Psychotic breakdown is not a good look for Donald Trump:
As news of Trump’s taxes breaks, he goes off script at a rally in Pennsylvania
Then again, neither is being incompetent at business. How do you lose nearly a billion dollars in a year? Could you lose a billion dollars in a year? That’s 3 million dollars a day. But we are not as good at losing as Trump is. He's really, really good at it.
Here is how the story mechanics happened:
WaPo on how it’s playing in Ohio:
John Gillespie dug into his omelet with one hand and flipped through the Toledo Blade with the other. The news that Donald Trump had declared a $916 million loss in his 1995 tax return, and may have avoided paying income taxes for as many as 18 years, had made it to the front page of the local newspaper. Gillespie, 52, struggled to make sense of it.
“This was in 1995?” he asked, looking up from the diner counter. “This was during an economic upturn — and he managed to lose $916 million?” The tool and die maker, who had voted for Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont in the Democratic primary, started to laugh. “That tells me a lot about his economic skills.”
The story, first published by the New York Times late Saturday and not denied by a flustered Trump campaign, represented a piece of a holy grail that Hillary Clinton had sought for months. The Democratic nominee, who is making her first campaign stop in this city on Monday, has struggled to convince many traditionally Democratic voters that outwardly successful Trump is not to be trusted and poses a threat to their livelihoods.
The revelations about the Republican nominee’s taxes gave Clinton a fresh opportunity. In conversations around Toledo, many voters said they were offended by Trump.
“It’s disgusting,” said Steve Crouse, 65, the owner of Toledo’s downtown Glass City Cafe and a separate printing business. “As a businessman, he’s got that right to do that. It’s the way the laws were set up. But it’s not right. I would feel guilty if I didn’t pay anything. It’s flat-out cheating the government. You’re using all the roads, the fire department, the police, so you should pay for that.”
CNN:
The extent to which Trump's tax controversies will damage him could also take time to play out.
But there is evidence that a majority of voters believe it is important that candidates for president release their tax records.
In a Monmouth University poll last month for instance, 62% of those asked thought it was very important or somewhat important for candidates to show their tax records.
Trump's decision not to release his tax returns is a complicated issue politically, and the controversy shows the complications of someone like Trump, with a vast business empire, running for president.
On the one hand, conservatives have long viewed the Internal Revenue Service with disdain and it has long been a plank of the Republican Party's orthodoxy that taxes should be lowered across the board. The GOP also sought to make political capital out of claims that the Obama administration used the IRS to target the tax-exempted status of conservative grassroots and Tea Party groups.
So it is not beyond the realm of possibility that Trump's core voters, who harbor deep suspicion of the federal government, would applaud his efforts to avoid some tax liability -- as long as he acted within the law.
But Trump's appeal in Rust Belt swing states has been aimed directly at voters who feel they have been left behind by the uneven economic recovery -- and who see Wall Street figures with vast means as able to use legal maneuvers to escape the kind of tax burden that ordinary middle-class voters must bear.
Laurie Penny/New Statesman:
Hillary Clinton: why I'm with her
I watched the debate in the cramped, noisy departures lounge of a New York airport, cross-legged on the floor with 50 other white-knuckled travellers only slightly consoled by the fact that whatever happened, we’d be leaving the country soon. Clinton was — and I use this word deliberately — perfect in the first debate. It was the best performance of a career whose length and breadth would make her the most qualified presidential candidate in history were it not for the pesky fact of her gender. She was funny, she was cutting, she was merciless without losing her cool, and she baited Trump gently and relentlessly until he revealed himself as the ignorant, bigoted invertebrate he is. She worked out that the best way to bait a mad dog is by showing it a mirror.
I want Clinton to win in November. Not just because I’d rather not see the world’s only superpower topple over the edge of political unreason. Not just because she’s clearly a better candidate than Trump — an ageing golden retriever chasing the Democratic ribbon on its own tail would be a better candidate than Trump. I also want Clinton to win because she is a woman and a feminist, even if her feminism is unlike my own. I believe that all else being equal — and in this case it’s not even close — it’s time for a woman to lead the nominally free world.
Benjamin Wallace-Wells/New Yorker on Trump voters, great piece:
The Tea Partiers whom Hochschild writes about sense a collapse in the work ethic of their neighbors, but they also still hold the conviction that social decay is worse in other places. They are sure that some inner-city welfare recipients arrive to pick up their checks at the wheel of a Lexus; they are convinced that the federal government employs four out of ten working Americans, when the real figure is about one in seventy-five. For these voters, “Trump, the King of Shame, has covertly come to the rescue,” reaffirming their proud anger at people from other places, and displacing a shame that might otherwise work its way inward. Hochschild writes, “He has shamed virtually every line-cutting group in the Deep Story—women, people of color, the disabled, immigrants, refugees. But he’s hardly uttered a single bad word about unemployment insurance, food stamps, or Medicaid, or what the tea party calls ‘big government handouts,’ for anyone—including blue-collar white men.” Hochschild continues, “In this feint”—by making it seem that white people who accept welfare are only taking advantage of what everyone else gets—“Trump solves a white male problem of pride.”
Another great Trump voter explainer, from Yoni Applebaum:
Trump Is No Moral Exemplar—He's a Champion
The conservative, Christian voters backing the Republican nominee are looking for someone who can defend them, not someone who embodies their values.
Boston Globe:
A Florida city that’s voting with fear
The notices arrived in June, tucked amid bills and junk mail, to hundreds of residents of this wealthy seaside community.
Kathleen Kee, a home health nurse, stood at her kitchen counter, still dressed in scrubs, staring in disbelief at the voter information card from the Palm Beach County supervisor of elections.
There, in the upper left corner spelled out in bold uppercase type, was her new polling location: The Islamic Center of Boca Raton.
A mosque?
Alicia Shepard/Moyers and Co:
Trump’s Woman Problem
For Hillary Clinton, it's a gift that keeps on giving.
A quick post-debate poll by Public Policy Polling Monday night showed Clinton winning the exchange by a wide margin of 54 percent to 36 percent among women polled.
Maybe it was that she was better prepared. Or wasn’t easily rattled. Or has more in-the-trenches experience as a first lady, US senator and secretary of state.
But there’s no doubt that Trump’s bullying, shouting, smirking, talking over and continuous interrupting struck a chord with women who for too long have put up with men in work settings, if not at home, doing the same thing.
Vox pointed out in a tweet at 9:26 p.m. that Trump had interrupted Clinton 25 times. The final count for the 90-minute-plus debate was more than twice that.
John Hempton/Bronte Capital:
According to the New York Times the losses came
... through mismanagement of three Atlantic City casinos, his ill-fated foray into the airline business and his ill-timed purchase of the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan.
There is an issue here.
Donald Trump did not repay all the debt associated with those investments.
Either
- the loss is a real loss and the Donald was really was out of pocket by $916 million (in which case he has legitimate NOLs)
- or the loss was passed on to someone else by The Donald defaulting on debt - in which case Donald Trump should be assessed for income from debt forgiveness.
After all if the debt is forgiven it is not Donald Trump's loss. The loss is borne by the person who lent Donald money and did not get it back.
That - clearly stated by example - is why most income tax systems assess debt forgiveness as income.
Michael Brenden Dougherty/The Week:
"But it's not about Donald Trump."
This sentence brought me up short the first half-dozen times I heard it come out of the mouth of someone smart who was implausibly but passionately arguing that I should support Donald Trump. It is now very familiar. It is the response I got every time I pointed out that Donald Trump is not reliable, has a wicked character, is enslaved to his passions, and is kind of stupid. Now I recognize this sentence for what it is. "But it's not about Donald Trump" is the verbal initiation into what I call the esoteric case for Trump. It comes in many forms, but they all share a basic outline.
Meet The Press:
Welcome back to this week's Data Download. There's been the belief by some that in 2016, a working class white army is going to emerge for Donald Trump and swing key states for him. Well we've looked at the data in two of these states: Florida and Pennsylvania. And the numbers suggest there is a missing working class white vote out there. Working class whites who stayed home in 2012. But are these folks actually registering to vote for 2016? Well let's start with Florida. In the five counties with the highest percentage of white working class voters, places that should lean Republican this year, voter registration is up four and a half percent from last fall. But that's lower than the state's total registration increase of 4.7 percent.
And compare that to the five most diverse counties in Florida, which largely lean Democratic, where registration is up 5.7 percent. So there does not seem to be a Trump advantage in Florida.
Well let's go to Pennsylvania. In the five most white working class counties, voter registration is up a mere 2.8 percent. It's significantly lower than the state up-- updates overall: 4.8 percent. And again, lower in Pennsylvania than the five most diverse counties in the state, where voter registration has increased over 5 percent.
So in these places where Trump has the most votes to gain -- the voters who could potentially win him this election -- there's no evidence that people are registering to vote in droves. In fact, there's no evidence that anybody's in these counties registering people to vote. Many of the folks in these counties stayed home in 2012, and it's quite possible we'll see the same thing this November.