As Donald Trump`s fortunes continue to slide, he`s increasingly dragging the fortunes of senate republican`s weapon.
The Cook Political Report now predicting senate democrats are poised to pick up five to seven seats, which would give them the majority. Pointing out the history shows that races in the Toss Up column never split down the middle, one party tends to win the lion`s share of them. With two weeks to Election Day, there`s not enough time for republicans to recover toss-up seats in states where Hillary Clinton is currently leading, considering this, early voting is under way, and [Donald]Trump won`t be any help especially since his campaign doesn`t really have a ground game to speak of.
[Donald] Trump`s campaign, the Republican National Committee and state parties employ just 1,409 staffers in 16 states. So, nearly for the one, democratic advantage in human resources, the big question now is, how well does that turn out machinery work for democrats for Election Day?
It's no accident that there is a nexus between Trump, Roger Stone and Infowars and Alex Jones. It's very much an Infowars presidency in many ways. The President is a conspiracy theorist. He has reliably touted conspiracy theories. It's a core part of how he processes the world epistemically. That is deeply, deeply dangerous, and disturbing.
Americans like to humiliate wrongdoers...We like, in short, to punish. It makes us feel good. By every conceivable metric - arrests, prosecutions, duration of sentences, conditions of imprisonment - the United States is by far the most punitive rich democracy.
Generally the impulse to find justice through punitive measures can be a kind of quicksand. What James Whitman, the scholar I cite in the chapter of my book, talks about as an urge to level down, I think you see that everywhere. We're going to be a punitive society, so we might as well level out that punitiveness. Bankers and college swim stars and everyone face that same kind of wrath.
The desire to punish is a desire that emanates from a place of equality and justice. The lesson I feel that we have to confront is that that impulse is so easily transmuted into something corrosive and corrupt in how it's actually put into practice. That's the danger. It's not that the impulse is wrong or unjust or not totally righteous. It's that the ways in which the system that operates, the system that we've constructed tends to not deliver the promise of equity we might want, when we look to the system to provide it.
We have different expectations for different groups of people. We tend to modulate the degree with which we're forgiving or punitive depending on how well we know folks, or how much we consider them peers, or how much social capital we've invested in them. That has to do with race, class, gender, and socioeconomic status. We have a tendency to bend over backwards to forgive folks we think of as part of "the us." The question of who we define as "the us" is a lot of what constitutes how we punish who we punish.
The central question for American politics right now is how did the country that elected Barack Obama elect Donald Trump. There's a lot to what Ta-Nehisi says about the racial reaction and backlash. And the power and the force and ultimately the success. The man who was selling this racist conspiracy theory about the first black President's birth: that's what launched him into a political career that ended up getting him elected the President of the United States. That is an absolutely remarkable fact.
All the people that you see on television defending Donald Trump have not been drafted into it.
There is a sense in which, like, it could be the case that the incentives of running for president and the incentives of getting maximum attention for yourself, sometimes align, and at a certain point, they stop aligning, and you just keep going with the incentives for maximum attention for yourself.
Now, in an analysis of campaign finance filings by Politico we learned the [Donald] Trump campaign has paid Trump businesses more than $8 million so far in this race, that includes $1.3 million in rent for campaign offices, half a million for food and facilities for events, over $300,000 for corporate staffers, and nearly $6 million for the use of Trump`s private plane.
We should note it is not illegal for the campaign to pay [Doanld] Trump owned businesses as long as they`re charging fair market rates. And while the optics are pretty stunning, we shouldn`t be surprised. Afterall, this is the guy that told Fortune magazine in 2000 it`s very possible I could be the first presidential candidate to run and make money on it.
If anonymous [Donald] Trump campaign sources are to be believed, they`re pretty concerned he`s going to blow the big debate Monday night with an utter lack of preparation.
In Utah, where the states` Mormon GOP electorate is especially unfavorable to [Donald] Trump.
Given [Donald] Trump`s polling deficit, his reluctance for ads until very recently in his near total lack of any ground game to speak off, it came as a surprise today that according to The Washington Post, Trump has stopped holding high-dollar fund-raising events, relying almost exclusively on online donations, which, of course, tend to be much smaller.
With the advent of Trump Tower Live, the campaign`s new nightly broadcast, streamed over Facebook, rumors are once again, swirling of a potential Trump media empire to be launched after the election.
Like one of [Donald] Trump`s sons said this is a huge step down for him to run for president. Like he`s not doing it - let`s just be clear.
Donald Trump isn`t doing anyone any favors by running to be the most powerful person on the planet, right?
I understand that that`s the theory of the case for [Donald] Trump supporters and it`s what Donald Trump says, and it`s possible that that is actually the case.
The other theory of the case - and it`s not just one that people opposed to him politically believe, but also people who share the Republican Party`s beliefs or conservative, but don`t like Donald Trump, is that he`s fundamentally a narcissist who has become addicted to the attention, is sort of compulsively driven by attention, and this has given him an outlet for that attention, and crucially doesn`t actually care about the party that he is nominally representing.
The degree to which I try to be honest that there's some Donald Trump in all of us. The seduction of the promise of order, the politics of white fear, it's not just some other group of uneducated white people who are susceptible to those appeals. It's everyone. And not just white people, frankly. All Americans have this susceptibility to a politics of fear and order that I think we have to be really honest about.
Politics is more than policy, right. Like, one thing that has occurred to me is Bernie Sanders is clearly a very adept and able politician, right. But he spent 30 years being a very adept and able politician in an almost entirely white state.
We were arguing about what was good to deal with making education fairer, diverse and more American. We were not arguing about where black scientists get a good education.
I think is interesting is that term is so pejorative or understood to be so pejorative and there`s a real difference between how Republicans, it seems to me, think of that and how Democrats do. I don`t think Democrats feel as negatively about the Democratic Party establishment as Republicans do feel about their party`s establishment.
