When Trump tried to fraudulently vote they wouldn’t let him
by digby
And yes, he was with that Billy Bush. They have quite the relationship:
Trump says it’s very easy to commit voter fraud, but he had a remarkably difficult time voting in 2004 with Billy Bush. pic.twitter.com/HNDrMuJLS9— Yashar (@yashar) October 20, 2016
Has there ever been a bigger whiner than Donald Trump?
by digby
This article about Trump acting like an ass about losing the Emmy says it all:
A refrain of this election season has been the necessity to fact check the comments made at the presidential debates. And so here we are to settle one controversial claim: Should The Apprentice have won an Emmy?
At Wednesday night’s final showdown between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, Clinton dutifully listed all the instances in which Trump had argued that something was “rigged” against him, including the Emmys, which has never rewarded Trump’s reality TV competition series The Apprentice.
“There was even a time when he didn’t get an Emmy for his TV program three years in a row and he started tweeting that the Emmys were rigged against him,” Clinton said, to which Trump interjected: “Should have gotten it.”
Indeed, Trump has, as is his wont, taken to grieving in 140 characters over various Apprentice Emmys slights.
“The Emmys are all politics, that’s why, despite nominations, The Apprentice never won—even though it should have many times over,” he tweeted in 2012. “I should have many Emmys for The Apprentice if the process were fair,” he tweeted in 2013, “in any event, it’s not my day job.” And, never one to let go of a grudge, in 2014 after another year of zero nominations for his show: “Which is worse and which is more dishonest—the Oscars or the Emmys?”
He reprised it in 2014:
I mean — this:
According to awards website GoldDerby.com, in a 2015 episode of Celebrity Apprentice Trump complained about the Emmy slight for the first season of The Apprentice over a decade earlier, in 2004.
“Everybody thought I was gonna win it,” he said. “In fact, when they announced the winner, I stood up before the winner was announced. And I started walking for the Emmy. And then they announced the most boring show on television, The Amazing Race. Piece of crap.”
Read the whole thing to see how ludicrous it was that he thought he should win.
I suppose it’s possible that he might be a gracious loser in November. But I wouldn’t count on it.
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Clinton’s most important moment
by digby
Clinton mopped the floor with Trump last night. But something else important happened too. Hillary Clinton made the most impassioned defense of Roe vs Wade any candidate has ever made in a debate. Pro-choice women really shouldn’t think twice about voting for Clinton because of this alone:
CLINTON: Well, I strongly support Roe v. Wade, which guarantees a constitutional right to a woman to make the most intimate, most difficult, in many cases, decisions about her health care that one can imagine. And in this case, it’s not only about Roe v. Wade. It is about what’s happening right now in America.
So many states are putting very stringent regulations on women that block them from exercising that choice to the extent that they are defunding Planned Parenthood, which, of course, provides all kinds of cancer screenings and other benefits for women in our country.
Donald has said he’s in favor of defunding Planned Parenthood. He even supported shutting the government down to defund Planned Parenthood. I will defend Planned Parenthood. I will defend Roe v. Wade, and I will defend women’s rights to make their own health care decisions.
WALLACE: Secretary Clinton… CLINTON: And we have come too far to have that turned back now. And, indeed, he said women should be punished, that there should be some form of punishment for women who obtain abortions. And I could just not be more opposed to that kind of thinking.
WALLACE: I’m going to give you a chance to respond, but I want to ask you, Secretary Clinton, I want to explore how far you believe the right to abortion goes. You have been quoted as saying that the fetus has no constitutional rights. You also voted against a ban on late-term, partial-birth abortions. Why?
CLINTON: Because Roe v. Wade very clearly sets out that there can be regulations on abortion so long as the life and the health of the mother are taken into account. And when I voted as a senator, I did not think that that was the case.
The kinds of cases that fall at the end of pregnancy are often the most heartbreaking, painful decisions for families to make. I have met with women who toward the end of their pregnancy get the worst news one could get, that their health is in jeopardy if they continue to carry to term or that something terrible has happened or just been discovered about the pregnancy. I do not think the United States government should be stepping in and making those most personal of decisions. So you can regulate if you are doing so with the life and the health of the mother taken into account.
WALLACE: Mr. Trump, your reaction? And particularly on this issue of late-term, partial-birth abortions.
TRUMP: Well, I think it’s terrible. If you go with what Hillary is saying, in the ninth month, you can take the baby and rip the baby out of the womb of the mother just prior to the birth of the baby.
Now, you can say that that’s OK and Hillary can say that that’s OK. But it’s not OK with me, because based on what she’s saying, and based on where she’s going, and where she’s been, you can take the baby and rip the baby out of the womb in the ninth month on the final day. And that’s not acceptable.
CLINTON: Well, that is not what happens in these cases. And using that kind of scare rhetoric is just terribly unfortunate. You should meet with some of the women that I have met with, women I have known over the course of my life. This is one of the worst possible choices that any woman and her family has to make. And I do not believe the government should be making it.
You know, I’ve had the great honor of traveling across the world on behalf of our country. I’ve been to countries where governments either forced women to have abortions, like they used to do in China, or forced women to bear children, like they used to do in Romania. And I can tell you: The government has no business in the decisions that women make with their families in accordance with their faith, with medical advice. And I will stand up for that right.
So, this happened
by digby
I’m hearing a lot of people say that last night was Trump’s best debate and that if he hadn’t said he might not accept the results of the election and called Hillary “such a nasty woman” he would have been the winner.
Uhm, no. He made a total fool of himself the entire time. Here’s just one example:
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A window into his soul
by digby
Here’s Trump at the end of last night’s debate, tearing up his notes:
— Chris Cillizza (@TheFix) October 20, 2016
This is not the guy you can trust with nuclear weapons. He can’t control himself.
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“False criminalization as birtherism”
by digby
That’s basically what Trump is promising. I wrote about it for Salon this morning:
After Donald Trump became the presumptive nominee last spring, he went before a West Virginia audience and said, “You’ve been hearing me say it’s a rigged system, but now I don’t say it anymore because I won. It’s true. Now I don’t care. I don’t care. And the only way I won was I won by such big margins because it is a rigged system. But the only way you can do it, it’s like a boxer, you got to knock them out then you don’t got to worry about the judges.”
He didn’t win by big margins. He won by grinding it out in primary after primary, winning just enough in a huge field to come in first with far less than a majority. But Trump is a total stranger to the truth and he says whatever he needs to say to get through the moment.
The polls show that Trump is lagging far behind right now, and on Wednesday night in the final presidential debate in Las Vegas, when Chris Wallace asked him if he would accept the results of the upcoming election, Trump said again that the system is rigged, the media has been dishonest and corrupt and has poisoned the minds of the voters. Then he said this, very pointedly:
So let me just give you one other thing. So I talk about the corrupt media. I talk about the millions of people — tell you one other thing: she shouldn’t be allowed to run. It’s crooked — she’s — she’s guilty of a very, very serious crime. She should not be allowed to run. And just in that respect, I say it’s rigged, because she should never … Chris, she should never have been allowed to run for the presidency based on what she did with emails and so many other things.
He refused to say whether he would follow the American tradition of peaceful transfer of power, telling Wallace that he wanted to leave the American people “in suspense.”
This seemed to shock just about everyone, despite the fact that Trump has been saying this at every recent appearance. Apparently people thought that in the formal setting of a nationally televised debate he wouldn’t dare defy the norms of our electoral system, which is silly. That is what he does.
This is the man who challenged the legitimacy of Barack Obama for many years and only a few weeks ago conceded that he was an American citizen and therefore entitled to run for president. If you look at his comment above you will see where he’s heading with Hillary Clinton. Just as he questioned whether Obama should have been “allowed to run” because he had not adequately proven his citizenship, he is saying that Clinton shouldn’t have been “allowed to run” “based on what she did with emails and so many other things.” That’s what will make her victory illegitimate, not the vote count. As Rebecca Traister of New York magazinedescribed it on Twitter, “this is false criminalization as birtherism.”
How all this will play out after the election is unknown, but anyone who thinks he plans to just fade away like his favorite old soldier, Douglas MacArthur, is probably fooling herself. The birther stuff fed directly into the right-wing obstructionism that characterized the last eight years so we can expect this to be even more salient during a Hillary Clinton administration. Trump’s angry army will believe the presidency was usurped by a criminal.
And it may end up somewhere substantially more dangerous. Trump had been coasting along in the debate with snippets of his stump speech and managed to avoid blowing his cool until Clinton challenged him to repudiate the Russian interference in the election. Despite the fact that the consensus of intelligence agencies is that Russia deliberately interfered with the election, Trump refused to concede that it’s happening. Republican strategist Steve Schmidt on MSNBC said that his unwillingness to concede this point is every bit as bad as his unwillingness to commit to accepting the outcome of the election, since Russian interference in western elections on behalf of far-right parties is becoming a serious challenge. He speculated that this relates to what Trump has planned:
I think he plans on being martyred. I think in his martyrdom he’s going to wave the bloody shirt and he’s going to go out and say through a party of grievance and resentment that “we were cheated and this was stolen” and he’ll have a critical mass [for] a UKIP style third party that splits off from the Republican Party. Who knows where the funding for Trump TV will come from, but it will be a media designed to undermine the democratic foundations of the United States and the credibility of our elections processes. Vladimir Putin couldn’t hope for anything better than that.
That’s a startling scenario and perhaps it’s hyperbole. But Trump’s behavior with respect to all the Russian activity around this election is strange. But then, what isn’t strange when it comes to him? Perhaps Trump simply believes that “someone” has good taste in presidential candidates. One thing we do know is that even if he concedes the election in some technical sense, he is not going to concede that Clinton is a legitimate candidate whatever the outcome of the vote. The chants of “lock her up” will fuel whatever he does next.
To those Trump surrogates who are using Al Gore and the 2000 election as their precedent: Please. Gore did not spend the month before the election telling millions of people that George W. Bush was a criminal and shouldn’t have been allowed to run. The state of Florida’s laws kicked in an automatic recount and when the whole process was finished, he graciously accepted the results. Since Donald Trump doesn’t have a gracious bone in his body, it’s highly doubtful we can expect the same, even if he loses in a landslide.
Unfortunately, the right has killed off another important American democratic norm. Soon there won’t be any left, not even for them.
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They’ve exposed themselves for what they are
by digby
The Trump campaign has exposed so many of the right’s hypocrisies. From conservative evangelicals having no problem with a thrice married libertine groper to heresies on free trade and safety net programs, they have proved they have no principles or morals when it comes to family values or small government.
Now that they have proved they aren’t really social conservatives or fiscal conservatives, they are also proving that they aren’t national security conservatives either, at least not in the traditional patriotic sense of the word:
Q: Are you completely comfortable with the campaign using…. info stolen from Russian intel services? Conway: I am https://t.co/urndk9olKV— Morning Joe (@Morning_Joe) October 20, 2016
That feel when even the congenitally slippery Bill Kristol gets Morning Joe dead to rights: https://t.co/Hxr8KR5NWz— Greg Greene (@ggreeneva) October 20, 2016
It’s going to be important to remember this stuff for the future. These Republicans can’t be allowed to go back to pretending that they are morally superior, patriotic fiscal conservatives. They’ve shown their true colors.
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Says it all
by Tom Sullivan
It’s show time.
Polls open in North Carolina at 10 a.m. EDT, so there is not a lot of time to comment on last night’s third and final presidential debate. Thankfully, the tweet at the top says it all.
It was bad enough yesterday for the Donald. Hillary Clinton is now leading among men in Bloomberg’s latest poll of likely voters.
Still, all anyone will be talking about this morning, however, is this:
Trump Won’t Say if He Will Accept Election Results — New York Times
Trump refuses to say whether he’ll accept election results — Washington Post
Trump Won’t Say If He Will Accept 2016 Election Results — Newsweek
“It was a shocking and cravenly irresponsible thing to say, the sort of thing that threatens to rend our national fabric, and for that alone, Trump has earned his place in the history of American ignominy.” — John Podhoretz, New York Post
“Donald Trump turned, in the third and final presidential debate, from insulting the intelligence of the American voter to insulting American democracy itself.” — New York Times Editorial Board
To the barricades.
What Hillary needs to do
by digby
“You let me do the worrying”
by digby
I think this is one of the most powerful ads of the cycle:
That little girl is reportedly going to be at the debate tonight.
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