Philip Bump at The Washington Post highlights the headache that Donald Trump is to the Republican primary race:
Source: The Washington Post
Ten days ago, we raised an important point. People referring to Donald Trump as the Republican front-runner ignored that his leads, where they existed, were within the margin of error. Meaning that he was among the leaders, but he wasn't the clear leader.
In this crazy election, ten days is a long time.
As our colleagues Dan Balz and Peyton Craighill report, Trump now leads the 2016 Republican field according to a new Washington Post/ABC News polling conducted last week. He gained 20 points since the last survey, completed at the end of May. Twenty points! On the graph below (which shows the preferences of registered voters), any candidate in the gray area dropped since the May poll. Everyone else did better -- and the further from the diagonal line, the better they did.
From the
poll (PDF):
NATIVISTS – There’s a nativist element to Trump’s support: He’s backed by 38 percent of Republicans and GOP-leaning independents who feel that immigrants, overall, mainly weaken U.S. society. That drops to 12 percent among those who say immigrants strengthen this country. [...]
These are early days, of course; leaders came and went like flashcards in the 2012 Republican primary contest, and, as noted, potential fallout from Trump’s comments on McCain – or his next pronouncements – remains to be seen. But the results underscore the GOP’s conundrum in responding to Trump, a billionaire businessman and television celebrity who hasn’t ruled out an independent run for the presidency.
The Des Moines Register:
His comments were not merely offensive, they were disgraceful. So much so, in fact, that they threaten to derail not just his campaign, but the manner in which we choose our nominees for president. By using his considerable wealth, his celebrity status, and his mouth to draw attention to himself, rather than to raise awareness of the issues facing America, he has coarsened our political dialogue and cheapened the electoral process.
He has become "the distraction with traction" — a feckless blowhard who can generate headlines, name recognition and polling numbers not by provoking thought, but by provoking outrage.
In just five weeks, he has polluted the political waters to such an extent that serious candidates who actually have the credentials to serve as president can't get their message across to voters. In fact, some of them can't even win a spot in one of the upcoming debates, since those slots are reserved for candidates leading in the polls.[...]
The best way Donald Trump can serve his country is by apologizing to McCain and terminating this ill-conceived campaign.
More on the day's top stories below the fold.
Sean Illing at Salon:
What Trump said about McCain is deeply offensive. What he said about Mexicans was stupid and nakedly racist. Most people not running for the Republican nomination would happily concede this. What’s instructive, though, is that GOP candidates felt comfortable critiquing one offense and not the other. And the reason is obvious: racism resonates with a large subset of the Republican base.
Igor Bobic at The Huffington Post:
Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush was one of several 2016 GOP presidential candidates to condemn Trump's "slanderous attacks." He tweeted on Saturday that "all our veterans - particularly POWs have earned our respect and admiration." But Bush didn't object to such attacks in 2005, when he praised Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, a group of veterans that had helped torpedo Kerry's 2004 presidential bid by running television ads slurring his service record in Vietnam.
"As someone who truly understands the risk of standing up for something, I simply cannot express in words how much I value their willingness to stand up against John Kerry," Bush wrote in a January 2005 letter to Col. George Day, one of the group's members. [...] Perry, who over the weekend called on Trump to withdraw from the race, said in 2004 that Kerry ought to release his military records because "a lot of questions” remained unanswered.
Ben Jacobs at The Guardian:
Both Bush and Perry refused to speak out against the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth ad in 2004. In a radio interview with Sean Hannity, Bush said that he didn’t think the group’s attack on Kerry was “a smear.” He added “In fact, what ought to happen is, there ought to be fact checks. Every ad that goes out ought to be looked at by the press in an objective way and people can make their own determination whether they’re accurate or not.”
Bush also sent a letter to Bud Day, a Medal of Honor-winning POW who was a leader of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, praising his role in the organisation
Paul Waldman:
I suspect that Trump's supporters aren't going to desert him because he insulted John McCain — after all, McCain isn't much liked among the Republican base, and this actually fits in with Trump's political brand as the guy who tells it like it is. The fact that he's getting universal condemnation could even convince the base that he's exactly the kind of no-nonsense, shake-up-the-system candidate they've been hoping for. When he said Mexican immigrants were rapists and drug dealers, his support leaped among Republican primary voters, and they love the fact that he tosses around insults at anyone and everyone. And we in the media love it too.
Trump being a jerk is a feature of his candidacy, not a bug — and we just can't get enough.
Robert Schlesinger:
the same blustering verbosity that has fueled Trump will inevitably be his downfall, whether his dis of the service-members who got captured proves to be the specific back-breaking straw or one example in a drawn-out collapse. Either way, Trump's verbal diarrhea is bound to be his undoing. (And not just the stuff of recent vintage; as NBC's "First Read" team has been arguing for a while, if any opponents start to truly take Trump seriously they can destroy him with his pre-conservative comments on things like abortion, health care and gays.)
And that brings us back to the broader lesson for the Republican Party. As I wrote a few weeks ago, Trump is a funhouse mirror caricature of the GOP (rich, white, bombastic, bigoted) but he's also an unpleasant distillation of some of the right's worst impulses.
Switching topics,
The Denver Post looks at the Cuba-U.S. relationship:
The U.S. has normal interactions with many countries that regularly criticize it. The whole idea of diplomacy, after all, is to work through differences. [...] Even with embassies now open, U.S.-Cuba relations still face a big hurdle in Congress, since only it can lift the economic embargo against Cuba. Meanwhile, most Republicans and some Democrats oppose such a move absent progress by Cuba on human rights.
This is a curious demand, however. Has anyone ever conditioned trade, say, with Saudi Arabia or most other nations with abysmal records on human rights on whether they loosen internal restrictions?
Then why impose a separate standard for Cuba?
It's time to normalize economic interactions with Cuba along with political relations. The U.S. stands to gain, and so does the average Cuban.
The Miami Herald:
“The interests of both countries are better served by engagement than by estrangement,” Sec. Kerry declared said on Monday.
The only way to fulfill those words is to keep pressing for human rights reforms and to ensure that U.S. diplomats in Cuba at the redesignated U.S. Embassy make it a priority to do whatever they can without violating protocol to help ordinary Cubans achieve progress toward freedom.
The New York Times:
As sworn enemies become uneasy but respectful neighbors, the Cuban government is certain to come under increasing pressure from its citizens. They have long yearned for basic freedoms, like being able to oppose the government without fear, create livelihoods that are not controlled by the state, and have access to technology that allows communication with the rest of the world. [...] The full normalization of relations between the United States and Cuba will take years and will be an arduous process. Issues that will be hard to resolve include the disposition of American property the Cuban government seized in the 1960s, and the fate of the United States Navy base in Guantánamo Bay, which the Cuban government considers an illegally occupied territory. [...] some Cubans want to see a flood of foreign investment and a booming private sector. Others worry that a rapid economic transition will erode the socialist principles that have offered ordinary Cubans education and health care superior to that available to millions of impoverished Latin Americans. Some are eager for a multiparty political system with real elections, while others would settle for a more effective, less intrusive government.
These competing visions will be hard to reconcile. But they will eventually have to be debated and resolved among Cubans. In the meantime, altering the image of the United States as an antagonistic neighbor stands to help enormously.