The “Crazy/Stupid” Republican of the Day blog usually can just make a daily post where we talk about a member of the GOP who has run for, held, or currently holds office who is a bit extreme or unhinged, and cover it in a few hundred words. Donald J. Trump, is beyond most Republicans, and has spent decades running to the media to say racist, sexist, bigoted, and completely ignorant things. We covered his downright selfish and narcissistic tendencies from the first 69 years of his life in our first deep dive of this series…
Donald Trump- Full TimelinePart One: The Beginnings to his Presidential Run
And now, we begin our second chapter, where Donald Trump continues to be one of the most awful human beings to have ever walked the Earth and tries to use that fact to become the conservative ideal and win the 2016 Republican Party Nomination for President of the United States. Brace yourselves.
· June 16th, 2015: The day he announced his candidacy for the 2016 Republican Party nomination, Trump of course, decided to talk about illegal immigration for a bit, in less than articulate terms:
“The U.S. has become a dumping ground for everybody else’s problems. When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs.They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.”
· June 17th, 2015: Reports surfacethat the Trump campaign hired paid actors to cheer him at the announcement that he ran for president,with e-mails found being circulated from June 12th offering $50 for people to appear.
· June 24th, 2015: About a week after announcing his presidential run, word gets back to Trump that Neil Young wants him to never, ever again play “Rockin’ in the Free World” or any other song he’s created for his presidential campaign. Trump tries turning this around by claiming he “never liked that song anyway” and calling Young a “total hypocrite”. This is the first, but far from the last time a musician tells the Trump campaign this, and it happens repeatedly through his campaign.
· June 28th, 2015: Trump is humbled by CNN’s Jake Tapper, who while discussing Trump’s opposition to gay marriage and his support of “traditional” marriage, asks him how traditional his three marriages were.
· June 29th, 2015: After threats over a potential boycott if they continue to do business with Donald Trump because of his comments about Mexicans, NBC-Universal cancels The Apprentice. Trump threatens to sue for breach of contract and defamation. In the coming days, Macy’s also announces they will no longer carry Trump products. Trump spitefully calls for a boycott of Macy’s.
· July 1st, 2015: only refused to back off of his statements, he continued to defend his belief that Mexicans were rapists on social media, and even went on CNN to repeat the claim to Don Lemon. When confronted with the facts of the matter, he gave the meager rebuttal of, “Well, SOMEBODY’S doing the raping…”
· July 6th, 2015: Trump puts out a press release that actually says “the worst elements in Mexico are being pushed into the United States by the Mexican government.” That’s right, he said the criminals and rapists coming from Mexico were being specifically sent.
· July 13th, 2015: Trump continues railing against Mexico… that is until he gets a bit of a scare and stops talking about it after he name-dropped escaped drug kingpin El Chapo and made the mistake of saying he would “kick his ass”. Trump ends up wetting himself in terror when El Chapo responds to his Twitter rants with a promise that he’ll “eat his words”.
· July 14th, 2015: The Trump campaign starts claiming that The Donald is worth $10 billion. That’s nearly double what Forbes puts his real net worth at.
· July 15th, 2015: The Donald makes a campaign stop in Phoenix, Arizona, and lies about the size of the crowd in attendance, claiming it is three times larger than even the ballroom of the Phoenix Convention Center can hold.
· July 18th, 2015: A lot of folks were wondering if Trump would still make it to the first GOP Primary debate when at a campaign stop, he said that Sen. John McCain was “not a war hero” because he was taken prisoner. Remember, Trump dodged service in Vietnam with five deferments, one of them for bone spurs in a foot that never appeared while he participated in athletics, while McCain volunteered for service, and refused to be placed anywhere but in the action.
At another event the same day,Trump is asked, “Have you ever asked God forgiveness?”, and in this opportunity to humanize himself and potentially court Evangelical voters, Trump says he isn’t sure he has, and talks about taking Communion in less than inspiring terms, calling it, “Drink my little wine, have my little cracker.”
· July 20th, 2015: Trump starts lying about his John McCain comments, claiming he never said McCain wasn’t a war hero (even though it’s on tape) and that the media are “taking him out of context”.
· July 21st, 2015: Sen. Lindsay Graham was quick to defend his amigo, Sen. John McCain after Trump’s comments about him not being a war hero because he was taken prisoner, so Trump got his petty revenge over someone saying bad things about him by giving out the phone number of a sitting U.S. Senator, publicly.
· July 24th, 2015: Trump is on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, and when asked how many illegal immigrants there are in the United States, he gives the answer of “30 to 34 million”. That’s three times the real number, and Trump cannot cite where he got it from, except “he’s heard from some people”.
· July 27th, 2015: News begins circulating regarding the media reporting on an incident between Donald Trump and his ex-wife Ivana in their divorce proceedings. Back in 1989, Ivana recalled Donald vent his anger at her over a botched scalp reduction surgery by her plastic surgeon, where he physically attacked her, pulling her hair, before aggressively beginning to have sex with her forthe first time in over a year. Ivana, at the time, likened the attack to being “like a rape” and that she felt “violated” afterwards but has insisted Donald did not rape her. After the Daily Beast dredged up thestory from “The Lost Tycoon”, an unauthorized tell-all biography from 1993 that got the information from depositions from their divorce, Trump’s lawyer, Michael Cohen released a statement to defend Trump, but definitely botched the public relations end of things when his rousing counter-argument included statements claiming that “you can’t rape your spouse”.
· July 28th, 2015: Trump, all in the same day, both suggests he would find a place for Sarah Palin as a great addition to his administration’s cabinet if elected president… goes on a radio talk show to say that “climate change is a myth” and saying we’re just seeing “weather changes”, and is interviewed by CNN’s Jake Tapper where he discusses his proposal to build a border wall along the U.S./Mexico border, now also insisting “and we’re going to make Mexico pay for it”.
· July 29th, 2015: A former Trump lawyer, Elizabeth Beck, gave the media the story that while working for Trump, she once asked to be excused so she could pump breast milk. The Donald replied by calling her “disgusting”.
· July 31st, 2015: In Scotland, Trump tells reporters that he thinks he and Vladimir Putin would “get along very well”.
· August 1st, 2015: While most of America was outraged over Cecil the Lion, actress Mia Farrow went on social media to “out” several big-game safari trophy hunters. Among them? Donald Trump’s two sons. Who Donald defended for killing endangered animals.
· August 4th, 2015: Trump called for another Government Shutdown, if necessary, to shut down Planned Parenthood.
· August 6th, 2015: The first GOP Presidential Primary debate in Cleveland isheld. Trump proudly raises his hand when asked if he would run as an independent if he didn’t win the nomination, and hurt the chances of the actual winner, and when asked about sexist remarks he’s made towards women in the past, denies having made any “except against Rosie O’Donnell”.
· August 7th, 2015: Trump spends a whole day complaining about perceived “unfair treatment” by the Fox News moderators. However, he crossed a line with many when he went on CNN to talk to Don Lemon, and insinuated that Megyn Kelly may have only been so terse while asking him about sexist comments he had made in the past because she had “blood coming out of her eyes and her wherever”. (Ah yes. Nothing will convince people you’re not sexist by labeling a disagreement you have with a woman as being an attitude problem brought on bytheir menstrual cycle.)
· August 20th, 2015: Donald Trump gives an interview with TIME Magazine, where he implausibly states that 93 million Americans are unemployed, roughly one quarter of itspopulation, and nearly five times the actual unemployment rate. The same day, he gives a television interview where he says that a low minimum wage “isn’t necessarily a bad thing”.
· August 24th, 2015: Trump gets on Twitter to call Jeb Bush “crazy” because he “Speaks Mexican” sometimes, and not English. He also continues his feud with Megyn Kelly, referring to her as a“bimbo”.
· September 9th, 2015: Trump gives a speech where he responds to Carly Fiorinagetting a boost in polls by insulting Fiorina’s looks, saying, “Look at that face! Would anyone vote for that? Can you imagine that, the face of our next president?”
· September 15th, 2015: At a GOP Presidential Primary debate, Trump claims he was against the 2003 invasion of Iraq from the start, and said so at least 25 times. Fact-checkers look, and can find no such statements, save for three before the war where he just said, “I guess so” as to whether we should invade, that Iraq was “a mess”, and that he felt the invasion would help the stock market. He did not speak out against the Iraq War into well into 2004. Trump also mentioned at that debate that he thinks vaccines cause autism.
· September 18th, 2015: Trump appears with a “veterans group” , the Veterans for a Strong America that purports to have over 500,000 members, on the decommissioned ship, the USS Iowa. The media notes the VSA had their tax-exempt status revoked by the IRS in August for failing to file tax returns. The head of the VSA, Joel Arends, was the only actual known member of the “veterans group”, and was more well known for being a political consultant for failed U.S. Senate candidate from South Dakota, Annette Bosworth, who took his advice on signing documents with signatures to get her on the ballot that were all forged. In effect, the whole thing was a PR hustle that would have put zero charitable dollars towards any actual veterans not named Joel Arends.
· September 30th, 2015: Trump argues against the United States aiding Syrian refugees because “they could be an ISIS Army in disguise”.
· October 11th, 2015: Donald Trump says that he and Vladimir Putin were “stablemates” and talked about how they bonded when they appeared on the same episode of 60 Minutes.
· October 15th, 2015: Trump is interviewed by Iowa talk radio host Simon Conway, and promises to repeal and replace Obamacare, saying that his plan would not be socialism because he wouldn’t “put a label on it”. (Note: Donald Trump does not understand what socialism is, but just knows Republican voters don’t like it.)
· October 19th, 2015: At a campaign rally in South Carolina, Trump tells his audience he has “heard President Obama is thinking about signing an executive order to take your guns away”.This is, of course, paranoid nonsense.
· October 23rd, 2015: As Trump rallies continue to get more and more violent, he does not discourage the violence between protesters and his supporters, and instead, continues encouraging it. At a rally in Miami, he says, “See the first group, I was nice. Oh, take your time,” he said. “The second group, I was pretty nice. The third group, I’ll be a little more violent. And the fourth group, I’ll say get the hell out of here!”
· November 3rd, 2015: Trump releases a new book, “Crippled America”, and promises that proceeds from it would be donated to charity. (Hint: He never donated money from book sales to any charity.)
· November 9th, 2015: At a campaign rally, Trump tells the crowd that one of the reasons Hillary Clinton was running for president was so that she could “stay out of jail”.
· November 10th, 2015: During the fourth GOP debate, Donald Trump again says he and Vladimir Putin were “stablemates” when they were on the same episode of 60 Minutes.
· November 11th, 2015: Donald Trump calls for an end of birthright citizenship in an interview with Bill O'Reilly, incorrectly saying that a simple Congressional vote would be enough to do so (it would take a repeal of the14th Amendment).
· November 12th, 2015: Trump gives his poorly nuanced strategy for defeating ISIS, “I would bomb the s*** out of them!”
· November 13th, 2015: Donald Trump goes on CNN, nervous about Ben Carson beginning to catch up to him and polls, and starts claiming how mentally unstable Carson is (feel free to appreciate the pot/kettle moment), and begins saying his “pathological temper” cannot be cured, much like “a child molester”. Yes, he went there.
· November 16th, 2015: Trump talks about how he was “strongly considering closing down some mosques” after the terror attacks in Paris.
· November 17th, 2015: Donald Trump, in an interview with Laura Ingraham, falsely claims that Syrian refugees are only being sent to Republican-controlled states,and are not vetted properly (in spite of there being a two-year vetting process for them).
· November 18th, 2015: Trump is interviewed by conservative talk radio host Michael Savage, and treads back into Birther territory when he says “a lot of people say”President Obama has “evil intentions” forallowing Muslim refugees into the country, and it’s “virtually impossible” for Christian refugees to do the same (which is a lie). Trump also took time in this interview to praise Vladimir Putin for “bombing the hell out of ISIS”, which is remarkable because an estimated 90% of Russian air-strikes were not against ISIS, but rebels opposed to the Assad regime.
· November 20th, 2015: Donald Trump says if president, he would implement a national database registry of Muslims.
· November 21st, 2015: Trump discusses his desire to have mosques monitored by surveillance from U.S. Intelligence agencies, and also claims that “thousands of Muslims celebrated” the 9/11 attacks in New Jersey, insisting he saw it with his own eyes. The accusation of this celebration is widely debunked from the media as false.
· November 22nd, 2015: Donald Trump comments on a Black Lives Matter protester who was assaulted by attendees of one of his rallies in Ohio, saying, “Maybe he should have been roughed up because it was absolutely disgusting what he was doing.”
· The same day on Twitter, Trump retweets inaccurate crime statistics about black-on-black crime. After some research, it is determined the origin of what he was sharing was a Neo-Nazi website.
· Donald Trump also begins discussing a return to the use of waterboarding in the war on terror in an interview with ABC’s This Week.
· November 23rd, 2015: Donald Trump defends his Twitter post where he re-tweeted inaccurate crime statistics as not racist because it came from a “credible source”. (Note: He just said a Neo-Nazi website was a credible source.)
· November 24th, 2015: Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski gives an interview with Breitbart News where he says the reason the footage of Muslims celebrating on 9/11 that Trump claims to have seen does not exist is because it is “being suppressed by the media”.
· November 25th, 2015: Donald Trump, at a rally in Myrtle Beach, Florida, again began questioning why President Obama would allow Muslim refugees into the United States, again insinuating, “There’s something we don’t know about” regarding him, and encouraging the crowd to start “reporting their neighbors” if they’re suspicious of them, adding, “Most likely you’ll be wrong and that’s okay.”·
· December 2nd, 2015: Donald Trump is interviewed again by Simon Conway, and insists he has had “hundreds of phone calls” from eyewitnesses who insist they also saw Muslims celebrating on 9/11.
· December 3rd, 2015: Trump suggests a newer, tougher strategy for defeating ISIS… committing war crimes by “taking out” the families of terrorists in retribution.
· December 4th, 2015: Trump falsely claims in an interview with Bill O'Reilly that the girlfriends and wives of the 9/11 hijackers “knew what was going to happen” and were in the United States but allowed to leave the country for Saudi Arabia. This bit of 9/11 Trutherism is false, because the attackers had no romantic partners, at all.
· December 7th, 2015: Donald Trump proposes a ban on all Muslims traveling to the United States.
· December 8th, 2015: Trump defends criticism of his ideas to ban Muslims and monitor mosques by comparing his ideas to when President Franklin Roosevelt had Japanese internment camps during World War II, and we should enact his anti-Muslim ideas because “we are now at war”. Which, y'know, was one of the most shameful chapters in American history.
· December 9th, 2015: Perhaps as the best imaginable metaphor for how Republicans and Americans SHOULD have reacted to a Trump candidacy occurs when during a TIME Magazine photo shoot,Trump attempts to be photographed with an American bald eagle, and the bird attacks him. The animated gif will live on forever.
· December 15th, 2015: At another Republican Primary debate, Trump is asked about the United States’ nuclear triad, and as he gives his answer, it becomes painfully clear that he has no business being in charge of the American nuclear arsenal (how no one figured that out already isalso a mystery). In the same debate, he repeats his insane conspiracy theory about the wives and girlfriends of 9/11 hijackers being allowed to flee the country, in spite of none of them having been found to have had a romantic partner.
· December 17th, 2015: Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin exchange compliments towards one another in the media,with Trump saying of Putin, “It is always a great honor to be so nicely complimented by a man so highly respected within his own country and beyond.”
· December 18th, 2015: Trump is on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, and defends Vladimir Putin against the claims that he has ordered the killings of journalists who would report negative things he does, blowing it off by saying,“I think our country does plenty of killing also.” He goes on to say “Putin is a leader, unlike our president.” Later in the same day, he continues praising Putin in an interview with Simon Conway.
· December 19th, 2016: Trump is interviewed by Tony Perkins, the leader of the anti-gay hate group, the Family Research Council, where he talks about how Christians are having their rights taken away from them, and Muslims are not while complaining about how it’s not“politically correct to say Merry Christmas”.
· January 9th, 2016: Donald Trump praises North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un for the ruthless efficiency in which he maintained a stranglehold on power from potential rivals among the communist nation’s generals upon his father’s death.
· January 18th, 2016: Trump speaks at Liberty University, where he tries to pretend he’s a really dedicated Christian and prove that to Bible scholars. His credibility his hurt when he refers to the book “Second Corinthians” as “Two Corinthians”. He also swore… twice.
· January 23rd, 2016: Donald Trump brags about the persistent loyalty of his supporters, boasting at a rally,“I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters.”
· January 24th, 2016: Trump is at Rep. Steve King’s Iowa Freedom Summit, where he claims that the United States Border Patrol is deliberately letting people, potential Islamic terrorists come across the border:
“We have to build a fence and it’s gotta be a beauty. Who can build better than Trump? I build. It’s what I do. I build.I build nice fences but I build great buildings. Fences are easy, believe me. I saw the other day on television, people are just walking across the border, they’re walking, the military is standing there, holding guns and people are just walking right in front, coming into our country. It is so terrible, it is so unfair, it is so incompetent and we don’t have the best coming in, we have people that are criminals, we have people that are crooks, you can certainly have terrorists, you can certainly have Islamic terrorists, you can have anything coming across the border. We don’t do anything about it. So I would say that if I run and if I win, I would certainly start by building a very,very powerful border.”
· January 27th, 2016: Trump is interviewed by Michael Savage, and says that Bernie Sanders is a communist who will “destroy the very fabric of who we are”. The same day, a report is released where it is revealed that several times from 1991 through 2004, Donald Trump petitioned elected officials to throw street vendors off of Fifth Avenue, insisting that the veterans among them were faking their service to the United States.
· January 28th, 2016: Donald Trump chooses to skip a Fox News Republican Primary debate (he was boycotting because of Megyn Kelly) to “host a charity event for veterans”. $6 million is supposedly raised that night, with Trump himself donating $1million.The same day, Trump re-tweets an image that is purportedly of Megyn Kelly with Fox News’ co-owner, Prince al-Waleed of Saudi Arabia, and a second woman wearing a niqab. The image, of course, is quite obviously Photoshopped, and the account he re-tweeted from is from an unabashed racist who has repeatedly posted images comparing First Lady Michelle Obama to an ape.
· January 29th, 2016: After years of being a Birther conspiracy theorist against Barack Obama, Donald Trump finds a new target for those accusations… Ted Cruz, who he calls a “an anchor baby in Canada” because he was born there (he still is the child of an American woman and eligible for the presidency, but Birther accusations are all about casting doubt).
· February 1st, 2016: At another rowdy campaign rally in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Trump encourages his followers to “knock the crap out of” any protesters, and promises to pay their legalfees that could result from such attacks.
· February 6th, 2016: At a GOP primary debate, after Sen. Ted Cruz talks about bringing back waterboarding asa practice to be used on captured suspects in the war on terror, Donald Trump decides to one-up him by promising he would“bring back a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding”.
· February 8th, 2016: Trump, at a rally in New Hampshire, brings attention to a woman in the crowd, and with pride, announces to the whole audience how she just had said Ted Cruz was “a pussy”. The same day, the Trump campaign offers to make a “charitable donation” to the Liberty House, a charity organization for veterans, if they appear on stage with him at one of his campaign rallies in New Hampshire.They refuse, because they could lose their legal status as a charity if they endorse a political candidate. At this time, no other evidence exists of the Trump campaign offering money to any veterans’ group after their $6 million fundraiser.Trump also calls in to conservative talk show host Michael Savage’s program to imply that President Obama isn’t really trying to fight terrorism, because he won’t say “radical Islamic terror”:
“It’s radical Islamic terrorism. We have a president that won’t even use the words and if you don’t use the words, you’re never going to get rid of the problem. We have a —maybe he doesn’t want to get rid of the problem. I don’t know exactly what’s going on.”
· February 9th, 2016: Trump claims that the unemployment rate is far higher than is being reported. Rather than the actual number of 4.9%, he says he believes it is “probably 28, 29, as high as 35. In fact, I even heard recently 42 percent.”
· February 13th, 2016: At a GOP Primary debate, Trump responds to Sen. Marco Rubio’s defense of the George W.Bush presidency, saying he “kept us safe” by blaming Bush for 9/11 and saying it “happened on his watch”. This runs counter to much of the narrative the Republican Party would like to broadcast of a historical view of the Bush presidency.
· February 15th, 2016: DonaldTrump, always a fan of conspiracy theories, is interviewed by Michael Savage, and discusses the circumstances of the death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, and says it’s pretty unusual that he was “found with a pillow on his face”.
· February 16th, 2016: A report comes out revealing that the Veterans’ Hotline the Trump campaign set up in 2015 to allow our military veterans the ability to give him ideas to reform the VA does nothing but go to voice mail.
· February 17th, 2016: Contrary to the entire report on torture and enhanced interrogation released by the CIA, Donald Trump, on the campaign trail in South Carolina, insists it does, wants it used regardless of if it does or not:
“Don’t tell me it doesn’t work — torture works. Half these guys say: ‘Torture doesn’t work.’ Believe me, it works. They’re chopping off our heads in the Middle East. They want to kill us, they want to kill us. They want to kill our country. They want to knock out our cities. If it doesn’t work. They deserve it anyway, for what they’re doing.”
· February 17th, 2016: Trump goes on Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcast Network program, and promises he will see that Planned Parenthood is defunded, and that he would nominate conservative judges to the Supreme Court to overturn the ruling on same-sex marriage, and see that Roe v. Wade is “unpassed”, which isn’t a thing, and probably a word he made up because he’s not smart enough to say “overturned”.
· February 18th, 2016: After Pope Francis criticized Donald Trump’s plans to build a wall along the U.S./Mexico border, saying that such an idea was “not Christian”, Trump and his limitless ego fired back, saying that it was“disgraceful” for the pontiff to question his faith, and that it showed he was a “pawn” of Mexico.
The same day, Trump gave aninterview with Breitbart News, where he claimed Fox News and the Wall Street Journal were biased against him, and trying to help Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio in the election against him.
· February 19th, 2016: Donald Trump, at a campaign rally in South Carolina, tells the crowd an urban legend about a U.S. Army General, John Pershing, who executed dozens of Muslims in the Phillipines in World War I with bullets covered in pigs’ blood, as a way to assure they would be denied entry into Heaven, per their faith, and talks about using it as a threat against terrorists.The crowd, in disturbing fashion, seemed keen on the idea.
· February 21st, 2016: Never afraid to go Birther, Donald Trump finds a new and unexpected target… Marco Rubio, who he refuses to say whether or not he thinks is eligible to be president in an interview.
· February 23rd, 2016: At a campaign rally in Las Vegas, after a protester is escorted out, Trump talks about how he wanted to “punch him in the face”, wistfully talking about how “in the old days, they would get carried out on stretchers”.
· February 25th, 2016: At a GOP Presidential Primary debate, CNN’s Wolf Blitzer asks Trump how he can possibly make Mexico pay for his proposed border wall,and Trump doesn’t exactly answer, saying, “I will, and the wall just got 10 feet higher, believe me.” After the debate, Trump discusses not yet releasing his tax returns,continues to say he cannot release them because he is being audited (which is a lie, Nixon released his tax returns while being audited in ‘68), and that the IRS is “maybe auditing me because I’m Christian”, further playing up the myth of Christian victimization in the United States,when even the Pope has called him out on being one of the worst examples of Christendom.
· February 26th, 2016: At a rally in Texas, Donald Trump proposes that he would “open up libel laws” if elected president, and make it easier to sue media organizations that he feels tell “dishonest” stories about him.
· February 27th, 2016: While speaking in Bentonville, Arkansas, Trump invents another new conspiracy theory… that the lawsuit filed against him in the Trump University case by New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman was only done because Schneiderman was bribed to do so by President Obama. This statement is lost in the shuffle fro months, until August 16th, 2016, when it gets noticed by the media again, because they simply could not kep up with all of the insane things Trump was saying.
· February 28th, 2016: Former CIA Director Michael Hayden is interviewed, and says the U.S. Military would likely have to refuse orders from Donald Trump, if as president he ordered them to commit war crimes.
On this day, Trump also mentions the Trump University case in an interview with Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday, mentioning that he believes the “judge is very hostile to me”, that it may be because he is “strong on the border”, and that the judge is “Hispanic”. (This would be the first time Trump tries to play connect the dots for his more racist followers to cover up his shady business dealings by discrediting Judge Gonzalo Curiel.)
· February 29th, 2016: Trump is informed that former KKK Grand Wizard David Duke has endorsed him in an interview on CNN’s State of the Union, and fails to disavow Duke and other white supremacist groups. At first, he tried to pretend he didn’t know who David Duke was (fact checkers found quotes from 2000 where Trump very clearly did, though), and he later blamed his poor response to the question on“a bad earpiece”.
· March 3rd, 2016: In a new low for Republican debate politics, at a Fox News presidential primary debate,Trump defends himself from remarks from Marco Rubio where he said of Trump,“You know what they say about a guy with small hands…” by using part of his time in the debate to defend the size of his penis:
“Look at those hands, are they small hands?” the front-runner for the GOP presidential nomination said, raising them for viewers to see. “And, he referred to my hands – 'if they’re small, something else must be small.’ I guarantee you there’s no problem. I guarantee.”
In the same debate, Trump insists to moderator Bret Baier that the military would not refuse any orders he would give to commit war crimes because he is a“great leader”,refuting statements by Michael Hayden.
· March 4th, 2016: CNN begins noting that the veterans’ groups that were supposed to receive charitable donations from Trump’s fundraiser from January28th had not yet received any money.
· March 6th, 2016: Donald Trump again advocates the use of torture in the war on terror,saying, “we need to beat these savages”.
· March 9th, 2016: Trump is interviewed by CNN reporter Anderson Cooper, and during the interview, he says “virtually 100 percent of mosques” are preaching hatred:
“If you look at the mosques and you go to various places and you look at what’s going on there and it’s virtually 100 percent. Certainly you can say radical Islam is a disaster right now, it’s causing tremendous problems worldwide, not just here. But the question was asked about Islam and there’s a great hatred, there’s no question about it. I think Islam hates us.”
The same day, Corey Lewandowski, Trump’s campaign manager, physically assaults Breitbart reporter Michelle Fields to the ground as she attempts to approach Trump and ask him a question.
· March 10th, 2016: At a Trumprally in Fayetteville, North Carolina, after Trump had said how “weak” we had become for not treating protesters in a more “rough” manner… a protester being escorted out gets sucker-punched in the face by a Trump supporter, on camera.
· March 11th, 2016: During a particularly violent campaign stop in St. Louis, Trump actually expresses frustrations that his rallies are not violent ENOUGH, again wistfully longing for days when battering protesters was celebrated.
· March 12th, 2016: Trump, on thecampaign trail in Ohio, cravenly panics at the podium as a protester tries to rush the stage as Secret Service agents surround him. He would later go on Twitter to lie and claim the man “had ties to ISIS”.
· March 13th, 2016: On Fox News Sunday, Trump says that “27-35% of Muslims would go to war” against the United States, according to a Pew Research poll. The Pew Research agency responded, and said that they have never even conducted such a poll, and they have no clue what he was talking about.
· March 19th, 2016: At a rally in Fountain Hills, Arizona, Donald Trump claims that the government budget “directly funds sending illegal immigrants through the border and right through Phoenix”. Fact-checkers point out how bad of a lie that is.
· March 21st, 2016: In an interview with the Washington Post, Trump questions the need for NATO for the first time, and says that one of his advisers on foreign affairs in regards to counter-terrorism is Walid Phares. Phares is an anti-Muslim conspiracy theorist who thinks the Obama administration is being infiltrated by the Muslim Brotherhood, who himself had ties to Lebanese militias that committed atrocities in 1978. Trump also talked about removing military bases in places like Japan,unless the country where the base was located agreed to pay for 100% of the cost of having the United States there.
· March 23rd, 2016: Trump, in an interview with Mark Halperin of Bloomberg News, refuses to rule out the possibility of using nuclear weapons against ISIS. Remember now, that ISIS is a minority of a few thousand fighters at this point, and using a nuke against them would kill far, far more innocent people who are being attacked and enslaved by ISIS in the same region.·
The same day… after seeing that someone has begun disseminating photos of Melania Trump’s nude GQ photoshoot from over a decade before in support of Ted Cruz that asked if people really wanted her to be the first lady, Trump decided to blame the move on Cruz himself, and took to Twitter to start insinuating that Cruz’s wife Heidi was ugly.
· March 27th, 2016: In an interview with the New York Times, Donald Trump was asked about his plan to remove military bases from places like Japan if they refused to pay 100% of the cost, and that if there was no military bases in Japan, it could lead to countries like Japan or North Korea building nuclear weapons. Trump flippantly responded to this possibility by saying,“They might be better off.” (Note: Trump just expressed little to no concern about North Korea developing a nuclear weapon.)
· March 29th, 2016: Also, Trump’s campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski is charged with battery in Florida for his assault on Breitbart reporter Michelle Fields. The Trump campaign had lied and claimed the assault never happened, but it was caught on video. Still, Trump feels the need to accuse Fields of faking the bruises she got when she reported it to the authorities, since she “didn’t scream”.
· March 30th, 2016: Donald Trump,in a town hall hosted by MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, says women should face “some kind of punishment for abortion”. It remains a legal, constitutionally granted right. Anyway, the campaign spent the next day giving different excuses for this gaffe, saying at one point that abortion providers should face punishment.
· April 8th, 2016: A TIME Magazine report is released that notes that none of the money raised from Trump’s January 28th charity fundraiser for veterans has yet to go to any veterans’ group.
· April 25th, 2016: Trump, in a victory speech after the New York Primary, now easily the presumptive nominee of the GOP, begins setting his sights on Hillary Clinton, saying, “Frankly, if Hillary Clinton were a man, I don’t think she’d get 5 percent of the vote. The only thing she’s got going is the woman’s card.” Clinton responds by citing her record on supporting women’s issues like equal pay and maternity leave and says,“if that’s playing the woman card, then DEAL ME IN.” It is easily one of the most personal and memorable moments from Clinton on the campaign trail. The Clinton campaign goes on to use the controversy around Trump’s comments to raise roughly $2.5 million in funds.
· April 27th, 2016: Trump advisor Jeff Sessions meets with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak and discuss “policy matters important to Moscow”. This becomes public a year later, and was acquired via U.S. Intelligence intercepts of Kislyak.
GQ reporter Julia Ioffe has an interview with MelaniaTrump, describing her as a “party person” and upon publishing it, begins receiving anti-Semitic threats from Trump supporters.
· April 28th, 2016: Donald Trump goes on the O'Reilly Factor to brag about how Vladimir Putin said he was “a genius”. (This has never happened on record, that anyone can find.)
· April 29th, 2016: Trump, at a rally in California, repeats the urban legend of Gen. John Pershing executing Muslims with bullets coated in pigs’ blood. He also calls into Michael Savage’s talk radio show to praise Russian leader Vladimir Putin, and incorrectly claim that Putin was bombing ISIS.
· May 3rd, 2016: Trump, in a Fox News interview, begins to float the insane conspiracy theory that Ted Cruz’s father, Rafael, associated with the assassin of John F. Kennedy, Lee Harvey Oswald, and that he could have been involved in the assassination himself. People wondering where this insane accusation come from track it to a tabloid story from the National Enquirer about Rafael Cruz.
· May 4th, 2016: CNN’s Wolf Blitzer asks Donald Trump about the anti-Semitic threats being made towards GQ’s Julia Ioffe after her article about Melania Trump, and Donald says the piece was “nasty”, says reporters “shouldn’t be doing that with wives“, refuses to condemn the threats, or his fans for making them.
· May 5th, 2016: Trump, on CNBC, pitches a ludicrous idea, saying if president, he would renegotiate the public debt and pay less than 100 cents on the dollar if the economy went bad. Economists were alarmed,because that would almost certainly create further crisis in the Treasury markets.
This day, of course, is also Cinco de Mayo, and he tries to pander to Latino voters by posting a picture of himself in Trump Tower eating a taco bowl, and saying ”I love Hispanics!“ It… backfires.
· May 8th, 2016: Trump tells a crowd that "Hillary Clinton is planning on abolishing the 2nd Amendment”. Which would be remarkable, because to pass the repeal she would need an overwhelming 2/3 majority in both the House and Senate to do so, and neither body has the support to do it. You know, even if she actually wanted to, which she doesn’t.
· May 12th, 2016: A long time family friend of Donald Trump, and in-house historian of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate, Anthony Senecal goes on Facebook to rant about President Obama, leading to the discovery that one of Trump’s most trusted friends had a long history of online racism, and belief in racist conspiracy theories:
“To all my friends on FB, just a short note to you on our pus headed "president” !!!! This character who I refer to as zero (0) should have been taken out by our military and shot as an enemy agent in his first term !!!!!”
The Trump campaign attempts to distance themselves, saying that Senecal “has not worked at Mar-a-Lago for several years.”That’s not entirely honest, because while started working for Trump as a butler in 1985, and retired in 2009, he still gives tours of the historic property.
· May 17th, 2016: For the first, and not the last time, Trump tries to rehabilitate his image for mocking a disabled reporter, Serge Kovaleski with some amazing logic. Trump obviously doesn’t have issues with the handicapped, because he hasmade all of his businesses have wheelchair access for the disabled. Just one fact he left out… ADA compliance is the law, and it’s hardly a sign of going “above and beyond” for the disabled, and rather just doing what you’re legally required to.
· May 18th, 2016: Trump, in an interview with the New York Times, says that Ferguson, Missouri and Oakland, California are“as dangerous as Iraq” and that “the crime numbers are worse” there.
· May 19th, 2016: At a campaign fundraiser in New Jersey, Trump makes fun of the weight of his own campaign surrogate and New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, telling him, “NO MORE OREOS.”
· May 24th, 2016: Donald Trump, inan interview with the Washington Post, brings up the conspiracy theory surrounding the death of Vince Foster in 1993, and that his death was “very fishy” because he “knew everything that was going on with the Clintons” before he suddenly committed suicide.
· May 25th, 2016: Trump speaks before the NRA convention, and says that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are planning on “releasing violent criminals from jail”, saying Clinton wants them “all released”. President Obama has only commuted the sentences of non-violent drug offenders, and Clinton’s criminal justice reform proposals would only reduce the sentences for non-violent crimes.
The same day, he responds to online criticism from Sen. Elizabeth Warren by calling her the racist nickname “Pocahontas”(Warren’s family has told her she has Native American heritage.)
· May 26th, 2016: TalkingPointsMemo creates a timeline of the history of reports from the Trump campaign regarding donations to veterans’ charities after their benefit from January 28th, and note they keep getting conflicting information from Trump, his campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, campaign spokesperson Hope Hicks, and campaign surrogate Katrina Pierson.
Regardless, it is on this date that Trump secures enough delegates to become the prospective Republican Party Nominee for president in 2016.
· May 27th, 2016: Trump, at a campaign rally in San Diego, starts attacking the integrity of Judge Gonzalo Curiel, the man presiding over the Trump University case:
“The trial is going to take place sometimein November. There should be no trial. This should have been dismissed onsummary judgment easily. Everybody says it, but I have a judge who is a haterof Donald Trump, a hater. He’s a hater. His name is Gonzalo Curiel. The judge,who happens to be, we believe, Mexican, which is great, I think that’s fine.”
(Judge Gonzalo Curiel was born in Chicago, and raised in Indiana. He is not Mexican,but has Mexican heritage. But this is the beginning of Trump accusing Curiel of bias because of that heritage. Please also note that Curiel is bound by a judicial code of ethics, and is not allowed to “publicly respond to comments on a matter pending or impending in any court”, for risk of tainting the ruling of such a case.)
· May 31st, 2016: Donald Trump and his campaign finally provide a list of the charities they donated money to, and the amounts after weeks of inquiry from the media. Trump insults reporters for asking, calling one ABC News reporter a “sleaze” for doing his job. Interestingly, the $1 million from Trump’s own funds was not contributed right up until the last week of May, when the media really was circling in.
The same day… a shocking court deposition is unsealed in the Trump University case, where former Trump University Sales Manager Ronald Schnackenberg stated, “I believe that Trump University was a fraudulent scheme, and that it preyed upon the elderly and uneducated to separate them from their money.”
· June 1st, 2016: Trump calls up radio host Michael Savage, and says that if elected, on his first day in office, he would begin calling the leaders of allied nations toinform them that the U.S. will no longer honor commitments to defend them incase of a military conflict, saying they would need to “have to pay” much more for protection. (Note: Trump does not understand how treaties work, and would like to run our nation’s military like a protection racket.)
· June 2nd, 2016: In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Trump again goes on the offensive against Judge Gonzalo Curiel, saying that he could not fairly preside over the Trump University case because of his Mexican heritage, adding, “I’m building a wall, it’s an inherent conflict of interest.”In the same interview, he criticized German Prime Minister Angela Merkel for her country’s policy on taking in Syrian refugees, predicting, “Germany’s going down. They’re all going down.”
· June 3rd, 2016: Donald Trump is interviewed by CNN’s Jake Tapper regarding his comments about Judge Curiel, and repeats his false claim that Curiel is Mexican (earning a quick correction from Tapper), and that Curiel’s heritage was making him biased against him in the case because of his plans to build a border wall.
The public would also later learn on June 3rd, 2016, Donald Trump Jr. receives an e-mail from Rob Goldstone, a British tabloid journalist turned publicist, who offered to set up a meeting between the Trump campaign and a lawyer affiliated with the Russian government and vouched for by Emin Agalorov (a Russian pop star who once had Donald Trump in one of his videos) and his father Aras Agalorov (a Russian oligarch loyal to Vladimir Putin). The Russian lawyer is said to have “dirt” on Hillary Clinton that is “part of Russia’s efforts to help Trump’s election” and Trump Jr. responds, “I love it.”
· June 7th, 2016: Trump, in a campaign speech, promises within a week to provide proof of Hillary Clinton’s“corrupt dealings” with Russia.
After days of Trump’s attacks against Judge Curiel, several Republicans finally get around to chastising the billionaire for it. Even Republican Speaker of the House Paul Ryan begrudgingly admits that Trump’s comments are“the textbook definition of racism”. They continue to endorse him anyway.
· June 9th, 2016: Donald Trump, Jr., Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort, and Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, meet with a contingent of Russians, including Kremlin-linked lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya, at Trump Tower, to find out what the “dirt” the Russians have on Hillary Clinton actually is. Perhaps not coincidentally, hours after this meeting, for the first time, Donald Trump gives the pretty specific number of “33,000 missing e-mails that you deleted” by Hillary Clinton on Twitter, raising the strong possibility that he was given information from this meeting, or that he may have entered the meeting at some point while it was under way.
· June 10th, 2016: Donald Trump again responds to criticism from Sen. Elizabeth Warren by calling her “Pocahontas”,making many Republicans uneasy about how to defend him from charges of bigotry.
· June 12th, 2016: Trump responds to the worst mass shooting in modern American history in Orlando at the Pulse nightclub by patting himself on the back on Twitter:
“Appreciate the congrats for being right on radical Islamic terrorism, I don’t want congrats, I want toughness & vigilance. We must be smart!”
Through the day, he calls for the resignation of President Obama for refusing to say “radical Islamic terrorism”, and pretend he would be better at preventing it that his political opponents. Unfortunately for his narrative, it’s believed to be incorrect, because investigators have found the shooter had not ties to any terror group, was not a practicing Muslim, and was motivated by self-loathing over being a closeted homosexual himself. So there’s that.
· June 13th, 2016: Trump, at a rally in North Carolina, implies that United States troops stole money meant to be used to rebuild Iraq:
“Iraq. Crooked as hell. How about bringing baskets of money, millions and millions of dollars, and handing it out? I want to know who are the soldiers that had that job because I think they’re living very well right now, whoever they may be. Think of it, the money that went out.”
After the speech, the Trump campaign went into full spin mode, and spent the next few days trying to say he meant Iraqi troops stole the money, which is still a bit of an insult, as our troops were the ones tasked with guarding it from them.Reports also surface that Trump has reduced New Jersey Governor Chris Christie to his own personal errand boy, including sending him out to fetch him McDonald’s.
· June 14th, 2016: Donald Trump,on Twitter, makes the ridiculous claim that he would be better for the LGBT community than Democratic Nominee Hillary Clinton. Here’s why that’s ridiculous… a good summary of all of the radically anti-LGBT people Trump has partnered with or employs as Christian liaisons, that include pastors who would like to bring back stoning against the gay community, or thinks they are pedophiles who want to usher in the Anti-Christ. The same day… Daily Beast reporter David Cay Johnston began researching the tax history of Donald Trump, since he was refusing to release his tax forms. While he cannot find anything too recent, he found affidavits from tax appeals that Trump filed in the 1990s (and lost). In them, it had returns for 1975 through 1979. Of those six years, in three of them, Trump paid no taxes.
· June 15th, 2016: Russian hacker Guccifer 2.0 releases e-mails hacked from the DNC for the first time, days after members of the Trump campaign met with agents of the Russian government.
· June 17th, 2016: A Washington Post report comes out detailing the extensive business ties between Donald Trump and Russian businesses, and notes his disturbing tendency to praise Vladimir Putin.
· June 20th, 2016: A Jane Doe files a lawsuit against Donald Trump in New York City regarding a sexual assault that took place in the summer of 1994, when she was a thirteen year old prostitute under the manipulation of Jeffrey Epstein. A media inquiry by The Guardian into Trump’s background finds he has been accused of sexual assault on two other occasions, once by his first wife Ivana under oath that took place in 1989, and another from an employee in 1997.The same day, Trump’s campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, is forced to resign after a series of controversies, including his assault of reporter Michelle Fields. For several days, the media has no clear idea who is managing the Trump campaign, with best guesses being that it is Paul Manafort, a man who made millions working illegally as a foreign agent in Ukraine for the Kremlin.
· June 21st, 2016: An FEC report is released that shows historically anemic fundraising by the Trump campaign, putting them in a big hole going into the final leg of the presidential race. Estimates are there is only $1.3 million in hand to Hillary Clinton’s $42 million.
· June 22nd, 2016: Media investigations begin into expenditures by the Trump campaign based on the FECreport, showing that they spent almost twice as much on hats as they had campaign advertisements. And, bizarrely, the Trump campaign had paid $35,000 to an unknown consulting firm in New Hampshire that named “Draper Sterling”, apparently as a tribute to the AMC television show “Mad Men” for undisclosed reasons.
· June 24th, 2016: Just as the United Kingdom voted on Brexit, and the vote came back narrowly to have them leave the European Union, sending the British stock market and the value of the British pound into a free fall, Trump was visiting his golf course in Scotland. He gave a bizarre press conference where he was introduced with a flourish by bagpipers, and gave answers to the media that indicated he had no idea what Brexit was, or what its impact had been. It seemed Trump’s main takeaway of this political and economic catastrophe, was that he thought it meant more tourists would becoming to visit his golf course. Even stranger, he seemed not to understand that he was in Scotland, where people voted to stay in the EU by a 62% margin, leading to him being mocked on social media by angry Scots.
· June 28th: 2016: A Washington Post report comes out that based on public records, Donald Trump donated less than $10,000 to the charity he does rare philanthropic efforts in over seven years. This, after touting his charitable works for years. (HINT: You shouldn’t need hints at this point to know he’s lying when he says“proceeds to charity” to market something.) What little money Trump does give to charity, is usually his own, who uses it to throw “charity galas” in his honor. Based on the Washington Post’s estimates less than 10% of what goes into the Donald J. Trump Foundation has ever found its way out to other charities. At most, the billionaire has donated $7.8 million in his lifetime, or .08% of his income which pales in comparison to other individuals of such wealth.
· June 29th, 2016: Another development in the Trump University case hits, as a New York Times report discusses how most of the real estate lessons were actually plagiarized from other texts.
· June 30th, 2016: A Gawker report is released that based on interviews with four former employees of Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, who say that Trump used to tap into the phones of guests.
· July 1st, 2016: Ashley Feinberg, a senior writer for Gawker media, publishes an article recapping a long history of media reports and what little medical information is known about Donald Trump, which includes the possibility that he has partaken in prolonged usage of diet pills over decades, which are low-grade amphetamines. This would explain some of his more erratic behavior, his nervous, twitchy speaking style, and his tendency to insult others as being “low energy”. Oh,and any potential “delusions of grandeur”.
· July 2nd, 2016: Yet again,Donald Trump manages to re-tweet a white supremacist on Twitter, when he posts an image of Hillary Clinton over a huge pile of money next to a Starof David declaring that she’s the “Most Corrupt Candidate Ever”. Over the following days, the Trumpcampaign insists the image wasn’t anti-Semitic, and it was “just a sheriff’s star”, or alternatively, trying to re-release thepost with a circle shape instead of a star (where they just filled it in but the points of the star can still be seen). The Trump campaign’s Tony Scavino came forward to take credit for the post, and said he couldn’t possibly by anti-Semitic because he married a Jewish woman (so did Hitler’s father, so…)
· July 5th, 2016: Donald Trump praises Saddam Hussein for being “so good” at killing terrorists without bothering with trials, and that they would not be in Iraq if Hussein was still in power. Not only is his praise for a dictator disturbing, it’s incorrect. Saddam Hussein used to reward the families of terrorist suicide bombers.
· July 6th, 2016: In his most incoherent, unhinged speech yet (and that’s saying something), Donald Trumps peaks in Cincinnatti, if it can be called that. His frantic word-slurry sees him at different points, grow furious over accusations that he is anti-Semitic because of his “Star of David” tweet, his praise for Saddam Hussein, and raging that FBI Director James Comey could not find just cause to press charges against Hillary Clinton over her e-mails. At one point, he becamedistracted by a mosquito, and started comparing it to Clinton. Trump also comes out in support of North Carolina’s transgender bathroom ban, HB2. This is remarkable because he had spoken out against it less than three months earlier.
· July 7th, 2016: Trump foreign policy advisor Carter Page travels to Moscow to give a speech at a foreign policy institute where he criticizes U.S. foreign policy. He makes this trip with the Trump campaign’s permission, and also meets with Russians suspected of meddling with the U.S. elections.
· July 14th, 2016: A Trump campaign source says that Indiana Gov. Mike Pence is their Vice Presidential pick, however, they were cancelling a formal announcement they had planned for July 15th in New York City due to the truck attack in Nice, France.
· July 15th, 2016: The Trump campaign releases the new logo for theTrump/Pence ticket, and social media laughs their asses off about how easily itis to mock. Among the more popular comments or edits made of it include references to Beavis and Butthead, or the fact that the Trump “T”penetrating the Pence “P” is inadvertently sexual. Animations of the logo “fornicating” start trending so fast (and not in a goodway), the Trump campaign pulls the logo off the internet within a day (it willforever live on). A report also surfaces that Trump tried to back out of his pick for Vice Presidential candidate, and while most inside reports were already leaking it would be Mike Pence, internally, reports are that atthe last minute, as the midnight hour approached, Trump wanted to instead pickformer House Speaker Newt Gingrich. Pence literally had until noon on July 15th to tell Indiana election officials if he would be on the ballot as VP, or run for re-election as governor.
· July 16th, 2016: Trump has one job, give a glowing praise of his VP pick, Mike Pence, and introduce him to acrowd. Instead, he gives a half-an-hour rambling speech where he keeps naming Pence, then seems to lose focus and veer off onto a tangent before completing his task. He finally does introduce Pence, then completely walks off stage without appearing with him. Pundits note it seems like a botched roll out of a VP.
· July 17th, 2016: Donald Trump and Mike Pence appear in a joint interview on CBS’ 60 minutes, where Trump and Pence hardly seem like a perfect match. Trump repeatedly interrupts Pence whenever he tries to answer a question, and during a part of the interview, Trump starts trying to attack Hillary Clinton for voting for the Iraq War, leading Leslie Stahl to pointout that so did Pence, one of the war’s biggest cheerleaders during the Bush administration. Trump refuses to acknowledge any hypocrisy. Overall, it was another disaster.
· July 18th, 2016: As the Republican National Convention kicks off in Cleveland, the schedule of speakers is noted for not only failing to deliver on Trump’s promises of big celebrities (Scott Baio and Antonio Sabato, Jr. were the best) and star athletes (a low-ranked LPGA golfer and UFC President Dana White), but also his failure to even get star Republican politicians to show up. No former Republican presidents were in attendance, and the only presidential nominee from the Republican Party to attend was former Senator Bob Dole, well into his nineties, and not invited to speak. Ohio Governor John Kasich refused to attend, causing Trump campaign staff to badmouth him to the media. Perhaps upset that he didn’t want to wait four days to be the center of attention, Donald Trump called into Fox News to claim that the shooter who attacked police in Baton Rouge was a “radical Islamist”. The Trump campaign later tried blaming the false claim on it having been too “early in the morning”. We also will note in the same interview, Trump disgustingly insinuated that President Obama was not genuine in his support for the fallen officers, because of his “body language”:
His need to be in the spotlight wasn’t over, though, as Trump insisted on breaking tradition and appearing on the first night of the convention, walking out in silhouette through white smoke like a savior emerging from the gates of heaven to the tune of Queen’s “We Are the Champions” to introduce his wife Melania, which earned him warnings to again cease using the band’s music from their lawyers. Overall, the entrance was compared to that of a cartoonish pro-wrestler.
Among the first day’s disasters included a benediction by a pastor that declared that Democrats were “the enemy”, only 40 women showing up to attend the "Women for Trump” panel, signs laid out for “Latinos para Trump” failed to actually have proper Spanish (well, that and no Latinos to hold them), Congressman and Trump ally Steve King going on cable news to question the idea that any “non-white sub-groups” had ever contributed anything towards civilization, attendees cheering the fact that officers charged in the death of Freddie Gray in Baltimore were acquitted,a speech by former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani screaming at the audience and warning terrorists were coming to kill us all, Iowa Senator Joni Ernst left alone to speak to an almost empty room to close the night.
The big story was the speech from Trump’s wife, Melania Trump, that at firstseemed inspiring, until the media quickly noticed that she had plagiarized a large part of it from the 2008 DNC speech by current First Lady Michelle Obama. Yup, Trump’s genius not only allowed for plagiarism before they loaded the speech in the teleprompter and let his wife embarrass herself, but she had boasted about writing it herself with little help in an interview with Matt Lauer earlier in the day. He managed to trick the assembled GOP delegates into applauding the words of one of the Obamas. As most of the Trump campaign started settling in for the night, a few proxies were left to desperately grasp at straws to try and deny the plagiarism, or come up with some kind of excuse for the haphazard decision that could have been caught with simple teaching software.
What was also odd was that Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak again appeared to meet with members of the Trump campaign at the RNC, including Carter Page and Senator Jeff Sessions.
· July 19th, 2016: Day 2 of the RNC: The Republican Party Platform Committee releases its 2016 Republican Party Platform, which is the most anti-LGBT one ever, from most estimations, including pledges to support the practice of gay conversion therapy in there. The committee put the idea for Donald Trump’s border wall in the platform, as well, but oddly, there was only one part of the entire platform that the main Trump campaign insisted on… they wanted the parts about supporting Ukraine from Russian aggression removed. (Trying to suck up to Putin, maybe?)
· On cable news, Trump surrogates all went onto cable news with excuses for Melania Trump’s plagiarism from the previous day, and the main problem was… they obviously hadn’t talked to one another, and all gave varying and terrible reasons as to how what occurred was“just a coincidence”, only making matters worse. Paul Manafort tried blaming Melania’s plagiarism on Hillary Clinton (there’s a trick), and the RNC’s Communications Director, Sean Spicer, tried saying that Melania had plagiarized Hillary as much as she had Twilight Sparkle from My Little Pony (yes, that happened).
· On the floor, the last ditch efforts of the “Never Trump” movement were quickly squelched by the Rules Committee, and every speaker forgot the theme for the day, which was supposed to be a discussion of jobs and the economy called “Make America Work Again”, instead deciding to just go ahead and turn the proceedings into a modern recreation of the Salem Witch Trials with Hillary Clinton playing the part of the accused. Some of the highlights included a delegate screaming “NO ISLAM!” as the founder of “Muslims for Trump” spoke, CNN cameras catching a delegate face-palming as Trump was announced the nominee, Arkansas Attorney General Leslie Rutledge trying to prove Hillary Clinton untrustworthy because she doesn’t have a Southern accent like she does (which makes sense, because Hillary didn’t grow up in Arkansas), Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell being raucously booed as he took the stage, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie playing witchfinder general and using audience participation to perform a show trial where Hillary was found “guilty” by the crowd who began chanting, “LOCK HER UP!”, and Ben Carson ending the evening by going off teleprompter during part of his speech to try and play six degrees of separation to link Hillary Clinton to Saul Alinsky, and then to Lucifer himself. It really was shaping up to be a quite Trumpian affair, two days in.
· July 20th, 2016: The third day of the Republican National Convention… Trump still steals headlines away from the floor when an interview he gives to the New York Times gives many pause, where he openly talks of not honoring the United States’ commitments to NATO allies, including countries formerly part of the Soviet Union, should Russia try and invade them, saying he would have to revisit the conditions before protecting them. Oh, and he also seemed unaware over what to do about a military coup that was underway in Turkey attempting to overthrow Prime Minister Erdogan, as well.
The controversy surrounding Melania Trump’s plagiarism took a whole new term as Meredith McIver, a mystery woman who few people could ever recall meeting with no social media experience, suddenly started social media accounts and put out a press release confessing to having wrote Melania Trump’s speech, and that Melania wanted “something like” the lines that Michelle Obama said in 2008. Effectively, Melania is shown to be a liar for claiming she “wrote it herself”, and that she was aware of the plagiarism. McIver wrote this statement from Trump Corporation stationary, because of course she did.
Meanwhile, a report comes out that the Trump campaign actually called Ohio Governor John Kasich and offered HIM the vice-presidency before it was offered to Mike Pence. An anonymous Kasich aide claimed Trump’s sons called him, offered Kasich the honor of being the “most powerful vice-president ever” if he’d handle “all foreign policy and domestic policy”. When asked, “What would Donald do?”, they replied, “He would make America Great Again.” This… is not an inspiring story about what Trump would do if he gets in the Oval Office.
On the floor of the convention, Sen. Ted Cruz is allowed to speak by Trump,even though he literally spent most of the afternoon outside badmouthing the Republican nominee. When Cruz told the audience to “vote their conscience”, he is immediately booed, causing Donald Trump to walk out of a luxury suite and start moving towards the stage in fury, and causing security to escort Heidi Cruz off the convention floor as people began to accost her. Pundits are blown away as to how when a convention is supposed to bring about party unity, the GOP could still be seeing open revolt on the third full day. The entire flap is the biggest story of the day, and distracts yet again, from a successful promotion of Indiana Governor Mike Pence. This isn’t entirely a bad thing, considering after his speech, Trump attempts to give him an awkward air-kiss that leaves Pence visibly uncomfortable.
Through the rest of the day, a NASA astronaut also refused to read an endorsement of Donald Trump in her speech aloud, and Fox News personality Laura Ingraham was allowed to speak, and managed to add to the fascist flair of the proceedings by inadvertently (we hope) giving a Nazi salute to the crowd. Oh, and Trump campaign adviser Al Baldasaro got a visit from the Secret Service after he suggested Hillary Clinton should be executed for treason. So that, too.
· July 21st, 2016: Day Four of theRNC… Sen. Ted Cruz is still speaking out against Donald Trump in ballrooms of the convention, and all of the combined speeches over the previous two days given by Trump’s children have failed to show a single anecdote to humanize the perceived-d*** that their father was. The best that was mustered was Tiffany Trump pointing out that her father called her when she had a friend die, which is hardly a ringing endorsement. This pattern continued later in the evening as Trump was introduced by his favorite kid by most estimates, Ivanka Trump, who oddly gave a list of women’s issues that she said her father supports, like equal pay for women and paid parental leave. It would be refreshing if it had any basis in reality to anything her father, or any other Republican the whole weekend, had said.
But to the closing speech… Trump himself finishes a four day RNC where Hillary Clinton’s name was spoken of more negatively than his own was to endorse him by walking out not to a red, white, and blue patriotic display, but to a golden-themed set with his name in a font the size of Avogadro’s Number before blowing up his jack-o-lantern-like head onto the jumbotron like it was an Orwellian nightmare. His speech was the longest acceptance speech by a presidential candidate in history at 75 minutes, and a cursory fact-check found at least 21 glaring lies. The tone described America as a dystopian wasteland, and portrayed himself as our would-be-messiah, the only one who could save us from ruin from threats of terrorism and crime, lifting the “law and order” candidacy of the not-so-beloved President Richard Nixon, whose campaign famously used racial fear and bias in the Atwater “Southern strategy” to win office.
Among the worst reviews for the speech were from Republicans, like Josh Barro, who noted Trump’s speech lacked any of his sense of fun that makes him likable, former Bush speechwriter Nicole Wallace who said, “The Republican Party died in this room tonight”, and Atlantic writer Norm Ornstein, who wrote, “If Leni Riefenstahl were alive, Trump would hire her to film this speech. Then not pay her.” Pundits immediately rate the convention an overall disaster. Almost no policy proposals were discussed, save for an overall hatred of Hillary Clinton, if that counts as a policy.
Up Next: Part Three: The Final Build To Election Day 2016