In his editorial New Rule, Bill Maher examines Trump’s surrogates, and questions whether this cast of characters would be fit to serve in a Presidential administration.
Esquire breaks down the “who” and “why” of the Donald’s inner circle.
Why would Trump surround himself with these idiots? Well, as Trump once said, “Always be around unsuccessful people because everybody will respect you.”
It seems that Trump takes his own advice. “That does explain Rudy Giuliani,” Maher joked. It also explains the pastor who, when interviewed by CNN, declared the conversation “off the record” only after the reporter questioned him about his bogus claims that he graduated college.
And then there’s Marco “taco truck on every corner” Gutierrez. Or Katrina “Obama started the war with Afghanistan” Pierson. And let’s not forget Trump’s lawyer, Michael “Says who?” Cohen.
Donald Trump started his Friday morning by slut-shaming Alicia Machado, falsely claiming she has a sex tape.
You’ll recall Machado is a former Miss Universe that Trump called “Miss Piggy” and “Miss Housekeeping” when he felt she gained weight during her reign in the 1990s.
Her name became a presidential talking point when Hillary Clinton brought up her treatment at the hands of Trump near the end of the first presidential debate.
Since then, Trump surrogates have hit the political talk shows with Trump campaign-issued talking points directing supporters to trash Machado.
Apparently, those attacks weren’t sharp enough for the Trumpster as he took to Twitter at 5:14AM urging his followers to “check out [her] sex tape and past.”
From Think Progress:
Those tweets would be strange enough if they were accurate, but they don’t even rise to that standard. As the Daily Beast reported, “The alleged ‘sex tape’ Trump urged followers to ‘check out’ is non-explicit footage from a Spanish reality-TV show in which the Venezuelan model supposedly had sex with a fellow participant.” A separate Daily Beast report notes that “there does not appear to be any evidence suggesting the existence of professionally made pornography starring Machado.”
The unproven notion that Machado is a porn star was pushed this week by the Infowars website run by conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. In a post published Wednesday, InfoWars called Machado “literally a porn star.” Their evidence? A link to a screengrab of a porn video featuring a woman who looks vaguely like Machado.
Right Wing Watch reports on Trump spokesperson Katrina Pierson’s appearance on a radio show today defending the accuracy of unscientific, online polls.
She also hints that Hillary Clinton does better in fact based polls because news organizations have a “vested interest” in Hillary becoming president.
Trump campaign spokeswoman Katrina Pierson took a page from her boss and touted Trump’s performance in post-debate online polls that have no scientific accuracy whatsoever. After conservative talk show host Joe Pags told Pierson that “news organization polling” is tilted against Trump because media outlets “have some sort of vested interested in getting Hillary Clinton elected,” Pierson said that the scientific polls conducted by media firms are “skewed.” As proof, she cited the fact that the CNN sampled more Democrats in its poll of debate viewers. Three other scientific polls also found that most people thought that Clinton won the debate.
Pierson vigorously defended the accuracy of voluntary, unscientific online polls: “When you look at the online polls, these are people who are, like I said, not engaged in the day-to-day, 24-hour news cycle, watching cable news all day every day, these are just people. If you’re looking at Time magazine, if you’re on another website and they’re doing a poll and you vote in that poll, by the way, to the tune of over a million votes in some of these polls, that’s important, because those aren’t the people who are in it one way or another, a lot of those people are just engaging.”
You’ll note what Pierson doesn’t explain is the fact that with unscientific “widget” polls, a couple of thousand followers can “vote, refresh, vote, refresh, vote, refresh” to the tune of hundreds of thousands of votes, making it appear Trump had more support than he actually has.
As I reported earlier this week, Trump followers posted instructions on a Reddit board encouraging Trumpers to do just that.
The big story today in politics is the Newsweek cover story reporting that Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump apparently engaged in illegal business dealings with Cuba despite the strict embargo that had been in place for decades that banned any such business
A company controlled by Donald Trump, the Republican nominee for president, secretly conducted business in Communist Cuba during Fidel Castro’s presidency despite strict American trade bans that made such undertakings illegal, according to interviews with former Trump executives, internal company records and court filings.
Documents show that the Trump company spent a minimum of $68,000 for its 1998 foray into Cuba at a time when the corporate expenditure of even a penny in the Caribbean country was prohibited without U.S. government approval. But the company did not spend the money directly. Instead, with Trump’s knowledge, executives funneled the cash for the Cuba trip through an American consulting firm called Seven Arrows Investment and Development Corp. Once the business consultants traveled to the island and incurred the expenses for the venture, Seven Arrows instructed senior officers with Trump’s company—then called Trump Hotels & Casino Resorts—how to make it appear legal by linking it after the fact to a charitable effort.
The payment by Trump Hotels came just before the New York business mogul launched his first bid for the White House, seeking the nomination of the Reform Party. On his first day of the campaign, he traveled to Miami, where he spoke to a group of Cuban-Americans, a critical voting bloc in the swing state. Trump vowed to maintain the embargo and never spend his or his companies’ money in Cuba until Fidel Castro was removed from power.
He did not disclose that, seven months earlier, Trump Hotels already had reimbursed its consultants for the money they spent on their secret business trip to Havana.
My questions are:
• Will this affect or be of interest to undecided voters?
• Could this possibly move the needle with Cuban-American voters in the vital swing state of Florida?
From last night’s Rachel Maddow Show:
UPDATE – The Hillary Clinton campaign released this statement on the latest Trump scandal:
Mr. Trump’s debate preparation was unconventional. Aides have introduced a lectern and encouraged him to participate in mock debates, but he has not embraced them, focusing mostly on conversations and discussions with advisers.
During the primaries, the group briefing him for debates was small and closely held. By the weekend before the debate on Monday at Hofstra University, there were nearly a dozen people preparing Mr. Trump, including the retired Army generals Michael Flynn and Keith Kellogg, neither of whom has experience in presidential debates.
There were early efforts to run a more standard form of general election debate-prep camp, led by Roger Ailes, the ousted Fox News chief, at Mr. Trump’s golf course in Bedminster, N.J. But Mr. Trump found it hard to focus during those meetings, according to multiple people briefed on the process who requested anonymity to discuss internal deliberations. That left Mr. Ailes, who at the time was deeply distracted by his removal from Fox and the news media reports surrounding it, discussing his own problems as well as recounting political war stories, according to two people present for the sessions.
Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former New York City mayor and a friend of Mr. Trump’s who has been traveling with him extensively, took over much of the preparation efforts by the end. But with Mr. Trump receiving so much conflicting advice in those sessions, he absorbed little of it.
The team had primed Mr. Trump to look for roughly a dozen key phrases and expressions Mrs. Clinton uses when she is uncertain or uncomfortable, but he did not seem to pay attention during the practice sessions, one aide said, and failed to home in on her vulnerabilities during the debate.
“It clearly looked like he ran out of gas after 30 minutes, and that came through loud and clear,” said Scott Reed, the senior political strategist for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, who has not supported Mr. Trump.
With Millennials and college students in mind, The Democratic Coalition Against Trump drops this dramatic new campaign spot.
Via press release:
The video uses Miley Cyrus’s “Party in the USA” to attack Trump for the support he has received from America’s enemies and is designed to engage with Millennials and college students. With almost 40% of them declaring their support for 3rd party candidates and only 31% currently supporting Secretary Clinton – a far cry from the 60% who voted for Obama in 2012.
“The fact that Trump has received support from Vladimir Putin, neo-Nazi leaders and North Korea is incredibly telling. These are not individuals who want to make America great again,” said Nate Lerner, Executive Director to the Democratic Coalition Against Trump and a millennial. “Further, ISIS continues to use Trump in their recruiting videos, which means a Trump victory will be good for them as well. Clearly they don’t fear Trump as much as he thinks.”
Near the end of last night’s presidential debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, the issue of how Trump sees and treats women came up, along with a story I hadn’t yet heard.
Apparently, the Miss Universe of 1996 (Trump owns the beauty contest) was called “Miss Piggy” and “Miss Housekeeping” by Trump when he noted after winning the crown she had gained some weight.
In addition to names, Trump blind-sided her by inviting reporters to “watch her work out.”
Machado is now an American citizen, and she plans to vote this November. Guess who she’s casting a vote for?
Just another entry in the long list of ways Donald Trump lacks the proper temperament to serve as the president of the United States.
The newspapers of America are suddenly interested in Republican Donald Trump’s lack of interest in the truth and his constant stream of false statements.
Earlier today it was the New York Times, and now, the L.A. Times steps up to bat:
Never in modern presidential politics has a major candidate made false statements as routinely as Trump has. Over and over, independent researchers have examined what the Republican nominee says and concluded it was not the truth — but “pants on fire” (PolitiFact) or “four Pinocchios” (Washington Post Fact Checker).
Trump’s candidacy was premised on upending a dishonest establishment that has rigged American political and economic life, so many of his loyalists are willing to overlook his lies, as long as he rankles the powerful, said Republican strategist Rob Stutzman.
“It gives him not only license, but incentive to spin fantasy, because no one expects him to tell the truth,” said Stutzman, who worked against Trump during the primaries. “They believe they’re getting lied to constantly, so if their hero tells lies in order to strike back, they don’t care.”
PolitiFact, a Tampa Bay Times site that won a Pulitzer for its coverage of the 2008 election, has rated 70% of the Trump statements it has checked as mostly false, false or “pants on fire,” its lowest score. By contrast, 28% of Clinton’s statements earned those ratings.
“As we noted when we awarded Trump our 2015 Lie of the Year award for his portfolio of misstatements, no other politician has as many statements rated so far down the dial,” PolitiFact writer Lauren Carroll reported in June. “It’s unlike anything we’ve ever seen.”
Additionally, news site Politico published a piece titled, “Donald Trump’s Week of Misrepresentations, Exaggerations and Half-Truths,” which chronicled nearly five hours of remarks by Trump over five days on the campaign trail.
The results bore out that Trump said something untrue every 3 minutes and 15 seconds. That adds up to 87 false statements in five days.
But do any of his supporters, or more importantly, any independent voters care?
