• Super Tuesday Is Looking a Lot Like Super Trumpday


    Tomorrow is Super Tuesday. On the Republican side, Donald Trump continues to hold a commanding lead both nationally and in nearly every state being contested. No surprise there. But what happened on February 15 or thereabouts?

    The Pollster chart on the right shows the state of play over the past few weeks. Since February 15, the non-Trump part of the field has gone nowhere. They attract almost exactly the same aggregate share of the vote today as they did two weeks ago. Trump, by contrast, has gained more than five points.

    Is this a bandwagon effect, in which Trump has been picking up undecided voters who felt like they had permission to take him seriously after he won New Hampshire? Is it because Trump is picking up nearly all of the votes of the candidates who have dropped out of the race? Is it somehow related to the death of Antonin Scalia on February 13?

    It’s a bit puzzling. Trump’s sudden spike comes after two months of holding pretty steady in the national polls. So what happened on February 15?

  • Today’s Bad Memes: Faulty Earpieces and Gotcha Politics


    Donald Trump “explains” why he declined to denounce David Duke and the KKK yesterday:

    “I’m sitting in a house in Florida with a very bad earpiece they gave me and you could hardly hear what he was saying,” Mr. Trump said on the “Today” show on Monday, after about 24 hours of condemnation from Democrats and Republicans.

    The transcript makes it crystal clear that Trump heard the question just fine. He just didn’t want to disavow the support of white supremacists on national TV. And Laura Ingraham thinks that’s peachy:

    We know what’s going on here. [David Duke] is repugnant, but, frankly, it’s also repugnant to not talk about the issues that really matter to Americans….And the old games of gotcha politics, they’re going to do it, but it’s really not going to help any black American get a job. It’s not going to help any Hispanic American get a job or any poor white guy from West Virginia to get a job.

    Yeah, that’s gotcha politics for you. How dare the liberal media play these kinds of games?

  • Joe Scarborough Finally Turns on Donald Trump


    Joe Scarborough takes to the pages of the Washington Post today to condemn Donald Trump’s refusal to denounce the KKK:

    Sunday’s distressing performance is just the latest in a string of incidents that suggest to critics that Donald Trump is using bigotry to fuel his controversial campaign. The most explicit of all examples was his December proposal to ban Muslims from entering the United States.

    ….A brokered convention is now just the fantasy of Republican elites and Marco Rubio fans. The harsher reality is that the next GOP nominee will be a man who refused to condemn the Ku Klux Klan and one of its most infamous Grand Wizards when telling the ugly truth wouldn’t have cost him a single vote.

    So is this how the party of Abraham Lincoln dies?

    Scarborough has probably done more than any other single human being to help Trump get where he is. And he’s only now noticing that Trump’s bigoted rhetoric has turned out to be pretty popular among the Republican base? “It looks like I overestimated primary voters in the early GOP contests,” he tsk tsks, as if he’s been on a crusade for months to warn the nation that Trump is a racist and a xenophobe, only to be sadly ignored. The reality, of course, is that aside from a brief spat with Trump over his proposed ban on Muslims, Scarborough has been practically a one-man super-PAC pushing Trump’s candidacy.

    Better late than never for his eyes to finally open, I guess. But it’s a little rich to pretend he’s been warning us about this all along.

  • Donald Trump Is Afraid to Denounce the Ku Klux Klan

    February 14, 2000: Donald Trump ends his “brief and flamboyant” bid to be the presidential nominee of Ross Perot’s Reform Party:

    The new interim head of the Reform Party, Pat Choate, described Mr. Trump as a “hustler” last night, and said he had never believed that Mr. Trump had any interest beyond promoting himself and a new book that happened to be published at exactly the time he started his light schedule of campaign travel.

    ….Mr. Trump painted a fairly dark picture of the Reform Party in his statement, noting the role of Mr. Buchanan, along with the roles of David Duke, a former leader of the Ku Klux Klan, and Lenora Fulani, the former standard-bearer of the New Alliance Party and an advocate of Marxist-Leninist politics. “The Reform Party now includes a Klansman, Mr. Duke, a neo-Nazi, Mr. Buchanan, and a communist, Ms. Fulani,” he said in his statement. “This is not company I wish to keep.”

    February 28, 2016: CNN’s Jake Tapper asks Trump about David Duke’s recent endorsement, one of many from ultra-right and white nationalist leaders:

    TAPPER: Will you unequivocally condemn David Duke and say that you don’t want his vote or that of other white supremacists in this election?

    DONALD TRUMP: Well just so you understand, I don’t know anything about David Duke, OK?….I know nothing about David Duke. I know nothing about white supremacists….

    TAPPER: Would you just say unequivocally you condemn them and you don’t want their support?

    TRUMP: Well I have to look at the group. I don’t know what group you are talking about, you wouldn’t want me to condemn a group that I know nothing about….

    TAPPER: The Ku Klux Klan?….I mean I’m just talking about David Duke and the Ku Klux Klan here.

    TRUMP: I don’t know any — honestly I don’t know David Duke. I don’t believe I’ve ever met him. I’m pretty sure I didn’t meet him, and I just don’t know anything about him.

    This is from the man who bragged a couple of months ago that “I have the world’s greatest memory. It’s one thing everyone agrees on.” Obviously, then, the only conclusion we can draw is that Trump doesn’t want to denounce the KKK. After all, I’m sure he knows perfectly well where his core base of support lies. Why take the chance of pissing off the xenophobe vote?

  • Raw Data: Illegal Immigration From Mexico


    Are unauthorized immigrants “pouring across the southern border”? Since Donald Trump said it, there’s automatically a strong chance that it’s a lie, and sure enough, it is.

    According to Pew Research, the population of unauthorized immigrants from Mexico peaked in 2007 at 6.9 million and has been dropping ever since. Currently it stands at 5.6 million. As the chart on the right shows, net migration from Mexico has been negative every year since 2008. But maybe the ones that are here are disproportionately murderers and rapists, as Trump also says. Nope. The number of unauthorized immigrants in US prisons is relatively small, and the bulk of the available research suggests that they’re incarcerated at lower rates than US citizens. It’s just another lie.

  • Hillary Clinton Crushes Bernie Sanders in South Carolina


    This is nuts. Yesterday Pollster had Hillary Clinton ahead in South Carolina by about 20 points. Today they added one new poll, and they have her ahead by 50 points—which is about what she won by.

    Did Bernie really lose 30 points of support in the past two weeks? That’s what the polls seem to show. But why? And how did the press not pick up on this? Most of the coverage I’ve seen has suggested that, sure, Hillary is going to win, but she’s really being pressed in the black community and Bernie could do better than expected. But according to the exit polls, she ended up winning 84 percent of the black vote. And perhaps even more worryingly for Bernie, she even crushed him among voters who agree that our economic system favors the wealthy. That’s his wheelhouse, and he won only 30 percent of their vote.

    We’ll know more after Tuesday, but this doesn’t look good for Sanders. If Hillary racks up a big win on Super Tuesday, she’ll be so far ahead in the delegate count she’ll be almost mathematically unbeatable. At that point, it will be pretty hard for him to justify staying in the race.

  • Will Conservatives Abandon Donald Trump in the General Election?


    The New York Times has a big story this morning about the trials and tribulations of the Republican Party establishment in their efforts to stop Donald Trump. I would like to draw your attention to two things. First this:

    Late last fall, the strategists Alex Castellanos and Gail Gitcho, both presidential campaign veterans, reached out to dozens of the party’s leading donors, including the casino magnate Sheldon Adelson and the hedge-fund manager Paul Singer, with a plan to create a “super PAC” that would take down Mr. Trump….A Trump nomination would not only cause Republicans to lose the presidency, they wrote, “but we also lose the Senate, competitive gubernatorial elections and moderate House Republicans.” No major donors committed to the project, and it was abandoned. No other sustained Stop Trump effort sprang up in its place.

    ….[Mitt] Romney had been eager to tilt the race, and even called Mr. Christie after he ended his campaign to vent about Mr. Trump and say he must be stopped. On the night of the primary, Mr. Romney was close to endorsing Mr. Rubio himself, people familiar with his deliberations said.

    Yet Mr. Romney pulled back, instead telling advisers that he would take on Mr. Trump directly. After a Tuesday night dinner with former campaign aides, during which he expressed a sense of horror at the Republican race, Mr. Romney made a blunt demand Wednesday on Fox News: Mr. Trump must release his tax returns to prove he was not concealing a “bombshell” political vulnerability.

    So why didn’t Romney just fund this Super-PAC himself? $10 million would be pocket change for him, and these PACs all know how to keep contributions anonymous if Romney had wanted that. It’s ridiculous that the Republican Party’s many zillionaires have all been unwilling to drop a few megabucks on this effort, and doubly ridiculous that Romney is willing to go public with his “horror” but wasn’t willing to shell out to do something about it. Maybe that’s why he lost the 2012 race.

    And there’s also this:

    At least two campaigns have drafted plans to overtake Mr. Trump in a brokered convention, and the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, has laid out a plan that would have lawmakers break with Mr. Trump explicitly in a general election.

    ….While still hopeful that Mr. Rubio might prevail, Mr. McConnell has begun preparing senators for the prospect of a Trump nomination….Mr. McConnell has raised the possibility of treating Mr. Trump’s loss as a given and describing a Republican Senate to voters as a necessary check on a President Hillary Clinton, according to senators at the lunches.

    He has reminded colleagues of his own 1996 re-election campaign, when he won comfortably amid President Bill Clinton’s easy re-election. Of Mr. Trump, Mr. McConnell has said, “We’ll drop him like a hot rock,” according to his colleagues.

    Mitch McConnell is the ultimate transactional politician. He never bothers with fancy justifications for what he wants to do; he just tells reporters that his goal is stop x or push y because it’s what he wants, and that’s that. It’s almost refreshing in a way.

    So if he’s seriously suggesting that Republicans in significant numbers might break with Trump and hand the election to Hillary Clinton, he’s probably serious. He doesn’t play 11-dimensional chess. I’ve been frankly dubious about all the promises I’ve heard from conservatives about abandoning Trump even if he wins the nomination, and I still am. I think most of them will eventually invent some reason to “reluctantly” pull the lever for him thanks to their existential horror of a Hillary Clinton presidency. But who knows? If McConnell is up for it, maybe it’s a more serious possibility than I think.

  • Liberals Need to Back Off the Trump Love


    A few of my fellow liberals have been suggesting lately that they’d prefer Donald Trump as president to, say, Marco Rubio. Mostly this is for two reasons. First, they figure Trump will be easier to beat. Second, if he does win, Trump’s volatile personality and tenuous relationship to ideology suggest that he might be surprisingly flexible in office. Rubio, by contrast, is a stone ideologue who would appoint hundreds of fellow ideologues to office. He’d make a real effort to do every horrible thing he says he’s going to do.

    This is an enticing argument, but it’s also dangerous. For months, we’ve been warning that Trump would be a uniquely dangerous president. He’s a serial liar. He’s a demagogue. He’s a racist and a xenophobe. He appeals to our worst natures. He’d blithely enact ruinous policies simply because his vanity makes him immune to advice and policy analysis. He’d appoint folks who make Michael Brown look like Jeff Bezos. He would deliberately alienate foreign countries for no good reason. He’d waste money on pet projects like border walls and huge military buildups that would likely have no appreciable effect. And while that volatile personality of his probably wouldn’t cause him to nuke Denmark, you never know, do you?

    No liberal wants to see a conservative in the Oval Office. Not Rubio, not any of the others. But there’s a difference between accepting an ordinary member of the opposition party and accepting a fatuous clown like Donald Trump. The former will enact lots of policies we hate, but that’s democracy for you. We’ve been through it before and we’ll go through it again. The latter is a mockery of everything democracy stands for.

    Even if you assume that Marco Rubio might be more technically destructive of liberal policies than Trump—an unlikely but admittedly possible outcome—Trump would be more destructive of the very core of liberalism. If we’re willing to accept bigotry and belligerence and just plain inanity—along with the small but genuine chance of something truly catastrophic taking place on his watch—just for the sake of maybe getting a slightly better outcome on a few liberal policies, we really ought to just hang it up.

    At this point, it’s not clear if Trump can be stopped anytime before November 8th, but liberals should nevertheless be doing everything they can to help his opponents relegate him to the ashcan of history. After all, it’s no sure thing that he’ll lose in November either. There are lots of ways he could win. An economic downturn could do it. Trump’s demagoguery might do it. Some kind of unexpected scandal could do it. He might turn out to be a better general election campaigner than we think. Or Hillary Clinton could just run a bad campaign.

    This is not 11-dimensional chess. All those arguments we’ve been making against him are absolutely correct. We need to be against Trump—not ironically and not with our fingers crossed, but in reality. The conservative establishment hates him because he’d be bad for conservatism. We ought to hate him because he’d be bad for the country and bad for liberalism.

  • Let Us Take a Minute to Fully Appreciate the Current State of American Politics

    Do you remember this famous video of the South Korean parliament from a few years ago?

    How infantile! This is supposed to be a mature democracy. What the hell is going on?

    Well, ladies and gentlemen, I give you Marco Rubio on Friday morning, making his case against Donald Trump:

    Can you feel the burn? And here is Trump a few hours later making his case against Rubio:

    Makes you proud to be an American, doesn’t it? The presidential campaign of one of our great political parties has now degenerated into two guys in suits insulting each other for sweating a lot during a debate.

    By the way, Trump’s schtick came during an event where he announced the endorsement of New Jersey governor Chris Christie. Trump now has the following endorsements:

    • Sarah Palin, crackpot former Republican VP candidate.
    • Teresa Giudice, star of Real Housewives of New Jersey.
    • Geert Wilders, Dutch Islamaphobe and leader of the Party for Freedom.
    • Joe Arpaio, famous Arizona sheriff fond of chain gangs, dressing inmates in pink underwear, feeding them moldy food, and too many other lunatic acts to count.
    • Paul LePage, wingnut governor of Maine who memorably said that Maine’s biggest problem was “guys with the name D-Money, Smoothie, Shifty….they come up here, they sell their heroin.”
    • David Duke, noted white supremacist and former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.
    • Alex Jones, insane talk radio conspiracy monger.
    • Jerry Falwell Jr., evangelical leader of Liberty University, whose endorsement came despite Trump’s well-known string of affairs, remarriages, skinflint charitable giving, and apparent lack of any serious Christian faith.
    • Ann Coulter, political commentator noted for her Islamaphobia, hatred of illegal immigrants, and general descent into highly-calculated derangement.
    • Dennis Rodman, famous basketball player and friend to Kim Jung-un
    • Juanita Brodderick and Paula Jones, who both made sketchy but famous accusations of sexual harassment against Bill Clinton.
    • Willie Robertson, homophobic star of Duck Dynasty.
    • Carl Paladino, racist emailer and secret-daughter-hiding former Republican candidate for New York governor.
    • Chris Christie, ambitious, tough-guy governor of New Jersey embroiled in a controversy over punishing a political opponent by deliberately shutting down two lanes on the George Washington bridge and tying up traffic for miles.

    This man is currently leading the national Republican polls by more than 20 points over his nearest competitor.