First Read:
It's Getting Harder for Trump to Avoid Releasing His Taxes
With less than eight weeks until Election Day, it looks like Donald Trump will be successful in not releasing his tax returns, becoming the first presidential nominee we can remember not doing so. But it's becoming harder and harder for him to avoid releasing them. First is the news that New York's Democratic attorney general has launched an inquiry into the Trump Foundation (the Trump campaign has called in a "left-wing hit job"). Second was the Washington Post's investigative piece noting that most of the Trump Foundation money comes from other people's money; that Trump passes the money to other charities and takes credit for it; and that he has used that money to buy himself a gift. ("One candidate's family foundation has saved countless lives around the world," President Obama said on the campaign trail yesterday. "The other candidate's foundation took money other people gave to his charity and then bought a six-foot-tall painting of himself.") And third is a new Newsweek article detailing how Trump's international business ties could become a significant conflict of interest if he becomes president. Any conventional politician would be feeling the heat here; of course, Trump isn't your conventional politician. But every day that goes by with Trump not releasing his taxes suggests that these is something to all of these stories.
NBC:
"Trump has not taken the basic step of transparency," Karen Hobert Flynn, the President of the public interest group Common Cause said.
While Flynn had plenty of criticism of Clinton's level of disclosure and called for more, the comparison between the two was clear, according to her. Clinton has "obviously done a far better job than Donald Trump," she said.
And while critics say Clinton's private email server was an attempt to circumvent public disclosure, the public ultimately ended up with access to tens of thousands of her email.
It takes time to accumulate this conventional wisdom, but it is true nonetheless.
If you, out of conscience and mindful of hacked personal privacy, do not read Colin Powell’s email, you will miss out on “mentally deficient teletubby” as a Trump descriptor from one of his correspondents.
BuzzFeed:
Colin Powell Called Benghazi A “Stupid Witch Hunt” — And Condi Rice Agreed
Powell said about the fatal attack on the diplomatic compound in 2012, “basic fault falls on a courageous ambassador who thoughts Libyans now love me and I am ok in this very vulnerable place.”
Brian Beutler/New Republic:
Hillary’s “Deplorables” Barb Wasn’t a Gaffe—But the Trump Campaign’s Response Was
Conservatives and most media observers were in agreement this past weekend that Hillary Clinton had erred on Friday in saying “you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables.” Publications from The Washington Post to The New Yorker labeled the remark a “gaffe”—even though she’d used the word “deplorables” just a week prior—and Clinton later walked it part-way back, saying, “I was ‘grossly generalistic,’ and that’s never a good idea. I regret saying ‘half’—that was wrong.”
As time goes on, though, “baskets of deplorables” looks less like a gaffe and more like a forcing mechanism to make Republicans grapple with an awkward truth.
FiveThirtyEight tries to quantitate the number of deplorables (because it’s FiveThirtyEight):
harry: What Clinton said was inarticulate, but even if you look solely at Islamophobia, it was true.
clare.malone: I’d like to “mid-mort” it. But I’d also like to say that it’s a thing that not just the media is responsible for examining — i.e., the way we fact-check numbers, cover substance — readers and voters need to hold themselves to a standard of examining the larger moral/cultural statements that the candidates are putting forward about the country. It’s your election to examine, as well.
Charles P. Pierce/Esquire::
Mr. Madison knew that, and that's why he famously wrote in Federalist 55 that, "Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates, every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob."
It was an impolitic thing to write, probably a gaffe as those are defined today, almost as bad a gaffe as pointing out in public that the racists and xenophobes among us are deplorable. When Hillary Rodham Clinton dealt in this uncomfortable truth last weekend, the elite political media exploded, but she was not wrong. The reaction was primarily fueled not by the racists and xenophobes themselves, but by everyone else, who knew that, through their atrophied attention to their obligations as citizens in a democratic republic, they had enabled the racists and xenophobes and surrendered their birthright as Americans to a wish for a tyrant.
Remember that Bloomberg Ohio poll (Trump +5)? Kyle Kondik from Crystal Ball breaks it down without unskewing it, and a nice analysis:
James Hohmann/WaPo with a fascinating piece, quizzing multiple pollsters:
Why most think the country is on the wrong track, despite positive economic indicators
Democratic pollster Peter D. Hart of Hart Research: “For the moment, I believe the right direction/wrong track question has lost its usefulness. Over a 45 year life of this question, it has tracked within 20 percent of the president’s positive job rating. That is, if the president is at 50 percent positive, then right direction is at 30 percent or more. Today, and for much of the year, America has been out of sorts. Simply put, the country is no longer really judging where we are in current terms (between the campaign, the fear of terrorism, racial conflict, the struggle to get out from a terrible recession), but how we feel about where we have been. If it were a good barometer, (Barack) Obama’s numbers would be lower. I think much of this is aimed at the quality of the 2016 campaign, and the uncertainty about what is ahead with these candidates. So for the last six months, I have dropped this from my speeches. Also, I believe the high negative numbers are not about the present, but the sense of uncertainty about where we are headed. This presidential campaign has been chaotic and full of doubt. I believe some of the wrong direction is the campaign of the horribles.”
Matt Yglesias/Vox:
Donald Trump’s surprisingly shady charitable foundation, explained
At one point, the Trump Foundation operated like a fairly normal rich person’s poorly managed family foundation, receiving money from its founder and handing it out to this or that randomly selected cause. But in more recent years, as its founder has gotten less interested in real estate development and more interested in media celebrity and politics, it’s become rather unusual.
The Trump Foundation isn’t funded by Trump’s own money. Instead, contributions mostly seem to come from a range of Trump’s business partners, allowing him to parlay celebrity into securing credit for charity work.
But much of the foundation’s spending doesn’t really fit the traditional conception of philanthropy at all. Some of the money seems to flow back into Trump’s pockets through his businesses, while other funds are used to punish his political enemies or try to gain new friends in the conservative movement.
Jessica Valenti/Guardian:
Hillary Clinton, 'weak'? Not from where I'm standing
The decision not to immediately disclose her pneumonia is being attacked as a lack of transparency. But, just as the illness isn’t unprecedented on the campaign trail, neither is working through it without alerting the media: John Kerry’s bout with the illness wasn’t revealed until after his 2004 bid had ended.
And it’s not hard to imagine why Clinton wasn’t keen on sharing her diagnoses. Any time Clinton coughs or is in the vicinity of a pillow, conspiracy theorists on the right insist she’s dying of some horrific and well-hidden disease. (Let’s call it AgingWhileFemale-itis.) Her departure from a 9/11 memorial service in New York, followed by a video of her looking woozy and stumbling, only heightened the frenzied speculation.
The delusion that Clinton is seriously ill is so ingrained in some people’s imaginations that #HillarysBodyDouble started trending on Twitter soon after she emerged from her daughter’s apartment looking markedly better. Only in 2016, our year of political cartoonishness, would some people think it’s more likely that Clinton employs a doppleganger than the less exciting truth that a few hours of rest and fluids go a long way when you’re under the weather.
Saurabh Jha/Health Care Blog (and done with wit and precision):
It is Mrs. Clinton who is in the crossfire of Health McCarthyites. Many have diagnosed her ill health merely by looking at her. This is an extraordinary feat by the lay public, which physicians can’t achieve even after years of training. Perhaps I’m not staring at her intently enough, but I can’t detect pallor or icterus in Mrs. Clinton. I do detect boredom in her. Rather than the vigor I expect to see in her in the last lap of becoming the first female president, Mrs. Clinton’s physiognomy is of a runner who has hit the wall at mile 17 of a marathon.
Mrs. Clinton fainted last Sunday. Her syncope kick started the conspiracy theorists. In all fairness, the differential diagnosis for syncope is broad and includes stroke, pulmonary embolism, poisoning by Russians (theory advanced by Dr. Bennett Omalu of Concussion fame) and, as it seems to be the case with Mrs. Clinton, pneumonia. We should, at this moment, spare a thought for our colleagues in emergency medicine when they order a battery of tests in a patient with syncope, particularly as they have to rule out poisoning by Russians.
WaPo on the Great Sort in VA:
“If you think Hillary Clinton should be in jail, how positively are you going to respond to somebody who says, ‘I love Hilary Clinton,’” Kidd said. “If you think Donald Trump is a complete idiot, how positively are you going to respond to somebody who says, ‘I love Donald Trump’? And because the answer is ‘not very’ in either situation, the less likely it is that you’re going to want to talk about it with someone you don’t want to have an argument with.”
One person not at all surprised by the political segregation suggested by poll is Bill Bishop, author of “The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart.” In that 2008 book, Bishop describes a trend that began with cultural preferences but wound up having political consequences.
“People moved into these places ... where you could find your books in the bookstore, the kind of music you want at the club and the kind of food you want in the local grocery store,” he said in an interview last week. “There’s actually a good chart showing that conservatives want to live overwhelmingly where houses are farther apart even if you have to drive to schools or stores, and liberals want to live in a place that’s walkable even if the houses are smaller and you have a smaller lot. These lifestyle characteristics become overlaid with political characteristics. ... It’s not surprising one wouldn’t know another on the other side.”