Jelani Cobb/New Yorker:
THE MODEL FOR DONALD TRUMP’S MEDIA RELATIONS IS JOSEPH MCCARTHY
Trump and McCarthy share not only the kindred traits of demagogues—bombast and the manipulation of public fear in the service of their own ends—but a curiously close, almost familial resemblance. McCarthy’s hallucinatory anti-Communism was facilitated in part by a kind of swaggering masculinity that he deployed to differentiate himself from his patrician G.O.P. colleagues. He distorted his record of military service to portray himself as a fearless fighter against unambiguous evil. As with Trump’s, McCarthy’s world view was defined by a hypertensive, conspiratorial outlook. A conspiracy theory typically rests upon the extrapolation of a single shred of suggestion into a skein of unverifiable assertions—as with McCarthy’s 1950 claim that two hundred and five Communists had infiltrated the State Department. An internal government document had noted a number of employees whose background checks had revealed unspecified but troubling information, but there was no indication that these individuals were Communist moles. Trump’s Presidential campaign has been a miasma of conspiracy theories, virtually from the outset. Yet those parallels—disturbing as they may be—are surpassed by the similarities between Trump and McCarthy’s relationships with the press.
Dylan Matthews/Vox:
The key question on the Clinton Foundation is whether it saved lives. The answer is clearly yes.
There is little to no evidence that anyone received meaningful favors from the Clintons in exchange for donating to the foundation. There is definitely no evidence that Hillary Clinton altered her policies as secretary of state in reaction to donations. There’s no evidence that the Clintons or their foundation engaged in some of the more egregious activities of Trump’s foundation, like donating to a state attorney general to deter her from an investigation into Trump’s activities, or giving to a nonprofit to fund a lawsuit against another state AG who did opt to investigate, or even paying off the legal bills of his for-profit businesses.
But there is considerable evidence that the Clinton Foundation has saved millions of lives. And there’s evidence that Bill Clinton’s work with the group would make him more useful as first spouse. Presidents rely heavily on special envoys tasked with making deals to resolve prisoner disputes, facilitate peace processes, and the like. Clinton’s time with the foundation exhibited the exact set of skills necessary for a role like that. His presence could greatly expand the diplomatic bandwidth of his wife’s administration.
The fact that Hillary Clinton’s association with a group, and a husband, with that track record has become a liability rather than an asset is a deep indictment of how skewed the press’s priorities in covering this election have become.
Erica Grieder/Texas Monthly on Cruz endorsing Trump:
At the same time, I’m aware that even before today’s news, it was tricky to persuade anyone to consider giving Cruz the benefit of the doubt about anything—and after today, it will be impossible. Either his endorsement is a pack of lies, or his speech at the RNC was: they can’t both be true. And though it’s possible that “Lyin’ Ted” might still one day become president, the odds, in my view, are now vanishingly narrow. We’ve all heard it a million times: “Everyone hates Ted Cruz.” And now he’s given this faceless “everyone” plenty of reason to do so.
Dan Drezner/WaPo:
Nate Silver says I should be nervous about the election. Here’s why I’m not too nervous.
My model of this election is that Trump has a rigid core of supporters but also a hard ceiling on that support. Clinton has more voter support but also more “soft” support. These are voters who become easily disaffected when she has a bad news cycle or two. (It’s also possible that those on the left get disaffected when she appeals to moderate Republicans and vice versa.) So when the race looks close, it’s not because Trump is attracting Clinton voters, it’s because possible Clinton voters are not feeling all that good about Clinton and might choose not to vote — or answer a pollster.
In this way, the very tightening of the race prevents Trump from winning. There is a bevy of voters who are not jazzed by Clinton but are petrified by a Trump presidency. Once polls start to show that it’s close, they will decide to vote for Clinton or say so in a poll. When the lead expands, they get more complacent and disaffected by Clinton’s flaws.
Given the good recent economic news, and the failure of terrorism threats to benefit Trump, my baseline of the 2016 election is that any tightening of the race creates endogenous effects that prevent Trump from taking the lead.
John Stoehr/US News:
Clinton Is Winning
Yet she's still ahead – and the bad news cycle appears to be over. The major news agencies, as I have argued, have been her primary rival. They now appear chastened after weeks of fetishizing Clinton's flaws while glancing over Trump's. Not only that, but major news agencies are changing tactics to report responsibly on a brazen candidate rolling over the norms of decorum that usually oversee politics and the press.
Indeed, major media appear to have awakened to Trump's real campaign strategy: to dominate the press and lie prodigiously. The New York Times, the most conventional of elite news media, has finally broken the seal, using "lie" in a headline to describe Trump's five-year campaign to besmirch America's first black president. Its executive editor, Dean Baquet, said the paper plans to call out even more lies.
How much impact the Times' decision will have is hard to gauge, but it will have some.
Aaron Blake/WaPo:
“Why aren’t I 50 points ahead?” Hillary Clinton asked rhetorically on Wednesday, echoing a question she surely gets all the time — and perhaps legitimately wonders herself.
It’s a question that seems to come up over and over again among left-leaning Americans: How, given all of the things — they would argue racist and sexist — that Donald Trump has said, is this race as close as it seems? How has an experienced politician like Clinton not buried her opponent by now?
Some blame the media for taking it too easy on Trump and giving him all kinds of free publicity — or for not calling him out more directly for telling lies. But that theory ignores that fact that Trump has been, and remains, the most unpopular presidential candidate in modern American history. As many as two-thirds of Americans don’t like him.
And yet, he’s still close. Why? Why is Clinton not much further ahead in a race that her supporters — and many in the media — thought was un-lose-able?
A few reasons:
Jonathan Cohn/HuffPost on Hillary’s policy shop:
Back in the comparatively innocent days of 2015, before Donald Trump completed his hostile takeover of the Republican Party, before the Bernie Sanders juggernaut really got going, Hillary Clinton’s campaign thought it could get ahead through well-crafted policy proposals. On August 10, Clinton was set to unveil a grand plan to help families pay for college tuition, and for months leading up to her speech, the preparation soaked up hundreds of man-hours in conference calls, meetings and email exchanges. The level of seriousness, according to one participant, rivaled that of a White House staff gearing up for a State of the Union address.
Jay Cost/Weekly Standard:
If we anti-Trump conservatives concede that the president is some sort of governmental superman, functioning as a king in all but name, then every four years the future of the republic must be at stake.
This is not to suggest that the republic is not in danger. Indeed, it is. Rather, I would argue that the "imperial presidency" is a symptom of the underlying malady—and that to cede the point to progressives on the centrality of the executive office is to thwart our own efforts to restore constitutional principles to preeminence.
The ailment, simply put, is this: Congress is a basket case. It refuses to exercise many of its sovereign responsibilities under the Constitution. Many of the tasks it retains it executes badly. Worst of all, the legislature itself has ceded these authorities. They were not taken from it, but granted, happily, of its own volition. A return to true constitutional government does not require us to elect a kingly president who vaguely sympathizes with the platform of the Republican party, but insisting that the legislature reconstitute itself under the Framers' original vision.
Observer (owned by Jared Kushner, Trump son-in-law, and therefore interesting):
Trump’s Brand of Ugly Will Be the Ruin of Our Country
The GOP candidate was never a part of what made New York great—he was what made a great city stumble
Brian Beutler/New Republic:
Trump’s White Supremacy Platform Comes into Focus
He promises the enrichment and safeguarding of white people at the expense of the principle of equal protection.