Month: May 2016

“The fires of nationalism, the fires of identity, the fires of anger against the corrupt establishment are arising…”

by digby

Peter Montgomery at Right Wing Watch surveys today’s Trump victory celebrations on certain corners of the right. They are soooo excited:

Donald Trump’s presidential campaign has been energizing and electrifying white supremacists, and their excitement is hitting new highs now that he is clearly the Republican Party’s presumptive nominee. 

The neo-Nazi site Daily Stormer, which endorsed Trump two weeks after his immigrant-disparaging campaign launch, is filled with posts celebrating the GOP candidate’s victory this morning. “White men in America and across the planet are partying like it’s 1999 following Trump’s decisive victory over the evil enemies of our race,” 

says one post, which also celebrates that “[t]he Jews are in full-on freak-out mode.”
The site is also promoting a video parody in which Trump and other political figures are spliced into clips from the movie “300” and Trump is portrayed as “leading an army of the White race against the barbarian hordes.” Daily Stormer is also glad that Trump helped move his ally Alex Jones from “tinfoil goofiness” and into “nationalism.” 

White nationalist Richard Spencer’s Twitter feed is similarly filled with celebratory gloating. 

White nationalist leader Matthew Heimbach, chair of the pro-Trump Traditionalist Worker Party, recently celebrated Trump for having gone “full ‘America First’ for his foreign policy plan.” On his Daily Traditionalist show on Radio Aryan this morning, Heimbach and co-host Sven Longshanks praised the way Trump’s campaign has “opened up so much political space for nationalists” and made it easier for people in both the U.S. and Europe to say things that were previously impossible to say in public discourse. 

Heimbach said Trump’s campaign has also helped his Traditionalist Worker Party’s organizing because areas in which Trump does well provide fertile ground for recruiting. There’s a need for long-term organizing, he said, and while Trump takes the beachhead, nationalists will provide the reinforcements.

The fires of nationalism, the fires of identity, the fires of anger against the corrupt establishment are arising all around Europe, all around America, all around the entire world. So we just need to strap in, because the future is gonna definitely be interesting, and I believe we could have a switch in our direction even more…Hail, Emperor Trump! And hail, victory! 

The white nationalist website VDARE leads with an article by James Kirkpatrick celebrating the meltdown of the conservative “establishment” and the conversion of the Republican Party into a nationalist party. A few days earlier, after Trump’s wins in the so-called “Acela primaries,” Kirkpatrick declared that Trump “is creating a new opportunity for the American Right, which either needs to embrace nationalism and identity policies or suffer slow extinction in a Third World America.” – 

And keep in mind that Trump has been promising to bring a lot of new people into the process …

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Trump the dove

by digby

We can totally trust him when he says he’s going to be “neutral” on the Israeli-Palestinian issue. After all, he says “I know more about foreign policy than anyone else, believe me.” He understands it all:

Donald Trump came down foursquare in favor of new construction of Jewish settlements in the West Bank on Monday, telling Dailymail.com that the controversial practice has to ‘keep going’ and ‘keep moving forward.’

There are ‘thousands of missiles being launched into Israel,’ he said Monday. ‘Who would put up with that? Who would stand for it?’

Trump said last year he would like to initially remain ‘neutral’ in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as president, a position that he believes would allow him a better opportunity to be seen as a peace broker.

Meanwhile he has repeatedly expressed his love for Israel and increasingly his support for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his policies, all while repeatedly trashing the Barack Obama-backed Iran nuclear deal.

But in an exclusive interview with DailyMail.com, Trump came out for the continued construction of new settlements irrespective of Israeli government policy.

Asked whether there should be a pause in new construction – which the Obama administration has pressured Netanyahu’s government to observe in order to bring the Palestinians to the negotiating table – Trump responded: ‘No, I don’t think it is, because I think Israel should have – they really have to keep going. They have to keep moving forward.’

‘No, I don’t think there should be a pause,’ Trump said. ‘Look: Missiles were launched into Israel, and Israel, I think, never was properly treated by our country. I mean, do you know what that is, how devastating that is?’

‘With all of that being said, I would love to see if peace could be negotiated. A lot of people say that’s not a deal that’s possible. But I mean lasting peace, not a peace that lasts for two weeks and they start launching missiles again. So we’ll see what happens,’ Trump added.

‘I’d love to negotiate peace. I think that, to me, is the all-time negotiation,’ Trump said, in reference to stalled peace talks – which Palestinian negotiators say won’t occur without a halt in new construction.

What a  sophisticated thinker he is.

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Trump’s America

by digby

I read this story the other day and reserved judgment because I didn’t know if the perpetrator might just be a mentally ill street person. Now that I’ve seen the video, it does not appear to be a street person. Perhaps she is mentally ill but if so, Donald Trump is inspiring her thoughts:

A Washington, D.C. Muslim woman says she was attacked by a Donald Trump supporter while sitting outside a coffee shop, WJLA reports.

The woman, who did not give her name, is African-American and wears the hijab, a head covering that devout Muslim women wear. She told WJLA she was sitting outside a Starbucks on April 21. Police have since released surveillance footage that shows the woman yelling in the victim’s face, then returning with a bottle of liquid and dousing her.

“A Caucasian lady with blond hair walked right past me,” she told the station. “Then as soon as she sat down she started talking about me. Saying ‘F-ing Muslim. Trash, worthless piece of Muslim trash. You all need to go back to where you came from.”

The woman was able to record a brief video, on which the attacker can be heard saying, “You’re a terrorist. So stupid.”

According to a video released by MyNews4, the woman is wanted for simple assault.

The victim says the attacker said she supports GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump.

“She says if Donald Trump wins the nomination I’m going to vote for him so he can send all of you all back to where you came from,” she told WJLA.

He’s unleashed the beast.

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RIP to the True Believer

by digby

I wrote about Lyin’ Ted for Salon this morning. I’m going to miss him. But I’ll bet we haven ‘t seen the last of him yet.

If anyone thought Trump might go easy down the stretch, yesterday’s circus sideshow before the vote should disabuse them of that fact. On the day he was projected to win a yuuuuuge victory in Indiana, which was widely assumed to spell the end of the #nevertrump movement and be Ted Cruz’s last stand, Trump decided to take a gratuitous swipe at Cruz by parroting a National Enquirer article that accused Cruz’s father of being in on the Kennedy assassination:

TRUMP: And, you know, his father was with Lee Harvey Oswald prior to Oswald’s being, you know, shot. I mean the whole thing is ridiculous. What is this, right prior to his being shot, and nobody even brings it up. I mean they don’t even talk about that. That was reported, and nobody talks about it. But I think it’s horrible. I think it’s absolutely horrible that a man can go and do that, what he’s saying there.

BRIAN KILMEADE (CO-HOST): Right. There was a picture out there that reportedly shows Rafael Cruz standing with Lee Harvey Oswald —

TRUMP: I mean what was he doing with Lee Harvey Oswald shortly before the death, before the shooting? It’s horrible.

KILMEADE: Crazy.

Cruz was clearly angry about that and with some justification. If anyone else had said something like this it would have been considered a heinous smear unworthy of a presidential candidate. With Trump it was just another Tuesday.

Cruz came out swinging and staged an election day press conference like nothing we’ve ever seen before. “Pathological liar”, “narcissist”, “serial philanderer” are just a few of the words he used to describe his rival. He reminded people that Trump has said he regards “his battle with venereal disease as his own personal Vietnam” and said he was “nuts.” And that was just for starters.

“Lyin’ Ted” spoke the truth. Trump is all those things and more. But he’s Teflon Don and nobody cares.

Cruz also showed that he had finally figured out how to grab the microphone from Trump and use him as a foil to get media attention. He managed to do it with the Fiorina announcement, his weird confrontation with a Trump yahoo on Monday and now this. The problem is that he figured it out too late. And even if he had done this earlier instead of being too clever by half by clutching Trump to his bosom, assuming he would implode and he’d inherit his votes there’s still the problem of Cruz’s truly unpleasant personality which puts people off so much they’re willing to take a chance on putting the country into the hands of Donald Trump.

And as if he were a big cat playing with mouse, Trump responded to Cruz’s angry tirade with this:

Ted Cruz is a desperate candidate trying to save his failing campaign. I is no surprise he has resorted to his usual tactics of over-the-top rhetoric that nobody believes.Over the last week I have watched “Lyin’ Ted become more and more unhinged as he is unable to react under the pressure and stress of losing.

Within 12 hours of Donald Trump accusing his father of being involved in the JFK assassination, Ted Cruz dropped out of the race. Donald Trump is officially the presumptive nominee of the Republican Party.

You have to give Cruz credit. He was almost as much of a long shot as Trump when this whole thing started. And he turned out to be the runner-up in a field that had been touted as an embarrassment of political riches. Nobody expected him to do as well as he did and for good reason. He is an extremist much too far right to win a national election and way too unpopular in the party establishment. Nonetheless, he might have been able to pull it off if it weren’t for the fact that Trump exposed a major tear in the GOP matrix. It turns out that at least half of those who call themselves evangelicals aren’t quite as principled as they like to pretend. They succumbed to the siren’s call of a decadent, thrice married billionaire who hates foreigners and women a lot more than he loves Jesus. Cruz had planned to get the whole Christian Right on his team but was only able to corner the market on those who aren’t hypocrites. Unfortunately for him, it turns out that there aren’t as many ultra-conservative right wing ideologues in the Republican party as we all thought.

But despite setbacks, he proved to be a smart tactician who used sophisticated modern methods to analyse the electorate and was nimble enough to switch gears when things weren’t working. (Recall that his original plan was to sweep the hard right conservatives in the deep south, which had to give way when Trump was so strong there.) He fought hard all the way through yesterday, trying anything and everything to gather delegates by hook or by crook, planning for a contested convention by lining up 2nd ballot delegates all over the country.

As loathsome as I find his politics, I cannot help but feel sorry for him. Ted Cruz was everything the base of the GOP said it wanted. He is an evangelical Christian, a social and fiscal conservative, a demagogic warrior for the far right who went to Washington and did exactly what all these people say they wanted the Republicans to do when they voted for them in the 2010 and 2014 midterms. He obstructed the president at every turn, angrily defied the GOP leadership and answered only to the Tea Party base. It wasn’t good enough.

The problem for Ted Cruz was made clear on the day before the Indiana election by a protester he engaged on the sidewalk outside one of his events. People in the crowd were yelling, “career politicians have killed America” and “Trump’ll take down ISIS, he’ll take down the whole damn thing” and the man to whom Cruz was speaking directly looked right in his face and said, “you are the problem, politician, you are the problem.”

The Trump phenomenon isn’t a rejection of ideology, it’s a rejection of politics. Trump and the people who are voting for him aren’t interested in fancy ideas or academic theory and they do not care about the principles that inform our system of government. They just want action and a lot of them obviously think Donald Trump might just be a superhero who can make things happen by sheer will and the power of his out sized personality.

No one would ever mistake Ted Cruz for a superhero. He’s just a True Believer and that’s no fun at all.

I’m going to miss Cruz being in the race. Throughout this amazing primary season he has offered us the purest example of what the modern conservative movement has to offer. As horrifying as his program for the country is, it’s rational and familiar, subject to scrutiny and analysis and argument. Trump is something else entirely.

The good news for Trump is that the media simply refuses to accept that he is serious about what he says, which means that his inane gibberish will continue to be normalized.

We are witnessing the pivot. This is the most presidential we’ve seen @realDonaldTrump since he launched. Gracious. Thankful. #Trump2016

— Craig Melvin (@craigmelvin) May 4, 2016

Nate Silver pointed out that during the fallow period in the campaign when Trump was failing to get traction he whined and complained a out the system being rigged and threatened to riot at the convention if he didn’t get his way. You have to wonder if he’ll have a similar effect on the general electorate — he’s going to make it s ugly that people will tune out. The only voters who aroused by his schtick are Republicans. Everyone else is repulsed.

Requiem for a movement?
by Tom Sullivan

Donald Trump all but officially clinched the 2016 Republican nomination for president when Sen. Ted Cruz bowed out last night after a crushing loss in the Indiana primary. Bernie Sanders upset Hillary Clinton to keep his campaign alive, but because Democrats assign delegates proportionally, he gained little ground in the delegate chase.

Politico reports that Sen. Elizabeth Warren wasted no time in launching an assault on the presumptive Republican nominee, “hitting him with a blistering late-night tweetstorm in which she cast the presumptive Republican nominee as a racist with a dangerous authoritarian streak.” She defined the challenge ahead both for herself and the country:

What happens next will test the character for all of us – Republican, Democrat, and Independent.— Elizabeth Warren (@elizabethforma) May 4, 2016

It will determine whether we move forward as one nation or splinter at the hands of one man's narcissism and divisiveness.— Elizabeth Warren (@elizabethforma) May 4, 2016

I'm going to fight my heart out to make sure @realDonaldTrump’s toxic stew of hatred & insecurity never reaches the White House.— Elizabeth Warren (@elizabethforma) May 4, 2016

Warren is not the only one. Republicans are already declaring they will not support Trump. A Republican foreign policy expert from the American Enterprise Institute tells Think Progress:

“If a conservative emerges that approaches foreign policy in a principled, coherent manner, and that understands and values the important role that America plays in world affairs, I will support them,” he wrote in a text. “Otherwise, I have faith that Clinton’s foreign policy would align with what I’m looking for, and she would have my vote.”

Philip Klein, the conservative Washington Examiner’s managing editor tweeted:

I have officially de-registered as a Republican. pic.twitter.com/DjRI21Oyvx— Philip Klein (@philipaklein) May 4, 2016

Perhaps the most dramatic response came in the form of a mea culpa posted to Red State Monday night, nearly 24 hours before Indiana polls closed. “Donald Trump is my fault as much as anyone else’s,” wrote Ben Howe. He built alliances with people with whom he fundamentally disagreed out of expedience:

I justified it quietly to myself the way we had at the beginning of the tea party when such things would happen. People would say outlandish things and I would find myself nodding my head and awkwardly walking away, not calling them out for their silliness.

After all, there were more pressing matters.

And so, as I said, I kept quiet about these allies in new media and in Washington. People who I thought I agreed with only 70% of the time. Which normally is a great reason to consider someone an ally, but not when the other 30% is cringe-inducing paranoia and vapid stupidity.

I chose peace over principle. I chose to go along with those I disagreed with on core matters because I believed we were jointly fighting for other things that were more important. I ignored my gut and my moral compass.

The result is that, almost to a man, every single person I cringed at or thought twice about, is now a supporter and cheerleader of Donald Trump.

It is perhaps too early to write the requiem for the conservative movement. Conservatism can never fail. It is only failed by people who were never really true conservatives. True conservatives will construct a stirring counter-narrative about how they were stabbed in the back once again by false ones who, as the Jesus-Only people believe, should be condemned to hell on a technicality because they failed to get the right baptism.

Congratulate the Trump supporters. Tonight will be their high point. In six months, they'll be blaming the rest of us for their choices.— Ben Shapiro (@benshapiro) May 3, 2016

Trump’s and his fanboys

by digby

Via 538:

A survey by the Republican analytics firm Evolving Strategies found that anti-Trump messages were far more likely to hit the mark with women than with men. After women viewed one of three ads that questioned Trump’s character, their support for Trump dropped from 52 percent to 44 percent. But the needle didn’t move for men sampled.

Hey, if you don’t count women, he’s really popular, amirite?

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Somebody’s delusional

by digby

Or he senses some kind of opportunity:

Hillary Clinton represents all of the elements of Washington DC that people are in rebellion against… I think a lot of the millennials who were voting for Bernie Sanders are not going to vote for Hillary Clinton. I think they think she’s not honest. I think they’re bothered by her scandals with the Clinton Foundation, her scandals with her email server… There’ll be a lot of Democrats out there looking for someone to go to. In addition, Trump has somehow communicated with blue collar workers across America and we certainly see this in terms of registration numbers… We’ve had a 60% increase in Republican turnout this year compared to four years ago. There’s been about a 30% Democrat turnout decrease over 2008, the last time they had a contested nomination… Secretary Clinton is not exactly rousing people’s excitement…

I think it’s important this year because of the unique moment in time and because of the uniqueness of Donald Trump to erase all of our thinking about what kind of states could be in play. I think if Trump runs as aggressive campaign in the general election as he has done in the primaries all 50 states could be in play.

Why delusional?

Our previous survey results suggested that as of early January, 46.7 percent of voters would vote for a Democrat and 43.1 percent would vote for a Republican in the upcoming presidential election. These results suggested a greater vote for the Democratic candidate. In March, our results indicate that 53.0 percent of voters will vote for a Democrat, and 37.9 percent will vote for a Republican in the upcoming presidential election, suggesting that the Democratic candidates are pulling ahead of the Republicans in the national vote.

I guess they have to say this. And who knows? Maybe it will happen that way. A lot of Republicans seem to think that because the young progressives prefer Bernie Sanders and both candidates are against trade deals, they are ripe for the picking. Let’s just say that’s not born out by the polling which shows that only 17% of millennials have a favorable opinion of Trump.

But Gingrich is a demagogue and an authoritarian tyrant too so he’s naturally drawn to Trump. They are cut from the same cloth. (It’s doubtful that Trump has the same regard for him, however.  He’s a “loser” who was ignominiously forced to resign from his leadership position.) Gingrich is undoubtedly very impressed with Trump’s ability to command the attention of the media and the country and his ability to run his campaign on his own terms. He was that kind of politician himself although without the resources and the glamour.

But Gingrich and Trump are both convinced of something that just isn’t true: that the majority of Americans like what Trump is selling when the evidence is that the more people see of him the more they loathe him. Yes, Republicans are starting to accept that he’s going to be the nominee but he’s hardly winning the nomination by acclamation.

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Super duper conspiracy a-go-go

by digby

Wow:

Donald Trump on Tuesday alleged that Ted Cruz’s father was with John F. Kennedy’s assassin shortly before he murdered the president, parroting a National Enquirer story claiming that Rafael Cruz was pictured with Lee Harvey Oswald handing out pro-Fidel Castro pamphlets in New Orleans in 1963.

A Cruz campaign spokesperson told the Miami Herald, which pointed out numerous flaws in the Enquirer story, that it was “another garbage story in a tabloid full of garbage.”

“His father was with Lee Harvey Oswald prior to Oswald’s being — you know, shot. I mean, the whole thing is ridiculous,” Trump said Tuesday during a phone interview with Fox News. “What is this, right prior to his being shot, and nobody even brings it up. They don’t even talk about that. That was reported, and nobody talks about it.”

“I mean, what was he doing — what was he doing with Lee Harvey Oswald shortly before the death? Before the shooting?” Trump continued. “It’s horrible.”

Remember this:

Trump and Enquirer chief executive David Pecker are reportedly palsy — “very close,” according to the New York Daily News, and “friends for years,” according to New York magazine. Conservative radio host Michael Savage, a Trump backer, told listeners last week that “David Pecker flies to Florida from New York on Trump’s private jet.” In 2013, Trump even suggested Pecker ought to take over Time magazine.

Trump has written several articles for the Enquirer during the campaign, including one that appears to have been recycled from 2011, when the tabloid was cheering the billionaire real estate mogul toward a White House run that he ultimately decided not to make. The contents are a glorious fusion of Trump’s bombast and the Enquirer’s gratuitous use of exclamation points.

After hearing this accusation about his father Cruz proceeded to go before the press and let fly:

What a circus sideshow. Unbelievable. Trump really can get away with saying anything. And Cruz was a little too clever by half when he helped fluff Trump all fall and winter in the hopes that he would inherit all those Trump voters once he dispensed with the rest of the competition for him and then imploded. That was a bad bet. It didn’t work out.

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Liberty U lawyers: Your guns are going to cost you money
by Spocko
Liberty University to allow handguns in dorm rooms

Next fall, Liberty University students with concealed handgun permits from the state can get permission from the school to keep their guns in safes in their dorm rooms 
   —Jesse Pounds, Daily Progress)

Liberty has been increasing the places that guns can be carried concealed on campus since 2011. The residents’ hall is one of the last places they were forbidden. Officials have downplayed the number of students who might have guns in the dorm, as well as the risk.

The Liberty people won’t listen to me. But they will listen to the underwriters and donors, the people who have to pay for the errors in judgement made by Liberty’s administrators.

Seeing red first thing in the morning

by digby

If Clinton wins the nomination it’s going to be a very long six months:

Just Donald Trump screaming his criticism of Hillary Clinton screaming pic.twitter.com/tupT6T3TgI

— Andrew Lawrence (@ndrew_lawrence) May 2, 2016

He’s insulting women right to their faces and it’s clear he doesn’t care one whit. And the crowd loves him for it. He is to sexism what George Wallace was to racism.

It is profoundly depressing.

It’s 2016, people.

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