman Sachs, especially in connection with opponents Ted Cruz and Hillary Clinton, Trump seems in fact to be referring more to himself than to them. “Notably, one of these [Trump building projects] – a Manhattan office building which Trump partly owns -‘“carries a $950 million loan,’ according to the Times. Goldman Sachs and the Bank of China are two of the building’s four lenders.”

And it goes on from there, at great length. Actually, no one (maybe even Trump) seems to know exactly what he owes in debt, or to who. As the Times concluded, if Trump were elected president, the country could for the first time ever have a president with business ties and debt obligations so extensive the country realistically has no idea what he owes to whom.

Anyone who thinks Trump would arrive at the White House free of obligation to special interests, has the reality twisted 180 degrees. – rs

Is the weekend after the appearance of naked Donald Trump statues in a number of American cities a good time to point out that the whole concept of rape plays a major role in the Trump presidential campaign?

Probably as good a time as any.

Because it does play a significant role, in ways large and small, this use of rape and sexual assault as an emotional frame for his politics.

It began on day one of his campaign, within the first three minutes of his announcement speech, when he started talking about Mexican rapists crossing the border and heading north.

In October, he told a strange story intended to make a point of some kind about Syrian refugees, and as the Truthout site put it, “In essence, he described Syrian refugees as snakes and America as a naïve woman. Again, it’s the framing of foreign men as a sexual threat and the damsel-in-distress imagery for the nation. He capped it off in a May 2016 speech when he said, “We can’t continue to allow China to rape our country.”

Rape is, of course, a political subject in the United States and understandably so. Some activists speak of a “rape culture.” There are specific complaints based in hard statistics about such matters as the numbers of rape kits which go untested. But these are not part of Trump’s conversation.

There are also, of course, assault allegations women have made against Trump; until they’re resolved, in the spirit of innocent until proven guilty, they’re just allegations.

But the use of rape as a concept, as a bludgeon to make people fearful and defensive, is bad enough by itself when the user is someone seeking to become president of the United States. – rs

One of the Donald Trump outrages from this year – from only a few months ago – centered on the Republican National Convention, at which the new nominee proclaimed himself the candidate of law and order.

That was what he said in his acceptance speech, at least. In the weeks before, the story was different.

Go back to March and April, when the battle for the Republican nomination was coming near its end but wasn’t yet wrapped. The NeverTrump forces were frantically pursuing their options, and among other things reviewing the possible ways a Trump nomination might be blocked at the convention itself.

In the event, the effort failed – at that point Trump had the votes he needed to prevail, and was able easily to bat the challenge back.

But in between, before the convention, the anti-Trump effort looked serious. And that prompted him to warn Republicans what might happen if he were well ahead at the convention and hit a roadblock: “I think you’d have riots. I think you’d have riots. I’m representing a tremendous, many, many millions of people. … I think you would have problems like you’ve never seen before. I think bad things would happen, I really do. I believe that. I wouldn’t lead it but I think bad things would happen.”

That scenario was never brought to the test, but what if it was? Trump was already on record as raising the prospect of riots if he did not get the nomination. True, he did not call for riots. But he got about as close to doing that as you could have without being totally explicit.

The National Review opined, “By any reasonable standard, he has long since disqualified himself for high office — or any office frankly. This latest threat about riots is Mafia talk, plain and simple. “Nice convention you’ve got there. Be a shame if anything were to happen to it.””

As the NR said, this is Mafia talk, coming from a man who would be president. We’ll come back around to that soon. – rs

Donald Trump’s ventures into conspiracy theories go back a few years, at least back to birtherism – his role in propagating the notion that Barack Obama was born not in Hawaii but somewhere else, Africa presumably. Where doesn’t really matter because the point was to try to delegitimize the Obama presidency. For most people, the effort failed early on for the same reason most extravagant conspiracy theories do: They involve so much incredible effort and coincidence that in the real world, there’s no way they could be made to happen. Conspiracies aren’t that easy to pull off, and in fact are damned difficult. There’s a good reason most people ascribe to incompetence that which a few insist came out of conspiracy.

The New Yorker, reviewing some of Trump’s forays into the realm of the tin-foil hats, noted that “birtherism is only the best-known among Trump’s large collection of creepy political fairy tales. You’ve probably heard the one about vaccines and autism. He even pushed that during a Presidential primary debate, on national television. Do you really believe that Obama won the 2012 election fairly? Wrong. Fraud. (At the same time, it’s Mitt Romney, total loser, who let everyone down.) Bill Ayers, not Obama, wrote “Dreams from My Father.” There is no drought in California, and the Chinese, outwitting us per usual, invented the concept of global warming to undermine American manufacturing. And so on.”

A good deal of this comes out of his association with Alex Jones, a conspiracy-minded radio talk show host who has hosted Trump several times. Trump has been a guest on the show; his close friend and ally Roger Stone has appeared on it repeatedly. What is Jones selling these days? A sampler from some of his recent tweets: “Election rigging: How she’ll do it”, “Hillary’s Trail of Death,” “Soros behind Muslim takeover of West,” and so on. His growing media operation, Infowars, is more or less ConspiraciesRUs.

So he does know his way around that world when he said of Trump, as he did to the New Republic, “There’s no way the Trump people would have reached out to me a year and a half ago, if he wasn’t aware of the work. He’s been what you call a ‘closet conspiracy theorist’ for 50 years. I think he’s been a chameleon in the system, and now he sees the time to strike.”

Reality has trouble making its way into Trump’s consciousness, but conspiracy theories seem to have an easier path.

The New Yorker continued, “Does Donald Trump actually believe any of this? Or is he laughing up his sleeve as apoplectic fact-checkers throw themselves into the thankless work of disproving his absurdities? To cover himself, he prefaces his more outlandish remarks with disclaimers like “I hear” or “A lot of people think.””

When he said, as he did this week, that a President Trump would not be willing to rely on American intelligence resources, he left open the question of who he would rely on. But by now we have a pretty good idea. – rs

This isn’t quite in the category of one of the international crisis disqualifiers from presidency that Donald Trump has in such abundance. And admittedly, as a non-parent, it doesn’t hit home for me personally the way it will for many other people – the parent-people among us.

I don’t have to exercise a lot of imagination, though, to come up with this scenario:

Donald Trump has done or said something outrageous again, possibly followed by more outrage from some of his camp followers. Which outrage it is doesn’t matter for this purpose. But like so many others, it is captured by video cameras, and turns up on television or on a computer screen in the family’s living room.

And when the five-year-old in the house inquires of a parent about the language, ideas and actions of this famous man on the screen – or maybe, depending on how things go in November, the President of the United States – just how does this parent try to explain what the child sees?

There’s the next generation coming up, folks – and what they’re absorbing about what matters in how we relate to each other.

The only honest answer to that five year asking about that president or presidential candidate is the honest truth: You may already be too mature to become president of the United States. – rs

Not even minutes were needed to draw the obvious comparison between the 1984 presidential campaign of Ronald Reagan, centered around the happy theme of “morning in America,” and the nomination acceptance speech this year by Donald Trump.

This new Republican candidacy, a mere 32 years from Reagan’s, was swiftly described as “midnight in America.”

And rightly so. In his telling this is a dystopian country, at imminent existential peril, overrun with vicious criminals and invaders and dangerous people. You step outside the front door at your peril . . .

And the GOP convention ate it up. For those of us who recall Reagan’s two successful runs for the presidency, the scene was astonishing.

When he ran in 1980, Reagan was not an incumbent and therefore had no incentive to argue that things were fine as they were; and he didn’t. But his tone, mood and persona projected optimism. It was a tonic. The 70s were a time of disappointment for many Americans, from Watergate to the energy crisis. President Jimmy Carter, trying to confront some of this, delivered an address widely called the “malaise” speech (though that word never appeared in it). Reagan spoke to positives, to a Pollyanna image really, but one many people wanted to hear and responded to. Republicans particularly, in those days, loved it. And they loved it even more when he could run an unalloyed “morning in America” message for re-election.

One of the things only a president can do is to use that singular pulpit to rally the country. Reagan did that. It was one of his best services to the country: He lifted up a country that was feeling down.

This year, Donald Trump, whose campaign book is titled Crippled America (recently retitled Great Again: How to Fix Our Crippled America, presumably on the advice of some campaign aide), seems bound to do exactly the opposite of Reagan: Take a nation that is essentially sound and moving toward peace and prosperity, and lower it, depress it, diminish it.

There are many more stirring orators than Hillary Clinton (even at her own convention), but listen to her speech alongside Trump’s and the contrast is stark: It speaks at least to the goodness and even greatness of the country, and to better days ahead. Trump offered none of that.

Crippled America? Midnight in America? Some of our presidents have lifted us up. We can ill-afford one that would slam us down. – rs

This ought to give us some pause about anyone we entrust with the job of president: They will have at their disposal the most sophisticated and sweeping surveillance network the world has ever known, getting more elaborate by the day.

We know what the law is, but realistically, on a day to day basis, we’re reliant on having a president who will to some reasonable degree at least exercise enough self-control not to put that system to use for bad reasons. We can debate what the outer margin of that may be, but we could at least say that it should not include the use of the system for anything less than serious national security reasons. There are laws in theory restricting how that system might be used, but in practice, if an order comes down from the White House . . .

If you say that giving this kind of surveillance power to anyone makes you uneasy, join the club. There is at least some reason to believe, though, that at least in recent years, as the system developed the sweeping capacity to grab, store and analyze great masses of communications has come into place, in the last quarter-century or so (the technology was simply less advanced before that), the presidents over this time – Barack Obama, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton – seem to have shown some restraint in using it.

Some restraint. An article in Vox has pointed this out too: “The NSA, of course, is supposed to focus these resources on hostile foreign governments and terrorist groups. But in principle, a future president could turn those capabilities inward, using them to spy on domestic political opponents, journalists, and activists. As we learned during the early years of the George W. Bush administration, there are few practical limits on the president’s surveillance powers. When lawyers advised Bush that a proposed dragnet surveillance program exceeded the NSA’s authority under the law, the president ordered the NSA to do it anyway.”

Anyone coming into the job is legitimately the subject of some concern in this area. But so far as we know, Hillary Clinton, who was in a position to have pressed for abuse of the system if she’d sought it, never did. There isn’t evidence of abuse in periods when it could have occurred.

We have no such experiential base to draw on with Donald Trump. The main cause for worry might simply be his shoot from the hip style, his lack of an internal governor stopping the execution of a bad idea.

But there is a little more. Every so often, in his speeches and other public places, you see an indication of the itchy trigger finger, the willingness to, as Nike promotes, Just Do It.

In a rambling answer to a question about who hacked the email server of the Democratic National Committee, he remarked, “Honestly, I wish I had that power. I’d love to have that power.”

Yeah, he probably would. Which is why he shouldn’t. – rs