We begin today’s roundup with Dana Milbank at The Washington Post who writes about Donald Trump’s rhetoric of violence:
There was a time when fantasizing aloud about the murder of your opponent would have been beyond the pale — but not anymore. “Absolutely nonsense,” Trump’s running mate, Mike Pence, told ABC News when asked if such a message could incite violence.
If Trump’s “let’s see what happens to her” suggestion were a one-off, there might be an argument for giving Trump the benefit of the doubt. The tendency to regard each Trump outrage in isolation is what allows him to become normalized. But look at the comprehensive output of Trump — who freely admitted to the Post that “I bring rage out” in people — there’s no escaping the conclusion that he winks, and sometimes smiles, at political violence.
Ryan Cooper at The Week makes the case against Trump (worth a click and a share on social media):
Trump does not have a remotely comprehensive policy platform. He clearly has no interest in building one. He clearly is unable to build one.
Trump constantly (and inadvertently) reveals his staggering ignorance of the most basic facts of government and recent history. Trump didn't know that Russia had annexed Crimea. He didn't know what Brexit was. He didn't know that the Trans-Pacific Partnership does not include China. He is very obviously a guy who gets his news from half-watching cable TV and the racists in his Twitter mentions.
When he does talk policy, his positions shift on a daily basis:
Olivia Nuzzi:
[I]t’s currently unclear what, exactly, Trump’s immigration plan is. He’s said that he would like to stop the flow of immigrants “from any nation that has been compromised by terrorism,” which might include France and Germany—but whether that’s in addition to his broad Muslim ban, announced in 2015, or in place of it, is uncertain. [...]
And it’s also unclear what, exactly, Trump’s plan for the 11 million undocumented immigrants already within our borders is, but deportation was surely on his mind Monday. At one point, he said “deportables” instead of “deplorables” while discussing Clinton’s criticism of many of his supporters.
Richard Cohen at The Washington Post compares Trump’s mentality to Hitler’s:
I realize that the name Hitler has the distractive quality of pornography and so I cite it only with reluctance. Hitler, however, was not a fictional creation but a real man who was legally chosen to be Germany’s chancellor, and while Trump is neither an anti-Semite nor does he have designs on neighboring countries, he is Hitlerian in his thinking. He thinks the truth is what he says it is. [...]
Just as Hitler’s remarks about Jews were deeply rooted in German anti-Semitism, so was Trump’s birtherism rooted in American racism — with some anti-Muslim sentiment thrown in. Trump’s adamant insistence on it raised issues not, as some have so delicately put it, about his demeanor, but instead about his rationality. It made a joke out of the entire furor over revealing his medical records. I’m sure that Trump is fine physically. Mentally, it’s a different story.
Eugene Robinson urges voters to cast a vote against Trump on the issue of climate change:
Elections have consequences, and this is one of the most fateful: Anyone who takes climate change seriously had better do everything possible to keep Donald Trump out of the White House.
Believe it or not, there are issues more important than Trump’s latest offensive outburst or Hillary Clinton’s score on the likability scale. Clinton accepts the scientific consensus on climate change, which is increasingly supported by what we see and feel every day. She would build upon President Obama’s efforts to address the issue, which include the historic Paris agreement, seen by many experts as our last best hope to prevent catastrophe.
Trump, by contrast, is a bald-faced denier.
Over at Rolling Stone, Tessa Stuart analyzes Trump’s reaction to the New York and New Jersey bombings:
Trump's reaction to the Manhattan bombing fits a pattern that he has settled into over the last several months: A terrorist will strike, and before waiting for the details, he'll jump to conclusions. And he'll often be right, not because he's particularly insightful, but because what appeared to have happened did, in fact, happen. Then he'll call for instituting, as a matter of policy, jumping to conclusions about a person on the basis of their religion or country of origin.
It's a troubling pattern for someone running to be president, especially of a country with a growing non-white population – and yet Trump is winning over voters with exactly this "non-PC" attitude.
At Foreign Policy, Max Boot explains why Donald Trump is the dream candidate of ISIS:
The core of his approach is to keep saying the enemy is “radical Islamic terrorism,” something that he (wrongly) claims Clinton never does. [...] But there’s a good reason why both Presidents George W. Bush and Obama have been reluctant to speak of “Islamic terrorism,” and it’s not because Obama is a closet Muslim, as Trump has insinuated in the past. It’s because they realize that in the battle against terrorism, the United States cannot win unless it can get the support of most of the world’s 1.5 billion Muslims. By seeming to insult Islam and Muslims as Trump does, he plays into Islamic State and al Qaeda propaganda, which posits that there is a battle between Islam and the West.
But Trump doesn’t care about winning Muslim hearts and minds. He seems to think he can keep Americans safe by keeping all terrorists out of the country, as if it weren’t the case that many of our post-9/11 attackers — such as Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, the Fort Hood, Texas, shooter, and Omar Mateen, the Orlando shooter — were homegrown.
And here’s Greg Sargent’s take on the RNC’s defense of Trump:
So it’s come to this: The institutional position of the Republican Party in the great birther controversy roiling the 2016 campaign — a consequential chapter in our political history — is now essentially that Donald Trump did the nation a service by forcing the first African American president to finally show his papers. [...] The Trump campaign’s effort to whitewash his birther history — in which he fed racist conspiracy theories for years — is being widely called out as dishonest. And that’s good. But Trump’s new narrative is actually a lot worse than the rendering of it we’ve seen in most media accounts suggests, and now the party has institutionally joined in promoting it. [...]
It is likely that many Republicans and conservatives — such as Paul Ryan and Marco Rubio — see it as a blot on the history of the modern GOP that the party nominated someone who launched a years-long racist campaign to delegitimize the first African American president in the explicit belief that it would appeal to the racist tendencies of many GOP primary voters. Those Republicans might even say so right now if asked. But Trump has compelled the RNC not merely to participate in helping him push lies designed to muddy the waters around his birther history, but also — and this is the really important part — to institutionally defend that history. Indeed, while many Republicans previously repudiated this history, the RNC is now helping Trump validate it.
On a final note, don’t miss this piece by Francesca Gino at Harvard Business Review on why Hillary Clinton gets interrupted more frequently than Donald Trump:
These differences in the treatment of men and women are robust, research shows. Take the issue of interruption, for instance. In a well-known study conducted back in 1975, sociologists Don Zimmerman and Candace West of the University of California, Santa Barbara systematically examined interruptions by men and women during conversations. They visited various public places, from coffee shops to drugstores, and surreptitiously recorded any two-person conversations they overheard. Their final sample was rather small (31 dialogues in total), but the results are still worth noting: In mixed-sex conversations, men were responsible for all but one of the 48 interruptions they overheard. These findings have been replicated in more recent research.