“The focus needs to be not on whether an illegal immigrant is a good person or a bad person but how sustainable it is to incentivize illegal immigrants to come over our borders,” Mrs. Palin said.
.. Since the overhaul at the top, Mr. Trump has been relying more on teleprompters at his rallies, making direct appeals to black and Hispanic voters, and moderating his immigration policy.
Stephen Bannon, a Rookie Campaign Chief Who ‘Loves the Fight’
advised female victims of online harassment to “just log off” and stop “screwing up the internet for men,” illustrating that point with a picture of a crying child.
.. “Steve is a fighter. He loves the fight. He loves the scrum,”
.. Mr. Bannon, 62, who grew up in a Democratic family in Virginia that fled the party in favor of Richard Nixon’s law-and-order Republicanism
.. He made movies that lionized Sarah Palin and vilified the Occupy Wall Street movement as fraudulent rebels backed by well-off liberals.
.. Mr. Bannon, who declined to be interviewed for this article, has made little secret of his desire to frighten Americans out of complacency, fusing relentless provocation and a hodgepodge of conservative ideas to make the case for rebellion against the political order.
.. “Fear is a good thing,” he said in a 2010 interview. “Fear is going to lead you to take action.”
.. Breitbart received 18.3 million unique visitors in July
.. The site has outpaced conservative rivals like The Daily Caller, and Breitbart executives say that monthly traffic has increased by 16 times since the year Mr. Bannon took over.
.. “There are very few people who have dealt with Steve Bannon who have not been cursed at,”
Exclusive: Is Donald Trump’s Endgame the Launch of Trump News?
The candidate is considering starting his own cable empire.
He has also discussed the possibility of launching a “mini-media conglomerate” outside of his existing TV-production business, Trump Productions LLC. He has, according to one of these people, enlisted the consultation of his daughter Ivanka Trump and son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who owns the The New York Observer.Trump’s rationale, according to this person, is that, “win or lose, we are onto something here. We’ve triggered a base of the population that hasn’t had a voice in a long time.” For his part, Kushner was heard at a New York dinner party saying that “the people here don’t understand what I’m seeing. You go to these arenas and people go crazy for him.”.. Trump, this person close to the matter suggests, has become irked by his ability to create revenue for other media organizations without being able to take a cut himself. Such a situation “brings him to the conclusion that he has the business acumen and the ratings for his own network.” Trump has “gotten the bug,” according to this person. “So now he wants to figure out if he can monetize it.”
.. Republican candidates have historically used the protracted national election cycle to indirectly land gigs on Fox News or Sirius XM. Election cycles have become veritable job interviews for the likes of Sarah Palin, Mike Huckabee, and others.
.. People around him have looked to the Oprah Winfrey Network—partly owned by Winfrey’s Harpo Productions and Discovery Communications—as a possible model, but OWN, too, was beset with its own issues in its early days. As Winfrey herself once famously noted, “Had I known that it was this difficult, I might have done something else.”
Introducing the Trump News Channel—Coming in 2017?
If Trump loses, his consolation prize may be a whole new right wing media juggernaut.
.. There is so much about the Trump campaign that doesn’t make sense so long as one assumes that its purpose is to propel the candidate to victory at the ballot box. But what if those involved now perceive a more attractive––or at least plausible–– endgame?
.. Trump and associates will be proved failures at electoral politics. But even if that proves so, I wouldn’t bet against a right-wing media behemoth that brought together Trump, Roger Ailes, Stephen Bannon, Ann Coulter, Matt Drudge, and Sarah Palin, especially if they had some help:
.. Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity and Greta Van Susteren all might exit the network if parent company 21st Century Fox gets rid of Ailes in the wake of a sexual harassment lawsuit
.. Trump’s rationale, according to this person, is that, “win or lose, we are onto something here. We’ve triggered a base of the population that hasn’t had a voice in a long time.”
.. For that reason, GOP officials and movement conservatives ought to be preparing for worst case scenarios. And a Donald Trump Network is perhaps the worst case possible.
.. A Trump campaign expecting to lose and then launch an effort of that sort would have every incentive to hoard campaign donations to pay back debt incurred by Trump himself; to be maximally inflammatory, polarizing the electorate while further cultivating a core of true believers; to aggressively blame Fox News, National Review, Glenn Beck, and all other potential competitors in order to alienate them from their audiences; even to sabotage the GOP down ballot, depending on just how cynical the folks running things are. After all, what could be better for business, if you’re a new media conglomerate to the right of Fox News, than a Hillary Clinton presidency supercharged by a Democratic House and Senate?
.. Since the Bush Administration, I’ve been warning the right that its media demagogues were doing great harm to the conservative movement, the Republican Party, and the country. A Trump News Network, while a ludicrous and absurd satirist’s gold mine, would do even greater harm