John Cassidy's Blog, page 22

Birtherism, Bombs, and Donald Trump’s Weekend

It’s been a whirlwind ninety-six hours, Chuck Todd, the host of NBC’s “Meet the Press,” noted during Sunday’s program. But, he added, “that’s pretty much the description you can do for any ninety-six hours during this campaign.” It was hard to argue with him. One of the difficulties of analyzing this election has been in disentangling the daily news, which has seldom failed to shock, from the larger forces driving the contest.

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Tim Kaine, America’s Dad, Makes His Pitch to Millennials
Morning Cartoon: Saturday, September 17th
Why Trump’s Maternity-Leave Plan Won’t Work

The Big Question About Donald Trump’s Rise in the Polls

Of all the opinion polls that have come out in the past few days, one in particular caught my eye. It was carried out in Michigan for the Detroit Free Press and WXYZ-TV, a Detroit station, and it showed that, in the past month, Hillary Clinton’s lead over Donald Trump in the Great Lakes State has narrowed from ten points to four points in a head-to-head matchup. “The race is tightening a lot in Michigan,” Bernie Porn, the pollster who carried out the statewide telephone survey, told the Free Press. “It may be a function of the timing of the survey and her health questions, [but] there has been a shift toward Trump. Whether it’s going to be a permanent shift is yet to be determined.”

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Why Trump’s Maternity-Leave Plan Won’t Work
Emotional Obama Tearfully Thanks Trump for Granting Him Citizenship
Morning Cartoon: Friday, September 16th

Does Donald Trump Pay Any Income Taxes at All?

The Washington Post’s David A. Fahrenthold is rightly getting a lot of attention for his stellar reporting on Donald Trump’s charitable giving, or the lack thereof. Fahrenthold and his colleagues have spent more than six months contacting hundreds of charities that Trump claims to have given money to through his family charity, the Donald J. Trump Foundation.

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Trump and the Truth: The Interest-Rate Flip-Flop
Mike Pence and the Meaning of “Deplorable”
Morning Cartoon: Wednesday, September 14th

Mike Pence and the Meaning of “Deplorable”

According to the Merriam-Webster online dictionary, this is the definition of the word “deplorable”: “very bad in a way that causes shock, fear, or disgust : deserving to be deplored.” If there is any public figure in America who fits that definition, it is surely David Duke. The Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks extremist individuals and groups, describes Duke as “the most recognizable figure of the American radical right, a neo-Nazi, longtime Klan leader and now international spokesman for Holocaust denial.”

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Getting Hillary Clinton to Talk About Her Health
Twenty Science Questions for Donald Trump
Afternoon Cartoon: Tuesday, September 13th

Clinton’s Pneumonia Shakes Up Campaign

What an election this is. On Monday morning, viewers tuning into “Fox & Friends” saw Donald Trump, who has spent months raising bogus concerns about Hillary Clinton’s health, wishing her a speedy recovery from an actual illness: pneumonia. “I just hope she gets well and gets back on the trail and we’ll be seeing her at the debate,” Trump said.

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Nuclear Lessons for Clinton and Trump from 1949
Afternoon Cartoon: Monday, September 12th
Morning Cartoon: Monday, September 12th

Hillary Clinton’s “Basket of Deplorables” Gaffe

One of the pressing questions of the 2016 campaign is: Why are so many Americans supporting Donald Trump? Broadly speaking, there are two competing theories, one cultural and the other economic. According to the first theory, the most powerful force motivating Trump supporters is resentment at the liberal, multicultural society that they see developing around them, a resentment largely rooted in racism. The economic theory, meanwhile, argues that what has turned Trumpism into a mass movement isn’t racism so much as the failure of the American economy to deliver rising living standards for much of the population—particularly the working-class and middle-class white households that prospered during the postwar decades.

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The Lives of Poor White People
Poll: Unconscious Clinton More Fit to Be President Than Conscious Trump
Trump and the Truth: The Unemployment-Rate Hoax

Donald Trump’s Big Lies at the Commander-in-Chief Forum

According to many accounts, it was the young Adolf Hitler who coined the term “Big Lie.” In his 1925 tract, “Mein Kampf,” he wrote that “the broad masses” are more likely to “fall victims to the big lie than the small lie,” because “It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.”

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Afternoon Cartoon: Thursday, September 8th
What to Make of Military Endorsements
Hillary Clinton’s Patriotism

Trump University: The Scandal That Won’t Go Away

If news cycles were driven by issues of import, rather than what’s new, Trump University, the scandal-plagued learning annex which promised to teach its students Donald Trump’s secrets of how to get rich in real estate, would never leave the front pages and home pages of American media outlets. As I noted in a June post that was based on court documents, even some of Trump University’s own employees regarded it as giant ripoff.  The idea that the proprietor, and principal promoter, of such an enterprise could end up in the Oval Office is absurd on its face.

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Afternoon Cartoon: Wednesday, September 7th
Morning Cartoon: Wednesday, September 7th
The Election Is Still Hillary Clinton’s to Lose

The Election Is Still Hillary Clinton’s to Lose

With nine weeks left until the general election, most signs point to a victory for Hillary Clinton. In head-to-head national polling she has been ahead of Donald Trump for much of the past year, and in most recent surveys she has retained the lead. At the state level, too, Clinton holds the advantage: over the summer she moved ahead of Trump in many key battleground states, greatly complicating his path to accumulate two hundred and seventy votes in the Electoral College.

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Don DeLillo and Move-In Day
Morning Cartoon: Monday, September 5th

The Challenge of Rebranding Donald Trump

Donald Trump, Inc., is badly lagging the competition, losing market share, alarming its financial backers, and being portrayed by its main rival as a toxic product that incites hatred and bigotry. From a business perspective, there is no doubt what is needed: a major rebranding campaign.

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Rodrigo Duterte’s Campaign of Terror in the Philippines
The Far Right’s Obsession with Hillary’s Health
Pence Recaptured After Fleeing Trump Campaign Bus