Putin’s friendship with the Italian may simply demonstrate that the Russian leader has a natural chemistry with a rich, politically incorrect businessman.
.. “Putin is very strategic. He would focus on people’s vulnerabilities — whether their vanity or greed or financial needs.”
.. Putin, drawing from his background as an intelligence officer, had made a “calculated” overture to Trump early in the presidential campaign, “playing upon Mr. Trump’s vulnerabilities by complimenting him,” and turning Trump into an “unwitting agent” of Russia.
Asked about Trump in December, Putin described the New Yorker as “bright and talented,” words that clearly pleased Trump: “It is always a great honor to be so nicely complimented by a man so highly respected within his own country and beyond,” the mogul told reporters soon after... Berlusconi holidayed at Putin’s dacha on the Black Sea, while the Russian stayed at the Italian leader’s villa in Sardinia.
.. At various times Berlusconi defended Putin’s military incursion into the republic of Georgia, which the U.S. and much of Europe strongly denounced. He praised Putin’s leadership style.
.. “In reality, what he was doing was pushing Putin’s agenda with no real guarantee that Putin would ever compromise on our agenda,” says the U.S. official, who spoke to POLITICO. “I see a similar trend with Trump.”
.. the former German chancellor Gerhard Schroeder joined the board of the Russian energy giant Gazprom, and in 2014 he attended a lavish 70th birthday party thrown for him by a Gazprom subsidiary in St. Petersburg
The Unhappy Campaign Of Paul Manafort
Manafort had reason to know this from the start ― and reason to know that his advice would be ignored.
The taco bowl incident, trivial though it was, is one example. On Cinco de Mayo, Trump happened to be eating a taco bowl for lunch at his desk in Trump Tower. Manafort was in the office with other aides when a member of the family suggested they tweet a picture of Trump enjoying his “Mexican” lunch.
Manafort politely suggested that this might be seen as condescending and cautioned against it. The tweet went out. Trump himself was delighted by the resulting controversy. “The people who were offended were people we wanted to offend,” he later said.
A super-confident bearing is essential in Manafort’s main trade, which involves advising foreign authoritarian leaders on how to win elections using old-style American tactics.
But the fact is that Manafort, as shrewd and capable as he is, never managed a presidential campaign, or any high-level American campaign effort. He is a master of conventions and delegate counting, which is an insiders’ game. He is not an outward-facing message, media and U.S. voting expert.
.. “Paul’s knowledge, such as it is, is about 20 years old,” said a longtime adviser to Trump, who declined to be identified and is not in the Lewandowski camp. “He doesn’t know the new demographics or the new media.
..
Rather, the GOP presidential nominee maintains a floating array of power centers around him. His office can be crowded with sub-groups vying for attention, undercutting each other. He plays them off against each other, which allows him to keep his options open and deny chain-of-command responsibility that a hierarchy would impose.
The Pull of Racial Patronage
Alternatively, the more you favor a left-wing politics that stresses economic forces above all else, the more you’ll cast Trump’s blue collar support as the bitter fruit of the Democratic Party’s turn to neoliberalism
.. My sympathies are with the second group in both debates — as a partisan of a more solidaristic conservatism, and as an outsider who prefers the old left’s class politics to the pseudo-cosmopolitanism of elite liberalism today.
.. Eventually, we ended up with a liberalism that favors permanent preferences for minority groups, permanently large immigration flows — plus welfare programs that recent immigrants are more likely than native-born Americans to use.
.. it still amounts to a system of ethnic patronage, which white Americans who are neither well-off nor poor enough to be on Medicaid see as particularly biased against them.
.. the gainfully employed but insecure lower middle class, is the Trumpian core.
.. By embracing white identity politics, they’re being bigoted but also, in their own eyes, imitative: Trump’s protectionist argle-bargle boils down to a desire to once again have policies that specifically benefit lower-middle-class whites — welfare for legacy industries and affirmative action for white men.
.. the absence of economic common ground between Hillary-voting white moderates and the party’s poorer, minority base means that her temporary coalition is likely to fracture first along racial lines.
That fracturing will help the G.O.P. recover, but it won’t help Republicans build a pan-racial conservatism. The pull of white identity politics can be overcome, but only with great effort.
Donald Trump Appoints Media Firebrand to Run Campaign
Mr. Bannon was appointed a day after the recently ousted Fox News chairman, Roger Ailes, emerged in an advisory role with Mr. Trump. It was not lost on Republicans in Washington that two news executives whose outlets had fueled the anti-establishment rebellion that bedeviled congressional leaders and set the stage for Mr. Trump’s nomination were now directly guiding the party’s presidential message and strategy.
Mr. Bannon’s most recent crusade was his failed attempt to oust the House speaker, Paul D. Ryan, in this month’s primary, making his new role atop the Trump campaign particularly provocative toward Republican leaders in Washington.
.. Mr. Bannon is likely to be more amenable to letting him run the sort of media-focused campaign he prefers.
.. “This is Trump going back to the nativism and nationalism that fueled his rise in the primary,” said Lanhee J. Chen, who was Mr. Romney’s policy director in 2012. “But it’s very dangerous to the future of the party because it only further narrows the appeal of a party whose appeal was already narrow going into this cycle.”
.. the possibility that the coming weeks could resemble a conservative publicity tour more than a conventional White House run, fueled speculation that Mr. Trump was already looking past November.
.. the growing influence of Robert Mercer and his daughter Rebekah, conservative donors from Long Island. The Mercers are investors in Breitbart
.. Before Mr. Ailes’s ouster, some of the network’s most prominent journalists and contributors privately complained that Mr. Ailes was pushing them to be more supportive of Mr. Trump.