Month: October 2016

It’s not about Trump, it’s about his followers

by digby

I’m sorry, but I think people are missing the point. Trump is Trump and saying that he can get away with grabbing women’s crotches because he’s a star is not really different from him saying “I could shoot someone on 5th Avenue and wouldn’t lose any voters.” He has used blatantly racist, sexist, xenophobic, violent psychopathic language since the first day of his campaign.


This “political incorrectness” is what his followers like about him.

People like this are not going to quietly acquiesce to the idea that Trump was forced to quit the race over saying the word pussy and docilely vote for Mike Pence instead:

A float showing trump pulling the electric chair switch on Clinton

A favorite image of Clinton in a Gitmo style orange jumpsuit

This is not the first “star” politician who did this

by digby

This was released before Arnold Schwarzenegger won. Nobody cared:

Women Say Schwarzenegger Groped, Humiliated Them

The acts allegedly took place over three decades. A campaign aide denies the accusations.

October 02, 2003|Gary Cohn, Carla Hall and Robert W. Welkos | Times Staff Writers

Six women who came into contact with Arnold Schwarzenegger on movie sets, in studio offices and in other settings over the last three decades say he touched them in a sexual manner without their consent.

In interviews with The Times, three of the women described their surprise and discomfort when Schwarzenegger grabbed their breasts. A fourth said he reached under her skirt and gripped her buttocks.

A fifth woman said Schwarzenegger groped her and tried to remove her bathing suit in a hotel elevator. A sixth said Schwarzenegger pulled her onto his lap and asked whether a certain sexual act had ever been performed on her.

According to the women’s accounts, one of the incidents occurred in the 1970s, two in the 1980s, two in the 1990s and one in 2000.

“Did he rape me? No,” said one woman, who described a 1980 encounter in which she said Schwarzenegger touched her breast. “Did he humiliate me? You bet he did.”

Four of the six women told their stories on condition that they not be named. Three work in Hollywood and said they were worried that, if they were identified, their careers would be in jeopardy for speaking out against Schwarzenegger, the onetime bodybuilding champion and box-office star who is now the front-runner in the Oct. 7 gubernatorial recall election.

The other unnamed woman said she feared public ridicule and possible damage to her husband’s business.

In the four cases in which the women would not let their names be published, friends or relatives said that the women had told them about the incidents long before Schwarzenegger’s run for governor.

None of the six women who gave their accounts to The Times filed any legal action against him.

Schwarzenegger’s campaign spokesman, Sean Walsh, said the candidate has not engaged in improper conduct toward women. He said such allegations are part of an escalating political attack on Schwarzenegger as the recall election approaches.

“We believe Democrats and others are using this to try to hurt Arnold Schwarzenegger’s campaign,” Walsh said. “We believe that this is coming so close before the election, something that discourages good, hard-working, decent people from running for office.”

Walsh said Schwarzenegger himself would have no comment.

The Times did not learn of any of the six women from Schwarzenegger’s rivals in the recall race. And none of the women approached the newspaper on her own. Reporters contacted them in the course of a seven-week examination of Schwarzenegger’s behavior toward women on and off the movie set.

Schwarzenegger’s attitudes about women have been an issue on the campaign trail, where critics have accused him of being misogynistic, based on past statements he has made to various publications. In response, Schwarzenegger has said he respects women and that many of his comments were made in jest or simply meant to be provocative.

Schwarzenegger’s conduct toward women also has been widely discussed in Hollywood over the years, notably after a March 2001 article in Premiere magazine called “Arnold the Barbarian.” After the article appeared, a number of Schwarzenegger’s colleagues wrote to the magazine saying that the story was inaccurate and that Schwarzenegger treated women with respect and kindness.

The earliest incident of the six described to The Times was said to have occurred in 1975 at Gold’s Gym near Venice Beach. E. Laine Stockton, then newly married to professional bodybuilder Robby Robinson, said she had gone to the gym to watch her husband work out.

Stockton was 19 at the time. She said she was wearing slacks, tennis shoes and a loose-fitting T-shirt. She said she was not wearing a bra.

As she sat on an exercise bench, Stockton said, Schwarzenegger walked up behind her, reached under her T-shirt and touched her bare left breast.

“The gym is full of bodybuilders and Arnold comes and he gropes my breast — actually touches my breast with his left hand,” she said.

She said Schwarzenegger then walked away without saying a word.

Stockton said she does not rule out that Schwarzenegger “may have meant it in playfulness.” But she did not take it that way.

“I was just shocked, shocked to the point where I almost didn’t know how to react, because it was so out of the blue and so unexpected,” she said. “It just completely caught me off guard, and when I finally came to my senses, I immediately went over to Robby and I said, ‘Look, Arnold just groped my breast.’ “

Robinson, a former Mr. America, Mr. World and Mr. Universe, said he “tried to comfort her.”

Robinson has since had a falling out with Schwarzenegger. An African American known as the “Black Prince” during his years on the professional bodybuilding circuit, Robinson has accused Schwarzenegger of racism — a charge that Schwarzenegger’s campaign denies.

Robinson said he was upset by what Schwarzenegger had done to his wife, but did not confront him. “What he did was uncalled for, but I couldn’t say nothing,” Robinson said, explaining that he feared he’d be ostracized by the bodybuilding world.

Read on… if you can stomach it.

Oh, and by the way, this is the guy they chose to replace Trump on “The Apprentice.”

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This is the guy nominated to run against the first woman nominee


by digby

Trump is a white nationalist authoritarian demagogue who wants to order war crimes, ban religions from immigration, build walls and unleash the police on minority citizens.  But I wonder if Trump’s latest will finally explain to certain people in this country why so many women have felt particularly frantic at the prospect of Donald Trump’s nomination and the possibility that he could actually win this thing — after which the first female nominee would be blamed for not measuring up.(“We’d love to hire a woman. We’re just waiting for ‘a good one.'”) That’s how this sick world so often works.

Nominating Donald Trump to run against Hillary Clinton is as if they had nominated David Duke to run against Barack Obama. It’s that insulting. And women like me have had to suck that insult up for months listening to the endless litany of complaints that this first woman, a mainstream Democrat with impeccable credentials, doesn’t “excite” people enough.


Here’s what I wrote about this for Salon a week or so ago:

It has always seemed to me that the extremely close presidential primary campaign of 2008 signaled that America was at a pivotal moment in its history. As the vehicle for social progress and the home of most racial minorities and women, the Democratic Party was naturally the institution that would advance two breakthrough leaders in succession. The time had come, the country had changed and I naively thought it would be easy.

As it turned out, there was an immediate, fierce backlash against the ascendancy of Barack Obama to the presidency called the Tea Party. It was portrayed as a revolutionary anti-government movement but when scholars studied these folks, it turned out that they were simply garden-variety conservatives after all — and they were very, very angry. Harvard’s Theda Skocpol, author of “The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism,” with Vanessa Williamson, explained to Salon in 2013 that Tea Party attitudes about taxes and government reflected something deeper:

There’s no question that at the grass roots, approximately half of all Republican-identifiers who think of themselves as Tea Partyers are a very conservative-minded old group of white people, some of whom do go all the way back to [Barry] Goldwater and the [John] Birch Society. They are skeptical of the Republican Party as it has been run in recent years. But they both hate and fear the Democratic Party and Obama. We argued in many ways that anger comes from alarm on the part of these older conservatives that they’re losing their country — that’s what they say. That they’re the true Americans, and they’re losing control of American politics.

Nothing symbolized that “loss of control” more than the African-American president sitting in the White House. Sadly, it turns out that these older, more affluent conservatives weren’t the only ones who felt that way. White working-class Americans, particularly men, were growing more and more angry about losing their place in the hierarchy of privilege. These two groups make up the Republican coalition that is now expressing the right-wing backlash in the form of explicit white nationalism.

After dealing with a black president and his family occupying the White House for eight long years, accepting a woman taking the job immediately thereafter is more than they can bear. As the National Rifle Association’s president, Wayne LaPierre, quipped, “I have to tell you, eight years of one demographically symbolic president is enough.”

The right-wing opposition’s response to the “demographically symbolic” female candidate has been to nominate a famously crude misogynist to restore white male authority once and for all. Rebecca Traister memorably explained it in this Hillary Clinton profile in New York magazine a few months back:

There is an Indiana Jones–style, “It had to be snakes” inevitability about the fact that Donald Trump is Clinton’s Republican rival. Of course Hillary Clinton is going to have to run against a man who seems both to embody and have attracted the support of everything male, white and angry about the ascension of women and black people in America. . . . Of course a woman who wants to land in the Oval Office is going to have to get past an aggressive reality-TV star who has literally talked about his penis in a debate.

Because, of course, conservatives on the right were not going to be able to tolerate yet another living symbol of progress that they see as forcing them further back in the line.

This explains to some extent why we don’t see the kind of rapturous excitement at this “first” that we saw in 2008 for Obama. The sense of violence and hostility that was bubbling just under the surface then and that churned throughout the Obama years has now exploded. It’s frightening and disorienting and it forces optimism to the down-low. The atmosphere is more like a war than a movement.

Clinton’s ad campaign shows the terrain on which this war is being fought. There have been plenty of standard issues ads and character studies, but her most effective spots are those that simply use Donald Trump’s own words against him, showing him insulting people and expressing himself in crude, bullying fashion. They’re presented from the point of view of kids, veterans, seniors, individuals with disabilities, people of color and women who can see how this man who tells his voters, “I am your voice” talks about them.

The ads are not about Clinton and they aren’t really about Trump. They are about us and what Trump’s followers really think of us.

This one, called “Mirrors,” is one of the most powerful:

Many fathers who see the ad are appalled that their daughters have to live in a world where someone like Donald Trump is an acceptable leader. That’s why the experience of Alicia Machado, the former Miss Universe who has come forward with her story of being humiliated at Trump’s hands, has such resonance with women and Latinos.

It’s why people with disabilities and their families are frightened by Trump’s cruel mockery of a reporter. It’s the reason that African-Americans feel a chill down their spines when they hear Trump say that the way to achieve racial healing is “law and order” and “stop-and-frisk.” It’s why millions of Americans of all races and creeds were stunned at his blithe dismissal of Khan family members and their sacrifice. These are the people on the other side of all that angry white grievance.

It’s not a coincidence that the first African-American president may be followed by the first woman president. Progress requires that you let the momentum carry you when you have it. But it also shouldn’t be a surprise that the first would enter office on a high note of inspiration and the second would face the inevitable backlash. We should have seen it coming. I get the feeling that Hillary Clinton did.

Glenn Beck’s Blaze is Flaming Out, And We Helped! 

by Spocko

From the Huffington Post:

Glenn Beck’s The Blaze Is Falling Apart, Staff Says Once the envy of other right-leaning sites. Not anymore. -Huffington Post

Dragon’s Breath at Firefighter School, by Lance Cheung Creative Commons Licence

It’s a nice story about Glenn Beck’s The Blaze falling apart. The other day Digby wrote about what this might mean for conservative media and what it might mean for the Talking Yam after his electoral failure.

What the Huffington Post story doesn’t cover is why Beck had to create his own media “empire” instead of staying in the protected bubble of Fox News and News Corp. He was fired, canned, pushed out, let go, contract not renewed, left to spend more time crying with his family or whatever euphemism is used these days. News Corp gave all sorts of lame reasons, but the documented fact that he stopped bringing in ad revenue for News Corp is a huge part of why he is off Fox.

And the reason ad revenue disappeared is because of the incredible work of my friends at Color of Change, Angelo Carusone of @stopbeck (now at Media Matters) and all of their supporters. They convinced advertisers to not associate their brand with Beck’s race baiting and craziness.

This decoupling of consumer goods advertisers from conservative media is a really big deal. It’s something that I and a legion of people have been working on for over a decade. The success of my friends in the #stoprush group alone is absolutely phenomenal.

We’ve found that in general advertisers don’t like to support racist, sexist bigots. There are some exceptions, especially those whose audience sees being called a sexist bigot a compliment.

The reason I developed the Spocko Method to defund right-wing media was because while I knew there are plenty of people who will happily consume racist, sexist claptrap, I also knew that the women and men running consumer businesses do not want to be publicly associated with it. Using these people’s desire to protect their brand has led to a massive loss of revenue to right-wing media distributors.

Right-wing radio and TV hosts like Limbaugh and Beck have gone from cash generating assets, to consumer brand damaging liabilities.

If Trump decides to start a media company he will be competing with Fox News and other networks for advertisers, many of whom pressured those media companies to not associate their brand with Trump.

• Are the thousands of advertisers who left Limbaugh because of his sexist comments about women going to want to be associated with Trump News?
• Will the hundreds of advertisers who said, “Take us off race-baiter Beck’s show!” flock to the network of Donald “Mexicans are rapists and women are pigs” Trump? 

This does not mean that a “Trump News” wouldn’t have tremendous traffic like Glenn Beck did. In the beginning Trump will be able to generate huge traffic, but not necessarily ad revenue. And traffic alone might be enough for Trump, especially if it is the only metric that he reveals. But the idea pushed by conservatives to the mainstream media and the liberal media is that if you don’t generate revenue it’s not really a success. Of course the same metric doesn’t exist for right-wing media.

The possibility of a popular, but money losing, Trump network should concern us and remind us of another media model that is glossed over. It currently exists and it shapes “conventional wisdom.” It’s the “purposely lose millions in your news divisions to push an agenda” model. As an example, did you know that the New York Post LOSES around $110 MILLION dollars a year, every year?

This is the Murdoch model. He uses his money-losing properties, often newspapers, to punish his enemies and threaten the people who disagree with him and his views. He uses all his properties to push the “no-taxes on the rich, no trust busting, no regulation” views.

And he’s not the only rich right winger who throws bad money after bad to push extreme conservative views in the media, often times by being the media. Were you aware that the Washington Times lost a billion dollars over 33 years? I’m sure you know about how Pete Peterson is spending one billion dollars

“..to underwrite numerous organizations and PR campaigns to generate public support for slashing Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, citing concerns over “unsustainable” federal budget deficits.
 –SourceWatch, the Center for Media and Democracy

But here’s the thing, Trump doesn’t need a profit making media empire to push his ideas, just a Twitter account and a phone. Why would he spend money on programming or infrastructure when the media will include his Tweets for free?

I think that Trump will continue to use the media to promote himself after he loses. It will be very hard for the media to wean themselves of the tiny-fingered walking orange hairball they have enjoyed pimping 24/7 for over a year. What will stop them from continuing to run his tweets alongside every single story about every single Clinton action during her term?

I’m actually kind of hoping that Cheeto head does try to start a media empire, because it would cut into his visibility on the rest of the “news” shows.

One of the reasons that media will keep running with Trump’s comments on Hillary after the election is because it keeps the conflict going. Expect continued, “He said she said, the truth lies somewhere in the middle, we have to leave it there.” from the media.

Sometimes watching the media use their constitutionally granted power to enrich their investors, rather than inform people, leads me to despair. We talk a lot about the need to get money out of politics. We know it’s bad because of how it corrupts our elected officials. But it also twists the people who get that money.

The media aren’t going to voluntarily walk away from an Orange Goose who lays golden eggs. We need to change things so that the media doesn’t have to depend on covering the tweets of an Orange Goose to feed their families.

Trump is a molester and con artist. Who knew?
by Tom Sullivan

Nicholas Kristof interviews another victim. I can’t even:

Talking to Harth and Houraney, and reviewing the lawsuits and depositions from the time, convinced me that they’re telling the truth. It helps that many others have testified about Trump behavior that matches elements of the story — the stiffing of business partners, the sexual predation — and that he himself has promoted his own boorishness.

“He’s all about him,” Harth says, summing up what she learned about the man who may be our next president. “He’s a con artist.”

A con artist who is running for president and who has no regard either for the constitution or for justice. Asked about his taking out full-page ads calling for the death penalty for the “Central Park 5,” later wrongfully convicted in the notorious 1989 rape case, Trump told CNN:

“They admitted they were guilty,” Trump said this week in a statement to CNN’s Miguel Marquez. “The police doing the original investigation say they were guilty. The fact that that case was settled with so much evidence against them is outrageous. And the woman, so badly injured, will never be the same.”

The five, four black teenagers and one Latino, alleged the confessions were coerced by police. A convicted rapist admitted the crime in 2002 and his DNA matched a sample taken from the victim. “The Central Park 5 were exonerated,” CNN reports, “and in 2014, New York paid them a $41 million settlement.”

Donald? Donald couldn’t care less.

Charlie Pierce:

Do I have to point out how many ways this disqualifies Donald Trump from the position of decent human being, let alone from the position of president of the United States? There’s the pure racism of the original ad. There’s the pure racism of his still holding to the opinions expressed in the ad in the face of overwhelming scientific and empirical evidence. There’s the know-nothing huffing at the legitimacy of the science used to exonerate the five men, which is reminiscent of the way he waves off the science of climate change and anything else that disturbs the fragile intellectual infrastructure of a career grifter.

This character isn’t running for president of the United States, to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States. He’s running to be anointed lecherous Judge Dredd.

Friday Night Soother

 by digby

Oh, you definitely need some baby otters eating while making squeaky “om nom nom” noises tonight just to feel human again  …

The “illegals stole my homework” excuse

by digby

This is Ann Coulter’s whole thesis in “Adios America”

The federal government is allowing illegal immigrants to flow into the U.S. so they can vote, Donald Trump alleged Friday, fueling his own argument that November’s presidential election will be rigged against him.

At a roundtable with National Border Patrol Council members Friday morning inside Trump Tower, Art Del Cueto, national vice president of the union that represents Border Patrol agents, told the Republican presidential nominee that agents have been advised not to deport illegal immigrants with criminal records, according to a pool report.

Trump conveyed his appreciation for Border Patrol agents, telling them their jobs would be so much easier if they just allowed people to come across the border.

“But you love our country,” Trump said, adding, “You know many people are coming in with criminal records.”

Del Cueto told Trump that he has spoken to a number of agents who are in charge of processing. “And the problem that we’re seeing reflected through us as a voice is that some of these individuals that were apprehended with criminal records, they’re not, they’re checking their records, they see that they have criminal records, but they’re setting them aside because at this point they are saying immigration is so tied up with trying to get the people who are on the waiting list to hurry up and get them their immigration status corrected,” he said.

“Why? Trump asked. “So they can go ahead and vote before the election,” Del Cueto responded.

“Big statement, fellas,” Trump said, motioning to reporters, whom he accused of concealing from the public what they just heard. “You’re not going to write it. That’s huge. But they’re letting people pour into the country so they can go and vote.”

Del Cueto said the government wants “to hurry up and fast track them so they can go ahead and vote in the election,” prompting Trump to promote himself as a change agent.
“You hear a thing like that, and it’s a disgrace,” he said. “Well, it will be a lot different if I get elected.”

This isn’t a new theme. Back in the 60s future Supreme Court Justice William Rhenquist was a “poll watcher” in Arizona, suppressing the Latino vote. But the current iteration has been gaining steam in recent years and I’ve been writing about the “illegals are stealing the election” stuff since at least 2006. With Trump and Coulter it’s made it into the big ime.

Anyone who thinks Trump is going to accept the results of this election is dreaming.

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He’s an authoritarian monster

by digby

Trump tells CNN he still considers Central Park 5 guilty: “They admitted they were guilty. police in original investigation say they were”

— John Harwood (@JohnJHarwood) October 7, 2016

If you’re unfamiliar with the despicable role he played in the persecution of these innocent people, I wrote about it here, trying to warn people many months ago that Trump is more than just a xenophobic nationalist. He’s an authoritarian, racist thug who has no interest in constitutional niceties.

This is the ad he ran:

As you undoubtedly know, the Central Park Five were innocent. They were young teenagers who had been coerced into confessing and years later it was proven through DNA that they didn’t commit the crime.

He wanted them killed and if it had happened just a few decades earlier  he would have been leading the vigilante posse to lynch them. ( Look at this sick piece of work.)

This is what he wrote when the city settled with them for false imprisonment:

My opinion on the settlement of the Central Park Jogger case is that it’s a disgrace. A detective close to the case, and who has followed it since 1989, calls it “the heist of the century.” 

Settling doesn’t mean innocence, but it indicates incompetence on several levels. This case has not been dormant, and many people have asked why it took so long to settle? It is politics at its lowest and worst form. 

What about the other people who were brutalized that night, in addition to the jogger? 

[…]One thing we know is that the amount of time, energy and money that has been spent on this case is unacceptable. The justice system has a lot to answer for, as does the City of New York regarding this very mishandled disaster. Information was being leaked to newspapers by someone on the case from the beginning, and the blunders were frequent and obvious. 

As a long-time resident of New York City, I think it is ridiculous for this case to be settled — and I hope that has not yet taken place. 

Forty million dollars is a lot of money for the taxpayers of New York to pay when we are already the highest taxed city and state in the country. The recipients must be laughing out loud at the stupidity of the city. 

Speak to the detectives on the case and try listening to the facts. These young men do not exactly have the pasts of angels. 

We are a month away from the presidential election in which the Republican Party has inexplicably nominated this monster to be president. The polls are close, mostly because a good portion of the American public is apparently just as monstrous  (aka deplorables) and too many otherwise mainstream white men are so insecure that they can’t vote for a woman for president.

It makes me sick to my stomach to know that so many of my fellow Americans are celebrating and cheering for this twisted freak.

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What took the media so long to thoroughly investigate Trump?

by digby

The main problem with the coverage of this campaign is the fact that the media never took Trumpseriously until it was very late in the game while they spent months pounding on Clinton’s emails (much of it fed to them by the right wing noise machine) knowing that she was the likely nominee. It created a distorted view of the two candidates that remains to this day.

That’s not to say there weren’t any investigations. The New York Times did a huge piece some months ago on Trump’s Atlantic City operations and there were individual stories about some of his real estate and branding scams like Trump University. But it was haphazard compared to the systematic, drip by drip, “vetting” of Clinton.

Now, with a month to go we’re seeing a flurry of major exposés about Trump’s business practices. Better late than never. This one from the New York Times is especially good because it provides an overview of his general ineptitude:

When Donald J. Trump unveiled his new online travel booking venture,GoTrump.com, he said in a promotional video in 2006 that customers would “love everything I put on this site.” “There’s nobody better,” he added. “There’s nobody even close!”

A few months later, ground was broken for Trump Tower Tampa, a project he said would “redefine both Tampa’s skyline and the market’s expectations of luxurious condominium living.”

And when he signed a long-term deal with the fledgling U.S. Pro Golf Tour that summer to become a partner on a new championship series, he proclaimed that “there is no doubt the talent level is among the highest in the world.”

The travel venture never took off. The tower in Tampa, Fla., was not built. And the golf championships? Mr. Trump withdrew as the tour fell apart.

Moving past a disastrous period that led to a loss on paper of more than $900 million — possibly freeing him from federal income taxes for years — Mr. Trump became a one-man factory of big ideas, churning out a continual stream of projects and promises. Together, they fed the image of Mr. Trump as an American Midas, the foundation of his argument for why he would make a great president.

To see whether the results of these ventures came close to their high-energy billing, The New York Times analyzed scores of Trump business announcements starting a decade ago, including those posted on the Trump Organization’s website and those that have been deleted but live on in web archives. The Times also combed through news reports, his personal financial disclosures and court records; interviewed partners; and interviewed Mr. Trump himself.

Of the roughly 60 endeavors started or promoted by Mr. Trump during the period analyzed, The Times found few that went off without a hitch. One-third of them never got off the ground or soon petered out. Another third delivered a measure of what was promised — buildings were built, courses taught, a product introduced — but they also encountered substantial problems, like lawsuits, government investigations, partnership woes or market downturns.

The remaining third, while sometimes encountering strife, generally met expectations — notably the television show “The Apprentice” and the purchases of numerous golf courses, including properties near Philadelphia and in the Hudson Valley.

In interviews, Mr. Trump disputed some of the characterizations, saying that, among other things, some projects that might appear to be failures were successes, for him at least, because he often made his money upfront, through fees for the use of the Trump name. The bottom line of all the hits and misses, however, is impossible to determine because Mr. Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, has not released any tax returns.

Regardless of how much money a deal made — or did not make — one constant through the years is that these ventures were almost always introduced with a certain Trumpian flair: Each would set a “new standard” or be the “very, very best.”

The problem, of course, is that he just isn’t that good. He inherited many millions from his father who also bailed him out numerous times as did his siblings.He failed over and over again but managed to invest in Manhattan real estate at the right time and acquire some golf courses that didn’t lose money.

His biographer had this assessment:

“I think he’s very good at real estate, I don’t think he’s very good at other things,” says biographer D’Antonio. “He tried to run an airline and failed at that. He tried to run casinos and failed four times. That’s not evidence of brilliance when it comes to operating a complex business.”

Trump has acknowledged a tendency to get bored easily with business ventures. “The same assets that excite me in the chase, often, once they are acquired, leave me bored,” Trump wrote in one of his books. “For me, you see, the important thing is the getting, not the having.”

Those are not good qualities for a president. The only way he could find that kind of stimulation is by starting a war.

He is also a tremendous scam artist, perhaps the greatest we’ve ever seen. Matt Yglesias some strings together in this piece about Trump’s long con in the 1990s:

Thanks to a leaked copy of his 1995 tax return, the basic story fact that Donald Trump built a mini empire of Atlantic City casinos that crashed and burned in the early 1990s is now well-known. What’s not yet well-understood by the public is the even more important story of what happened next. As Russ Buettner and Charles Bagli write in Wednesday’s New York Times, 1995 was also the year in which “Trump began the transaction that would eventually free him from his financial travails.”

Mom-and-pop investors who had the misfortune to put their confidence in Trump lost nearly everything. But as a performance of low cunning, his stewardship of THCR really did verge on genius. The company itself was a dumpster fire, losing money every year Trump served as chair. But he managed to personally pocket $44 million in salary and bonuses. Even more egregiously, he offloaded personal debts onto the corporate balance sheet and had the public company purchase services ranging from bottled water to plane flights from Trump’s privately held enterprises.

Along the way, he bankrupted the company and all but completely wiped out the value of its stock. If you want to be generous to Trump, the saga shows that he really does have some impressive business skills. He spun gold out of worthless casinos in a declining resort town with a dazzling efficacy.

If you want to be less generous, you see that the one time Trump’s leadership skills were put to the test as an agent of middle-class people’s economic well-being, he ripped those people off ruthlessly and unapologetically. As president, Trump would be a custodian of the American people’s interests — just as he was of THCR shareholders’ interests as chair. And unless he’s had a drastic change of heart, he’d be an incredibly ineffective one. 

Stocks were to the 1990s what junk bonds were to the 1980s and single-family homes to the 2000s — the hot asset class that got so hot it increasingly attracted naive middle-class investors hoping to make a quick buck, and unscrupulous financial actors hoping to make a quick buck off the naive investors.

In Trump’s case, stock mania was a golden opportunity to get out from under the legacy of his disastrous performance as an investor in the early 1990s.

Trump emerged from his companies’ bankruptcy still in possession of his key assets but saddled with debts that he had personally guaranteed. What’s more, as David Cay Johnston writes, in order to carry forward the tax value of his billion-dollar loss after receiving relief from some of his debts through bankruptcy, Trump would have had to agree to give up certain valuable commercial real estate tax breaks that are typically central to CRE deals.

Under the circumstances, to maximize the value of his holdings Trump needed to find a way to sell casinos to people who didn’t know anything about the nuances of real estate tax law. The mom-and-pop stock investors of the mid-’90s were the perfect suckers, and they bought into the Trump Casino & Hotel Resorts IPO to the tune of $140 million.

The company’s sole asset at the time was the Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino, and the IPO money was supposed to be reinvested in the company. But Trump Plaza was already indebted, so one of the first moves made with the new equity was to pay down the debts — debts that Trump had personally guaranteed, meaning that company money was used to relieve not just a company debt but a personal debt owed by Trump himself.

Having hooked a parade of marks, Trump’s next move was to tunnel as much money as possible out of the public company and into his pockets. One easy way to do that was for Trump to have the company he controlled buy things he owned personally.

The public company bought the Trump Castle casino from Trump, for example, for $490 million, a price that James Sterngold reported at the time “was based on optimistic profit projections and was about $100 million too high.” Trump also paid himself $880,000 for brokering the deal.

There’s more. And it’s devastating.

The 1995 tax return has obviously opened up this story for further investigation and all kinds of ugly details are spilling out. But I can’t help but wonder what would have happened if say, Michael Bloomberg, a billionaire who owns a media company, had put two dozen reporters all over the world on this story last winter. This is only the tip of the iceberg and we’re just finding out about it now.

Those of us who lived through the 2000 election know this race is still frighteningly close and anything can happen. If he were to pull this off we would have our very own thuggish criminal oligarch sitting in the white house. That should not be possible in a country with a free press.

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by digby

The New York Times interviewed some white males who are voting for Hillary Clinton:

Brian Methe, an artist who lives in Cincinnati, had a thought. Wouldn’t it help the chances of his preferred presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton, if he were to design a simple, powerful image that could have the same effect as the “Hope” poster made by Shepard Fairey for Barack Obama’s 2008 run? 

So Mr. Methe, 41, who has done graphic design work for the bands Wilco and the Avett Brothers, among others, created a rendering of Hillary Clinton that shows her in profile, with the slogan “I’m With Her” in the upper right corner. The color scheme is red, white and blue.
He was proud of what he had made, but when the image hit social media, the reactions from fellow adult males on Facebook were often angry: 

“Does it come with darts?”
“I want the orange jumpsuit version.”
“I’ll use it as toilet paper.” 

He should not have been surprised. As Mr. Methe said, being a white male Clinton supporter is “not a popular position,” something many polls have found as well. A New York Times/CBS News poll released on Sept. 15 showed that Donald J. Trump had the support of 57 percent of white males, while 33 percent supported Mrs. Clinton.

Within the white male demographic, 37 percent of those who are college-educated support Mrs. Clinton, versus 48 percent for Mr. Trump, according to an ABC News/Washington Post poll. Among white men without college educations, Mr. Trump’s lead is even greater: 76 percent to 17 percent. 

That is a sad comment on the college educated white male demographic.  But it is clarifying.   If they don’t have enough sense to know that Donald Trump is a fascist demagogue who will destroy everything in his path it’s obvious the country can no longer rely on them to run it. It’s a good thing there are a bunch of people of color and women ready to step up.

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