“[Trump], too, has financial ties to some of the same companies. From licensing his name to a golf club in Dubai to leasing his suburban New York estate to former Libyan strongman Muammar el-Gaddafi, Trump has launched several new business ventures connected to Middle Eastern countries since 2000.”
This man gives new meaning to the word hypocrisy.
.. “She can’t claim to care about African-American and Hispanic workers when she wants to bring in millions of new low-wage earners to compete against them.”
This is the epitome of the politics of public division that seeks to pit one part of the electorate against the other, a way of making starving dogs fight for scraps. It’s revolting and un-American — not only the liberal vision of America, but also the conservative vision of America as articulated by Paul Ryan in 2011 when he was hammering President Obama for engaging in what he thought was class warfare.
..Trump’s speech was garbage, pure and simple. Not only was it too often false, it was also flimsy, an effort to paint himself as a champion of the people who loathe him most.
Maybe the people who support him despise Clinton more than they cherish the truth, but for those who can see this man’s naked bigotry for what it is, this speech fell like seeds on a stony place. Nothing will come of it.
How Low Can the G.O.P. Go?
A week earlier, Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, cut off reporters’ questions about Trump, declaring
I’m not going to be commenting on the presidential candidates today.
John Cornyn of Texas, the Senate majority whip, told Politico last week that he will not discuss Trump until Nov. 8, adding wistfully, “Wish me luck.”
On June 19, Paul Ryan, the House speaker, told Chuck Todd on “Meet the Press”:
Well, first of all I feel like I have certain responsibilities, as not just Congressman Paul Ryan from the first district of Wisconsin, but as Speaker of the House. And imagine the Speaker of the House not supporting the duly elected nominee of our party, therefore creating a chasm in our party to split us in half, which basically helps deny us the White House, and strong majorities in Congress.
As if that were not enough, Ryan continued down this path:
The last thing I want to see happen is another Democrat in the White House. I don’t want see Hillary Clinton as president. I want to see a strong majority in the House and the Senate. And I think the way to achieve those goals is to have a more unified party, than a disunified party. Now having said that, you know me well, Chuck. If something is done and said that I don’t agree with that I think puts a bad label on conservatism, then I’m going to speak out on it as I have, as I will continue to do, and I hope I don’t have to keep doing.
.. You know the Republicans — honestly folks, our leaders, our leaders have to get tougher. This is too tough to do it alone, but you know what I think I’m going to be forced to. I think I’m going to be forced to. Our leaders have to get a lot tougher. And be quiet. Just please be quiet. Don’t talk. Please be quiet. Just be quiet to the leaders because they have to get tougher, they have to get sharper, they have to get smarter. We have to have our Republicans either stick together or let me just do it by myself. I’ll do very well. I’m going to do very well. O.K.? I’m going to do very well. A lot of people thought I should do that anyway but I’ll just do it very nicely by myself.
America’s New Normal
Americans were ignorant of a reality that East Europeans had come to know intimately.
.. Thus, even today, we tend to see the world around us as natural. The roads we take to work and back home; the schools we attend and lessons we learn; the institutions that shape our lives and the lives of friends and families we may take for granted: All of this, for Americans, reflects the natural order of things.
.. There was a time, he writes, when people would have called the police upon seeing a dead body in the street; soon there are so many corpses that they pretend not to see them.
.. when the quarter’s inhabitants are trucked out, never to return, the others grow accustomed to the sight. What do they see? That nothing could be more natural.
.. History teaches us that what was unnatural yesterday becomes natural today.
.. Political language, George Orwell observed in his essay “Politics and the English Language,” is devised “to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable and to give the appearance of solidity to pure wind.”
.. Much has been said about the ways in which Trump’s rhetoric has shattered the norms of political discourse in our country. Yet, among his accomplishments, Trump has made Orwell, one of the 20th century’s most sober and lucid observers, appear naïve. It is no longer that language deceives, but that it no longer matters.
.. ethics is, in the end, little more than seeing the world clearly and finding clear words to convey what one sees. Such an ethics allows us to see that we most often prefer not to see, makes us hear what most often we prefer not to hear.
Donald Trump’s Problem Isn’t Corey Lewandowski. It’s Donald Trump.
he has long lived by Lord Beaverbrook’s maxim: Never apologize, never explain.
.. Trump appears to be a one-trick pony. In focussing, verbalizing, and mobilizing the political alienation of a certain segment of the American population—one largely, but not exclusively, drawn from the ranks of working-class and middle-class white men—he has no equal. But in appealing to the voters he needs beyond his base—suburban white women and conservative minority voters particularly—he has demonstrated little or no aptitude.
.. After Republicans subjected Trump to a barrage of criticism, and one of them, Senator Mark Kirk, of Illinois, withdrew his endorsement, Trump resorted to a teleprompter for a speech he delivered on June 7th, the day of the California primary.
.. Republican leaders such as Ryan and Mitch McConnell appear to be giving at least tacit support to the effort to replace him on the ticket.
,, Trump still has a potential path to victory, albeit a narrow one. It involves shoring up his position in red states such as Arizona and Georgia, where recent polls show Clinton to be competitive; carrying Florida and North Carolina; and blazing through the Rust Belt states of Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania.