Convention night #1 summary:
Oh, by the way, Melania plagiarized Michelle’s speech.
On to other things.
Josh Marshall:
Dominance and Humiliation, No Middle Ground
This may all seem like no more than riffing on a handful of entertainingly pitiful figures. But it's more than that. As we discussed in the early Spring, the entirety of Trump's political message is dominance politics. To paraphrase McLuhan it is both the messenger and the message. Trump attacks, others comply and submit. Whether or not that is always true it is the story and the promise he has sold his supporters. Trump's handling of his vice presidential pick casts him in an extremely unflattering light. And yet the heaviest weight undoubtedly falls on Pence. It is simply no accident that those who come into his orbit, who join with him, are rapidly visited with a string of indignities that stand in a bracing contrast to the power and status they earlier enjoyed. On the field of other political actors, other would-be 'alpha males', for Trump you are either his enemy or his property. The only exceptions are those - think of Cruz and Rubio - who remain far enough from Trump's event horizon not to get pulled in.
None of this is an accident. We can confidently expect a string of new indignities for Pence from now until election day.
It’s going to be bad for him and his supporters to be beaten (as they see it ) by a girl.
Politico:
The scene, with party officials feuding in front of reporters and cameras, was a distressing one for a party looking to present a united front amid Trump’s battle with Hillary Clinton for the presidency.
And it was all the more frustrating for party leaders because they came an eyelash away from preventing it. In the final hours before the voting Monday, Cuccinelli — a leader of the party’s conservative faction — reopened talks with Republican National Committee leaders in an attempt to forestall the public spectacle. The conversations, confirmed by GOP sources involved and by Cuccinelli, began late Sunday and continued into Monday morning. They were an attempt to revive negotiations that failed last week, when Cuccinelli pushed for changes to party rules that would encourage states to close their primaries to Democrats and independents.
For the second time in a week the two sides almost reached an accord, but just like the unity talks at last week’s pre-conevntion meetings, the negotiations again fell apart because Cuccinelli couldn't bring other conservative leaders – and especially Utah Sen. Mike Lee – on board.
Greg Sargent:
Donald Trump is not qualified to be president. And the American people know it.
As the GOP convention gets underway in Cleveland today, three national polls released over the weekend showed Hillary Clinton leading Donald Trump: A CNN poll putting Clinton up by 49-42; an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll putting her up by 46-41; and a Washington Post/ABC News poll putting her up by 47-43.
But buried beneath the toplines is evidence of another dynamic that gets at something important about the state of this race: While both Clinton and Trump are very unpopular, large majorities in two of these polls believe that only one of them is qualified for the presidency, and equally large majorities believe that the other one is not.
The new WaPo poll finds, for instance, that Americans say by 59-39 that Clinton is “qualified to serve as president,” but they also say by 60-37 that Trump is “not qualified to serve as president.”
The WaPo poll also finds that 59 percent of Americans say that Clinton has the “better personality and temperament to serve effectively as president,” while only 28 percent of Americans say that about Trump.
We are a tribal nation, and Donald Trump starts with 40% support no matter what (a great year to prove the point, given what “no matter what” means).
Nate Cohn:
In truth, around 50 state and national polls were released this past week. Individually, they have sometimes felt as chaotic as the news around the world. But together they tell a far clearer story: Mrs. Clinton holds a modest but clear lead heading into the conventions.
While the occasional poll has looked good for Mr. Trump, it has been two months since he led a national survey that included voters without a landline telephone. Mrs. Clinton has led dozens…
The polls tell a very clear story about the country’s divisions in an era of sweeping economic and demographic shifts. For white voters with a college degree and nonwhite voters, the 2016 presidential election must look and feel like a landslide. Mr. Trump trails by as large or larger margins among these voters as John McCain did in 2008.
But the story is very different for white voters without a college degree, who remain a very large bloc of voters in the electorate. Here, Mrs. Clinton is doing far worse than President Obama last time. On balance, these two shifts have canceled out — leaving Mrs. Clinton ahead by roughly the same margin as Mr. Obama was in pre-election polls from 2012.
Jennifer Rubin:
As we head to Cleveland today, we certainly have been reminded that the GOP electorate picked someone as its nominee who is not only unfit to govern but entirely incapable of running a national campaign.
As to the governance, the attempted coup in Turkey — a NATO ally essential in the war against the Islamic State and headed by a problematic, increasingly authoritarian President Recep Tayyip Erdogan — coupled with the horrific attacks in Nice, France, and police deaths in Louisiana, reminds us that Donald Trump has no real understanding of the world, no respected advisers around him and atrocious foreign policy judgment. If he had been president this week, one could imagine him blundering along, leaping from one talk show to another spouting inflammatory rhetoric that would only upset allies and swell the ranks of jihadist training camps. What would he have done if the coup occurred on his watch? We have no idea — and, we fear, neither does he.
The past four days, however, were more about Trump’s utter incompetence as a candidate.
I wonder some days if anyone reads her.
Jim Rutenberg:
The can’t-look-away quality of his public persona and his media awareness have frequently pushed much of our national journalism into an unsavory corner where the imperatives of equal time, hard scrutiny and adherence to traditional standards have given way to the business lure of the huge television ratings and internet clicks that Mr. Trump uniquely provides.
Still, nothing will test the news media like the next few days in Cleveland, where the Republican convention gets underway on Monday. Mr. Trump will have something that even he has never had; something that only presidents and major party nominees get. And that is nearly full control of the national media stage for four straight evenings in prime time, across not only cable news, but, at least for one hour every night, the broadcast networks as well…
How far Mr. Trump goes with that convention approach, first reported byJeremy W. Peters of The New York Times last week, remains to be seen; one never knows. But some of it promises to border on spectacle, to put it mildly. (Let me repeat: Among the potential themes is Mr. Clinton’s sex life.)
It could be one of those events that we look back on as a defining moment in American media, especially for the television networks: Did they once again this year hand themselves over to a Trumpian infomercial — theultimate Trump infomercial — and bask in the ratings?
Or did they rediscover their vital role of providing context, perspective and truth in a contest that is not a countdown-clock-worthy sporting event orreality show, but a competition for the presidency of the United States in fraught and dangerous times?
EJ Dionne:
The Republican Party came to life as the bastion of “Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Speech, Free Men.” It was a reformist party dedicated to stopping the spread of slavery and to fighting a “Slave Power” its founders saw as undermining free institutions.
The new political organization grew out of the old Whigs and reflected the faith that Henry Clay and his admirer Abraham Lincoln had in the federal government’s ability to invest in fostering economic growth and expanding educational opportunity. Its partisans embodied what John C. Calhoun, slavery’s chief ideological defender, described disdainfully as “the national impulse.” It was, in fact, a good impulse.
But the Republicans who held their first national convention 160 years ago were more than just Northern Whigs. Their ranks also included many former Democrats who shared a fervor for the anti-slavery cause andhelped take some of the Whiggish, elitist edge off this ingathering of idealists and practical politicians.
“The admixture of Whig and Democratic politics inside the Republican Party,” writes historian Sean Wilentz in “The Politicians & The Egalitarians,” his recently published book, “created a forthright democratic nationalism, emboldening the federal government, for a time, at once to stimulate economic development and broaden its benefits.”
The Republicans descending on Cleveland would thus have every right to insist that all Americans owe a large debt to the GOP. We are a better, freer and more prosperous nation because their party was born.
And then Trump happened. As the title of the piece says, RIP GOP.
Five Thirty Eight:
Legend has it that after leveling Carthage in the Third Punic War, Roman army generals ordered that the city’s fields be sown with salt so that they’d lie fallow for years, Roman generals not being particularly well known for their benevolence in victory.
Many Republicans think Donald Trump’s nomination is doing roughly the same thing to their party: destroying any chance for growth it once had and leaving the GOP to wither and die on Trump vineyard vines.
“My general sense, looking at this election, is that what we’re witnessing here is the end of something much more than the beginning of something,” Yuval Levin, editor of the conservative policy journal National Affairs, told me recently…
Many have assumed that adherence to a certain conservative purity was the engine of the GOP, and given the party’s demographic homogeneity, this made sense. But re-evaluating recent history in light of Trump, and looking a bit closer at this year’s numbers, something else seems to be the primary motivator of GOP voters, something closer to the neighborhood of cultural conservatism and racial and economic grievance rather than a passion for small government.
KC Star on the Baton Rouge shooter:
He took up anti-government views, and while he said he didn’t want to be affiliated with any organized groups, he was a member of a bizarre offshoot of the sovereign citizen movement and had been associated with the Nation of Islam. He saw police as part of the government and was outraged by the recent spate of police shootings of black men.
Followers of the sovereign citizen movement believe the government is corrupt and has no jurisdiction over them. Federal authorities consider the movement a domestic terrorist threat, and the movement continues to swell, with violent incidents erupting regularly.
This is a terrific explainer (J.J. MacNab is a subject matter expert):
Paul Waldman:
We all understand that Supreme Court justices care about partisan contests, since they have ideological preferences just like anyone else. Ruth Bader Ginsburg apparently wants Clinton to win, just as her colleagues may well want someone else to win.
But if one of the other candidates had become the Republican nominee, there's no way she would have made these kind of remarks. She didn't do it because of Trump's plan to cut taxes for the wealthy, his proposal to repeal the Affordable Care Act, or his opposition to abortion rights. All the other candidates shared those positions.
She did it because Trump presents a unique threat to democracy itself, one that stands outside ideological and partisan differences.
Trump is that kind of threat not because he knows virtually nothing about policy (though that's true), or because he's crass and crude (also true) or because he lies constantly (undeniable). He's a threat because he rejects so many of the basic ideas on which our democracy is based.
You can hear the Tom Jensen interview here.
Chris Lehmann:
The key bulwark of faith-based Trumpism is the prosperity gospel — a movement rooted in Pentecostal preaching that holds that God directly dispenses divine favor in the capitalist marketplace to his steadfast believers. Trump assiduously courted the leading lights of the prosperity faith well before his presidential run got serious enough for him to make the obligatory rounds at hard-line evangelical gatherings, such aslast month’s Faith and Freedom Coalition Conference. Last year, he hosted a conclave of three dozen leading prosperity preachers at Trump Tower, and his effort promptly netted him the vocal support of prosperity televangelist Paula White. Indeed, White is reputed to have presided over Trump’s born-again conversion.