Melania Trump gave a speech yesterday, and David A. Graham at The Atlantic explains why it was all “a bit surreal”:
“We need to teach our youth American values. Kindness, respect, compassion, charity, understanding, cooperation,” she said.
If you’ve been paying any attention to the campaign, this is a bit surreal. Her husband’s campaign has been notably short on pretty much all of these. He has been unabashed about his cruel streak, sometimes boasting of it. He has blithely brushed off calls for respect. A series of Washington Post articles by David Fahrenthold has shown that he has nearly no record of recent charitable giving, and has used a personal foundation as a method for settling private legal disputes. He has demonized Muslims and immigrants.
Her handwringing about social media—and particularly anonymous Twitter trolls—is equally strange. It’s not just that Donald Trump has retweeted anti-Semitic accounts with anonymous handles like “@WhiteGenocideTM.” Melania Trump herself has given cover to such behavior. After the journalist Julia Ioffe profiled Melania Trump for GQ, she received a barrage of anti-Semitic comments and death threats. Offered a chance to condemn that, Melania Trump said that she didn’t “agree with what they’re doing,” but said that she doesn’t “control her fans,” placing the blame on Ioffe: “She provoked them.”
Callum Borchers:
This one left reporters asking questions, too: Did she just plagiarize Marla Maples? She thinks how many women live in poverty? Has she met her own husband?
The last question is a bit facetious, of course. But as Melania Trump denounced cyberbullying, journalists noted that she is married to the year's cyber-bully-in-chief.
The New York Times, meanwhile, blasts Republicans for calling for the preemptively calling for the impeachment of Hillary Clinton:
Donald Trump and other embattled Republican candidates are resorting to a particularly bizarre and dangerous tactic in the closing days of the campaign — warning that they may well seek to impeach Hillary Clinton if she wins, or, short of that, tie her up with endless investigations and other delaying tactics.
Of all the arguments advanced by the Trump forces, this has to be among the most preposterous. In effect, what they’re saying is, Mrs. Clinton won’t be able to govern, because we won’t let her. So don’t waste your vote on her. Vote for us.
In a rational world — you know, one that values comity and progress in the national interest — this line of argument would be seen as incendiary at worst and hopelessly wacky at best. Not so in Trumpland, where the candidate himself warns (as he did in Miami on Wednesday) that a Clinton victory would “create an unprecedented and protracted constitutional crisis,” raising the specter that government would be severely hobbled by congressional Republicans’ open-ended investigations and a determination to impeach Mrs. Clinton. All this even if she was fairly elected by a majority of American voters.
Paul Waldman at The Week:
When longtime Obama-foil Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) is telling his fellow Republicans to settle down on the impeachment stuff, you know we've arrived at a strange place. Calling it something that "happens in third-world countries," the former head of the House Oversight Committee said this week, "I would ask everyone to calm down and go back to the basics, which is we have an opportunity at the ballot box to determine whether Hillary Clinton has disqualified herself with her actions. Do that first."
But Issa (who is painting himself as a moderate now that he's in a tough reelection race) is probably not going to have a lot of company in advising his fellow Republicans to cool their jets. [...] Would Republicans actually try to impeach Clinton? The practical answer is that it would be very difficult. But at the same time, they'll be under intense pressure to do so.
Betty Medsger at The Nation details the FBI’s Hoover history:
Congressional oversight committees were among the most important reforms initiated after Hoover’s many corrupt actions were revealed in the 1970s. It never was intended, though, that the FBI would notify Congress about new material that had not yet been investigated internally, let alone had not yet been read and assessed. [...]
It is one thing to insist on being independent from control of superiors when one regards their demands as unethical or illegal, as Comey did when he confronted President Bush in 2004 and was prepared to resign rather than approve a program he thought was being conducted illegally. It is quite another thing for him to assert independence in the face of his superiors Lynch and Yates, who concluded that his plan to write to Congress could undo the integrity of the election process, of the director himself and the bureau, as well as the integrity of the Department of Justice, by launching all of them into the situation that tradition and policies were established long ago to avoid: the disruption and reshaping of a presidential election.
On the foreign policy front, former CIA Chief Michael Hayden pens a detailed piece explaining how Trump is aligned with Russia’s policies and calls Trump “Russia’s useful fool”:
[T]he American presidential candidate routinely comes to the defense of his Russian soul mate. [...]
We have really never seen anything like this. Former acting CIA director Michael Morell says that Putin has cleverly recruited Trump as an unwitting agent of the Russian Federation.
I’d prefer another term drawn from the arcana of the Soviet era: polezni durak. That’s the useful fool, some naif, manipulated by Moscow, secretly held in contempt, but whose blind support is happily accepted and exploited.
That’s a pretty harsh term, and Trump supporters will no doubt be offended. But, frankly, it’s the most benign interpretation of all this that I can come up with right now.
Eugene Robinson highlights the major reasons Trump shouldn’t be president:
Clinton understands and embraces [America’s demographic] changes. Trump, by contrast, has become the champion of those whites who, like King Canute, would hold back the sea. It is no accident that he is avidly supported by the likes of David Duke, the unabashed white nationalist, Holocaust denier and former imperial wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. When Trump says “Make America Great Again,” many minorities hear “Make America White Again.” [...]
I could go on, but you get the point. Donald Trump gravely threatens our future. He must be stopped.
On a final note, over at POLITICO, Steven Shepard brings us the campaign expert consensus that Hillary Clinton has the superior ground game:
The presidential race may be tightening, but Democrats are convinced they have an Election Day ace-in-the-hole: Hillary Clinton's ground game. They're confident it will withstand Donald Trump’s late surge in key battleground states. [...]
Democratic insiders are most confident in Colorado, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio and Wisconsin. They express more uncertainty in Florida and Iowa. [...] Insiders in both parties agree that Hillary Clinton has the advantage in Colorado, where every ballot with be cast by mail for the first time in a presidential election.
“For the first time ever, Democrats are outpacing Republicans in ballot returns,” said a Colorado Democrat — who, like all insiders, completed the survey anonymously. “In the past, only on Election Day itself did more Democrats vote than Republicans. This year, there has been only one day when the Republicans outpaced the Democrats. Something special is happening here.”