JUST A REMINDER: THE GOP IS STILL INCAPABLE OF AGREEING ON AN ALTERNATIVE TO TRUMP

Two guys who probably don't agree on much -- Ace at the greybeard right-wing blog Ace of Spades and Jonathan Bernstein of Bloomberg Politics -- think Donald Trump could be dumped at the Republican convention.

Ace:

I have heard that there are in fact schemes a-brewing to replace Trump with Ryan at the convention. How, you say? Well, simply by rewriting all the rules to allow delegates to vote as they will, for any candidate.

Now you may say "But that's extreme; they'd destroy the party."

Yes, but there are two competing considerations:

1. Elite GOP opinion-- the Upper Middle Class and Capital Class that controls the party -- is horribly embarrassed by Trump, and, little secret, they run this thing. You vote in it, but they run it.

And the people who run it can change the rules as they like.

2. Trump appears to be a likely loser.

... that's what I take all this judge bullshit to be about -- the psyops necessary to justify the party rewriting the rules and kicking Trump the hell out.

Bernstein:

... it's worth noting: All it would take to dump him in Cleveland would be a vote to free the delegates, followed by having at least half of the convention oppose him on the first ballot.

Technically, they wouldn’t even have to have an alternate candidate. Trump dissenters could vote for various other candidates -- or Mickey Mouse, for that matter -- as long as a total of 1,237 of them don’t vote for Trump.

Remember, the campaigns don't directly choose most Republican delegates. They are bound to a candidate, but may or may not personally support that candidate. And the convention has the final word on its own rules. The bottom line is that a convention majority with the support of the convention chairman -- House Speaker Paul Ryan, in this case -- can do pretty much whatever it wants....

I’m not predicting anything. I’m just saying it'd be great to have a count after the final delegates are chosen this week of exactly how many of them were chosen by Trump and dedicated to him.

Granted, without a candidate to rally behind, the result of defeating Trump at the convention might be chaos. But at some point, does chaos start looking good to some Republicans?

But GOP insiders couldn't settle on a consensus Establishment candidate in the run-up to the Iowa caucuses. They couldn't settle on a consensus anti-Trump candidate when the field began to be winnowed. They couldn't settle on a #NeverTrump strategy -- vote for whoever can win a particular state? put all the chips on Ted Cruz? -- when Trump began sprinting toward the finish line. The most prominent advocate of a third-party challenger, Bill Kristol, fantasized on Twitter about all sorts of A-list names (Mitt Romney, Condi Rice, David Petraeus) until he finally settled on a C-list pundit David French ... who then turned him down.

So it's not that replacing Trump is theoretically impossible for them. It's that they're clearly incapable of collective action that would be in their mutual self-interest.

Ace thinks Paul Ryan would be the replacement nominee. RedState is floating a rumor that Scott Walker would take the gig if the party offered it. But meanwhile, Ted Cruz has the second-highest number of delegates, as well as an overgrown debate nerd's fondness for parliamentary infighting. Oh, and I suppose the threat of convention unrest from Roger Stone and others if Trump is denied the nomination is still on the table.

So Trump's not going to dethroned. The GOP can't possibly get its act together.

NEW YORK TIMES ED BOARD: IT'S HILLARY'S JOB TO REBUT CONSPIRACY THEORIES FROM PRIMARY TRUTHERS

Hillary Clinton is the presumptive presidential nominee of the Democratic Party, and the New York Times editorial board thinks it's her job to rebut crazy claims that she won the nomination through fraud:

Now comes more hard work for Mrs. Clinton. Many in this newest generation of American voters say that they don’t trust her, or that she represents a Washington disconnected from their struggles. They backed Bernie Sanders and his demand that government provide health care, education and opportunity for everyone. Among some of his supporters there will be lingering frustration and a belief that the party’s leaders conspired to deprive them of their choice.

This isn’t an accurate or fair assessment, but Mrs. Clinton must address it. Unlike the Democratic stalwarts Mrs. Clinton delivered to Barack Obama in 2008, younger voters, including many Sanders supporters, are generally less likely to turn out. Unless she makes a substantial effort to win them over, they might stay home, and low turnout historically helps Republicans.

(Emphasis added.)

Why is this her responsibility? Why is it not the responsibility, at least in large part, of the Sanders campaign, which has allowed that notion of a "rigged system" to fester and metastasize among supporters?

A story that appeared at Politico last night makes clear that Bernie Sanders really is not interested in reconciliation:

There are many divisions within the Sanders campaign....

But more than any of them, Sanders is himself filled with resentment, on edge, feeling like he gets no respect -- all while holding on in his head to the enticing but remote chance that Clinton may be indicted before the convention....

Take the combative statement after the Nevada showdown.

“I don’t know who advised him that this was the right route to take, but we are now actively destroying what Bernie worked so hard to build over the last year just to pick up two fucking delegates in a state he lost,” rapid response director Mike Casca complained to Weaver in an internal campaign email obtained by POLITICO.

“Thank you for your views. I’ll relay them to the senator, as he is driving this train,” Weaver wrote back....

Top Sanders aides admit that it’s been weeks, if not months, since they themselves realized he wasn’t going to be win....

They haven’t been able to get Sanders focused on any of that....

“He wants to be in the race until the end, until the roll call vote,” Weaver said.

He made clear in his speech last night that mending fences is not a priority:

In a speech of striking stubbornness, he ignored the history-making achievement of his Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton, who became the first woman in American history to clinch the presidential nomination of major political party....

At almost every turn, he was grudging toward Mrs. Clinton, passing up a chance to issue the kind of lengthy salute that many, in and out of the Democratic Party, had expected and craved.

At this point, I think in some ways it's less important for him to say nice things about Clinton than it is for him to say that she won fair and square. He doesn't even have to stop complaining about what he regards as inherent problems with the Democratic primary process. But he needs to say that this was a legitimate election. This is important because a significant percentage of his voters don't believe that.

I live in New York, where there's no early voting, where primaries are closed, where unaffiliated voters who want to register with a party have to do so many months before an election, and where elections are controlled by incompetent hacks who can't manintain voters rolls properly. All of this should be reassessed. None of it was in place specifically to thwart Bernie Sanders.

The superdelegate system wasn't put a place specifically to thwart Sanders. The notion of a Super Tuesday, early in the primary season, that's focused largely on Southern states wasn't put in place specifically to thwart Sanders. Good or bad, these were fixed aspects of the primary process. There's nothing devious or secret about them. It was up to Sanders to find a way to address them. (Superdelegates were always likely to gravitate toward the party favorite. Barack Obama had to overcome that hurdle in 2008, and he did.)

What's happened now is that many Sanders voters now sound like Obama birthers or 9/11 truthers -- to them, at this point, every fact or rumor or offhand remark or stray pixel in a digital file becomes part of an ever-expanding web of deceit.

@PlacidiJoe @chemoelectric @nomoremister @terri_georgia Documented voting concerns, secret docs being withheld, big money.Something is amiss

— Teresa (@TeresaMayNot) June 8, 2016

Trump World is now taking advantage of Sandersite fraud memes. Donald Trump said this in his speech last night:

To all of those Bernie Sanders voters who have been left out in the cold by a rigged system of superdelegates, we welcome you with open arms.

Jim Hoft of Gateway Pundit, a Trump backer, is spreading the ridiculous notion that the Clinton campaign was "CAUGHT COLLUDING With AP" because graphics in a Clinton campaign email celebrating her attainment of presumptive-nominee status were apparenly dated a couple of days before Clinton actually reached that status, as determined by Associated Press and other media organizations. The notion was first spread by Sandersites.

Basic notions of delegate math that are knowable and have been accepted throughout the world of politics for many election cycles are now deemed fraudulent by conspiratorial Berners. Delegate math is why the Clinton could foresee victory this week and had a staffer creating victory graphics over the weekend. But Sandersites are scrutinizing those graphics the way wingnuts scrutinize Obama birth documents.

Sanders needs to tell his followers that this was a legitimate election. This absolutely isn't, as the Times ed board argues, all Clinton's responsibility.

But I don't think Sanders will ever do this. He's too angry.

OF COURSE REPUBLICANS CAN CONDEMN TRUMP WHILE ENDORSING HIM INDEFINITELY

Chris Cillizza thinks mainstream Republican supporters of Donald Trump can't sustain their strategy of backing him while keeping him at arm's length until November:

House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) said Tuesday that Trump's comments about Judge Gonzalo Curiel are "the textbook definition of racism" before adding: "Do I believe Hillary Clinton is the answer? I do not."

... Think of the logical inconsistency in Ryan's comments Tuesday. Yes, Trump is engaging in a "textbook" example of racism. No, I will not rescind my support. What conclusion can possibly be drawn from those comments? That, sure, Trump is playing with racism but he's still better than Clinton?

The way Ryan sets up the argument -- if it's not Trump then it's Clinton -- bypasses a third option that the likes of Mitt Romney, Jeb Bush and Graham have already taken: Choose not to vote in this election because you cannot in good conscience support either of the candidates.

I get that no politician who spends his or her life asking people to vote and emphasizing how important doing so is for democracy wants to publicly choose not to participate in an election. But how is what Ryan is doing right now not worse for himself and the broader Republican brand? Yes, my candidate is a racist, but he's still my candidate because Clinton?

But notice what happens every time a Republican makes a statement like this: The notion that Hillary Clinton is a genuinely awful person gets reinforced. ("Yes, what Donald Trump said is outrageous, but at least he's not -- ick! ptui -- Hillary!") It sends the message that Trump is bad but Hillary is unspeakable.

If you're a Republican and you think some voters are persuaded by your words, do you want to tell them you're sitting out the election because both Trump and Clinton are equally unacceptable, which might help persuade some of your audience that the choice is tossup and some of them might as well vote for Clinton? Or do you want to keep saying that nothing Trump has done rises to the level of sheer horror that is Hillary?

For Ryan and the rest of the GOP, I think it's an easy choice.

The flip side of this message is: Really, what's so awful about what Trump is saying? It's bad, but it's not that bad. What Ryan and others are doing is defining deviancy down. Since this is still a majority-white country, that message is certain to find a receptive audience. (I'm not convinced that the Curiel business is even going to hurt Trump or other Republicans in the polls. We really don't know whether white America accepts the notion that respected non-white judges can be trusted to be impartial.)

Cillizza thinks the GOP, and mainstream backers like Ryan in particular, can't continue to stand by Trump without being permanently tainted. I'm going to continue to say what I've been saying -- that the Beltway will decide that all is forgiven as soon as Trump is out of the picture, simply because Trump regularly denounces the GOP establishment and establishment figures (mildly) denounce Trump, which means the establishmentarians weren't really Trumpites. The alternative to accepting Ryan et al. back into the fold would be to reject an entire major party; the Beltway is so deeply invested in the notion of parity between the two parties (both sides do it!) that that's simply unthinkable.

So, yes, Ryan and the rest will continue to say they're troubled by Trump's words, will continue to back him, and will continue to get away with it.

****

Many people wonder whether Trump is committing political malpractice by focusing on Curiel right now. Here's Byron York:

The problem is, Trump, while busy shooting himself in the foot, is missing opportunity after opportunity to go after Clinton. As a campaign, the Trump team made almost no use of the State Department Clinton email report. The same was true for the terrible jobs report. It didn't respond well to Clinton's much-discussed anti-Trump speech last week.

Is it possible that this is a strategy that has some logical basis, whether or not it's actually a smart one? Trump knows that Clinton can throw a punch and, perhaps more important, take one. He knows she's powerful, with powerful allies and a powerful organization behind her. If you rank-ordered everyone in America, Curiel would rank much lower than Clinton. In the never-ending brawl that is life as Donald Trump sees it, Clinton is a ranked heavyweight; Curiel is a palooka.

So maybe Trump is pummeling a palooka to distract us from Hillary Clinton, who might land a few punches if he takes a swing at her. Maybe Trump knows exactly what he's doing. That's not to say it's a good strategy. But it might be a strategy.

FIGURES -- FOR HILLARY CLINTON, EVEN WINNING IS AWKWARD

When I heard this news last night, I assumed that a carefully conceived Democratic plan to stage-manage the end of the primary season had played itself out. But it's clear that this is not at all what the Clinton campaign wanted:

Hillary Clinton became the presumptive Democratic nominee in a surprise development on Monday, making her the first woman ever to win a major party’s presidential nomination one day before she was expected to cross the threshold.

... the announcement -- first made by the Associated Press, and quickly confirmed by NBC and ABC -- was not expected until Tuesday night, when results from six states, including California and New Jersey, come in. Clinton's campaign had prepared a major victory rally in Brooklyn for Tuesday night, exactly eight years to the day after she conceded the 2008 race to then-Sen. Barack Obama.

... [Bernie] Sanders, long suspicious of superdelegates' role in the process, refused to concede on Monday night. His communications director Michael Briggs decried the media's "rush to judgment," signaling Sanders' intention to fight on.

... It was indeed superdelegates that put Clinton over the top -- the AP spent the day surveying these party insiders and counted those who said they were "unequivocally" for Clinton, according to the news agency’s U.S. political editor, David Scott.

My first thought was that the Clinton campaign, or the Democratic establishment, had been in contact with superdelegates who planned to vote for Clinton but hadn't publicly communicated that preference, and had encouraged them to come forward to the media. Why? I thought perhaps because private polls showed Clinton about to lose California, so the campaign (or the party) wanted a victory story as soon as possible. That's more or less what Billmon, a Sanders backer, seems to believe -- that the evil neoliberal Democra-media-fat-cat complex did this to shut Sanders down prematurely.

MSM couldn't wait, decided to hold coronation ceremony early -- lest CA voters take a dump in Her Majesty's lap. pic.twitter.com/cgTqF1p1IH

— Billmon (@billmon1) June 7, 2016

But that makes no sense. This makes an embarrassing Clinton loss in California even more likely. Sandersites aren't going to believe the race is over, so now they're even more motivated to turn out. Clinton voters, realizing it's over, are now less motivated to turn out. I can't believe the Clinton campaign or the Democratic establishment wanted that, all for a one-day jump on the inevitable. Why would the Clintonites or the Democrats want to set a fresh round of complaints about the alleged "rigging" of the system from the Sanders camp?

It's just another awkward moment for a campaign that's had too many of them. This particular awkwardness should last only a day, after which the president, vice president, and others will come off the sidelines in a show of unity around Clinton. (Nancy Pelosi just endorsed Clinton.) That'll be good. But this was a mess.

NO, TRUMP IS NOT GOING TO DROP OUT OF THE RACE

Could this happen?

Thinking there must be some creeping dread in Clinton world that all this Trumpenfreude will end with him quitting before the convention.

— Brian Beutler (@brianbeutler) June 6, 2016

Beutler isn't the only person thinking this way. Jim Snyder in my comments points out that the comment thread at this Kos post includes much speculation about a possible Trump withdrawal:

I’m starting to wonder if he will drop out of the race before the convention under some inane, bogus pretense.

I honestly don’t think the guy has any interest in being president.

****

Agreed and it concerns me. The guy is the dog who caught the car, and was just trying to have some fun.

****

He would couch it in some spectacular and phony excuse that makes him think he’s going out as a hero.

****

... I think he might end up bailing out, to avoid the humiliation of having his butt kicked by a lowly female.

****

... I predict a bogus health crisis. That would get him off the hook and sympathy.

None of this is going to happen. Nor is this:

Five bucks says he has a nervous breakdown before Election Day.

Trump loves what's going on right now. You can say that Trump is enraged by the hits he taking on Trump U and on his criticism of Judge Curiel, but Trump loves being enraged. Trump draws nourishment from being enraged.

If the general election consisted of a series of contests between Trump and Clinton over the next several months, and Trump were to lose so many of them that he couldn't possibly win -- if, in other words, the general election were like the primaries, but with different results for Trump -- then he might drop out short of November. But there's one election. Even if there are a hundred polls saying he's losing, he won't believe he's losing until Election Night -- and then he'll believe he was the victim of fraud. (Which, of course, makes him a typical Republican.) Trump cannot fail. Trump can only be failed.

A Bloomberg story seems to depict a rudderless campaign, with Trump contradicting his own senior staff:

An embattled Donald Trump urgently rallied his most visible supporters to defend his attacks on a federal judge's Mexican ancestry during a conference call on Monday in which he ordered them to question the judge's credibility and impugn reporters as racists....

When former Arizona Governor Jan Brewer interrupted the discussion to inform Trump that his own campaign had asked surrogates to stop talking about the lawsuit in an e-mail on Sunday, Trump repeatedly demanded to know who sent the memo, and immediately overruled his staff.

"Take that order and throw it the hell out," Trump said....

"Are there any other stupid letters that were sent to you folks?" Trump said. "That's one of the reasons I want to have this call, because you guys are getting sometimes stupid information from people that aren't so smart."

... A clearly irritated Trump told his supporters to attack journalists who ask questions about the lawsuit and his comments about the judge.

"The people asking the questions -- those are the racists," Trump said. "I would go at 'em."

Josh Marshall calls this a "meltdown." It's not. Trump thinks he wins through intimidation and Trump thinks, in this case, that Fox News talking points can be a key component of that intimidation. He's just energized.

And I worry that there just aren't that many Americans in this majority-white country who think what he saying right now is particularly awful. He's only down 5 to Clinton in a new IBD/TIPP poll conducted this past Tuesday through Sunday. (Yeah, I mentioned a Reuters poll over the weekend with Clinton up by 11, but most polls still have Clinton with only a small to medium-size lead.)

Trump has family, friends, and a massive ego -- his mental health is just fine, if you discount the extreme narcissism. Trump enjoys the fray. And Trump is still not getting blown out. So he's absolutely going to hang in.

If, for some reason, he starts consistently trailing Clinton by double digits between now and the convention, and if polls show him seriously endangering downballot Republicans, he might still be forced out by the GOP. But he is absolutely not going to quit.

I STILL SAY THE PRESS WILL LET REPUBLICANS DISAVOW TRUMP AFTER NOVEMBER

I want to believe that Rick Wilson is right, but I strongly suspect he isn't:

Veteran Republican strategist Rick Wilson warned this weekend that GOP leaders who have endorsed Trump "own his politics."

"You own his politics," Wilson wrote in a column for Heatstreet, adding later, "You own the racial animus that started out as a bug, became a feature and is now the defining characteristic of his campaign. You own every crazy, vile chunk of word vomit that spews from his mouth."

I'd also like to agree with The New Republic's Brian Beutler that Paul Ryan, in particular, will finally lose some of his Teflon now that he's backing Trump:

As House speaker [Ryan will] face regular, high-profile inquiries about Trump’s most recent offenses, whether to conservatism or to good conscience. Every week will be a referendum on his decision. Can you continue to support your party’s presidential nominee? ... this continual reassessment will serve as an ongoing reminder of how badly the endorsement cuts against the image he presents of himself. It will drag on for months. If you’ve built your public image on claims to ideological commitment and high-mindedness, a cyclical, structural corrective like this should shatter it.

But we've been told for nearly a year that Trump is at odds with the GOP Establishment. That's Trump's brand. Sure, the party Establishment fell in line as soon as Trump clinched the nomination (Ryan a bit more slowly than others), but the perception is still that this is a shotgun marriage, one that neither partner is particularly happy about. That will be the GOP's post-Trump alibi.

Also, the press continues to reinforce the notion that Trump is a heterodox Republican. He supposedly wants to preserve benefits for ordinary Americans when other Republicans don't. He supposedly wants to tax the rich in ways that other Republicans don't. He claims he opposed the most recent Republican war from the beginning. He says racist things that Republicans claim would never in a million years occur to them, even though, as Scott Lemieux notes, that's not the case:

You may remember, for example, the discourse surrounding the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor. Her formal credentials were impeccable, essentially identical to Sam Alito’s. And, yet, Republicans routinely described her as “unqualified” because her background meant that she couldn’t be an impartial judge.

I’m also old enough to remember the National Review's chief legal affairs writer arguing that a judge should recuse himself from hearing a same-sex marriage case because he was gay.

In other words, Trump probably got the idea that only straight, conservative white men could be truly impartial judges from…listening to how Republicans talk about judges.

After all this is over, Republicans will say they had their fingers crossed behind their backs when they endorsed Trump. They'll say he assured them that he'd tone down his rhetoric and become more presidential. They'll say that every time he shot off his mouth after clinching the nomination, they were shocked, shocked. He swore to them he wouldn't!

The press will accept all these excuses, and will allow the post-Trump GOP to pretend Trump never happened.

NEW YORK TIMES MEDIA CRITIC DOESN'T KNOW THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A SHOWRUNNER AND A PRESIDENT

In his column today, New York Times media critic Jim Rutenberg confirms our suspicion that the press lavished softball coverage on Donald Trump throughout the primaries out of a deep admiration for Trump's ability to generate profitable content -- a sense of admiration Rutenberg shares:

Mr. Trump is not running a campaign in the modern sense -- or what was the modern sense until about yesterday. Rather, he oversees a prolific content production studio that has accomplished what every major media conglomerate is trying to pull off with mixed success.

It has managed to produce a huge amount of inexpensive programming that has consistently dominated the ratings and the conversation across the entire new-media landscape -- cable news, broadcast news, radio, Twitter, Facebook and who knows what else.

With Mr. Trump as its star, show runner and chief content officer, the operation has taken over the vast media space with multiple running plotlines (War With Megyn Kelly; Peace With Megyn Kelly!), shocking comments (A federal judge can’t be fair to me because he’s of Mexican heritage!) and personal insults (Hillary belongs in jail; that reporter is a sleaze!) that keep Americans glued to their screens.

These plotlines often lead to negative portrayals of Mr. Trump. And the Trumpian content can at times be contradictory or even counterfactual, as in false. But Trump Productions appears to be operating on the premise that as long as the conversation is all about Mr. Trump, he is winning. Content is not only king, it is kingmaker, too.

Rutenberg's admiration is palpable.

Now, none of this would have worked if Trump weren't saying what a lot of angry white voters want to hear, but the media let him broadcast it all the way he wanted to -- repeated phone-in interviews, full speeches aired without commentary -- because everyone in the news media is anxious about falling revenues and Trump has figured out how to make news profitable. He may be a know-nothing and a fascist, but he will grab those eyeballs, and all that matters, right?

Rutenberg seems to think Democrats should tremble before Trump's mighty power.

Given his against-the-odds success so far, political strategists from both parties are wondering whether the Trump approach represents the future of political media -- and, if so, does Hillary Clinton need to transform her traditional (and relatively press-averse) campaign into a rival studio pumping out its own voluminous counterprogramming?

“She is fighting a conventional war and he is fighting an asymmetrical war, and I don’t think that bodes well for her,” said Terry Sullivan, a Republican strategist. Mr. Sullivan has a unique perspective on the question, as the former manager of Senator Marco Rubio’s vanquished presidential campaign.

Mr. Sullivan; the former Rubio communications adviser Alex Conant; and a lawyer for Mr. Rubio, Will Holley, had reached out to me to discuss their new consulting firm, Firehouse Strategies. It’s based on the premise that Mr. Trump has rewritten the rules of modern communications strategy, and candidates and corporations need to take heed.

The primary lesson: “The solution is always more content, not less,” Mr. Sullivan said.

Um, Hillary Clinton is going to be declared the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee in about 36 hours, and she's led Trump in all but a tiny handful of head-to-head polls. She's not following Trump's template. And Bernie Sanders, while he won't win the Democratic nomination, has captivated a large part of the Democratic electorate without ginning up gossip-rag controversies or attacking minority groups (and while getting a fraction of Trump and Clinton's free-media coverage for much of campaign season) -- and while he might have a hard time withstanding a billion dollars' worth of Republican attacks in a general election, for now he has a huge lead over Trump in virtually every poll.

So please, Jim, stop confusing Trump's mastery of your industry with a mastery of politics -- and don't forget that even a mastery of politics isn't a values-neutral thing if the master is an ignorant, vindictive hatemonger and demagogue.

MAUREEN DOWD: STUPID RACIST ONE-LINERS ARE GOING TO MAKE TRUMP TOUGH TO BEAT

Donald Trump has supposedly pivoted to the general election, but he continues to be racially inflammatory, at a time when he's facing an electorate with a much smaller percentage of white racists than the one in the GOP primaries. Dan Balz of The Washington Post says Trump is scaring his fellow Republicans:

Over the past week, Trump has repeatedly cited the Mexican heritage of U.S. District Judge Gonzalo Curiel, who is overseeing a lawsuit brought by former students of Trump University alleging fraud against the institution. Trump accused Curiel of a conflict of interest in hearing the case because, according to his reasoning, the judge’s Mexican heritage puts him at odds with Trump’s proposal to build a wall on the U.S.-Mexican border....

... House Speaker Paul D. Ryan ... said Trump’s accusations against the judge had come “completely out of left field,” adding, “It’s reasoning I don’t relate to. I completely disagree with the thinking behind that.”

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) criticized Trump for an earlier attack on New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez, a Republican, and expressed his concern that Trump’s language and behavior could permanently alienate Hispanics from the Republican Party...

But Maureen Dowd, in her latest column, says that racist one-liners and cheap shots will actually be beneficial to Trump in the fall (emphasis added below):

[Hillary Clinton] made a really good speech in San Diego. But even if she dispatches Sanders on Tuesday, Trump isn’t going to be easy. Given the slurs and punches and eggs and salacious, hellacious stuff flying around, this could be the wildest, meanest election in modern history.

Just look at Friday alone.

Trump was on a tarmac in Redding, Calif., recounting a story about a black “great guy” who slugged a protester at a prior rally. He interrupted himself to point at a random black supporter in the crowd, saying: “Oh, look at my African-American over here. Look at him.”

This followed an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper in which Trump was unyielding in his insistence that he was not being racist when he said that the judge presiding in a lawsuit over Trump University was biased because “he’s a Mexican” and “we’re building a wall between here and Mexico.”

Tapper gamely tried to point out, more than once, that the judge, Gonzalo Curiel, was born and raised in Indiana. But Trump held his ground: “He’s proud of his heritage. I respect him for that.”

The latest installment in a nutty attack on the judge -- coming more than a week after a nutty attack on New Mexico’s Republican governor, Susana Martinez -- forced Paul Ryan, who had finally dragged himself over to Trump a day earlier, to start skittering away again.

So even though Dowd calls some of these attacks "nutty," and even though she acknowledges that they've alienated Paul Ryan, and even though she herself seems put off by them, she thinks they're the reason "Trump isn’t going to be easy" to beat.

It would be one thing if Dowd were arguing that Americans approve of Trump's racism to a greater extent than we're comfortable acknowledging. But her point seems to be that Trump is such a savage brawler that Hillary might not be able to outfight him -- even if he's flailing blindly and doing more damage to his party than to his opponent.

But maybe I'm looking for more coherence in this column than is actually there -- after all, at the top of the column Dowd seems to imply that Trump (yes, Trump!) is a woman. Or at least I think she does:

LOS ANGELES -- THIS is a town where scripts routinely come back to writers from entertainment executives with the same scrawled command about a female character: “Make her more likable.”

As Hillary Clinton fights up and down California to fend off Bernie Sanders and clinch the nomination, Democrats watch with clenched teeth. Sure, the Republicans are engaged in a hilarious performance of “The Taming of the Shrew” with their tart-tongued presumptive nominee.

But can plodding Hillary be, as Barack Obama famously put it, likable enough?

What does that Taming of the Shrew reference mean? Is Dowd saying that the GOP is trying to tame Trump, who is Katherina in this analogy? Or is Trump the tamer and Clinton the shrew? I think it's the former, in which case it's the first time in my memory that Dowd has played gender games while writing about a Republican.

If that's what she's saying, Dowd gets the gender politics all wrong. Why would you describe a notorious dick-swinging sexist as an untamed woman?

What else does Dowd get wrong? Well, she approvingly quotes this:

Naturally, Lin-Manuel Miranda of “Hamilton” fame provided the perfect kicker for the week in a new Rolling Stone interview, saying that this election is “no more bizarre than the election in 1800 wherein Jefferson accused Adams of being a hermaphrodite and Adams responded” by spreading rumors “that Jefferson died so that Adams would be the only viable candidate. He was counting on news to travel slow! That, weirdly, gives me hope.”

You might imagine that a veteran columnist at America's Finest Newspaper would want to quote an actual historian on this point, but this is Dowd we're talking about, so an entertainer who reads history books is the best we'll get. In fact, the "hermaphrodite" charge against Adams wasn't literal, and it didn't come directly from Jefferson:

[Jefferson's] supporters accused the incumbent president Adams of having a "hideous hermaphroditical character, which has neither the force and firmness of a man, nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman." In response, a leaflet by Adams' team called Jefferson "a mean-spirited, low-lived fellow, the son of a half-breed Indian squaw, sired by a Virginia mulatto father."

The Adams leaflet sounds a lot like Trump -- and the attack by Jefferson's backers sounds like a line from a Maureen Dowd column.

WHAT IF HILLARY CLINTON DOESN'T NEED SANDERS DIEHARDS?

When Donald Trump effectively clinched the Republican presidential nomination and head-to-head Trump-Clinton polls tightened, it was huge news. But what if that was a blip? What if the race really isn't close?

If we're to belive a poll released yesterday -- and yes, it's just one poll -- the tightening might well have been temporary:

Democratic presidential contender Hillary Clinton has opened up a double-digit lead over Republican rival Donald Trump, regaining ground after the New York billionaire briefly tied her last month, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll released on Friday.....

Some 46 percent of likely voters said they supported Clinton, while 35 percent said they supported Trump, and another 19 percent said they would not support either, according to the survey of 1,421 people conducted between May 30 and June 3.

Trump had briefly tied Clinton in support among likely U.S. voters in mid-May....

This comes as we're reading that Bernie Sanders intends to fight to the bitter end:

Sanders is showing few signs of surrender as end of the primaries loom, pointing out his differences with Clinton and vowing to take his bid to the party's convention in July.

... Sanders is expected to return to his Vermont home on Wednesday and advisers say he intends to ramp up his courtship of the party's superdelegates, a process that is already underway....

Sanders will compete in the District of Columbia primary on June 14, the final contest. Beyond that, Sanders' campaign manager Jeff Weaver said they are considering whether Sanders might appear at more rallies around the country after the primaries and speak in Chicago at a gathering of Sanders' activists on June 17-19.

By contrast Hillary Clinton dropped out of the contest with Barack Obama on June 7, 2008.

Sanders assumes that Clinton can't win without his most fervent supporters. But what if she can? What if Trump continues to run the same slipshod, unprofessional, trash-talking, voting-bloc-alienating campaign he's running now? What if Clinton's well-received anti-Trump speech this week is a sign that she's found her stride?

And wht if, furthermore, she has a plan to try to win without the Bernie-or-Busters -- possibly by targeting moderate Republican voters? There was little in Clinton's Trump speech that would alienate most liberals, but before it was delivered, Amy Chozick of The New York Times -- at the prompting of Clintonites -- described it as outreach to the middle:

Mrs. Clinton’s campaign aides said the speech, which she will deliver in San Diego, would be the start of a persistent assault to portray a potential Trump presidency as a dangerous proposition that would weaken American alliances and embolden enemies....

While Mrs. Clinton must be cautious not to alienate liberal Democrats who oppose some of her hawkish foreign policy stances, her campaign says national security could be the catalyst that drives independents and wavering Republicans to support her this fall....

To that end, the Clinton campaign and its outside advisers have embarked on an effort to reach out to prominent moderate Republicans who could endorse Mrs. Clinton, largely making the case for foreign policy sure-footedness.

If more polls start to show that Clinton has a sizable and persistent lead, and if Trump continues to alienate moderates by campaigning like a bigoted drunk at the end of the bar, then the "no retreat, no surrender" posture of Bernie Sanders miht turn out to be a gamble he loses. Polls make clear that the vast majority of Sanders supporters will back Clinton in the fall -- the only question is whether Clinton will need the diehard remainder. If she doesn't, Clinton might decide that she doesn't need to mollify Sanders on platform issues. She might decide she's moved as far to the left as she's comfortable moving.

She might win doing this. If that happens, how does it advance the revolution?

It seems to me that Sanders really could end this campaign with less influence over the Democratic Party than he would have had if he'd reached out to Clinton sooner. She really might find herself in a position to blow Sanders and his progressives off -- both now and in her presidency. That shouldn't have happened. But if Sanders drives too hard a bargain, and if the Trump campaign never expands beyond his base, I think it might.

MUHAMMAD ALI GAVE A MUSLIM PRAYER BOOK TO THE PRESIDENT!

Hope I made you look, wingnuts.

Muhammad Ali, who died yesterday at the age of 74, was famous for refusing to serve in Vietnam and for a very public conversion to Islam. Near the end of his life, he denounced Donald Trump for proposing to ban Muslims from entering the U.S.

But in 1983, he paid a visit to the Reagan White House, and posed for one of those goofy pictures with celebrities the Gipper was so fond of:

Muhammad Ali visited the White House on January 24, 1983, presenting President Reagan with an autographed Muslim Prayer Book, of which President Reagan mentions in his handwritten diaries.

Omigod! Maybe Ronald Reagan was a secret Muslim! (Wingers, that's what you'd say if Ali had given a Muslim prayer book to President Obama, right?)

The President later noted in his diaries that Muhammad Ali endorsed him for President during his 1984 re-election campaign.

That's true -- Ali endorsed Reagan in October 1984:

Muhammad Ali, the former heavyweight boxing champion, who endorsed the Rev. Jesse Jackson's unsuccessful run for the White House, has announced he is switching to President Reagan....

Asked to elaborate on his endorsement of Mr. Reagan, Mr. Ali told reporters, "He's keeping God in schools and that's enough."

Ali, along with fellow boxers Joe Frazier and Floyd Patterson, appeared in a pro-Reagan billboard in the fall of 1984:



Ali later received a Presidential Medal of Freedom from President George W. Bush, who, at the awards ceremony, spoke of Ali's "beautiful soul." (Maybe Bush is a secret Muslim, too!)

Jack Cashill -- the guy who thinks Bill Ayers wrote Barack Obama's Dreams from My Father -- once wrote a book about Ali, and later published a World Net Daily column in which he described the young Ali as a "mind-numbed Nation of Islam zombie." When Ali grew older, however, the scales fell from his eyes, according to Cashill, as he embraced Republicanism.

Now I see that Donald Trump is among the people praising Ali in death:

Muhammad Ali is dead at 74! A truly great champion and a wonderful guy. He will be missed by all!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 4, 2016

I expect that at least one or two idiots in the punditocracy will say that this reveals a softening in Trump's attitude toward blacks and Muslims. (It doesn't -- it's just a wannabe macho man seeking reflected glory from a boxing champ.) But based on a statement Ali put out back in December, it doesn't appear that the admiration was mutual:

... Muhammad Ali took jabs Wednesday at "so called Islamic Jihadists" and those who would "use Islam to advance their own personal agenda."

... But the real target of Ali's roundhouse was Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump.

The statement never mentions Trump by name -- but its headline is "Presidential Candidates Proposing to Ban Muslim Immigration to the United States."

... Here's the champ's full statement:

I am a Muslim and there is nothing Islamic about killing innocent people in Paris, San Bernardino, or anywhere else in the world. True Muslims know that the ruthless violence of so called Islamic Jihadists goes against the very tenets of our religion.

We as Muslims have to stand up to those who use Islam to advance their own personal agenda. They have alienated many from learning about Islam. True Muslims know or should know that it goes against our religion to try and force Islam on anybody.

Speaking as someone who has never been accused of political correctness, I believe that our political leaders should use their position to bring understanding about the religion of Islam and clarify that these misguided murderers have perverted people's views on what Islam really is.

I guess at the end Ali wasn't much of a Republican after all. Sorry, Frank Cashill.

OH YEAH, DONALD, THAT'LL WORK

This is a legitimate press release. It is not a joke.

The National ENQUIRER today announced that renowned Author and Political Commentator Dick Morris would be joining the magazine in the role of Chief Political Commentator & Correspondent. The appointment of Morris to the editorial team further establishes The ENQUIRER as one of the leading voices of this political season....

In addition to providing exclusive news and analysis for the weekly print edition of The National ENQUIRER, Morris will also provide regular columns and video commentary for NationalEnquirer.com.

Now, we know that Dick Morris hates Hillary Clinton the way Wile E. Coyote htes the Road Runner. We also know that Donald Trump has a very close relationship with the Enquirer:

Trump has written several articles for the Enquirer during the campaign....

Trump and Enquirer chief executive David Pecker are reportedly palsy -- "very close," according to the New York Daily News, and "friends for years," according to New York magazine. Conservative radio host Michael Savage, a Trump backer, told listeners last week that "David Pecker flies to Florida from New York on Trump's private jet." In 2013, Trump even suggested Pecker ought to take over Time magazine.

David Pecker would be a brilliant choice as CEO of TIME Magazine -- nobody could bring it back like David! http://t.co/lLMjQh2iz9

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 19, 2013

The Enquirer, of course, published a sleazy story alleging that Ted Cruz has had multiple affairs, at a time when Trump was trying to fend off Cruz in the Republican primaries. Did that story really hurt Cruz? There's no evidence that it did -- Cruz seemed to have hit his natural ceiling around the time, or maybe he just stopped appealing to GOP voters when he accepted the mantle of the hated party establishment and took on Trump -- but if Trump and Pecker think it was a big factor in Cruz's loss, I guess they're entitled to that opinion.

And now, apparently, they think they're going to beat Hillary Clinton using the Enquirer's mighty agenda-setting power in the political world (I'm being sarcastic, folks). They think the Enquirer is going to gain instant credibility from this guy:

In December 2012, several Hill staffers told Media Matters that the columnist lacked credibility in light of his faulty predictions, with one saying: "I think everyone at The Hill views him the way that people outside The Hill do. He is a laughingstock, especially the way he acted in this last election." ...

(The Hill has decided to terminate Morris's column now that he's taken the Enquirer gig.)

His political predictions include claiming Mitt Romney would win the 2012 election in a “landslide”; it’s “very possible” President Obama would drop out of the 2012 race; the 2008 election would feature Condi Rice vs. Hillary Clinton; Clinton would drop out of her 2006 U.S. Senate bid because she’s afraid of challenger Jeanine Pirro (Pirro dropped out amid a poll showing her losing by over 30 points); and Rick Lazio would defeat Clinton in the 2000 Senate race (he lost by double digits).

Morris’ contract was not renewed by Fox News in early 2013. New York writer Gabriel Sherman reported that "Morris's Romney boosterism and reality-denying predictions became a punch line" inside the network.

Indeed, many of Morris’ former Fox News colleagues mocked him as "often wrong," a self-promoter, and "creepy." He was rebuked by a Fox executive after he attempted to auction off a Fox News studio tour to benefit a local Republican Party group.

Oh, and Morris is making a brilliant start at the Enquirer:

Morris’ first column unsurprisingly appears to be bogus. The New York Post reported that it will run next week and “claims that Hillary Clinton’s private e-mail server was actually hacked twice while she was secretary of state. ‘It was revealed in a footnote in the inspector general’s report,’ he told Media Ink.” Morris previously claimed Clinton’s server was hacked twice in a column on his website. In reality, as Vox notes, the inspector general’s report “doesn't turn up any evidence that Clinton's emails were successfully hacked or compromised” -- just that there were attempts.

This is a key component of the Trump victory plan? If so, I don't think Trump is very bright.

STOP THE VIOLENCE BECAUSE IT'S WRONG. DON'T STOP IT BECAUSE YOU THINK IT'S HELPING TRUMP.

Donald Trump is appalling, but there's no justification for this:

Protests outside a Donald Trump rally in downtown San Jose spun out of control Thursday night when some demonstrators attacked the candidate’s supporters.

Protesters jumped on cars, pelted Trump supporters with eggs and water balloons, snatched signs, and stole “Make America Great” hats off supporters’ heads before burning them and snapping selfies with the charred remains....

In one incident captured on camera, a Trump supporter was struck hard over the side of the head as he was walking away from a group of protesters. The attack left him with blood streaming down his head and onto his shirt....

Watch: The moment a Trump supporter, surrounded by protesters, is egged in the face, hit by other food. pic.twitter.com/qYFdwJWvrS

— Jacob Rascon (@Jacobnbc) June 3, 2016

I called 911 but no one answered. Donald trump protest in San Jose, CA pic.twitter.com/LwaWyeYZfq

— Marcus DiPaola (@marcusdipaola) June 3, 2016

This is just wrong. It needs to stop.

And yet I don't believe it's going to lead to a backlash that elects Trump. I've said before that if you're thinking 1968, you should remember that the violence in Chicago was targeted at Hubert Humphrey, not the eventual winner, Richard Nixon. But there are other reasons I don't think violence at Trump rallies will help Trump.

First of all, this isn't 1968. Violent unrest isn't happening everywhere. Right now, it seems to be happening only at Trump rallies. The average middle-of-the-road voter doesn't think this is a widespread societal problem right now. It seems more like a Trump problem. Maybe swing voters think it's an anti-Trump problem -- but it's somehing that's following him around, and not Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders. And he's been known to encourage violence. Voters don't even like angry non-violent partisanship in D.C. They want someone who'll make all the turbulence go away. But where Trump goes, turbulence follows. I don't think that helps him.

And here's another problem for Trump: He says he's the guy who can get all our worst problems under control -- so why can't he control the perimeter at his own rallies? In fact, the unrest in San Jose seemed to be made worse by utterly inept policing:

Marcus DiPaola, a freelance photographer following the Trump campaign, posted video of someone getting punched violently in the face....

DiPaola said he called 911 but was put on hold and so hung up. He said he told one police officer about the beating but was told SJPD “didn’t have the man power” to intervene.

“Morons,” he said. “How do you not staff 911 for an event of this size?”

DiPaola wasn’t the only journalist to condemn the cops’ handling of the protest....

BREAKING: The police in San Jose have appeared to lost control. Trump supporters being terrorized and beaten up by mobs of protestors.

— Tom Llamas (@TomLlamasABC) June 3, 2016

But if crowds get out of control where Trump goes, doesn't that make him seem less like a can-do macho man? How can he stand up to ISIS if he can't control a few thugs outside his own rallies?

And Trump's temperament makes it a lot harder for him to use violent protesters as foils than it was for "law and order" Republicans of the past. Richard Nixon had a criminal soul, but he exuded an air of moral rectitude. He came off as self-denying, not self-indulgent. His message to voters was, in effect, You and I, we get up in the morning, go to work, and try to do the right thing, and here are all these snot-nosed kids running around doing whatever they damn please.

But Trump is someone we believe does whatever he damn pleases. That extends to his rallies. There's an air of license in Trump World. There's an air of license when Trump fires up Twitter, or even when he debates.

If you're a swing voter watching that from the outside, Trump seems to exude the same chaos that seen outside his rallies. So why would you trust him to keep America on an even keel?

HEY, CONCERNED LIBERALS, SHED NO TEARS FOR PAUL RYAN -- HE'LL BE JUST FINE

In news that should have surprised no one, today Paul Ryan got on board the Trump Train:

Speaker Paul D. Ryan endorsed Donald J. Trump for president on Thursday, finally giving his backing after weeks of reluctance to the man who ran against the party’s establishment, of which Mr. Ryan is the titular leader.

Members of the liberal commentariat are already expressing concern for Ryan's welfare (and the welfare of other former Trump opponents who've emerged from the reeducation camps):

Does Paul Ryan realize he'll still be a "supporter of Donald Trump" 3 yrs from now? Just checking.

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) June 2, 2016

Trump is poisoning not just GOP prospects this year but destroying future prospects of entire generation of GOP pols: Ryan, Rubio, etc.

— Jeet Heer (@HeerJeet) June 2, 2016

What are they worried about? The political establishment is so invested in the notion of Both Sides Do It that nothing Trump can possibly say or do between now and November will define him as truly beyond the pale, assuming he doesn't actually don a sheet and burn a cross. (Hey, Hillary Clinton is unpopular too! And she's had scandals, so that's precisely equal to Trump's flirtations with fascism and white nationalism, his utter ignorance of policy, his embrace of torture ...!)

What's more, even if Trump just plunges further and further into the gutter, remember that the GOP never suffers long-term consequences and always gets a do-over at the earliest possible opportunity. Two years after Newt Gingrich crashed and burned, George W. Bush made it into the White House after running as the media favorite in the presidential race; two years after Bush's presidency ended in utter ignominy and Democrats seemingly took over D.C., the Tea Party rebranded the GOP and the GOP gained the House back. The same thing is going to happen to the GOP post-Trump -- rebranding will happen and the slate will be wiped clean.

And if I'm wrong and some Republicans do see their careers suffer because of Trump, rest assured that media darling Ryan will be spared. Hey, he did this with his fingers crossed behind his back!

I'm pretty sure that Paul Ryan endorsing Trump means Ryan is 99.999% sure Trump is gonna lose.

— Liz Mair (@LizMair) June 2, 2016

If Ryan actually thought he might have to deal with a President Trump, I don't think he would have endorsed him.

— Liz Mair (@LizMair) June 2, 2016

And what did Ryan say about Trump, really?

Paul Ryan endorses Donald Trump https://t.co/6sqe6eJvVS the key here is that he does NOT "endorse"

— Jennifer Rubin (@JRubinBlogger) June 2, 2016

Yes, it's true that Ryan said he'd vote for Ryan Trump but didn't use the word "endorse." However:

In a column on GazetteXtra.com, Mr. Ryan made clear he believed that Mr. Trump was the best candidate to help establish the agenda that he himself wants to get through Congress. A spokesman for Mr. Ryan, Brendan Buck, wrote on Twitter that the column constituted an endorsement.

But it will be remembered that Ryan squirmed briefly before endorsing, and avoided the E-word -- so we'll be told that he really didn't mean it. He'll emerge from this smelling like a rose. The Establishment will never stop rooting for him.

SMART PROGRESSIVES VOTE FASCIST!

Susan Webber, who blogs at Naked Capitalism under the names Yves Smith, has written a Politico op-ed largely devoted to a Sandersite takedown of Bill and Hillary Clinton. But that surely wasn't enough to get the op-ed published, so the hook of the piece is this:



Smith writes:

Why do progressives reject Hillary Clinton? The highly educated, high-income, finance-literate readers of my website, Naked Capitalism, don’t just overwhelmingly favor Bernie Sanders. They also say “Hell no!” to Hillary Clinton to the degree that many say they would even vote for Donald Trump over her....

To be sure, not all of my Sanders-supporting readers would vote for Trump. But only a minority would ever vote for Clinton....

And you'd better pay attention, because these aren't just a bunch of Millennial neckbeards -- they're wealthy middle-aged people with really really big brains!

Who does Naked Capitalism represent? The site, which I describe as “fearless commentary on finance, economics, politics and power,” receives 1.3 million to 1.5 million page views a month and has amassed approximately 80 million readers since its launch in 2006. Its readership is disproportionately graduate school-educated, older, male and high income.

Cue Robert Farley:

"Progressives" who trend old, white, wealthy, and male think that Trump is just spiffy. https://t.co/hedPozBpQT

— Robert Farley (@drfarls) June 2, 2016

Oh, but they're not all wealthy old white male progs:

Despite the overall predominance of male readers, many of the fiercest critics of Clinton in the commentariat are women, with handles like HotFlash, Katniss Everdeen, Martha r, Portia, Bev and Pat.

Yeah, because nothing says "maturity of judgment" like the screen name "Katniss Everdeen."

Smith tells us that these upcoming Trump votes from progressives aren't just a flipped bird -- they'll be the result of a careful weighing of the alternatives:

Some of them also have very reasoned arguments for Trump. Hillary is a known evil. Trump is unknown. They'd rather bet on the unknown, since it will also send a big message to Team Dem that they can no longer abuse progressives. I personally know women in the demographic that is viewed as being solidly behind Hillary -- older, professional women who live in major cities -- who regard Trump as an acceptable cost of getting rid of the Clintons.

Right -- because he's "unknown." We've been listening to him nonstop for nearly a year, but we have absolutely no idea who he is, what he stands for, or what voters he represents.

Heck, what's the worst that could happen?

Trump Delegate Says Current US Leaders May Need to Be "Killed"

A Patriot Movement supporter, approved by the Trump campaign, talks of violently overthrowing the federal government.

Last December, Donald Trump's presidential campaign approved David Riden to be a delegate candidate on the Tennessee ballot, and when the state held its primary in March, voters selected Riden to go to the Republican National Convention. When Riden represents Trump there in July, it will not be his first time as a delegate to a political gathering. Seven years ago in Illinois he attended the so-called "Continental Congress of 2009," where he and other delegates put forth "Articles of Freedom" that called for abolishing all federal firearms laws, replacing the Department of Homeland Security with citizen militias, and, if necessary, launching an insurrection against the federal government.

Riden explains that his views today go even further than those of the Continental Congress of 2009 -- his involvement in which he says he explicitly disclosed to the Trump campaign when he applied to be a delegate. Riden told Mother Jones in an interview that US leaders who violate the Constitution may have to be done away with: "The polite word is 'eliminated,'" he said. "The harsh word is 'killed.'"

Hey, but at least Trump and his supporters aren't neoliberals!

Smith proudly quotes a comment from one of her readers:

“I don’t want to vote for Trump. I want to vote for Bernie. But I have reached the point where I feel like voting for Trump against Clinton would be doing my patriotic duty. … If the only way to escape a trap is to gnaw off my leg, I’d like to think I’d have the guts to do it.”

Here's that quote in context:

Even if Trump rules as a typical Republican, the mere fact that he ran by repudiating its core beliefs means something. People are finding others who also see that the Emperor has no clothes, on both sides of the divide. That’s empowering. Collective action matters, even if votes don’t particularly. And people finding out they’re not alone is step 1. The elite has set up this “lesser of two evils” situation. This year, actually voting lesser of two evils could bring real good. Because Trump is unquestionably the lesser evil. Still probably evil, no question. But even if he goes back on all his leftish policy positions while keeping his racist incitement, the Ds will have to fight him, at least a tiny little bit. But more importantly, it should do real harm to both parties’ corrupt control. Purging the Clintons is good for the planet, in my opinion. And how much longer will corporations and banks flood the Democrats with money if they control NOTHING? Nothing in Washington, almost nothing in the states.

I don’t want to vote for Trump. I want to vote for Bernie. But I have reached the point where I feel like voting for Trump against Clinton would be doing my patriotic duty. Because you’re right, there are no good answers in this situation. But if the only way to escape a trap is to gnaw off my leg, I’d like to think I’d have the guts to do it. The blood either Clinton or Trump spill won’t be on my hands. I’m doing my best to stop them.

If I'm reading what this commenter says correctly, Hillary Clinton is so awful that "even if [Trump] goes back on all his leftish policy positions while keeping his racist incitement" he would be "unquestionably the lesser evil," because ... well, I guess because the commenter is white and probably male and probably safe from the worst Trump might unleash with his "racist incitement." And Trump is "unquestionably the lesser evil" even if he dispenses with all that jackbooted thuggery and "rules as a typical Republican," because (ick! pthui!) neoliberalism is way worse for economic inequality than this:



Besides, Trump and a GOP Congress running rampant will destroy the evil Democrats by depriving them of rich people's cash, and that's good, right? Because if the only major party left in America is the GOP receiving all the plutocrat cash on offer, what could possibly go wrong?

Enough. I just can't. Yves Smith's highly educated, well-to-do readers are too stupid to breathe.

****

I should add this, from David Neiwert:

I have spent the past 14 years trying to warn the public about the proto-fascist threat coming down the road at us through the auspices of the increasingly radicalized conservative movement and its official organ, the Republican Party. I’ve even published two books describing this threat -- five and six years before it actually emerged....

Well, now those trends have all come home to roost, and that “alarmism” has proven precisely accurate. The warnings have come true in no small part not just because conservatives drove their bus over the cliff, but because many progressives -- especially those in institutional progressive organizations -- did not take them seriously either, and took few steps to address the underlying dynamic....

And now these same, clueless progressives are insisting that -- even with the steam train of extremist right-wing populism, the historical foundation of all fascist movements, heading straight towards them in the form of the Trump candidacy -- their Purity of Essence will keep them from ever voting for the last remaining politician capable of keeping him from attaining the presidency.

Look, I support the Sanders campaign’s desire to take their movement into the convention, since I support most components of their agenda....

But if you can’t understand that a Donald Trump presidency would be an extinction-level event for American democracy -- and especially if you are so fanatically blinkered that you think that Clinton and Trump are actually comparable or similar -- then you have neither paid any attention to the matters that I’ve spent the past 14 years focused on, and/or you simply have no respect for it. You are, on a very deep level, no friend of mine.

Even if Niewert's worst fears wouldn't be realized in a Trump administration, how can you pretend to be a thinking person and shrug off the risk?

****

UPDATE: Scott Lemieux gives this op-ed the fisking it deserves.

LANGUAGE: A YOOGE, CLASSY MECHANISM OF CONTROL

The Trump University story has me more convinced than ever than Newt Gingrich will be Donald Trump's running mate. It's not just the Gingrichesque nature of the Trump U grift; it's the fact that, as Slate's Henry Grabar notes, there was an effort to weaponize language at Trump U that seemed highly Newtonian:

Some of the language in Trump U's sales playbooks seems to presage the tone of Trump’s presidential campaign. Most of it, though, served as a template for Trump University employees looking to get the upper hand in their dealings with prospective customers.

In this illustrative example, the Trump U playbook explains that saying "thank you" is a sign of weakness.

Grabar goes on to note this bit of advice to Trump U sales reps:

“The most persuasive words in the English language ... are: You, New, Money, Easy, Discovery, Free, Results, Health, Save, Proven, Guarantee, and Love. They share three characteristics: they are simple, familiar and dramatic.”

I'm reminded of the mid-1990s Gingrich memo titled "Language: A Key Mechanism of Control."

That missive, a component of the extreme right wing GOPAC’s propaganda machine, offers a litany of words and terms that should be used when describing Republican initiatives — “courage,” “legacy,” “inventive,” and “eliminate good-time in prison” — and contrasting words used when describing Democratic opposition, including “destructive,” “bizarre” and “bureaucracy.” That last word can also be modified as “unionized bureaucracy.”

“The words in that paper are tested language from a recent series of focus groups where we actually tested ideas and language,” Gingrich wrote in a cover letter that came with the memo. “This list is prepared so that you might have a directory of words to use in writing literature and mail, in preparing speeches, and in producing electronic media. The words and phrases are powerful. Read them.”

The full Gingich memo is here.

Trump U's word manipulation was focused on the desperate and the gullible. Gingrich's word manipulation was focused on the same kinds of people -- these phrases were meant to be used in direct mail -- but it was also directed at the political press, which took Gingrich's language very seriously. Gingrich's bamboozlement is still taken seriously in the Beltway.

Political insiders really are as easily fooled as the customers Trump tried to lure to his faux-university. I agree with what Slate's Isaac Chotiner says about another Trump effort to weaponize language, his use of disparaging nicknames: What Trump does is silly and infantile, and the press is crazy to be awestruck by it:

The media has decided Trump is a brilliant nicknamer; thus, his nicknames are brilliant....

The absurd degree to which we’ve bought into the idea that Trump is some kind of nicknaming savant becomes clear when you consider the category of Trump monikers that fail even to live up to the “little Marco” standard. Love her or hate her, is there really anything “goofy” about Elizabeth Warren? “Crazy Bernie Sanders” is neither witty nor apt; surely there is something more biting to be mined from the political life of the self-proclaimed democratic socialist than “crazy.” (“Bolshevik Bernie” might have eluded Trump’s command of world history.)...

It’s the media that has allowed Trump’s nicknames to become a story, rather than the ridiculous gimmick that they are.

And look, here's Michael Barbaro in the Times describing the scrawled letters Trump has written over the years as Trump's "secret weapon." I'll give Barbaro this: He's probably right when he says that flattering fellow egomaniacs is an effective strategy for Trump.

From early on, he seemed to intuitively grasp the potency of his praise when lavished on like-minded men.

In the 1990s, Mr. Trump occasionally fawned over New York’s brash mayor, Rudolph W. Giuliani. In one letter, Mr. Trump tore out a page from a magazine interview in which he had called Mr. Giuliani “the greatest mayor that the city’s ever had.” In case Mr. Giuliani missed the homage, Mr. Trump drew two bold arrows, each pointing at the glowing passage, and reiterated the message in a handwritten note: “Rudy, you are the greatest!” he wrote, adding, “see you soon.”

But sensible people aren't impresed by Trump's attempts to manipulate them emotionally:

After the basketball legend Kareem Abdul-Jabbar wrote a critical essay in The Washington Post about Mr. Trump’s candidacy, Mr. Trump sent him a copy of the essay with a biting message sprawled across it. “Now I know why the press always treated you so badly -- they couldn’t stand you,” Mr. Trump wrote. “The fact is that you don’t have a clue about life and what has to be done to make America great again!”

Mr. Abdul-Jabbar said he was flabbergasted. “It was such a petty and childish reaction, like a teenage boy responding to being turned down for a date by whining, ‘Well, nobody likes you!’ ” he said. He likened Mr. Trump’s decision to write his reply on the original article to “a dog urinating on a tree to mark its territory.”

Mr. Abdul-Jabbar had to get rid of the letter. “I crumpled it up real nice and tight and skyhooked it into my wastepaper basket,” he recalled, invoking his trademark shot.

End of story for Kareem. The rest of us, at least for the next five months, have to live in a world where crude emotional manipulation efforts of this kind are considered "presidential."

UM, COULD WE HAVE ONE PERSON ON THE DEMOCRATIC TICKET WHO WASN'T TIGHT WITH TRUMPS?

It's good to see New Jersey senator Cory Booker attacking Donald Trump, even if he's doing it primarily to impress Hillary Clinton so she'll make him her running mate:

Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) on Wednesday fueled speculation that he could be Hillary Clinton's vice presidential pick with an all-out assault on Donald Trump at a campaign event in New Jersey.

“The issues we hear Donald Trump talking about are just so contrary to who we are as a people,” the first-term senator said at a Clinton rally in Newark.

“They are an affront and an insult to our higher angels and our best selves,” Booker added. "We have Abraham Lincoln saying, ‘with malice towards none’ and Donald Trump saying ‘with hate for all.’ ”

... One of the key jobs of a vice presidential candidate is to be an attack dog, and Booker embraced that task with relish, throwing a series of rhetorical bombs at the presumptive Republican nominee.

“We have Donald Trump standing up as one of the greatest fear-mongers in this nation’s history. He’s trying to make us afraid of each other.”

I have some doubts about the explosive power of those "rhetorical bombs," but attacks on Trump are always welcome.

However, it's being pointed out that Booker wasn't always quite so hostile to Trump, or at least to members of his family. In fact, back in 2013 he was very tight with members of Trump's family:

Ivanka Trump, the daughter of Republican real estate mogul Donald Trump, will host a fundraiser for Newark Mayor Cory Booker’s Senate bid next Wednesday, a campaign source familiar with the event said.

The event, with a suggested contribution of $5,200 per person, will be held at Ivanka Trump’s home on Park Avenue in Manhattan.

She and her husband, Jared Kushner, had bundled $41,000 for Booker’s Senate campaign as of May.

Jared Kushner is a fat cat, but he's is not a dyed-in-the-wool Republican, and he's been tight with Booker for a while:

Kushner, CEO of the real estate firm Kushner Companies and a son of Charles Kushner, formerly a major donor and power player in New Jersey Democratic politics, first backed Booker when he was mayor of Newark. From their political congruity, the two men quickly developed a personal friendship.

Booker attended Kushner’s star-studded wedding in 2009 to Ivanka Trump, held at Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, N.J. In 2011, Booker and Kushner were among the honorary hosts for a Freedom to Marry reception at the Manhattan home of Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes and his then-fiancé Sean Eldridge, another friend of Kushner’s; there, Eldridge, Booker, Kushner and Ivanka Trump posed together for a photo, grinning broadly.

Well, it's not a wedding photo, though I'm sure one of those will show up eventually, and it was at an LGBT rights event, and Sean Eldridge was an unsuccessful Democratic congressional candidate a while back. But still:



There's been some friction in this relationship, reportedly in part because Booker was on the correct side of an issue:

For months, however, Kushner and Booker have not spoken, according to a source close to Kushner. For one, Kushner, an orthodox Jew and a supporter of pro-Israel causes, was “really disappointed” when Booker supported the president’s Iran deal, the source said.

But there is another awkward hang-up: Kushner is now advising the presumptive Republican nominee for president, his father-in-law, Donald Trump, whose political rhetoric, style and policy stances could not depart more sharply from Booker’s.

Booker acknowledges that he's been chummy with the Trump family:

"I know Donald Trump, I've met him, I know his family," Booker said. "I have love, and friendship, and affection for his family members. But I'm going to work very hard to ensure that he is not our president."

"Ivanka is a woman of great grace and kindness and has been a good friend to me," he added.

Now, I'm not (to use Tom Hilton's term) a "puritopian." But still -- shouldn't there be someone on this ticket who's never partied with a Trump? Just for appearances' sake? Is that too much to ask?

WILL THE UNIVERSITY SCAM REALLY COST TRUMP ANY VOTES?

I want to believe this will hurt Donald Trump in November:

In blunt testimony revealed on Tuesday, former managers of Trump University, the for-profit school started by Donald J. Trump, portray it as an unscrupulous business that relied on high-pressure sales tactics, employed unqualified instructors, made deceptive claims and exploited vulnerable students willing to pay tens of thousands for Mr. Trump’s insights.

One sales manager for Trump University, Ronald Schnackenberg, recounted how he was reprimanded for not pushing a financially struggling couple hard enough to sign up for a $35,000 real estate class, despite his conclusion that it would endanger their economic future. He watched with disgust, he said, as a fellow Trump University salesman persuaded the couple to purchase the class anyway.

“I believe that Trump University was a fraudulent scheme,” Mr. Schnackenberg wrote in his testimony, “and that it preyed upon the elderly and uneducated to separate them from their money.”

It ought to hurt him, obviously. But I suspect that a lot of people -- and not just in Trump's voter base -- will apply the "just world" fallacy and assume that anyone who signed up but couldn't afford the fees probably deserved to go into permanent debt, and anyone who wasn't able to emerge from the school with the skill to make money in real estate simply wasn't bright enough to take advantage of what Trump had to offer. We're inclined to believe that people who suffer did something bad to deserve that suffering. It's hard to overcome that.

Contrast the Trump U story with this ad, which was run against Mitt Romney during the 2012 campaign:



A worker for a company that came under the control of Romney's Bain Capital says:

"Out of the blue one day, we were told to build a 30-foot stage. Gathered the guys, and we built that 30-foot stage, not knowing what it was for. Just days later, all three shifts were told to assemble in the warehouse.

A group of people walked out on that stage, and told us that the plant is now closed, and all of you are fired. I looked both ways, I looked at the crowd, and we all just lost our jobs. We don’t have an income.

Mitt Romney made over a hundred million dollars by shutting down our plant, and devastated our lives.

"Turns out that when we built that stage, it was like building my own coffin. And it just made me sick."

It's harder to apply "just world" thinking in this case -- here's a guy who went to the same job every day, and one day, through no fault of his own, Bain Capital came along and took away his job. We don't see this worker making any bad choices.

But the Trump U attendees all signed on willingly and (if that's what we prefer to believe) wittingly. Just-worlders will say they knew what the costs were, and will cling to the favorable assessments of the U offered up by Trump as evidence that there was valuable information available if you were willing to do the work.

I don't know that this is how most people are going to react. I really can't tell. I just think it's possible that Trump U isn't going to make the scales fall from Trump diehards' eyes, or be the thing that turns fence-sitters into detractors. But we'll see.

HILLARY, THERE'S YOUR DAISY AD

So we know about Donald Trump's meltdown yesterday:

Donald Trump's criticism of the media has reached Nixonian levels -- only Trump isn't doing the name-calling in private. He's doing it right to reporters' faces.

On Tuesday, Trump pointed out ABC News reporter Tom Llamas and called him "a sleaze." Llamas' crime? Asking the presumptive Republican presidential nominee to explain why he had misled people about how much money he'd raised for veterans.

During his tirade about the press, he interrupted CNN's Jim Acosta who was asking Trump about his ability to deal with scrutiny, to say sarcastically, "Excuse me, excuse me. I've watched you on TV. You're a real beauty."

Hillary Clinton and her surrogates have come close to doing this, but I think sooner or later they should make an ad that intercuts outbursts like this with clips of the world on fire -- war, terrorism, riots -- to make the point that Trump's temperament creates the very real possibility that he'd blow up the planet in a fit of pique. It's not exactly what LBJ's campaign did with the famous "daisy" ad, but it fits the current circumstances.

****

Of course, Trump attacks the press because the press sits at his feet inviting attack. I know it's unimaginable, but in a better world, reporters would have just walked out when Trump started attacking the integrity of their colleagues. Trump's press conferences reveal his character, but we don't garner information from them. We watch the alpha male thrust and parry; it's good television, and that means it pays the bills, but it doesn't turn us into informed citizens. Nobody apart from the ratings-hungry media needs another Trump press conference; he'll never tell us the truth in any of them, and we see his personality elsewhere. So screw him -- reports, if he insults your integrity, tell him where he can stick his insults. Show some backbone.

That'll never happen, of course. New York Times media critic James Poniewozik reveals (unwittingly?) the real nature of the Trump-media relationship in this piece of commentary about the press conference:

And then there came the question about Harambe, because it is 2016, and this is what we do now: We ask the reality TV star who may become the leader of the free world how tough he would be on large zoo animals.

It was poetically fitting. For almost a year, Mr. Trump has been the 800-pound gorilla whose unpredictable rampages have obsessed the news media. Now he was completing the circle by commenting on the 400-pound gorilla who briefly stole the spotlight from him for one holiday weekend.

For the record, Mr. Trump said that he thought zoo officials had little choice but to shoot Harambe. But, he added: “There were moments with the gorilla, the way he held that child, it was almost like a mother with a baby. It looked so beautiful and calm. And then there were moments when it looked pretty dangerous.”

So it is with Mr. Trump and the news media, and their volatile symbiosis. Tuesday morning, he was in raging silverback mode, glowering, posturing and verbally dragging the press around his gilded Manhattan lair.

But viewed from another vantage point, it can look as if he were holding them very close.

Um, Poniewozik realizes what the press is in this metaphor, right? A helpless three-year-old boy separated from his mommy and at the mercy of an apex predator a strong, untamed beast who sometimes seems to be nurturing? Is that really how these people see themselves in relation to Trump?