If Trump’s campaign was actually built on uncomfortable truthtelling, his obvious dissembling and disregard for facts in these cases might be damaging. After months of violence at Trump rallies, and after he strategically stoked the anger, Trump now insists it’s someone else’s problem. But blaming outside provocateurs while refusing to acknowledge any internal flaws is in keeping with the Trump campaign. Trump’s candidacy is, like his famously over-the-top resorts, essentially an escapist exercise: It promises people who are angry about the state of the nation that there is a simple solution and they don’t have to change anything. The problem is always somewhere else, someone else.
Hill Republicans don’t blame Trump for violence
Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) sided mostly with Trump, who’s been unapologetic about his rhetoric and blamed protesters for wreaking havoc. The longest-serving GOP senator said he had his own run-in over the weekend with liberal protesters, who implored him to “do your job” and take up a Supreme Court nominee.
“It’s amazing to me in my life it’s always been Democrats who do that. It’s not Republicans,” Hatch said in an interview on Monday. “I hate to say it, I but do believe the media’s going to blame Republicans no matter what happens” at Trump rallies.
“I don’t see where anything [Trump] says is so inflammatory that it justifies doing what they did in Chicago. He’s funny in a lot of ways, he’s provocative and interesting. He’s all of those. So he’s certainly not calling on people to be rude and ignorant and invasive of the program that’s going on,” Hatch added. “I don’t think anybody on either side is really condoning that kind of thing.”
.. Ryan was the most forceful on Monday, clearly referring to Trump when he said that “the candidates need to take responsibility for the environment at their events. There is never an excuse for condoning violence, or even a culture that presupposes it.”
.. If Republicans have any hope of retaining Senate control with their large House majority while running alongside Trump, they’ll need to figure out how to harness the enthusiasm of his supporters without being dragged down by his incendiary statements.
Ben Carson: Even if Trump’s a bad president, it’ll only be 4 years
“Even if Donald Trump turns out not to be such a great president, which I don’t think is the case, I think he’s going to surround himself with really good people, but even if he didn’t, we’re only looking at four years as opposed to multiple generations and perhaps the loss of the American dream forever,” Carson told Newsmax‘s Steve Malzberg.
Carson Endorses the Demagogue
On Friday, I watched yet another bizarre scene from an already bizarre election cycle: The affable but hopelessly vacant Ben Carson endorsing the demagogic real estate developer who once said of Carson that he had a “pathological temper” as a child and compared him to a child molester.
.. This is the same Ben Carson who has inveighed against the “purveyors of division,” who played a video at his presidential campaign announcement in Detroit in which the narrator said in part: