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The Amazing Democrats – Editor’s comment: God Bless America – Everyone got it wrong and to a point, so did we. Leave a comment
5 Reasons Why The Duck is Jumping All Over the GOP. Leave a comment
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.
1. He’s advancing a populist economic message
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.
Here it is: Email Time AGAIN – Watch Ed Henry (CNN) Go At The Boss. Leave a comment
The DNC Are Wrong to Defend Hillary’s Emails and Here is Why… Leave a comment
by the Editor of The Amazing Democrats
The DNC are wrong to fall in line with the main stream media and begun an email campaign last week to its followers to defend Hillary’s private email server when she was the Secretary of State. You have to wonder who is hired as their Communications Director that is allowed to make such decisions.
Once again the DNC are digging themselves into a huge hole that they won’t be able to dig themselves out closer to the election and will end up hurting Hillary in the long term and not helping her win in 2016.
The Democrats and the DNC need to learn and learn fast to fight fire with fire. It is no secret that Sheldon Aldeson, the Koch brothers, Karl Rove and Dark Vader (Dick Cheney) himself were investigating Hillary over a year ago and the private server issue was brought to their attention as the investigators had to justified the large fees they were charging. Is the American public really that stupid that they can’t see through all this GOP bull?
The DNC could of easily months ago (before this story broke) quietly remind our main stream media that Dick Cheney when he was VP destroyed the VP’s residence’s guest list (which was illegal). It baffles me why the DNC can’t reach back to a few years ago when the last Republican administration in the U.S. was in fact George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. Why is there is so much inaction of the DNC when this story was bubbling up for months before it even hit the main stream media outlets? Come on DNC wake up please or you will hand the 2016 Presidency to the Republicans and this will be twice in your history you kicked Hillary in the butt. I am amazed she is so forgiving of you when the Super Delegates (another crazy DNC rule) elected Obama as the candidate in 2008 even though Hillary was by far the more popular candidate for us all.
It is not a case of that is the past and move on. It simply is PC (Political Correctness) that has taken over in America. The words now used daily to quieten logically discussion has being set by the CEOs of Corporate America and the rest of us including the media follow like sheep. The word they invented was “inappropriate” and now that word is used for everything and everyday millions of times across the country to control the voices of dissent. Never do you heard them say that their own salaries or bonus are “inappropriate” or that Donald Trump is “inappropriate” in how he speaks about people’s race. No, because he is wealthy, he is not a no-body because he has that healthy bank account. Do you see where this is going DNC? It is like Shakespeare said in Hamlet: “was and is, to hold, as ’twere, the mirror up to nature; to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure”. What we will be known as in this decade in the twenty-first century is a “bunch of hypocrites”. It can’t be helped with our obsession with PC and the word “inappropriate” that is mostly used to suppressive the voices of dissent while the very people imposing these rules are overpaid bloated useless CEOs that pour their company’s big bucks into the Super PACs RATs.
Hillary needs to take a leaf out of Obama’s 2008 campaign when he hired (somewhat) inexperienced people for all areas of his campaign. Hillary surrounding herself with all these “experts” from Bill’s past administration will be her downfall. Her communications department to date has proving useless with the email server story. What her people and the DNC are ignoring is that oiling this very wheel with the main stream media outlets are the Karl Roves, the Dick Cheneys, the Koch Brothers and Aldeson in Las Vegas and you fight fire with fire. What Hillary should do from September 2015 is hold a weekly hour long press conference every Friday morning and allow the reporters free rein with their questions and allow five minutes only (every week if need be) on the email server topic. She would even be advised to put her hands up and say “look I was wrong, it was stupid of me, and I did it for conveyance; that was all. No biggie here. Did I get a memo from the President to say he was writing me up for this? No.” The American public love that. You did something wrong, you were caught, say you’re sorry and by the summer of 2016 we will all be sick of Hillary’s emails and her private email server and please when she becomes President may she never send one email!
Listening to the learned attorneys on U.S. Federal law, when she was Secretary of State it was a very gray area then concerning using a private server for Federal government business and it is very unlikely the FBI could even find a law to proceed to move into a criminal investigation. Sadly for Hillary and the campaign the Roves, Cheneys, Kochs and Aldesons are feeding the main stream media differently and most not worth their grain in salt just publish this misinformation. Sound familiar? We had it for eight years under the George W. Bush/Dick Cheney administration and Obama left them off scot free. It’s called the “President’s Club” and there is nothing we the voter can do about that.
But the DNC emailing all their supporters last week trying to explain Hillary’s emails and her private email server when she was Secretary of State will do Hillary a huge disservice in the long term and plays right into the hands of Rove, Cheney, the Koch bothers and Aldeson. Please DNC fight fire with fire and let’s get Hillary elected in 2016.
The One Who Is Going To Save US All! Leave a comment
Come on Ladies…Time to Fight Donald Donkey Back Not with Blood but Tweets. Leave a comment
An online defence of periods (time of the month) has been trending, after Donald Trump’s comments about “blood coming out of” Megyn Kelly, the host of last week’s Republican party leadership debate.
It all started with Trump’s response to Kelly’s challenge during Thursday’s debate. “You’ve called women you don’t like fat pigs, dogs, slobs, and disgusting animals,” she said. “Only Rosie O’Donnell,” came the reply.
When quizzed about the exchange afterwards, Trump made the remarks that were seized upon by his opponents. He told another journalist that he hadn’t been impressed with Kelly’s questioning or, as he saw it, her angry tone. “You could see there was blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever,” he told CNN’s Don Lemon.
Many thought he said this because Kelly is a woman – insinuating she was angry because she was on her period. He himself was swift to refute that interpretation, saying that he’d meant to say “nose” or “ears”, but plumped for “wherever” simply in an attempt to change the subject.
Either way, he’s now being targeted by women on Twitter who’re using the platform to live-tweet their periods, using the hashtag #PeriodsAreNotAnInsult and retweet it to Donald Duck Donkey Trump using the hashtag #realDonaldTrump
The question the media should be asking Trump: Did he or did he not rape his former wife? Leave a comment
Ivana Trump once accused the real-estate tycoon of ‘rape,’ although she later clarified: not in the ‘criminal sense.’
Donald Trump introduced his presidential campaign to the world with a slur against Mexican immigrants, accusing them of being “rapists” and bringing crime into the country.
“I mean somebody’s doing it!… Who’s doing the raping?” Donald Trump said, when asked to defend his characterization.
It was an unfortunate turn of phrase for Trump—in more ways than one. Not only does the current frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination have a history of controversial remarks about sexual assault, but as it turns out, his ex-wife Ivana Trump once used “rape” to describe an incident between them in 1989. She later said she felt “violated” by the experience.
Michael Cohen, special counsel at The Trump Organization, defended his boss, saying, “You’re talking about the frontrunner for the GOP, presidential candidate, as well as a private individual who never raped anybody. And, of course, understand that by the very definition, you can’t rape your spouse.”
“It is true,” Cohen added. “You cannot rape your spouse. And there’s very clear case law.”
Ivana Trump’s assertion of “rape” came in a deposition—part of the early ’90s divorce case between the Trumps, and revealed in the 1993 book Lost Tycoon: The Many Lives of Donald J. Trump.
The book, by former Texas Monthly and Newsweek reporter Harry Hurt III, described a harrowing scene. After a painful scalp reduction surgery to remove a bald spot, Donald Trump confronted his then-wife, who had previously used the same plastic surgeon.
“Your fucking doctor has ruined me!” Trump cried.
What followed was a “violent assault,” according to Lost Tycoon. Donald held back Ivana’s arms and began to pull out fistfuls of hair from her scalp, as if to mirror the pain he felt from his own operation. He tore off her clothes and unzipped his pants.
“Then he jams his penis inside her for the first time in more than sixteen months. Ivana is terrified… It is a violent assault,” Hurt writes. “According to versions she repeats to some of her closest confidantes, ‘he raped me.’”
Following the incident, Ivana ran upstairs, hid behind a locked door, and remained there “crying for the rest of night.” When she returned to the master bedroom in the morning, he was there.
“You’re talking about the front-runner for the GOP, presidential candidate, as well as a private individual who never raped anybody. And, of course, understand that by the very definition, you can’t rape your spouse.”
“As she looks in horror at the ripped-out hair scattered all over the bed, he glares at her and asks with menacing casualness: ‘Does it hurt?’” Hurt writes.
Donald Trump has previously denied the allegation. In the book, he denies having had the scalp reduction surgery.
“It’s obviously false,” Donald Trump said of the accusation in 1993, according to Newsday. “It’s incorrect and done by a guy without much talent… He is a guy that is an unattractive guy who is a vindictive and jealous person.”
Cohen acknowledged Monday that he has not read the entire deposition but said he had read the two relevant pages of it, including the rape accusation.
“It’s not the word that you’re trying to make it into,” Cohen told The Daily Beast, saying Ivana Trump was talking about how “she felt raped emotionally… She was not referring to it [as] a criminal matter, and not in its literal sense, though there’s many literal senses to the word.”
Cohen added that there is no such thing, legally, as a man raping his wife. “You cannot rape your spouse,” he said. “There’s very clear case law.”
That is not true. In New York, there used to be a so-called marital rape exemption to the law. It was struck down in 1984.
Trump’s lawyer then changed tactics, lobbing insults and threatening a lawsuit if a story was published.
“I will make sure that you and I meet one day while we’re in the courthouse. And I will take you for every penny you still don’t have. And I will come after your Daily Beast and everybody else that you possibly know,” Cohen said. “So I’m warning you, tread very fucking lightly, because what I’m going to do to you is going to be fucking disgusting. You understand me?”
“You write a story that has Mr. Trump’s name in it, with the word ‘rape,’ and I’m going to mess your life up… for as long as you’re on this frickin’ planet… you’re going to have judgments against you, so much money, you’ll never know how to get out from underneath it,” he added.
When Lost Tycoon was about to be printed, Donald Trump and his lawyers provided a statement from Ivana, which was posted on the first page of the book. In it, Ivana confirms that she had “felt violated” and that she had stated that her husband had raped her during a divorce deposition. But Ivana sought to soften her earlier statement.
“During a deposition given by me in connection with my matrimonial case, I stated that my husband had raped me,” the Ivana Trump statement said. “[O]n one occasion during 1989, Mr. Trump and I had marital relations in which he behaved very differently toward me than he had during our marriage. As a woman, I felt violated, as the love and tenderness, which he normally exhibited towards me, was absent. I referred to this as a ‘rape,’ but I do not want my words to be interpreted in a literal or criminal sense.”
The statement, according to a “Notice to the Reader” in the book, “does not contradict or invalidate any information contained in this book.”
Nevertheless, Cohen, Trump’s attorney, said that “there is nothing reasonable about you wanting to write a story about somebody’s usage of the word ‘rape,’ when she’s talking [about how] she didn’t feel emotionally satisfied.”
“Though there’s many literal senses to the word, if you distort it, and you put Mr. Trump’s name there onto it, rest assured, you will suffer the consequences. So you do whatever you want. You want to ruin your life at the age of 20? You do that, and I’ll be happy to serve it right up to you,” he added.
“I think you should go ahead and you should write the story that you plan on writing. I think you should do it. Because I think you’re an idiot. And I think your paper’s a joke, and it’s going to be my absolute pleasure to serve you with a $500 million lawsuit, like I told [you] I did it to Univision,” Cohen continued.
The 1990 divorce case between the two Trumps was granted on the grounds of Donald’s “cruel and inhuman treatment” of Ivana. The settlement, under which the Trumps agreed on the division of assets, was finalized in 1991. Her divorce involved a gag order that keeps her from talking about her marriage to Donald Trump without his permission.
Divorce records in New York state are not open to public inspection. But some of the legal documents surrounding the contract dispute over the Trumps’ prenuptial agreement are still available and were reviewed by The Daily Beast.
In one such document, Ivana Trump’s lawyers claim that in the three years preceding their divorce Donald Trump, “has increasingly verbally abused and demeaned [her] so as to obtain her submission to his wishes and desires” as well as “humiliated and verbally assaulted” her. The New York County Clerk’s records office couldn’t locate at least one box of documents relating to the contract dispute. (It’s not uncommon for court files to go missing.)
Ivana Trump did not respond to a request for comment.
Donald Trump has a history of grandstanding on rape. His controversial campaign-trail comments this year about Mexicans were hardly the first time he has waded into the hot-button issue of sexual assault.
Two years ago, Trump weighed in on the alarming rate of sexual assault and rape in the military—and in doing so, pinned the blame on the presence of women.
“26,000 unreported sexual [assaults] in the military—only 238 convictions. What did these geniuses expect when they put men & women together?” he tweeted in 2013. “The Generals and top military brass never wanted a mixer but were forced to do it by very dumb politicians who wanted to be politically [correct]!” he continued.
In 1989, the real estate mogul placed a full-page ad in four New York City newspapers calling for the execution of the five alleged rapists of Trisha Meili, the Central Park jogger who was put in a coma by her assailants. The defendants received different sentences and served between six and 13 years behind bars before new evidence of coerced confessions emerged that led to their convictions being vacated in 2002.
“Criminals must be told that their CIVIL LIBERTIES END WHEN AN ATTACK ON OUR SAFETY BEGINS!” Trump’s 1989 ad blared. “BRING BACK THE DEATH PENALTY. BRING BACK OUR POLICE!”
Trump’s other public statements on rape cases range from tone-deaf to offensive. In 1992, he floated the idea that convicted rapist and boxer Mike Tyson should be allowed to pay “millions and millions” of dollars to rape victims instead of serving jail time. Trump’s modest proposal did not go over well.
“How offensive,” shot back Dollyne Pettingill, spokeswoman for the mayor of Indianapolis, where Tyson committed the assault. “We have a judicial process for these matters and it’s not for sale.”
Whether Trump’s comments about rape—or the accusation of assault from his ex-wife—will hurt his burgeoning political career is an open question. So far, Trump has been able to shake off the sorts of scandals that would destroy any other campaign for president. Dissing Mexican immigrants and prisoner of war has not cost him his campaign, nor has his history of giving to Democratic campaigns. In the latest CNN poll, Trump leads all other candidates in the Republican presidential field, with 18 percent support.
—with additional reporting by Nina Strochlic and Asawin Suebsaeng.