Here’s the twist: Look at the man who threatens to pull the trigger on mentioning the Clinton scandals — a serial adulterer who is more removed from twinges of conscience than any figure in American political life. He boasts of his extra-marital affairs. He humiliated the mother of his children. He is the Playboy philosophy made flesh. He even found the time to mock Paula Jones as a “loser” and argue that Bill Clinton’s conduct was “totally unimportant.” His factotums, Newt Gingrich and Rudy Giuliani, are also serial adulterers, though they didn’t boast about it. Still, their boss’s crudeness has now rubbed off.
Girl Talk at Trump Tower
Every minute of every day, Trump debunks that old “science” when he shows that the gossipy, backbiting, scolding, mercurial, overly emotional, shrewish, menopausal one in this race is not the woman.
Trump is surrounded by a bitchy sewing circle of overweight men who are overwrought at the prospect of a distaff Clinton presidency.
Newt Gingrich, Chris Christie, Roger Ailes and Rudy Giuliani are the Really Desperate Housewives of Trumpworld.
.. A witness at the infamous bridge trial painted Christie as a vengeful and manipulative she-devil
.. Ailes was supposed to help prep Trump for the first debate, but he was too busy pouting on his fainting couch about losing his job.
.. Her longtime Arkansas friend Jim Blair told the paper her response to “bimbo eruptions,” as they were called, was: “These people are not going to run over us.” This, even though in case after case, Bill Clinton would later admit the women were telling the truth.
.. Women are known as having more tender feelings, but no one on the planet is more thin-skinned than Trump.
.. Trump’s team wants to prepare him for the second debate with an actual rehearsal — as opposed to coming up with zingers over cheeseburgers and Cokes. They want to toss him questions that will get under his skin, so that next time he doesn’t let his emotions get the better of him and go all PMS
The Paranoid Style in American Politics Is Back
.. historian Richard Hofstadter famously described in 1964 as “The Paranoid Style in American Politics”:
In fact, the idea of the paranoid style as a force in politics would have little contemporary relevance or historical value if it were applied only to men with profoundly disturbed minds. It is the use of paranoid modes of expression by more or less normal people that makes the phenomenon significant.
The paranoia of the Trump campaign has found expression in the accusation that the Republican establishment in the primaries and now Hillary Clinton and her allies in the general election are committed to rigging the election to prevent Trump’s rightful accession to the White House.
.. Hofstadter describes the paranoid style as
made up of certain preoccupations and fantasies: the megalomaniac view of oneself as the Elect, wholly good, abominably persecuted, yet assured of ultimate triumph; the attribution of gigantic and demonic powers to the adversary.
.. Trump’s strongest supporters do in fact feel abominably persecuted. They are unlikely to fade away gracefully.
.. Roger Stone, a Trump confidant, shared his own thinking with Milo Yiannopoulos of Breitbart News on July 29:
I think we have widespread voter fraud, but the first thing that Trump needs to do is begin talking about it constantly.
.. Stone’s advice was that Trump should say,
I am leading in Florida. The polls all show it. If I lose Florida, we will know that there’s voter fraud. If there’s voter fraud, this election will be illegitimate, the election of the winner will be illegitimate, we will have a constitutional crisis, widespread civil disobedience, and the government will no longer be the government.
.. The poll found that 56 percent of Trump supporters believed the election would be rigged. Among all voters, 34 percent predicted a rigged election; 60 percent rejected the notion.
.. Part of the reason that our nation has been relatively free of political violence is that losers of contests have nearly always accepted their loss and opposed the victor through legitimate means, such as challenging them in future elections or working against their agenda in Congress. The 2000 election was very close and obviously very controversial, but Al Gore nonetheless conceded after the Supreme Court’s ruling. Were Trump and his supporters to continue to argue that the election had been stolen from them, it would mean that they reject nonviolent solutions to political differences. It could jeopardize future elections, undermine the legitimacy of the federal government, and create an environment in which political violence becomes more likely.
.. the so called alt-right — white nationalists and hard-line opponents of immigration who oppose multiculturalism and defend a particular vision of western values — has become an influential force in politics.
.. He’s certainly creating a movement that will continue independently of him even if he does fold at some point.
.. Hans Noel, a political scientist at Georgetown .. points to the problems a narrow Trump loss could pose for the Republican Party
.. The conviction that Democrats and the Washington establishment will rig the election in Clinton’s favor is by no means limited to the alt-right. Newt Gingrich, the former House Speaker, and Rudy Giuliani, the former mayor of New York, have both promoted the idea.
“There’s a long tradition on the part of Democratic machines of trying to steal elections,” Gingrich told Sean Hannity on Fox News on Aug. 2:
I mean, if you assume that she is a crook, as he says, if you assume that she lies, as he says, why would you expect her to have an honest election?
.. Fifty-two years ago, writing in the year of the Johnson-Goldwater election, Hofstadter proved remarkably prescient: the right wing, he argued,
feels dispossessed: America has been largely taken away from them and their kind, though they are determined to try to repossess it and to prevent the final destructive act of subversion.
.. The situation becomes worse when the representatives of a particular social interest — perhaps because of the very unrealistic and unrealizable nature of its demands — are shut out of the political process. Having no access to political bargaining or the making of decisions, they find their original conception that the world of power is sinister and malicious fully confirmed. They see only the consequences of power — and this through distorting lenses — and have no chance to observe its actual machinery.
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.”