Democrats and “Hillary’s People” need to seriously wake up to the most dangerous man for America on the planet and could even have a chance of being our next President of the United States. Donald Trump is not only America’s number one clown around the world, he is also a very dangerous man. The Amazing Democrats have remained silent these past few weeks as we are very disappointed with the direction of the Hillary Clinton campaign. We mentioned time and time it needs a massive shake up campaign staff wise and still (even with the new television commercials for Hillary Clinton’s campaign this week), we see the same old, same old boring save approach messages.

 

This has never worked against the GOP and we certainly wouldn’t have had a hope in hell re-electing Obama against Romney in 2012 if we had taken that approach. We took our gloves off and played in the dirt with the GOP and we did what we set out to do, we won. The fact the Clintons are friendly with Trump (or Jeb Bush for that matter) makes no odds. Trump threw the first punch when recently (in the South) he brought up Bill’s sex life. So Hillary time to get serious. Shake up your campaign staff from top to bottom and don’t be such a stick in the mud by not hiring some of Obama old campaigners as remember we won for Obama in 2012. There were no rules and there simply aren’t when you are up against the GOP, they don’t play fair and Trump certainly won’t. You and your campaign are giving Trump too much of a head start and you will regret this big time should he be nominated as the GOP candidate. Didn’t you make that same mistake with an unknown Senator called Obama in 2008?

 

The secret with Trump’s weakness is his business deals in the past. Dig and dig hard. In the 1980’s in New York, who did he do business with then? Follow the money. Follow his treatment of people who got in his way. For example take the poor people of Scotland and what he did to the locals there who were just trying to make a living. Trump is not just a man about greed and stupidity, he is a very dangerous man for America and the world. Wake up Ms. Clinton please and start the fight today and shake up your campaign staff and campaign. Don’t repeat the mistakes of your 2008 campaign – Editor, The Amazing Democrats.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-kM1D1igMeI

LOS ANGELES — Flooded with homeless encampments from its freeway underpasses to the chic sidewalks of Venice Beach, municipal officials here declared a public emergency on Tuesday, making Los Angeles the first city in the nation to take such a drastic step in response to its mounting problem with street dwellers.

The move stems partly from compassion, and in no small part from the rising tide of complaints about the homeless and the public nuisance they create. National experts on homelessness say Los Angeles has had a severe and persistent problem with people living on the streets rather than in shelters — the official estimate is 26,000. The mayor and City Council have pledged a sizable and coordinated response, proposing Tuesday to spend at least $100 million in the next year on housing and other services. They plan, among other things, to increase the length of time shelters are open and provide more rent subsidies to street people and those in shelters.

“Every single day we come to work, we see folks lying on this grass, a symbol of our city’s intense crisis,” Mayor Eric Garcetti said at a news conference at City Hall on Tuesday. “This city has pushed this problem from neighborhood to neighborhood for too long, from bureaucracy to bureaucracy.”

In urban areas, including New York, Washington and San Francisco, rising housing costs and an uneven economic recovery have helped fuel a rise in homelessness. In some cities, officials have focused much of their efforts on enforcement policies to keep people from living in public spaces.

In places known for good weather like Honolulu and Tucson, or for liberal politics — like Madison, Wis. — frustration has prompted crackdowns on large encampments. Some cities, like Seattle, have tried setting aside designated areas for homeless encampments. But to date, no city has claimed to have the perfect solution.

Like other urban mayors, Mr. Garcetti has made promises to end chronic homelessness. Yet the homeless population here has grown about 12 percent since he took office in 2013. He, too, has been criticized for taking a heavy-handed approach to enforcement while doing too little to help people find and pay for housing. City budget officials estimate that Los Angeles already spends more than $100 million, mostly through law enforcement, to deal with issues that stem from people living on the streets.

In New York, Mayor Bill de Blasio has been grappling with a soaring homeless population since he took office nearly two years ago. The number of people occupying homeless shelters peaked around 60,000 last winter and remained stubbornly high — around 57,000 — this week.

Unlike the dispossessed in Los Angeles, the vast majority of the homeless in New York are sheltered. But the presence of the street homeless, highlighted on the front pages of tabloids, has put public pressure on Mr. de Blasio to address the 3,000 unsheltered homeless holding signs on sidewalks, sleeping atop subway grates and huddling in encampments.

Increasingly, young families are becoming the most potent symbol of homelessness, with mothers who work multiple jobs living in shelters in New York or in their cars in Los Angeles.

“This is the fallout of not having anywhere near the affordable housing that’s needed,” said Megan Hustings, the interim director of the National Coalition for the Homeless, a Washington-based advocacy group.

“It is repeated all over the country: We work to get them emergency food and shelter, but housing continues to be unaffordable, so you see people lingering in emergency services or going to the streets.”

In Los Angeles, rents have soared all over the city and housing vouchers usually cover only a fraction of the rent for a home near public transportation. Efforts to build new housing units have floundered, and the city’s spending on affordable housing has plummeted to $26 million, roughly a quarter of what it was a decade ago.

Neighborhoods that were once considered hubs of relatively inexpensive motels and single-room apartments — Venice Beach, the Downtown Arts District — have been transformed into well-to-do enclaves filled with cupcake emporiums and doggy day care centers.

A census of the homeless in Los Angeles County released in May found that the number of people bedding down in tents, cars and makeshift encampments had grown to 9,535, nearly double the number from two years earlier. More than half of the estimated 44,000 homeless in Los Angeles County live in the city limits, according to the census. And nearly 13,000 in Los Angeles County become homeless each month, according to a recent report from the Economic Roundtable.

The spending proposal will need to be approved by the City Council and allocated by its Homelessness and Poverty Committee. The $100 million figure was chosen in part for its symbolism, said Herb J. Wesson Jr., the City Council president, to show county, state and federal officials that the city was willing to make a significant contribution to an urgent problem. “Today, we step away from the insanity of doing the same thing and hoping for different results, and instead chart our way to ending homelessness,” he said.

But many longtime advocates for the homeless here said the City Council’s proposal was not likely to make a big dent in the number of people who are finding themselves on the streets. “Encampments used to be contained to Skid Row, where city officials would try to control or ignore them,” said Gary Blasi, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, who has studied homelessness in the region for years. “Plans have been made, and never made it off the paper they’re written on. It’s not clear what will be delivered. And do the math here — it doesn’t amount to much at all.”

In New York, Mr. Blasi said that hundreds of existing housing vouchers went unused because homeless people could not find landlords who would accept them.

While overall homelessness has declined nationally, urban areas with rising rents are facing the most acute problems.

“People who would have thought of themselves as homeowners 10 or 15 years ago are renting, and it’s a grim situation in a lot of places,” said Steve Berg, the vice president for programs and policy for the National Alliance to End Homelessness. “A lot of places don’t have a real grip of what the homeless population is in real time, and respond only crisis to crisis. But what we’ve learned about homelessness over many, many years is that you have to provide housing, and criminalizing the homeless doesn’t keep people off the streets at all.”

Earlier this year, the Los Angeles City Council approved an ordinance that lets the police confiscate property and makes it easier for them to clear sidewalks of homeless encampments. Similar legislation has been passed in other cities.

In Honolulu, where the city has spent the last two days shutting down homeless encampments that have irritated residents and frightened tourists, a federal judge on Tuesday denied the American Civil Liberties Union’s request to stop seizing and destroying people’s property during the sweeps.

Mr. Garcetti proposed using $12.6 million this year from unexpected tax revenue for rental subsidies for short-term housing and other services, including $1 million to create centers where the homeless could store belongings and shower. The $100 million, if approved, would be for the 2016 budget.

Some advocates for the homeless here have said that the rising street population has created a public health crisis on Skid Row downtown, where about 5,000 people now live outdoors.

“It’s a humanitarian crisis and a moral shame,” said José Huizar, a council member who represents the area. “It has reached a critical breaking point, that the sea of despair that we witness on the streets of Los Angeles each and every day must end, and it begins with all of us here today.”

Donald J. Trump, who received draft deferments through much of the Vietnam War, told the author of a coming biography that he nevertheless “always felt that I was in the military” because of his education at a military-themed boarding school.

Mr. Trump said his experience at the New York Military Academy, an expensive prep school where his parents had sent him to correct poor behavior, gave him “more training militarily than a lot of the guys that go into the military.”

That claim may raise eyebrows given that Mr. Trump, now a Republican presidential candidate, never served in the military and mocked Senator John McCain of Arizona, a decorated naval aviator, for his captivity of several years during the Vietnam War.

“He’s not a war hero,” Mr. Trump said in July. “He’s a war hero because he was captured. I like people that weren’t captured.”

Mr. Trump described his education, business life, marriages and childhood in extensive interviews with Michael D’Antonio, a Pulitzer Prize-winning former reporter at Newsday. Mr. D’Antonio’s biography of Mr. Trump, “Never Enough: Donald Trump and the Pursuit of Success,” will be published Sept. 22.

In the book, Mr. Trump emerges as a man largely unchanged from his childhood in the wealthy Queens neighborhood of Jamaica Estates, where an exacting father, Fred Trump, schooled him in self-promotion and encouraged a lifetime of fighting. The senior Mr. Trump, a major real estate developer, counseled his son to “be a killer” and told him, “You are a king.”

Mr. Trump memorably told Mr. D’Antonio that “when I look at myself in the first grade and I look at myself now, I’m basically the same.”

“The temperament is not that different,” he said.

Mr. Trump’s preoccupation with winning — at anything and everything, big or small — dominated his youth. His mentor at the New York Military Academy, Theodore Dobias, called Mr. Trump “a conniver, even then.”

When Mr. Trump’s high school classmates showed up for a Columbus Day parade in New York City, expecting to lead the procession, they were dismayed to find a group of Roman Catholic girls arranged ahead of them. Mr. Trump announced that he would take care of the problem. When he returned a few minutes later, having negotiated a Trump-like deal, the cadets were put at the front of the parade, Mr. Dobias said.

Mr. Trump, he said, “just wanted to be first, in everything, and he wanted people to know he was first.”

St. Martin’s Press provided an advance copy of the book to The New York Times, and Mr. D’Antonio provided excerpts from his interviews with Mr. Trump. (The author interviewed Mr. Trump for more than six hours. The sessions abruptly ended, he wrote, after Mr. Trump learned that Mr. D’Antonio had spoken with a longtime Trump enemy.)

The biography offers candid and sometimes unflattering assessments of Mr. Trump by co-workers, friends, enemies and, most entertainingly, his former wives. “The little boy that still wants attention,” said Marla Maples, his second wife.

“He wants to be noticed,” said Ivana Trump, wife No. 1, who recalled sending him into a fit of rage by skiing past him on a hill in Aspen, Colo. Mr. Trump stopped, took off his skis and walked off the trail. “He could not take it, that I could do something better than he did,” she said.

Asked if she had ever figured out her ex-husband, Ivana Trump said, “Yeah, I figured it out.” But then she added, “Well, I really don’t know.”

But as Mr. Trump seeks to become commander in chief, with a slogan promising to “Make America Great Again,” his statements about the military are likely to draw the most attention.

According to the book, Mr. Trump attended the New York Military Academy after years of rowdy and rebellious behavior at Kew-Forest, a more traditional prep school in Queens. Mr. Trump once recalled giving a teacher at Kew-Forest a black eye “because I didn’t think he knew anything about music.”

He arrived at the military academy — where tuition now reaches $31,000 a year — for eighth grade in 1959 and remained for high school. Like all students at the campus in Cornwall-on-Hudson, N.Y., he wore a uniform, participated in marching drills and was expected to conform to a hierarchy imposed by instructors. Despite sitting out the Vietnam War because of deferments followed by a high draft lottery number of 356 out of 366, Mr. Trump said he endured the rigors of military life.

“My number was so incredible, and it was a very high draft number. Anyway, so I never had to do that, but I felt that I was in the military in the true sense because I dealt with those people,” he told Mr. D’Antonio.

The author seemed taken aback by this. Not many of the academy’s alumni “would compare military school with actual military service,” he wrote. “But the assertion was consistent with the self-image Trump often expressed.”

During an interview for the book, Mr. Trump removed a shoe to show the author the cause of his medical deferment. “Heel spurs,” he said. “On both feet.”

As for the Vietnam conflict, he called the war “a mistake.”

Mr. Trump relished his five years at the military academy and bemoaned the dwindling enrollment at such schools.

“After the Vietnam War, all those military academies lost ground because people really disrespected the military,” Mr. Trump said. “They weren’t sending their kids to military school. It was a whole different thing, but in those days — 1964 I graduated — that was a very good thing or tough thing, and it was a real way of life at military academy.”

Mr. Trump’s reputation for self-indulgence is well known (the helicopters, the planes, the penthouses). But at times, his biographer found, he has displayed unexpected generosity.

When the wife of his chauffeur had a baby, Mr. Trump surprised them with a car seat delivered to the hospital. When a 10-year-old fan of “The Apprentice” asked the developer to utter the catchphrase “you’re fired” to him on the set of the show, Mr. Trump gave the boy a check for several thousand dollars and said, “Go have the time of your life.”

Mr. Trump is a veritable factory of boorish put-downs, laugh-out-loud exaggerations and self-aggrandizing declarations. But “Never Enough” unearths decades-old gems that might otherwise be lost to history.

On his publicity seeking: “The show is ‘Trump,’ and it is sold-out performances everywhere,” he told Playboy.

On his feelings of superiority: “For the most part, you can’t respect people because most people aren’t worthy of respect,” he told Mr. D’Antonio.

Perhaps his most revealing statement applies to the time-honored virtue of self-reflection. Mr. Trump is not in favor of it.

“When you start studying yourself too deeply, you start seeing things that maybe you don’t want to see,” Mr. Trump once told Time. “And if there’s a rhyme and reason,” he continued, “people can figure you out, and once they can figure you out, you’re in big trouble.”

Hillary Rodham Clinton acknowledged on Tuesday that her use of a private email server while she was secretary of state was a “mistake,” and apologized directly for it, uttering words that many of her allies have waited to hear from her in hopes that she can quell a controversy that has dogged her presidential candidacy for months.

“That was a mistake. I’m sorry about that. I take responsibility,” Mrs. Clintonsaid in an interview with David Muir of ABC News broadcast Tuesday night. “And I’m trying to be as transparent as I possibly can.”

Asked by Mr. Muir about a recent poll in which respondents used words like “liar” and “untrustworthy” to describe her, Mrs. Clinton conceded that she still had work to do: “Obviously, David, I don’t like hearing that,” she said. “I am confident by the end of this campaign, people will know they can trust me, and that I will be on their side and I will fight for them and their families. But I do think I could have and should have done a better job answering questions earlier. I really didn’t, perhaps, appreciate the need to do that.”

When asked if she had ever second-guessed her decision to make another run at the White House, Mrs. Clinton began to choke up, admitting that she had, at times, before invoking her mother’s admonitions to “fight for what you believe in, no matter how hard it is.”

“I think about her a lot. I miss her a lot. I wish she were here with me,” Mrs. Clinton said of her mother, who died in 2011. But, she added: “I don’t want to just fight for me. I mean, I could have a perfectly fine life not being president. I want to fight for all the people like my mother who need somebody in their corner. And they need a leader who cares about them again. So that’s what I’m going to try to do.”

Mrs. Clinton’s apology on ABC was the more striking for coming just a day after an interview with The Associated Press in which she maintained that she did not need to apologize for her private email account and server, saying, “What I did was allowed.”

And in an interview with Andrea Mitchell of NBC News on Friday, Mrs. Clinton, asked if she was sorry, allowed only that she was “sorry that this has been confusing to people and has raised a lot of questions.”

In an Aug. 26 news conference, Mrs. Clinton said she understood why people had questions about the email arrangement, which she said came about as a matter of convenience so she could carry a single mobile device. She said she took responsibility for the decision to use the private server and said it would have been better to have used a private email only for personal matters and an official one for work.

Last week, Mrs. Clinton’s aides showed a video of that news conference to a New Hampshire focus group of independents and Democrats, according to a Democrat briefed on the focus group whose account was confirmed by a person in her campaign. Participants said they wanted to hear more from Mrs. Clinton about the issue.

The focus group also showed that the email issue was drowning out nearly everything else that Mrs. Clinton was hoping to communicate to voters — something Mrs. Clinton and her husband have complained about to friends.

Privately, some of Mrs. Clinton’s allies have drawn comparisons between her resistance to using the word “mistake” over the email server and her similar reluctance to say she had erred in voting as a senator to support the invasion of Iraq. That vote dogged her in the 2008 presidential primary, but Mrs. Clinton resisted calling it a mistake, despite entreaties from many liberals and some of her own aides.

Only in her 2014 memoir, “Hard Choices,” did Mrs. Clinton say she had “got it wrong” on the Iraq invasion.

“In our political culture, saying you made a mistake is often taken as weakness when in fact it can be a sign of strength and growth for people and nations,” Mrs. Clinton wrote.

“I thought I had acted in good faith and made the best decision I could with the information I had. And I wasn’t alone in getting it wrong,” she wrote. “But I still got it wrong. Plain and simple.”

In recent weeks, some advisers had privately expressed hope that Mrs. Clinton would acknowledge a mistake on her email practices in similarly clear and blunt terms.

But others on her team, saying they were bound by the constraints of a complex situation, with several investigations underway, argued that Mrs. Clinton was limited in her ability to defend herself.

For her part, Mrs. Clinton had long insisted that the controversy was a news media fixation that voters had not raised with her on the campaign trail. At a Democratic dinner in Iowa last month, she even made light of it, with a joke about the iPhone application Snapchat, whose pictures delete themselves. And a few days later, when a Fox News reporter asked if she had wiped her server of data, Mrs. Clinton quipped, “What, like with a cloth or something?”

Mrs. Clinton, who has said that she broke no rules and is trying to be as transparent as possible, turned over about 55,000 pages of emails to the State Department, which is reviewing them to comply with freedom-of-information lawsuits. She has said she deleted the remaining 31,000, which she deemed not work-related.

But the email controversy has stayed in the headlines, with new reports about whether Mrs. Clinton’s server contained classified information, the F.B.I.’s taking possession of the server to ensure its security, and the decision by the technician who maintained the server for Mrs. Clinton to invoke his Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination. (She says no material she sent or received was marked classified at the time.)

In recent days, Mrs. Clinton’s aides have signaled that she planned to address the email controversy more openly, and with a tone of humility rather than defensiveness.

 

 

Maybe it is the end of summer that Hillary and her campaign is finally listening. This week they announced we will see the more human side of Hillary. About time! However she needs to do what we have suggested for months regarding the private server crisis (which the GOP smartly have turned into a crisis) and put her hands up and just say three words to the American people: “I am sorry”. This works in American. When Bill was a bold boy in the White House the American people rallying behind him when he said “I am sorry” regardless of the GOP witch hunt at the time.

 The DNC historically hide from severe unfair attacks from the right and the GOP. We saw this in 2000 with Al Gore and 2004 with John Kerry and their inaction allowed George W. two disastrous terms for America. Hillary needs to take more of the fight against the Bushes and leave the fact that the Clintons and Bushes are friends aside. There is too much to be lost if she doesn’t. Her private email server issue fuelled by the money raised by the Super PACs (RATs) by Karl Rove, Koch brothers, Dark Vader (Dick Cheney) and Mr. Handsome himself (Sheldon Aldeson) is building up even more stream. The GOP is very smart and the Hillary campaign should never under estimate them. It is no accident that they have called her to give evidence in Congress over her private email server at the end of October and the timing couldn’t be worse. The GOP want to string this issue out into the primaries (which is only a few months away now). They really want Bernie Sanders to take New Hampshire and the other Southern caucuses from Hillary. As much as we love everything Bernie says he hasn’t a hope of hell of winning over the Southern states’ democrats or moderates. That’s a fact of political life but it is good that Hillary has a policy of not attacking Bernie’s message. That is wise. It is also smart that the campaign has finally turned on attacking Donald Duck Trump. Trump will lose speed as his mouth will prove that he nothing but a hot air balloon that in turn will damage the GOP. The focus needs to be to ensure that the Duck gets the GOP nomination and that the GOP don’t succeed by having Bernie Sanders nominated as the Democratic nomination.

 However we were disappointed last week when Hillary on MSNBC didn’t say she was sorry for using a private email server when she was Secretary of State. She needs to take lessons from her husband Bill on this. American loves when our high profile individuals say “listen I was stupid about that issue, I am sorry, please forgive me” and then we might move on from this private email server crisis that is slowly hurting Hillary’s numbers and will continue to unless her campaign gets really serious and fights back.

 Hillary also needs to make friends with the media and stop treating them like they are all her enemies. Whatever you think of CNN, Ed Henry is no enemy of the Democrats and hasn’t a hidden agenda for Fox (Fix) News. Hillary needs to lighten up with them, let her humor (which she has) and her human side flow, otherwise she risks isolating herself. She also needs to come out of that place of safety that hides her within the campaign and make some bold moves like a visit to the Fox (Fix) studios for an interview and say “OK, now I am here, say all those things please you have being saying about me for months and give me the chance to answer”. Voters and the public like boldness. We see that with the Duck’s campaign. Hate him if you want but he is proving bold and says what he thinks (no matter whom he offends) and it is working for the moment. The American public are tired of the same old same old from the GOP and the Democrats. Washington is not just broken, the main parties are as well as they don’t listen to those who can’t make ends neat financially on a weekly basis since our financially meltdown in 2008 and that is a lot families across the US.

 So Hillary let’s see you put your hands up and say “I am sorry” for the private email server and yes becoming more human and funny on the campaign trail will really help your campaign but also becoming friends of the media will really do wonders for your 2016 chances. Be like the Duck, look like you’re having fun like he says he does and not someone who ducks under the table every time a journalist mentions those three damning words: “private email server”.

– The Amazing Democrats’ Editor

 

Hillary Rodham Clinton will renew her focus this week on changing the country’s weak campaign finance laws to limit the influence of big donors, even as her supporters exploit those weaknesses to raise millions of dollars for her election effort.

The Clinton campaign plans to release a video Tuesday that frames the candidate’s crusade against the dominance of corporate money in politics as personal. The two-minute production notes that the Supreme Court’s decision to allow corporations and unions to pour unlimited amounts into independent political committees came in a case involving her.

Citizens United, the conservative lobbying group at the center of the Supreme Court case, went to court to gain permission to pay for the broadcast of a movie attacking Clinton. It was called “Hillary: The Movie.”

“One of the things that people don’t really realize is that Citizens United was actually started from a conservative organization that wanted to bring down Hillary Clinton’s candidacy,” Kristin Schake, Clinton’s deputy communications director, says in the video. “They didn’t like who she is. They don’t like what she stands for.”

Still, Clinton is in an awkward position on campaign finance. She is calling for a reversal of the court’s decision, vowing to nominate justices who would uphold limits on campaign spending. She has also said she would push for a constitutional amendment if the court will not bend.

“We have to end the flood of secret, unaccountable money that is distorting our elections, corrupting our political system, and drowning out the voices of too many everyday Americans,” Clinton said in a statement. “Our democracy should be about expanding the franchise, not charging an entrance fee.”

But the candidate herself is taking advantage of the openings the court created as well as the laxity of the Federal Election Commission to raise eye-popping amounts of cash.

Clinton supporters say they have no choice. Unilateral disarmament, they often say, would only assure self-destruction.

The candidate’s proposals for changing the system are unlikely to get much traction if Republicans maintain control of at least one house of Congress, as is widely expected. The GOP has shown no interest in rolling back Citizens United.

Republican officials, led by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, argue that the high court was right when it held that the ability to spend money in support of a candidate is a key element of free speech, protected by the Constitution’s 1st Amendment.

Republicans also have little fondness for other items on Clinton’s campaign finance agenda, including a new system in which the federal government would match small campaign donations.

Under that plan, contributions made by small donors would be matched up to an unspecified, modest amount. Candidates would only be eligible for such funds if they agree to new limits on the amount they receive from any individual donor.

Clinton also is proposing new federal rules that would require publicly traded companies to disclose to shareholders any political contributions they make. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has been urging companies to resist such disclosure amid several years of pressure from shareholder activists and academics.

An annual report called the CPA-Zicklin Index of Corporate Political Disclosure and Accountability ranks companies for their transparency in disclosing political donations. The publicity around the report has pushed many firms to reform their practices.

President Obama arrived in Alaska on Monday (August 31^st, 2015) for a three-day trip aimed at showing solidarity with a state often overlooked by Washington, and to make a call to action on climate change.

1. He’s advancing a populist economic message

Donald Trump isn’t going away. As the recent Time magazine cover succinctly says: “Deal with it.”

That’s proving easier said than done for many Republican officials, political commentators and presidential hopefuls, however. Mr Trump has gone from joke to serious player in just a few months, thanks to his seemingly bulletproof level of Republican primary voter support and a trillion-dollar personal bank account to fuel his campaign, and he seems unwilling to play by standard political rules.

Here are just a few ways the Trump phenomenon has turned the Republican presidential nomination race on its head.

Tax-cutting and deregulation have been key parts of Republican orthodoxy since the days of Ronald Reagan. Mr Trump isn’t reading from that particular hymnal, however. Instead he preaches a populist salvation for the economically disaffected.

Poll after poll shows economic security is the most important issue for Republican voters, and Mr Trump’s entire message – his anti-illegal-immigration stance, his condemnation of Chinese and Mexican trade practices, his calls for taxation of Wall Street hedge fund managers and his constant touting of his resume as a successful businessman and “job-creator” – is built around this.

Earlier this year, as candidates made their appearances at various Republican forums across the country, it seemed the biggest applause lines among conservative audiences were warnings of the growing threat of the so-called Islamic State and condemnations of President Barack Obama’s foreign policy. This would be a foreign policy election, wags opined, and the candidates all sharpened their rhetoric accordingly.

Then Mr Trump showed up, shrugged off questions of international affairs in favour of his jobs message and now sits at the top of the polls.

2. He’s pumped up the volume on immigration

Donald Trump has singlehandedly raised the decibel level of the Republican campaign. His seeming willingness to say whatever crosses his mind, no matter how impolitic, has cast him as an “authentic” contrast to the more measured – perhaps timid – actions of his competitors.

Nowhere is this more clear than the current state of conversation on the issue of immigration, where the New York trillionaire has condemned illegal immigrants from Mexico as criminals and job-stealers.

Some candidates seem to have concluded that the way to beat Mr Trump is to be just as over-the-top as the Donald himself.

How else to explain Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker calling for consideration of a Canadian border wall? Or New Jersey Governor Chris Christie suggesting immigrants be tracked “like FedEx packages”? Or former Florida Governor Jeb Bush, who married a Mexican national, condemning “anchor babies” used to obtain US citizenship? Or Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, the child of Indian immigrants, repeatedly saying “immigration without assimilation is invasion”?

The year before the presidential primaries begin is supposed to be the time when candidates play the long game – building name recognition, avoiding missteps, establishing the rationale for their presidential aspirations and laying the groundwork for future success. Mr Trump’s headline-dominating juggernaut is throwing all of that to the wind.

3. He’s stepped over Walker

If there is one of Trump opponents who most reflects the adverse effect the New Yorker has had on the field, it’s Mr Walker.

Up until now, the governor’s appeal has been as the mild-mannered “aggressively normal” Mid-westerner who successfully advanced a solidly conservative agenda in left-leaning Wisconsin. He’s been billed as the establishment-endorsed man who also boasts crossover grassroots appeal.

When compared to Mr Trump, however, “aggressively normal” seems decidedly milquetoast. For months Mr Walker was the man to beat in first-in-the-nation voting Iowa, but recent polls have him dropping to the middle of the pack, as Mr Trump and other unorthodox candidates like retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson have flourished.

That’s left Walker supporters and advisors calling for a campaign reboot, while the candidate tries to grab headlines by calling for the cancellation of an upcoming US visit by Chinese President Xi Jinping and seemingly endorsing, then backing away from, ending the practice of automatically granting citizenship to all children born on US soil.

“What happened to Scott Walker?” asks the headline of a recent Washington Post piece – in the type of soul-searching article that often greets campaigns on a downward trajectory.

Donald Trump. That’s what happened.

4. He’s weaponised social media

Last week Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo wrote that Mr Trump is disrupting conventional political campaigns the way General William T Sherman’s US Civil War strategies revolutionised the military.

Sherman cut through the South with a speed and agility that left his opponents reeling. Mr Trump, thanks to his deft use of social media-based attacks on multiple, often seemingly contradictory fronts, is doing the same to his political opponents.

“You need to be able to not just act fast but act fast again and again to control the tempo and pace of the news conversation so you’re on to the next punch or the one after that before your adversaries have even responded,” he writes. “You also need to be experienced in the tabloid news culture and be totally in tune with your target audience. All of these combined are allowing Trump to act faster and thus more totally dominate the progression of the news conversation than any candidate has ever.”

Up until now, social media has essentially been a public relations arm of a political campaign, subject to the same careful vetting and control that goes into a candidate’s public speeches and position statements.

Mr Trump is operating more like a pop culture celebrity, however, picking fights and tossing casual insults at furious pace. He’s a spider monkey in a fight with tortoises.

And, at least so far, it’s working for him.

5. He’s fomenting a Republican civil war

Mr Trump’s rise is exposing the fault lines within the Republican Party between rank-and-file conservatives and the party’s governing elite.

Rick Wilson, a long-time Republican political strategist, was one of the first to launch an anti-Trump salvo, with an article in Politico urging the candidate’s supporters to come to their senses.

“The circus is almost over,” he wrote. “My advice to Trump fans? Don’t be the last clown out of the tent.”

As Mr Trump support continued to endure despite much-touted “game-changing” gaffes, the barbs directed his way turned sharper still.

“Every sulfurous belch from the molten interior of the volcanic Trump phenomenon injures the chances of a Republican presidency,” wrote establishment scion George Will of the Washington Post.

Meanwhile, grassroots conservative commentators like Breitbart’s John Nolte relentlessly hammer the party “smart set” for what they see as its denigration of loyal voters who support Mr Trump.

“Listen, I’m no highly-paid, inside-inside strategist, but maybe – just maybe – instead of dismissing, marginalising, attacking, and attempting to disenfranchise Trump’s supporters, the GOP could try to figure out what his appeal is and make their own appeal to those voters?” he writes.

The level of debate has descended from there, ending in an obscenity-laden Twitter war of words between Nolte, Wilson and several other conservative commentators.

All of this has some on the right wondering if the ground within their party is shifting.

“Could it be that the conservative movement is no longer driven by a coalition of fiscal conservatives, people of faith, and those concerned about foreign policy, but instead is driven by a coalition consisting of working class whites, blue collar populists, and anti-immigration hawks?” the Daily Caller’s Matt K Lewis asks.

The thing is, such paradigm-shifting developments usually don’t happen quietly or smoothly. Those in power want to stay there, while those aspiring to power are eager to claim it. The recent Trump television advert hitting Mr Bush for being soft on immigrant criminals is only the latest example.

And if it all seems acrimonious now, just wait to see what happens if Mr Trump starts winning primaries and caucuses next year.