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Welcome to our last daily roundup of Donald J. Trump campaign news. We're done; we made it. That is, unless Donald Trump refuses to concede the election, which is a possibility, or unless the vortex of terribleness that has been 2016 refuses to release its grip and we find ourselves next Wednesday in a time-loop that throws us back to the moment Donald Trump first descended his golden escalator to say racist things in front of a crowd of employees and hired movie extras. Which, given how the year has gone to date, is also within the realm of possibility.
Donald Trump ended his campaign like he began it: Accusing immigrants of undermining America from within. That's all his campaign ever had. All the rest, all the so-called "policy" that his staff tried to pin to his jacket and his running mate so earnestly pretended to see, were things his party affixed to him in order to make themselves feel relevant; he himself would only say those other things during the rare moments he would abide by their teleprompters.
So let's close this out. Tomorrow is election day, which means today was the last full day Donald Trump and company could make their case. And what a case it was:
• The Trump campaign talking point of the day: Beyonce and Jay Z are bad, and Hillary Clinton is bad for hold a campaign rally with them. No, really. Because they use bad words.
“If I ever said those words, it would be the reinstitution of the electric chair,” Trump said Monday, repeating a gripe that the two musical artists’ lyrics haven’t prompted the same outcry as his 2005 remark that fame let him grab women “by the pussy.” [...]
“The language was so bad,” he said at a rally in Sarasota, Florida. “And as they were singing ― singing, right? Singing. Talking? Was it talking or singing? I don’t know.”
• Trump surrogate Scottie Nell Hughes continued the theme, condemning Jay Z for his "anti-police message" and complaining that "one of his main videos starts off with a crowd throwing mazel tov cocktails." And here you thought the Trump campaign was struggling to connect with Jewish voters.
• The New York Times reports that finally, at long last, Trump's campaign team has been able to take Trump's Twitter access away, preventing the candidate from sending out his usual stream of newsworthy bile and dubious retweets. The news that Trump's team (rightly) could not trust him with his own Twitter feed was gleefully and deservedly mocked by the current president.
• Trump's transition team is still working hard on what a Trump Administration might look like. And it looks like exactly what you'd expect. Rudy Giuliani as Attorney General? Secretary of State Newt Gingrich? It's the Biff Tannen presidency.
• Donald Trump today declared that he once been named "Man of the Year" in Michigan. All the combined forces of the national press cannot figure out what the hell he might have been talking about.
• Vouching for Donald Trump's charitable nature, campaign manager Kellyanne Conway pointed to the "tremendous sacrifice" Trump made to run for president. "Basically a huge sacrifice: didn't need the money, didn't need the fame, didn't need the power, didn't need the status." Stop, already—we're tearing up. We never knew how much Donald suffered for us.
• After being kicked out of a Trump rally (literally; Trump fans kicked the family and "gathered to push JJ's wheelchair" out of the rally) for protesting, 12 year old JJ Holmes, who suffers from cerebral palsy, met with President Obama at a Clinton campaign rally. A Clinton staffer arranged the visit after hearing Holmes' story from a reporter who "called me in tears."
• Another Trump protester was being physically assaulted by a rally crowd when an individual in the crowd shouted "gun", upon which the man was manhandled of the venue by the Secret Service and Trump was briefly spirited off the stage. No gun was found, but Trump campaign social media director Dan Scavino and Donald Trump Jr. both tweeted that Trump had survived an "assassination attempt."
• Despite Trump's campaign-trail history of flagrant and egregious lying, he's still seen by voters as more "honest" than Clinton. This may have something to do with sexism. It might also have something to do with the many news outlets who have resisted straightforwardly informing their viewers when something Donald Trump says was untrue.
• Donald Trump never did release his taxes.
• White supremacist and nationalist groups continue to be giddy over their own roles in boosting Trump's presidency. They're also highly supportive of his final 2-minute ad of the campaign, an ad rife with anti-Semitic tropes that "highlights evil Jews destroying America."
• Profiles in political courage: House Speaker Paul Ryan told Republicans this weekend that it was time to "come home" and vote for Trump. Because regardless of whatever Trump's said or promised to do, it's not as bad as ... Clinton's email protocols.
• Justice Department resources will be stretched thin tomorrow as the agency tasked with protecting voting rights grapples with both the end of key federal voting protections and conspiracy-minded Trump supporters who vow they'll be "monitoring" minority polling places. They won't be getting any help from the courts, as the Supreme Court today refused to restore a court order barring those "poll-watching" efforts.
• Trump's long campaign of bashing Latino communities is being repaid with record Latino turnout for his opponent. This will make for an interesting data point in next year's Republican postmortem.
• Republican strategist Anna Navarro writes in an op-ed that she will be voting for Clinton, and against Trump.
• Hundreds of political science professors in U.S. colleges and universities signed an open letter warning that a Trump presidency "would pose a grave threat to American democracy and to other democratic governments around the world."
• Glenn Beck, who previously had his own replica Oval Office built so that he could deliver videotaped pronouncements from it, says his own dealings with Trump have caused him to believe Trump is "dangerously unhinged."
• The Trump family fortune can be traced back to a Canadian brothel funded by Trump's grandfather. Surprisingly, Donald seems reluctant to embrace this heritage.