“Solid. Smart. Loves politics, knows how to win.”
That’s one way to put it. Win at any cost would be another, and that’s being polite. If Bossie’s name doesn’t ring a bell, you’re lucky, because it means that you haven’t been immersed for the past two decades-plus in the mucky minutiae of the right’s no-holds-barred war against Bill and Hillary Clinton.
.. He is the Captain Ahab of Clinton haters.
.. Back in 1992, Bossie was working with Floyd Brown, of Willie Horton 1988 campaign ad fame, on an anti-Clinton effort that included a phone line in which callers could pay $4.99 to hear supposed sex tapes between Bill Clinton and Gennifer Flowers.
.. “Not since Roy Cohn — the bare-knuckled chief counsel for Sen. Joe McCarthy in the Red-hunting hearings of the 1950s — has a congressional staffer been so thoroughly demonized by his enemies,”
.. Bossie resigned under pressure, after accusations that tapes of former Hillary Clinton law partner Webster Hubbell had been unfairly edited to exclude exculpatory comments about whether Clinton had known of his phony billing
.. In a closed-door Republican conference meeting, then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich told Burton he was “embarrassed . . . at the circus that went on at your committee,”
How Many Division Has the Jonah Goldberg Class?
Every time you hear him talk about the Constitution, it’s like he’s trying to remember his high-school French.
.. Trump’s lodestars are not liberty and freedom — he virtually never uses the terms, and shows little interest in discovering how he should. He values “winning” and “strength” and innumerate and illiterate beggar-thy-neighbor economics.
.. he is a glandular, generally friendless (by his own admission), zero-sum conniver who has made it clear that he sees nothing wrong with breaking promises — in business, in matrimony, and in politics — so long as he’s dubbed a “winner” by a narcissistic standard of his own choosing.
.. Many of the so-called gatekeepers of conservatism have been utterly inadequate to the task of protecting that which we love, because while we’ve been guarding the gate, the Trumpians have smashed down the walls on either side of it. And in response, many have left their post to join the mob, in the spirit of “There go the people. I must follow them, for I am their leader!”
.. Even if I could bring over the entire Jonah Goldberg Class, Trump would still be underwater with independent and moderate Republican women, minorities, etc. —because Donald Trump is a very bad candidate, which is why I think the people most responsible for a Republican loss in November are those who couldn’t or wouldn’t see that.
.. I will tell you who I have contempt for and it’s not Ace or the gang at American Greatness or even Sean Hannity. It’s the class of pro-Trump pundits and politicians who, the moment the cameras blink off, turn to me or my friends and say how awful Trump is. A related group are the political reporters who go on TV and skew their analysis so as to ensure that they don’t burn their sources in the Trump campaign, at least not until they write their post-election post-mortems. Another group are the commentators and opportunists who see Trump’s candidacy as a useful way to establish themselves as cable-news “celebrities” or boost their ratings.
.. By their own words, the alt-righters want to destroy and replace classical liberalism and modern conservatism and replace it with some tribal “identitarian” understanding of whiteness as a unifying concept. In this it shares the same modes of thought as the radical racialist Left.
.. its real goal is to not just turn the alt-right into the Right, pure and simple, but to transform the consciousness of all white Americans — and white people everywhere — into racial jingoists. That’s not who white Americans are, thank God, and I see no reason to give an inch to the alt-righters’ effort to create an alt-white consciousness based upon the pigments of their imagination.
Tensions Deepen Between Donald Trump and R.N.C.
The Republican National Committee had high hopes that Donald J. Trump would deliver a compassionate and measured speech about immigration on Wednesday, and prepared to lavish praise on the candidate on the party’s Twitter account.
.. The evening tore a painful new wound in Mr. Trump’s relationship with the Republican National Committee, imperiling his most important remaining political alliance.
Mr. Priebus and his organization have been steadfastly supportive of Mr. Trump, defending him in public and spending millions of dollars to aid him. But the collaboration between Mr. Trump’s campaign and Mr. Priebus’s committee has grown strained over the last month
.. There is no prospect of a full public breach between the Trump campaign and the R.N.C. because both sides rely on a joint fund-raising arrangement crucial to their election efforts.
.. Mr. Trump, who has struggled to raise money, is dependent on his party’s national committee to perform many of the basic functions of a presidential campaign.
.. Within Mr. Trump’s circle, there is impatience with what advisers view as a cautious and conventional party bureaucracy, ill-equipped to accommodate Mr. Trump’s improvisational style
.. power is so divided among strategists and members of the Trump family that the process of making even simple decisions is laborious and unpredictable.
.. Mr. Priebus, who has a warm relationship with Mr. Trump and speaks with him daily
.. Throughout the campaign, Mr. Priebus and his committee have been broadly deferential to Mr. Trump, declining to criticize many of his most provocative remarks and quickly designating him as the party’s presumptive nominee in May. For Mr. Trump, Mr. Priebus has appeared to be a patient and accommodating partner, eager to promote his campaign and willing to rebuke Republicans who have declined to support him.
.. In a tone that several witnesses described as imperious and aggressive, Mr. Kushner suggested that the national committee might not be giving Mr. Trump all the support he was due.
.. Ms. Walsh told Mr. Kushner that the committee had a responsibility to take a broad view of its finances, mapping out a budget for the entire party and ensuring it could remain operational for the rest of the year, and could not solely focus on Mr. Trump’s needs.
.. Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former New York City mayor who has become one of Mr. Trump’s closest advisers
.. “The R.N.C. is giving him a lot of support,” Mr. Giuliani said. “He doesn’t have the united Republican Party behind him in the way that a more establishment candidate would.”
Trump’s immigration rope-a-dope
After diplomatic turn in Mexico, a fiery immigration speech proves the GOP nominee’s moderation to be a ruse.
Having ditched his traveling press corps, Trump’s lie that he and President Enrique Peña Nieto didn’t discuss who would pay for his border wall wasn’t exposed until the Mexican president tweeted that they had a few hours later
.. Trump and his campaign had used Peña Nieto as a prop in an opening act that served only to set up an evening stemwinder. The farce was, in hindsight, clear even before Trump approached the mic, as two of his warm-up speakers, Rudy Giuliani and Jeff Sessions, donned Trump hats that read “Make Mexico Great Again Also.”
.. He reverted to the tough talk he was unable to muster on foreign soil just hours earlier about Mexico paying for the wall.
.. Toward the end of his speech, he used the personal anecdotes of mothers whose children were killed by undocumented immigrants to further demonize “illegals.”
.. Trump’s revived bombast and the 10-pronged list of immigration policy ideas were actually a clumsy effort to obscure the fact that he is no longer vowing to immediately deport every undocumented immigrant in the country illegally