As news of Trump’s taxes breaks, he goes off script at a rally in Pennsylvania

When Trump finally took the stage, it was clear that he was worked up about something as he quickly rushed through his usual talking points. He read the first sentence of the prepared statement: “A new audio tape that has surfaced — just yesterday — from another one of Hillary’s high-roller fundraisers shows her demeaning and mocking Bernie Sanders and all of his supporters.”

Rather than continuing, Trump demeaned and mocked Sanders himself, saying that he has “a much bigger movement than Bernie Sanders ever had” and that he has “much bigger crowds than Bernie Sanders ever had.”

.. He told the crowd to get a group of friends together on Election Day, vote and then go to “certain areas” and “watch” the voters there. “I hear too many bad stories, and we can’t lose an election because of you know what I’m talking about,” Trump said. “So, go and vote and then go check out areas because a lot of bad things happen, and we don’t want to lose for that reason.”

.. “Did anybody like Lester Holt?” Trump said, naming the debate moderator as his crowd booed.

.. Our country is becoming a third-world country.”

.. Trump read the final sentence of the statement but by that point, he had overshadowed his campaign’s planned headline with numerous other ones. And he kept adding to the list.

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.

Steve Bannon’s Bad Day: Allegations of Voter Fraud and Domestic Violence

Donald Trump’s new campaign CEO, who is registered to vote at an empty house in Florida, may be as scandal-plagued as his predecessors.

.. But voting experts point out that there are virtually no documented cases of in-person voter fraud, where someone shows up and votes in someone else’s name. More common are cases where someone is registered at an address where they don’t live—just like Bannon. It’s not altogether uncommon for people to have failed to update old registrations, but it’s particularly embarrassing for Bannon, since he is running a presidential campaign, no less one that is warning about widespread fraud.

.. Not only is the whiff of voter fraud an embarrassing disclosure for a campaign that has railed against it, but the domestic-violence charges make Bannon the latest figure on the Trump campaign embroiled in misogyny and violence.

.. his ex-wife Ivana even alleged marital rape, though she has since withdrawn the claim.

.. Manafort, in turn, was hired as a counterweight to and later a replacement for Corey Lewandowski

.. But Lewandowski was pushed aside and later fired, beset by the campaign’s struggles at winning delegates but also by Lewandowski’s repeated physical altercations on the trail. In the most high-profile case, Lewandowski grabbed then-Breitbart reporter Michelle Fields at a rally in Florida, then denied he had done so. Although a prosecutor declined to bring charges, video evidence showed Lewandowski had lied about the encounter.