We begin today’s roundup with Emma Roller at The New York Times, who profiles the down-ballot candidates who are struggling with the fact that Donald Trump will be at the top of their ticket:
[W]ith Mr. Trump having clinched the Republican nomination, down-ballot candidates are finding the task of distancing themselves from their presidential nominee much easier said than done. On what seems to be an hourly basis, Mr. Trump churns out politically incorrect invective that has the dual effect of firing up his supporters and offending women, Latinos, Muslims and, as Mr. Trump has called them in the past, “the blacks.”
So Republicans in moderate states will be forced, over the next five months, to show that they are not the same as their party’s presidential nominee, while at the same time latching on to the anti-Washington sentiment that Mr. Trump has built his political success on. They may be incumbents, their argument goes, but they are the real outsiders in their races. They’re outsiders that use their place in Congress to get things done within the parameters of power. You know, an outsider’s type of insider.
On the right, meanwhile, Michael Gerson, pens a harsh assessment of Republicans who now support Trump:
Republicans are testing out a theory. “What Trump is doing,” argues Peter Wehner of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, “is exactly what Rush Limbaugh and others have been begging Republican presidential candidates to do — to run a brutal, scorched-earth, anything-goes campaign. They now have their man.” So, is the nation longing for more invective, more viciousness, more accusations of scandal and conspiracy? A strong plurality of voters in Republican primaries seemed to agree. We will now see how the national electorate responds. As a starting move, Trump has accused Bill Clinton of rape and intimated that the Clintons are guilty of murder. It is hard to imagine going lower from here, but Trump will surely manage.
Some Republicans keep expecting Trump to finally remove the mask of misogyny, prejudice and cruelty and act in a more presidential manner. But it is not a mask. It is his true face. Good Republican leaders making the decision to support Trump will end up either humiliated by the association, or betrayed and attacked for criticizing the great leader. Trump leaves no other options.
Over at The Washington Post, Eugene Robinson continues to explain how Trump will be an atrocious president if he wins:
As Trump showed the world, it is relatively easy to run for president if you are willing to say or do anything to get attention and you believe in nothing except your own self-inflated myth. His reality-television-style campaign overwhelmed a badly fractured Republican Party. But the act is getting harder to pull off because now his words, often chosen for their shock value, have real consequences.
Take his promise, made Thursday in a speech on energy policy, to cancel the Paris agreement on climate change and stop U.S. payments into a United Nations fund to mitigate the impact of global warming worldwide. That’s in keeping with Trump’s know-nothing approach to the climate issue, but it can hurt him more than he might imagine.
Switching topics, Rebecca Traister at New York Magazine has a fascinating profile of Hillary Clinton:
There are a lot of reasons — internal, external, historical — for the way Clinton deals with the public, and the way we respond to her. But there is something about the candidate that is getting lost in translation. The conviction that I was in the presence of a capable, charming politician who inspires tremendous excitement would fade and in fact clash dramatically with the impressions I’d get as soon as I left her circle: of a campaign imperiled, a message muddled, unfavorables scarily high. To be near her is to feel like the campaign is in steady hands; to be at any distance is to fear for the fate of the republic. [...]
When I asked her why she thinks women’s ambition is regarded as dangerous, she posited that it was about “a fear that ambition will crowd out everything else — relationships, marriage, children, family, homemaking, all the other parts [of life] that are important to me and important to most women I know.” She also mentioned the unappealing stereotyping: “We’re so accustomed to think of women’s ambition being made manifest in ways that we don’t approve of, or that we find off-putting.”
Over at POLITICO, Gabriel Debenedetti writes about Clinton’s strategy against Trump:
He’s too rich and out-of-touch to understand the problems facing average Americans. He’s hiding something in his tax returns. He’s a cold-blooded capitalist predator — and there’s a recording to prove it.
If the Hillary Clinton campaign’s attacks on Donald Trump feel a little familiar, it’s because they appear to be straight from Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign against Mitt Romney.
On a final note, here’s Aaron David Miller’s take on Trump’s foreign policy:
His lifelong response has been to put everyone else down, or at least anyone who challenges him. Call it Trump’s “counterpunch” approach; it’s one he’s articulated again and again in different forms and forums, and it’s plainly central to his worldview: When someone hits you, you hit them back 10 times harder. [...]
But the world is a place in which America probably can’t afford to be in a constant state of counterattack, and where every challenge isn’t a nail that requires a hammer. In such a world, the application of honey is often as important as vinegar; nuance, restraint and prudence matter, too. So history has taught us. [...] a president must carefully choose his fights, as we’ve learned throughout American history—and he (or she) really can’t afford to create new conflicts where there are none today.