Maggie Haberman and Michael Barbaro at The New York Times profile GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump:
While his competitors may be busy working through thick stacks of books on world affairs to prove their qualifications, Mr. Trump says he has little use for such. (“One of the problems with foreign policy,” he explained, “is that it changes on a daily basis.” As a busy man, he added, he prefers newspapers.)
There is no real policy shop churning out position papers, or for that matter a well-staffed central headquarters plotting his long-term message, or speechwriters drafting — or modulating — his words. And there is a circular, interoffice quality to what the campaign does with its money.
But the dangers of Mr. Trump’s approach are now being laid bare. Bare-bones improvisation, which seemed sufficient to fuel his ascent in the polls, is starting to backfire.
E.J. Dionne Jr. examines the GOP's "Midwest bracket":
It’s telling about the contemporary Republican party: Kasich would probably be the better bet in the general election but barely registers in the surveys, while Walker has the better chance of winning the nomination. [...] “I have a little bit of a different message here,” Kasich said at a Republican Governors Association meeting last year. Indeed he does. It’s probably why he can’t win. It’s also why his party needs to listen.
Ryan Cooper analyzes The Huffington Post's decision to cover Donald Trump in their entertainment section:
I respect The Huffington Post's right to make coverage choices as it sees fit. I'm also not sure I agree with the decision to move Trump into the entertainment section. As Matt Yglesias argues, Trump's highly unexpected success — especially given that it came immediately after he started up with bilious racist rants against Mexican immigrants — suggests there is a fairly wide constituency for gutter nativism. That is an important truth of our politics and our nation that should not just be shrugged off as some carnival sideshow.
Instead of banishing Trump to the land of Kardashians and superheroes, the media would probably be better off simply reporting on Trump with open contempt. His ideas are disgusting and he's a vicious, racist bully. But it's not wise to write him — or the ideas that he champions — off as a self-aggrandizing joke. There are a great many people who would eagerly sign on to an immigration-restriction agenda, and Trump would definitely not be the first colossal buffoon elected to the head of a major state.
More on the day's top stories below the fold.
USA Today:
We had hoped to pay no attention to the Trump sideshow. But that became harder to do when he jumped to the top of the recent USA TODAY/Suffolk and Fox News polls of Republican voters. Then, over the weekend, Trump's big mouth became, not surprisingly, impossible to ignore. [...]
Like meteors that flash across the sky and burn out, flawed candidates have a way of self-destructing. That’s one of the few benefits of our endless, grueling presidential campaigns.
The classless attack on McCain might or might not turn out to mark the end of Trump's presidential ambitions. This much is assured: The mouth will keep moving, and one day it will open wide and swallow his candidacy whole.
Also in USA Today, Trump himself writes an op-ed defending his comments.
You can read it here.
Dana Milbank writes about President Obama and the Confederate flag:
When President Obama arrived in Oklahoma City on Wednesday night, a vulgar sight awaited him: about 10 demonstrators across the street from Obama’s downtown hotel waving Confederate battle flags as the presidential motorcade pulled up. [...] What we need, for one thing, is the sentencing reforms he spoke about this week. As more nonviolent drug offenders (often black) have been put away, the United States now has 5 percent of the world’s population but 25 percent of its prisoners. The issue has Republican support, which raises the possibility of rare late-term legislative achievement.
Nobody thinks such a law will erase racism. But, as Obama said this week, “If we keep taking steps toward a more perfect union, and close the gaps between who we are and who we want to be, America will move forward.”
It’s the perfect response to the Confederate flag wavers.
Michael Brendan Dougherty at The Week adds:
America's prisons cannot possibly qualify as either punitive or rehabilitative. Instead, they are vindictive, chaotic, and degrading. A prison sentence should be the punishment in and of itself. But today, prisoners are expected to cope with unimagined and uncountable horrors. They are incentivized to join gangs. They are encouraged to commit more violence in order to avoid violence. Rape is pervasive and the threat of rape encourages prisoners to submit themselves to other violent men. There is no instance in which being plunged into barely controlled danger, or being raped, can be a just punishment.
[...] President Obama has done well to help humanize prisoners. He has emphasized that some receive unduly long or harsh punishments just for being "teenagers doing stupid things" in the absence of real help from functioning families and social institutions. His statement of empathy, that he could have ended up in prison himself, will be used cynically by his haters. It may well reek of sentimentalism even to some of his supporters. But it is a more vivid way of repeating John Bradford's statement upon seeing a group of men led to execution: "There but for the grace of God, go I."
On a final note, in case you missed
John Kerry's response to Donald Trump:
“John and I have some serious differences on a lot of things but he is nothing other than a hero and a good man. Where was Trump when John got shot down over North Vietnam? In school? At a party? Where was he?”