If anyone's been unshackled in the last several days, it's President Obama. Here's a glimpse of his Thursday night rally in Ohio from Sahil Kapur:
“The problem is not that all Republicans think the way this guy does. The problem is that they’ve been riding this tiger for a long time. They’ve been feeding their base all kinds of crazy for years, primarily for political expedience.”
Obama's new take on the Republican “swamp of crazy” that has led to Donald Trump's ascension may seem obvious to most progressives, who have watched the GOP dumb down its voters for decades. But it signifies a new phase of this campaign. The president’s widely praised convention speech made the purposeful case that Trump was a three-headed freak show with little relation to conservatism. But that was when Democrats were trolling for votes in a sea of squeamish, if not repulsed, conservative voters.
Now that a clearer path to a Democratic White House has emerged, the president has taken more of "let me tell how I really feel" approach to the campaign trail.
Ben Carson provided some welcome notes of comedy in the Republican presidential primary, back when we could think anything about the Republican presidential possibilities were funny. Now, Carson is still the same hapless, dim guy, but he’s doing it on behalf of Donald Trump. Which means that it’s only funny as long as you can forget that he’s defending the Republican presidential nominee’s history of sexual assault. Appearing on Morning Joe, Carson was asked if he knows what evidence the Trump campaign will present that Trump is innocent of all the unwanted groping and forcible kissing he’s accused of.
No, I do not have any insight into that. Although I do have common sense, and for instance, if somebody's sitting next to you in the first class section of the airplane -- there are stewardesses, there are other people around, and there's this gigantic arm rest. What happened to all those things?
Another first class armrest truther. Great. But maybe the best—and the Trumpiest—part of Carson’s Morning Joe appearance was when he was challenged by the BBC’s Katty Kay, who asked “The real reason that women who have been sexually abused don't come forward to talk about their stories is precisely this, that all too often, they are accused of being liars. Are you saying that these women are lying?” When Kay wouldn’t allow Carson to dodge the question, he appealed to Joe Scarborough:
CARSON: Can you turn her microphone off, please?
SCARBOROUGH: No! It's a simple question, yes or no? Do you believe these women are lying or not? Nobody's trying to paint you as a bad guy. We just want an answer. Straight talk.
That’s right. Ben Carson made Joe Scarborough look like a feminist. Or an adequate journalist. Either way, it’s shocking. Also, Carson defended his candidate against charges of sexual assault by demanding that a female journalist be literally silenced. After a little more crosstalk, Carson again pleaded “Do you guys have a plug, please?”
When even Ben Carson is no longer good for comedic value, you know an election has gone to a dark, dark place.
Given the GOP’s spectacular implosion, we are making an extra push to highlight Democratic House candidates in races worth watching. We sent out the following questions to New Hampshire’s Carol Shea-Porter, who is running for the state’s 1st Congressional District, and here’s what the campaign sent back, starting with her biography.
I grew up in a large family—three generations under one roof. My father, a WWII vet, served his country with great patriotism and then received a good education thanks to the GI Bill. He never forgot the power of government to help build a solid middle class. He was Republican, but we both believed that America is a land of opportunity, and everyone should have a chance for a better life.
I worked my way through University of New Hampshire (UNH), and married my husband, who was serving at an Army Medical Center during the Vietnam era. I saw the terrible physical and psychological damage that war causes. I also saw the enormous sacrifices military families make. To this day, I am their advocate.
I then earned a Master’s Degree in Public Administration from UNH, worked, and raised a family. I was a Social Worker and Administrative Director, and started a non-profit social service agency. I also taught Current Issues and American History at the community-college level.
Volunteering in New Orleans after Katrina, I saw the miserable federal response and realized Congress needed people who would speak up for what I always called "the rest of us, the bottom 99%." My 2006 campaign was called the “Cinderella Campaign” because most didn’t believe that a candidate could win without corporate PAC or DC lobbyist money. I—and my grassroots supporters—proved them wrong. I was the first woman ever elected to national office from NH, and I am a progressive who has won the majority of my races in a district that has 26 percent registered Democrats, 34 percent registered Republicans, and 40 percent registered Undeclareds.
Kerry Eleveld: What do you see as the key to your electoral victory?
Carol Shea-Porter: The key to my electoral victory lies in the power of the grassroots, because that's where I come from. My supporters make the calls, knock on doors, use social media, sign postcards to send to their neighbors, and hold visibilities on street corners. I don't take Corporate PAC or DC lobbyist money, so I really need them! NH-01 is 26 percent Democratic, 34 percent Republican, and 40 percent Independent, so it's a tough district. Getting out the vote and having the funding to do that is essential.
After a People magazine reporter came forward to tell about having been assaulted by Donald Trump, Trump blew off the allegation by saying “Look at her.” In one more act of gaslighting, his campaign claims he didn’t mean to imply the woman was too ugly to sexually assault, but in case there was any doubt, here’s Trump in 1994:
So why in 1992 did you tell a writer for New York magazine, Marie Brenner, that ‘You have to treat women like shit” — ultimately pouring a bottle of wine down her back?
I didn’t say that. The woman’s a liar, extremely unattractive, lots of problems because of her looks.
Look at that. The same basic play: I didn’t do or say what that reporter reported, and you shouldn’t believe her because she’s ugly. Isn’t it interesting how Trump often changes his policy positions in the course of a single speech or interview, but his character has remained the same for decades?
On Thursday, two speeches delivered within as many hours defined the stakes of this election perhaps as well as everything that has come before.
In back-to-back appearances, in what might be the two most compelling hours of the entire election, Michelle Obama in New Hampshire and Donald Trump in Florida delivered the fiercest, most provocative and hardest-hitting speeches of an election cycle that has been without precedent in hot rhetoric.
Michelle Obama delivered a highly personal, impassioned, and forceful speech. And at the same time, she showed that you can be inflamed without losing your intellect. That empathy and moral outrage are powerful enough to still reach people in the midst of a season overrun with exaggeration and outright lies.
“And I have to tell you that I listen to all of this and I feel it so personally, and I’m sure that many of you do, too, particularly the women. The shameful comments about our bodies. The disrespect of our ambitions and intellect. The belief that you can do anything you want to a woman. It is cruel. It’s frightening. And the truth is, it hurts.”
Michelle Obama delivered a red-hot sense of decency and a flaming demand for the rejection of cruelty and abuse. She grabbed this election by the scruff of the neck and shook it.
As she finished, Donald Trump emerged onto a stage in Florida to address his latest rally. And what Trump showed was that passion can amplify more than intellect and decency. It also serves hatred. It also amplifies distrust. It welds fear and anger into destructive rage.
What Donald Trump delivered was the demolition plan for democracy.
A handful of Republican senators—Richard Burr, Roy Blunt, Pat Toomey, Marco Rubio, and Ron Johnson—are still firmly behind their party's groping, racist, misogynist monster of a presidential nominee. But you wouldn't know it from the email pitches.
The campaign arm of Senate Republicans has all but excised Donald Trump’s name from their email pitches after previously making him central to their online fundraising efforts—a sign of just how toxic the GOP nominee has become since the video of his lewd comments came out last week.
The National Republican Senatorial Committee had used Trump’s name in each of the five days leading up to the release of the tape at 4 p.m. on Oct. 7, including twice earlier that same day, according to a POLITICO account signed up for updates.
But in the six days since, Trump’s name has appeared only once in the 20 or so emails that the committee has sent.
That's a pretty dramatic shift, since "NRSC had used Trump’s name in their email solicitations in 23 of the month’s final 27 days." One of the days they took off from fundraising was September 11. You see the same effect in the House, where the National Republican Congressional Committee is running ads that essentially assume that Hillary Clinton will be president.
Trump is toxic. The national Republican organizations recognize that. But those Republican senators seeking re-election—Richard Burr, Roy Blunt, Pat Toomey, Marco Rubio, and Ron Johnson—are sticking with him (or in Toomey's case, refusing to take a stand). That makes them toxic, too.
Can you chip in $3 to each of these candidates to send these deplorables packing?
The civil war Donald Trump has set off within the Republican Party is going hard on Republican National Committee Chair Reince Priebus, especially as some of the party’s big donors start to revolt against the party’s continuing support for Donald Trump:
For all Mr. Priebus’s public expressions of loyalty, he has been deeply shaken by revelations about Mr. Trump and the rifts within the party, seeing years of Republican organizational work potentially being undone, according to multiple people who described private conversations with Mr. Priebus on the condition of anonymity. He has said he feels adrift, fearing that Mr. Trump is headed for disaster, and told one longtime associate that he was having sleepless nights. Mr. Priebus did not respond to requests for comment.
Ha ha ha ha ha. That’s fantastic. Why is Priebus having such a tough time? As that paragraph makes clear, it’s not a values thing, not the horror of having to support such a morally bankrupt candidate. No, it’s stuff like this:
“At some point, you have to look in the mirror and recognize that you cannot possibly justify support for Trump to your children — especially your daughters,” said David Humphreys, a Missouri business executive who contributed more than $2.5 million to Republicans from the 2012 campaign cycle through this spring. [...]
“The R.N.C. long ago should have cut ties with Donald Trump,” said William E. Oberndorf, a California investor who has given more than $3 million to Republicans since 2012. “Reince should be fired and replaced with someone who has the competence and leadership skills to rebuild the R.N.C.”
When your big donors are turning against your candidate and in some cases taking it the next step and blaming you, that is a recipe for sleepless nights. But Reince Priebus isn’t important here as an individual. He’s important because his sleep quality is directly tied to the health of his party. And right now, the Republican Party is in bad shape.
Well, he just keeps getting creepier and creepier. Now that Donald Trump’s sexual assault history was made public with the Billy Bush tape, accounts of Trumpian assault are coming fast and furious. The Republican leadership that has supported him, of course, are shocked, SHOCKED at the behavior of their presidential nominee.
For some reason, calling Mexicans rapists, mocking disabled people and wanting to ban Muslims was not enough for the GOP politicos to dump Trump. (And apparently, even a recording where Trump describes gleefully describes sexually assaulting women is also not enough.) Anybody but Hillary, you know.
Even though I’m happy to see Trump tumbling, I’m disappointed it didn’t start sooner with his actual policy pronouncements (or what passes for Trump policy pronouncements). It looks like good ol’ fashioned lying and philandering (and criminal sexual assault) may be the beginning of the end for The Donald. Stay tuned, as always, and be sure to go behind-the-scenes with me over at my Patreon page.
●NJ-05: Endangered GOP Rep. Scott Garrett hasn't responded to a House Majority PAC poll that showed him trailing Democrat Josh Gottheimer by a 48-41 margin with numbers of his own. Instead, he's answering back with a new TV ad that dredges up some awfully feeble-sounding claims involving a nearly decade-old civil suit brought against Gottheimer by a woman in his apartment complex that was dismissed in 2008. While we don't have a copy of the spot, The Record describes its contents, which feature a narrator saying of the plaintiff, "Gottheimer aggressively intimidated and assaulted her and left her fearful in her own home. Scared and violated, the victim had to move to escape Gottheimer's harassing environment."
For starters, "assault" is being used in a very legalistic—and weaselly—sense. When lay people hear the word "assault," they think of one person striking another. But as first-year law students learn, "assault" only describes the act of making someone fearful that they're about to get hit; actually striking someone is called "battery." So despite what the ad tries to make it sound like, even the plaintiff didn't accuse Gottheimer of hitting her. And that's if we take her allegations at face value! Yet even if we do, they sound trumped up:
The woman's complaint said she was retrieving her keys from an unattended key closet in the lobby when "Gottheimer aggressively approached" and "derisively asked if she was the new security guard."
"When plaintiff informed him that she was a resident, Gottheimer threateningly waived [sic] his finger in her face and aggressively questioned plaintiff in a loud voice and an intimidating manner about who she was and what she was doing," the complaint said.
Gottheimer's actions "were plainly intended to give plaintiff, and did give plaintiff, the imminent apprehension that he was about to strike plaintiff with his finger or hand," the complaint said.
The plaintiff also lodged all kinds of other complaints against the building she lived in, such as the concierge failing to notify her a package had been delivered, before voluntarily withdrawing her suit "with prejudice," meaning she could not refile it. As we often note with ads that make scurrilous charges like this, though, it's all well and good for us to fact-check them in a newsletter read by savvy political junkies. It's harder for Gottheimer to rebut these claims with the only people who matter: voters in the district.
But that's what he's already doing with a new ad of his own. A narrator quotes newspaper editorials calling Garrett an "unskilled liar" with a "shaky grasp on reality," then says that the vehicle for Garrett's "latest desperate lie" is a "frivolous lawsuit a court quickly dismissed," as the word "dismissed" is highlighted in large type on screen. Wisely, Gottheimer avoids repeating the charges against him, a mistake all too many ads make.
The spot then shifts to slam the congressman, saying "newspapers just caught Garrett at a fundraiser with the leader of a homegrown terrorist militia group, who Garrett called an 'unsung hero.'" That's a reference to this Bloomberg article, which reported that a recent Garrett event was organized by a local Republican active in a group called the Oath Keepers, which has been identified by New Jersey's Office of Homeland Security as a "domestic terrorism" group. It's a lacerating attack, and one that ought to stick better than Garrett's.
Donald Trump started his political campaign spreading the idea that Mexicans were criminals and rapists. Now that his own sexual assaults are at the front of the news, he’s ready to explain how that is also Mexico’s fault.
Donald Trump will broaden his attack against the media to hit globalism and the Clinton Foundation by charging that Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim is part of a biased coalition working in collusion with the Clinton campaign and its supporters to generate news reports of decades-old allegations from several women.
Hillary Clinton is part of a Mexican conspiracy to take down Donald Trump. Donald Trump doesn’t explain how donating a small amount to a charity ties Slim to Clinton. But then, Carlos Slim knows that the Wall Tax the Mexican government will pass when it comes time to Build. That. Wall. for Donald Trump, will impact Mr. Slim’s fortune. And Mr. Slim has a much, much bigger fortune than Trump.
As early as Friday, Mr. Trump is planning to claim that Mr. Slim, as a shareholder of New York Times Co. and donor to the Clinton Foundation, has an interest in helping Hillary Clinton’s campaign, according to a Trump adviser.
Honestly, there is no doubt that Carlos Slim does have an interest in seeing Hillary Clinton elected. The same interest shared by billions of people around the world—desperately hoping that the world is still here on November 9 because Donald Trump is defeated on November 8.
Has Donald Trump called up Vladimir Putin yet to complain that a foreigner might be interfering in our election?
Well, we’re still alive. And there’s still a United States of America. Apparently.
So Trump hasn’t killed us yet.
We’ll wrap up the week with whatever insane garbage he’s used to fill the last 22 hours. But to make it all worth it, we’ll visit again with Josie Duffy Rice, to make you smart for the weekend.
Oh, right! It’s probably time to craft a new shtick for this middle part, here. This is the bit where I remind you that we need your help in order to make a living at this. If the show is something you enjoy, or just want people to think it is, why not pitch in and keep alive our hopes of one day fully justifying to our families the time we spend on it?* You can make a one-time donation, or subscribe via PayPal or Patreon to provide ongoing, monthly support!
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We begin today’s roundup with this editorial from The New York Times regarding Donald Trump’s threat to sue the paper for reporting on sexual assault allegations:
...Justice William Brennan Jr. wrote that “public discussion is a political duty, and that this should be a fundamental principle of the American government.” Such discussion “may well include vehement, caustic, and sometimes unpleasantly sharp attacks on government and public officials.”
In Donald Trump’s view, these principles shouldn’t exist. “I’m going to open up our libel laws so when they write purposely negative and horrible and false articles, we can sue them and win lots of money,” he said in February. Never mind that as president, he would have no power to alter state libel laws.
Of course, Mr. Trump’s threat to sue may be an empty one, as so many of his previous threats — intended mainly to energize his angry base — have been. But it is yet another frightening reminder of what a Trump presidency could bring.
Timothy O’Brien, who was sued by Trump in the past, writes about Trump’s baseless lawsuits:
For starters, the attempts at intimidation are familiar. In the run-up to the suit, Kasowitz showed up at a book reading I was giving to tell me, with a grin, that he was a writer, too. The Trump team recorded the reading with a video camera posted across the street, and the audience included a few obvious plants (literally dressed in raincoats) who asked probing questions like: “Didn’t you write this book to hurt Trump because you don’t like him?” I think I said something really shrewd like, “Of course not,” without thinking to add: “Are you crazy? The guy could be president someday.”
In retrospect, I realized that Kasowitz and his crew were preparing for the libel suit Trump filed against me a few months later. The suit dragged on for several years — in part because Trump was slow to respond to discovery requests for his financial and tax records — before the courttossed it out in 2011. In short, Trump lost his case, and he spent boatloads of money litigating it.
Trump never seemed to have thought through the implications of sitting through discovery in a hotly contested lawsuit — which is why my lawyers had the opportunity to depose him for a two-day stretch during which he lied 30 times about his career and finances.
