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 Timeline Part One: The Beginnings to his Presidential Run
Our second look featured events taking place from Donald Trump announcing his candidacy for president, to accepting the GOP nomination at the 2016 Republican National Convention…
Donald Trump- Full Timeline Part Two: The Path to the 2016 Nomination
And now, we begin our third chapter, picking up where we left off, and covering the final four months leading to Election Day 2016:
- July 22nd, 2016: The day after the RNC, Trump still has not done a good job of introducing VP candidate Mike Pence, and instead decides to continue his feud with Ted Cruz, choosing to resurrect his conspiracy theory about Rafael Cruz working with Lee Harvey Oswald to assassinate JFK.
- July 24th, 2016: Donald Trump releases a self-congratulatory video about how "great" his RNC speech was, because it was the longest, and how many minutes of applause there were. It also features incorrect math on what percentage of time was spent from the crowd applauding in his new demographic "applause ratio".
In an interview with Chuck Todd, Donald Trump is asked about Fox News CEO Roger Ailes regarding charges that he sexually harassed dozens of female employees over the course of decades, and describes him as "a good person, very talented".
- July 25th, 2016: Trump goes on Twitter to talk about how there's the theory floating around that the Democratic National Committee was hacked by Russians, and the information was given to Wikieaks to disseminate on the internet, because "Putin likes me".
- July 26th, 2016: Earlier in the year, at a couple of Trump rallies, a novelty act opened the festivities called The Freedom Girls, a group of young girls who would sing and dance in patriotic outfits in a display that most thought smacked of propaganda gone wrong. They eventually disappeared from view, and on this date, the public found out why... the Trump campaign reneged on promises to the Freedom Girls regarding payment, and then tried to placate their manager by just getting them a table to sell merchandise, and failed to deliver on that promise.The latest example of Trump being an untrustworthy business partner, even on the smallest scale.
The same day, Trump is interviewed on Fox News by Bill O'Reilly, and when asked what he would do regarding the minimum wage, he gives the ultimate worthless answer of, "I would leave it and raise it somewhat".
- July 27th, 2016: Donald Trump invites Vladimir Putin and Russian hackers to hack into Hillary Clinton's e-mail, when he says, “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing. I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.”
During the same press conference, Trump makes a slightly less disturbing gaffe when he mixes up the Democratic Vice-Presidential candidate, Senator Tim Kaine, and former New Jersey Governor Tom Keane. Solid opposition research going on in the Trump campaign.
The same day, new Trump campaign manager, Paul Manafort, announces that Trump will not be releasing his tax returns (breaking a tradition from candidates going back over four decades started by George Romney), but insists "it has nothing to do with Russia". People are hesitant to believe him.
- July 28th, 2016: Trump, at a press conference in Florida, suddenly claims that he has never met Vladimir Putin. Which is the opposite of what he’s said numerous times through the past several years. The same day, his campaign's harsh relationship with the press reaches a new low. Previously, Trump had revoked the press credentials of employees of the Washington Post, and forced them to pay to attend events like any other citizen... on this date, they started taking the unprecedented step of barring the press from attending, altogether, refusing even paid entry to Washington Post reporter Jose DelReal.
Meanwhile, at the Democratic National Convention, among the brilliant Day 3 speakers (Joe Biden, Barack Obama, and Tim Kaine all were on this day)... the family of a Gold Star Veteran comes to the stage... Pakistani immigrant Khizr Khan speaks with his wife Ghazala at his side, and talks about his son Humayan Khan, who died in Iraq in 2004 for our country's freedom, and questions if he has ever been to Arlington National Cemetery. Khan accuses Trump of knowing nothing of sacrifice, and offers to lend him his copy of the Constitution, which he pulls from his pocket and holds up to the crowd to raucous applause.
- July 29th, 2016: As the 2016 Democratic National Convention ends, several noted conservatives get online to further criticize Trump's efforts at the 2016 RNC, lamenting that his planning managed to have them lose, of all things, the spirit of optimism, appreciation for hard work, family values, and patriotism:
Ron Fournier, conservative blogger: "Well done, @realDonaldTrump. You made Democrats a party of sunny patriotism and values. You sure @billclinton didn't ask you to run?"
Jonah Goldberg, National Review editor: "Why this convention is better: It's about loving America. GOP convention was about loving Trump. If you didn't love Trump, it offered na da."
John Podhoretz, former speech-writer for Ronald Reagan: "Take about five paragraphs out of that Obama speech and it could have been a Reagan speech. Trust me. I know."
Steve Deace, hard right conservative talk-show host from Iowa: "So most of conservative media and the GOP spent the week rooting for Russia, and now the Democrats get to rally around the flag. Dreadful."
Rich Galen, Former Press Secretary to Dick Cheney: "How can it be that I am standing at my kitchen counter sobbing because of the messages being driven at the DNC? Where has the GOP gone?"
Matt Mackowiak, conservative ops veteran: "This Democratic convention has been an unmitigated disaster for the GOP. Very well produced. Unifying. Patriotic. Bravo."
The real proof the RNC was a failure, though, is that after months of touting all the input he had into guest bookings, stage design, and promising a spectacle, suddenly Donald Trump was saying he had little to nothing to do with the planning that was the disaster of the RNC.
July 31st, 2016: Donald Trump is interviewed on ABC's This Week by George Stephanopolous, where he begins to attack the Khan family, insinuating that Ghazala Khan was "not allowed" to speak by her husband (she actually doesn't speak about her son's death because she becomes overcome by grief), and when asked for an example of an actual sacrifice he has made, Trump only can manage to say he's created jobs and built things, neither of which are sacrifices.
The less offensive moment, but still disturbing one, was when he was asked about his comments regarding NATO alliances and if Vladimir Putin would attempt to retake territories from the old Soviet Union, he said he would keep Putin out of Ukraine, and had to be corrected, because Russia had already annexed the Crimean Peninsula from Ukraine. He has not a clue on foreign policy.
The least offensive part of the interview, perhaps, is when Trump started insisting the presidential debate schedule was "unfair" because two of the debates would air on television during NFL games, and claimed he had a letter from the NFL that proved they wanted the debates on another night as well. Well, the NFL still remembers Trump suing them in the 1980s when he was a USFL owner, and quickly denied ever sending him a letter, which he obviously could not produce. Also, the GOP and Democrats agreed upon the terms of the debate schedule way back before Donald Trump ever entered the race.
Oh, and that morning, the New York Post ran new, never seen nude photos of potential First Lady Melania Trump from 1995.
- August 1st, 2016: Trump, when asked in an interview with USA Today regarding what Trump would do if his daughter Ivanka were sexually harassed, he said he hoped she would "find a new career or a new place to work".
That night, speaking to a crowd in Pennsylvania, not content to just call her "Crooked Hillary", Trump flat out called Hillary Clinton "The Devil". He discussed Sen. Bernie Sanders "making a deal with her, a deal with the devil. She's the Devil."
Donald Trump also continued his feud with the Khans on Twitter, claiming Khizr Khan had "viciously attacked" him at the DNC. Meanwhile, Trump surrogates like Roger Stone and Al Baldasaro begin trying to save face for Trump in his battle with the Khan family, by smearing the hero and his family, saying that Humayan Khan was a terrorist, and Khizr Khan is a secret member of the Muslim Brotherhoood.
Then senior campaign advisor Ed Brookover is fired, reportedly because he started telling Trump he wasn't going to win the election. His campaign also begins trying to claim that they never asked for the GOP platform to be changed regarding foreign policy with Ukraine and Russia, but the fact that there were witnesses who already reported on it made that link of bunk go nowhere.
As poll numbers began to turn against Trump, at a town hall in Ohio, he began laying the seeds for unrest after his likely future election loss, saying the election was "rigged".
Trump finishes the day by showing he’s a blue collar billionaire and man of the people by getting on Twitter to show himself eating Kentucky Fried Chicken like an average joe… which seemed less credible because the photo was of him eating it on a private jet with a knife and fork.
- August 2nd, 2016: At a rally in Columbus, Ohio, for the second time in a week, Trump goes on a tirade against a fire marshal, coming up with the conspiracy theory that he turned away thousands of his supporters from entering the building because the mayor of the city is a Democrat. It actually was because of fire code, and the Trump campaign was informed well in advance of arriving.
Meanwhile, at the White House, President Obama becomes the first sitting president to declare the nominee of the opposing party's presidential candidate "unfit to serve", and he rhetorically asked Republicans why they still endorse him. There is, amazingly, little push back from conservatives for this.
Where there was push back, though, was the fact that Trump gave an interview with the Washington Post where he seemed to suggest that he would not be endorsing the re-election campaigns of House Speaker Paul Ryan, Sen. John McCain, and Sen. Kelly Ayotte.
- August 3rd, 2016: Early in the morning, on MSNBC's Morning Joe, host Joe Scarborough shared that he was told by an anonymous foreign policy adviser in the Trump campaign that during a one hour meeting with Donald Trump, he asked three separate times about nuclear weapons, asking why if "we have them, why not use them?"
The whole panel went to stunned silence. So did everyone watching at home.
Judge Gonzalo Curiel ruled that immediately after the 2016 election, Donald Trump would stand trial for fraud and racketeering in the Trump University case. He did not release Trump's video-recorded testimony, however, for fear it would taint the case.
Trump surrogate Katrina Pierson tried to blame President Obama for Humayan Khan's death... which would have been quite the feat since Khan died in 2004 when Obama was an Illinois State Senator.
Trump, early in the day, appeared at a campaign rally in Daytona Beach, Florida, where he said the United States has "got to stop being the stupid country being led by stupid people". Trump then said he had seen a "top secret video" that showed the United States paying a ransom to Iran for the release of U.S. hostages in January. His campaign, later in the day, would sheepishly admit that Trump had actually just watched footage of the hostages being released in Geneva, and had not seen any top secret cash exchange, which is probably good for their cause, because if Trump had, he would have just had blabbed out to the public something "top secret" immediately upon being told that secret. Trump then moved on to try and defend his proposed ban on Muslims entering country, saying that it would have prevented 9/11.
After he continued to ramble on incoherently, as he is noted for doing, at one point again referring to Sen. Elizabeth Warren by the bigoted nickname he likes to call her, "Pocahontas", and still wanted to rehash the time he mocked a reporter with a disability and how he said Megyn Kelly was too hard on him because she was, in his mind, menstruating or something.
In mid afternoon, Trump was campaigning in Ashburn, Virginia, asking for a show of who in the crowd worked for a factory that was failing and got no hands... because it was located over 300 miles away across the state. Trump then drew is attention to a crying baby, at first telling the mother to not worry and to stay, and a minute later, talking to her like an idiot, and telling her to "get that baby out of here". He... he actually did it. He was a d*** to a baby.
Then, inexplicably, with the controversy still hounding Trump for criticizing the Khan family, who pointed out that he dodged the draft in Vietnam... a veteran in the crowd offered Trump his Purple Heart medal in support. Trump accepted it, and then went on stage to boast of the gift, saying, "I always wanted to get the Purple Heart. This was easier." Military veterans' groups hit the roof, pointing out that if he wanted one so bad, he shouldn't have accepted five deferments , and served in Vietnam. And, even if he did, he still shouldn't WANT one, because you get them for being wounded or killed in combat.
Events began spiraling out of control for Trump fast enough that GOP insiders began calling for an "intervention" meeting with him, to try and salvage some hope of holding onto control of the House and Senate, and get him to stop embarrassing them. Some discussed trying to replace Trump on the ballot, but it would be too late to get Trump on the ballot in several key states.
- August 4th, 2016: At a campaign rally in Maine, Trump claims AGAIN that he saw a top secret video where the United States paid a $400 million ransom to Iran. This after his campaign has already admitted that no such video even exists.
At that rally, Trump kicked out protesters for daring to hold up pocket-sized copies of the Constitution at him, inspired by Khizr Khan.
Trump also chose to also blame increased crime in Maine on Somali immigrants.
Oh, and he also attacked a new minority and overseas ally, when he listed the Philippines as a country he would ban people from entering the United States from, due to concerns that they were a terrorist nation.
And, at the same time, Politico runs a report that based on the nude photos of Melania Trump run in the New York Times, it would seem that Melania's own personal history of not breaking any immigration laws by working illegally would be false, because she said she didn't come to the United States until 1996, but the photo shoot took place in 1995.
- August 5th, 2016: Trump finally admits on Twitter he never saw any top secret video featuring Iran being paid a $400 million ransom
And, at a rally in Green Bay, Wisconsin, Trump finally caved and endorsed Paul Ryan and John McCain, by halfheartedly reading a written endorsement off a piece of paper.
At a rally later that night, Trump intimates that he would not come to Japan's aid if North Korea attacked them, because if the United States were attacked, "They would just sit home and watch Sony Television", which is yet another time he makes it sound like he would like to use the might of the U.S. Armed Forces like a protection racket. Trump insists for the United States to come to Japan's aid they would "have to pay".
Meanwhile, Rodrigo R. Duterte, a man who has often been referred to as “the Trump of the Philippines”, responded to Trump’s comments the previous day by challenging the Republican presidential nominee to a fistfight.
- August 7th, 2016: Trump goes on Twitter and blames his rash of gaffes upon… who else… the media, saying, “The media is going crazy. They totally distort so many things on purpose. Crimea, nuclear, "the baby" and so much more. Very dishonest!” The three gaffes he claims are being distorted are on video, sometimes from multiple cameras at once.
- August 8th, 2016: After laying low for the weekend, Trump returns to the campaign trail in Detroit, Michigan, where he is interrupted from reading these remarks 14 times by protesters, and may have been a bit rattled, as he incorrectly read his teleprompter, and clearly said “TITTIES” loudly instead of “cities” at one point.
This same day, Republican Senator Susan Collins of Maine wrote an opinion editorial in the New York Times explaining why she was not endorsing, nor voting for Donald Trump, and 50 Republican national security experts penned an open letter in the New York Times about what a danger to the union a Trump presidency would be.
Donald Trump responded to the latter criticism by saying they were “cultural elites” and that they were “politically motivated” in their assessment, which is amazing because these were members of the GOP who worked in presidencies from the Nixon, Ford Reagan and both Bush administrations.
That afternoon, Trump went back on Twitter with a new conspiracy theory, linked to him by The Drudge Report… the execution of a nuclear scientist in Iran who was accused of their country of spying somehow occurred as a result of Hillary Clinton’s e-mail server, writing ”Many people are saying that the Iranians killed the scientist who helped the U.S. because of Hillary Clinton's hacked emails.”
- August 9th, 2016: Donald Trump campaigns in North Carolina, and is back to being off-teleprompter. He again talks about the election being "rigged", before lying to the crowd that Hillary Clinton would "abolish" the Second Amendment:
“Hillary wants to abolish, essentially abolish the Second Amendment. By the way, if she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do folks. Though the Second Amendment people, maybe there is, I don't know.”
This earns him a sit-down from the Secret Service, which he lies about later and claims did not happen. If there was any mystery as to what effect that might have on some of the more fanatical supporters, Christina Wilkie, present at the rally, reported on a man shouting, "KILL HER! KILL HER!"
And, Trump also continued trying to weasel out of the presidential debates, saying he would only participate if he could renegotiate the date, time, and conditions of the debate, like he got to in the GOP Primary debates to get "bigger ratings". Unfortunately, that showed a lack of understanding on that there's a Commission for Presidential Debates that doesn't organize them for television ratings or advertising revenue, and sets them up in the interests of fairness.
- August 10th, 2016: Early in the day, the Miami Herald runs a story about how Donald “good at business” Trump had a 23rd lien placed upon a Miami golf course he owned for failure to pay contractors who renovated the property, to the tune of $276,000.
At a late rally in Sunrise, Florida, Trump says that President Barack Obama "founded ISIS" saying that the groups actions are to "honor" him, and that Hillary Clinton the co-founder of the terror group. The New York Times noted, for bizarre optics, that disgraced former Congressman Mark Foley was sitting behind Trump at the time.
- August 11th, 2016: Donald Trump gives several interviews and speeches where he actually doubles down on his comments about President Obama and Hillary Clinton being "founders of ISIS", alternating saying either was the "Most Valuable Player" of ISIS. Several Republican news agencies scramble to help him spin his way out of it, asking him if he actually just was saying policies from Obama and Clinton helped create ISIS, but no, Trump was very clear… he “literally believes Barack Obama founded ISIS”.
Trump also gave an interview to the Miami Herald where he presented a brand spanking new, illegal, and highly unconstitutional idea... trying American terror suspects before a military tribunal at Guantanamo Bay, and not in a court of law.
- August 12th, 2016: After two days of insisting that President Obama and Hillary Clinton were "the founders of ISIS", and having commentators suggest Trump had gone completely insane, and that "he meant what he said"... Trump gets on Twitter to insult the collective media for not understanding "SARCASM", and started claiming he did not, in fact, mean what he said.
Later that night, at a rally in Altoona, Pennsylvania, Trump again began suggesting his supporters become "poll-watchers” to prevent "cheating":
"The only way we can lose, in my opinion, I really mean this, Pennsylvania, is if cheating goes on. I really believe it. That’s the way we can lose the state, and we have to call up law enforcement and we have to have the sheriffs and the police chiefs and everybody watching. The only way they can beat it, in my opinion, and I mean this 100 percent, is if in certain sections of the state they cheat."
- August 13th, 2016: The morning starts of with Trump spokesperson Katrina Pierson going on CNN to try and revise history again, this time by idiotically charging that President Obama made the decision to invade Afghanistan in 2009.
Trump himself, meanwhile, makes the bizarre decision to campaign in Connecticut, which is not a swing state, favored Hillary Clinton by double-digits in polls, and even if he could flip it is only worth 7 electoral votes. In a rambling speech, he told the crowd "I might lie to you" (before reversing his stance and saying again that “President Obama is the founder of ISIS". He also began demonizing the media for being unfair to him, and mentioned Monica Lewinsky's stained dress.
- August 14th, 2016: A report surfaces that Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort is listed on multiple government documents found in Ukraine as having been paid more than $12 million by former pro-Russian Ukrainian strongman Viktor Yanukovych's regime from 2007-2012.
- August 15th, 2016: Donald Trump accuses the policies of President Obama and Hillary Clinton of destabilizing the entire Middle East at a rally in Youngstown, Ohio, and how they "launched" the Islamic State upon the world. And then, the fact-checkers came, and presented him with a dose of reality.
- August 16th, 2016: Trump, in West Bend, Wisconsin, tried making the pitch that his policies would be better for the African American community by putting MORE police officers in urban population centers.
- August 17th, 2016: After weeks of the media investigating connections between Donald Trump and Russia that frequently center on his campaign manager, Paul Manafort, Trump shakes up his campaign staff yet again, bringing Breitbart executive Stephen Bannon, and promoting Kellyanne Conway to a higher profile to the campaign so that Manafort would appear in the cable news cycle less.
Donald Trump, meanwhile, is supposed to begin getting classified intel briefings from U.S. intelligence, and after many weeks of critics calling for a change to a policy of telling presidential candidates classified information. Without irony, less than a month after he described the National Enquirer as "a reliable source", Trump said he didn't trust the U.S. intelligence he would be privy to in a Fox News interview.
- August 18th, 2016: Paul Manafort, already being shuffled to the back row of Trump's campaign staff, was revealed to have run a covert influence group in Washington to support pro-Russian Ukraine,along with his deputy in the campaign, Rick Gates. The problem? They never disclosed their work as foreign agents as required under federal law.
If that wasn't bad enough, one of Trump's foreign policy advisers, Joseph Schmitz, was researched by the media, and they remembered his history of being a widely anti-Semitic and disgraced former employee of the Pentagon, who used to brag about firing Jews, and cast doubts on the Holocaust having happened because of "how the ovens were too small to kill 6 million Jews".
- August 19th, 2016: Paul Manafort officially resigns from the Trump campaign, completely on this morning, and may be under investigation for his work in a Pro-Russian lobbying firm.
Early in the day, against the wishes of Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards, who tells both presidential candidates and the president to stay out of the state so first responders could work without distractions on rescue and recovery efforts. So what did Trump need to go "help" with relief efforts to do that distracted all those first responders? He Donald Trump and Mike Pence ignore common sense and go anyway for a photo op.. He oddly passed out Play-Doh, always a must need in disaster survival kits. For a total of 49 seconds.
Donald Trump campaigns in Dimondale, Michigan and makes a desperate appeal to win the black vote by saying, “You’re living in poverty. Your schools are no good. You have no jobs. 58% of your youth in unemployed. What the hell do you have to lose?”
- August 20th, 2016: A New York Times report comes out that Trump has debt totaling more than $650 million dollars, nearly double what he reported to the Federal Election Commission in financial disclosure forms.
- August 21st, 2016: Donald Trump's third campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway, goes on ABC's "This Week", and makes the outlandish statement that Trump doesn't "hurl personal insults". When asked later in the day about whether or not Trump's immigration policies will require a deportation force, she answers, "TBD..."
Cue a couple hours later...
Trump then went on Fox News to contradict his new campaign manager from the previous day and insist that he was still going to have mass deportations of illegal immigrants. He promised to deport so many that it would “make your head spin”. In the same interview, he also assured viewers that he knew how to curtail rising crime in Chicago “within a week”, saying that he would be “even more tough”, and had discussed policy with “very top police” in Chicago. Remember, the Chicago PD are already getting heat for running an illegal detention facility where illegal interrogations took place, and for police shootings of unarmed suspects that resulted in the deaths of citizens.
- August 23rd, 2016: The Chicago PD respond to Donald Trump’s claim that he’d spoken to “very top police” and deny the claim, saying it’s false and that Trump, nor anyone in his campaign had spoken to anyone in Chicago PD’s senior command.
Third stories also begin circulating regarding Trump campaign financing… the first that the minute Trump’s campaign ceased to be self-funded and was paid for by other donors, he quintupled the rent on the Trump Tower offices his campaign operates out of, to $170,000 a month. The second story was that Trump used $55,000 of his own campaign money to buy copies of his own book. The third was about an Associated Press investigation of the social media counts of over 50 current, and former paid staffers of the Trump campaign that found… they make a lot of bigoted posts online. Among their comments included statements that Muslims are unfit to be U.S. citizens, racist jokes about Mexican accents, calls for Secretary of State John F. Kerry to be hanged and stated their readiness for a possible civil war.
- August 24th, 2016: Trump, speaking before a virtually all-white audience in Jackson, Mississippi, says that it’s actually Hillary Clinton who is a “bigot” who will do nothing for African-Americans or Hispanics.
Appearing with Trump at the rally is British politician Nigel Farage, the xenophobic, anti-immigrant lunatic behind the Brexit vote that crippled the British economy after forcing the country out of the European Union. The duo actually seem to still think such ideas are good ones, in spite of the obvious instant negative impact.
- August 25th, 2016: Hillary Clinton speaks in Reno about Donald Trump’s links to the Alt-Right movement, including mentions of Breitbart News, and Alex Jones and InfoWars early in the day. This, of course, strikes a nerve, and Trump goes on a Tweet-storm on Twitter, saying that she was “fearmongering” and “race-baiting”, and later in the day, going on CNN where he denied knowing if the Alt-Right movement was even a thing in an interview with Anderson Cooper, who immediately pointed out it must be a thing, because Trump’s new senior campaign member, Steve Bannon, has identified Breitbart News as “the voice of the Alt-Right Movement”.
- August 26th, 2016: The day after Clinton’s speech tying Trump to the Alt-Right, and his long history of discrimination and racism, is met with deafening silence from other members of the GOP in his defense.
Meanwhile, NBC News tracked down Trump’s doctor, Dr. Harold Borstein, who admitted the gushing over-the-top note he wrote about Trump’s health was done in about five minutes while a limo from the Trump campaign waited to collect it. He admitted it was not reflective of Trump’s actual medical history.
Trump himself continued trading barbs with Hillary Clinton about how her policies were the “bigoted” ones and his campaign cancelled a schedule rally for Sept. 1st in Phoenix, the fourth rally that Trump cancelled in a week.
- August 27th, 2016: Trump, still trying to prove his silly claim that it’s Hillary Clinton and her policies that are “bigoted”, decides that it’s a good idea to exploit the death of Nykea Aldridge, the cousin of NBA star Dwyane Wade, as proof that he's better for African Americans, so he gets on Twitter to rant about it (without first giving any condolences towards the deceased, or her family).
Later in the day, Trump gets on Twitter, and does not to appear to be on the same page as the rest of his campaign, as he announces the Phoenix rally that was cancelled the previous day is still happening.
- August 28th, 2016: Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway goes on Fox News Sunday, and cannot defend her employer’s behavior in exploiting Nykea Aldridge’s death.
Meanwhile, Trump got back on Twitter to accuse Hillary Clinton of not releasing her full medical records, like he had, and suggesting all presidential candidates should do so. This is another bold attempt at pushing conspiracy theories about Clinton’s health, and a bizarre one, because Clinton had released more medical information that Trump did with the vague note from his gastroenterologist.
- August 29th, 2016: Trump, never a stranger to operating at the tabloid level, decides that upon hearing the news that after Anthony Weiner was caught sexting behind the back of his wife, Huma Abadein, a long-time Hillary Clinton aide, that he should exploit it for cheap points. But Donald Trump just can’t help but lie, and make a story somehow worse or more incriminating, so he chose to accuse Clinton of “compromising national security” by hiring a woman married to Anthony Weiner, that Hillary Clinton had. By the end of the day, Trump was, of course, hinting at the conspiracy theory that Abedin has secret ties to Islamic terror groups.
- August 30th, 2016: Trump campaigns in Everett, Washington, a state where he has zero chance of winning.
Mother Jones Magazine, meanwhile, runs a report about how Trump’s venture into running a modeling agency from 1999-2004, per multiple models who worked for it, not only knowing employed them while they were undocumented immigrants, but coached them into lying to authorities about their immigration status. Several models, some as young as 14, were also housed together in small apartments “like a sweatshop” by the agency, cramming up to eleven of them into a two bedroom apartment.
- August 31st, 2016: In the morning, Donald Trump flies to Mexico and meets with their president, Pena Nieto, who in March had compared Trump to Mussolini and Hitler. Trump seems reserved, and dials back his hyperbolic rhetoric towards Mexicans because he’s really a coward, and in their country.
Trump was planning to give an immigration speech in Phoenix (the one that had been cancelled, then re-scheduled), and while in the air from Mexico to Arizona on his private jet, checked Twitter to discover that President Nieto had already reported to the press that he had emphatically told Trump that Mexico would absolutely not be paying for his ridiculous border wall idea, should he be elected. Trump, meanwhile, was trying to tell the press that they didn’t talk about it, and he considered it the beginning of a “negotiation” that he would eventually talk Nieto into. Nieto outright called him a liar, and “Trump the diplomat” immediately turned back into “Trump, that ***hole who gets into fights on Twitter”.
Caught in an obvious lie, Trump took his anger out by going full Nuremberg rally at the Phoenix Convention Center, and any talk of him “softening” his immigration stance at the request of aides went completely and totally out the window. He offered no amnesty, and promised that “2 million aliens would be gone” in the first hour of his presidency. Not the first day… the first HOUR. The logistics of that are impossible, unless there are 500,000 border agents that can be mobilized immediately upon him being sworn in, and they can each deport an illegal immigrant every fifteen minutes in that hour.
- September 1st, 2016: It's unclear what took them so long, but several of Trump’s Latino surrogates quit the campaign, or reconsider their support after his speech the night before, with some remarking that they had been used as “props”. One supporter who probably should have quit while he was ahead later in the day, though, was Marco Gutierrez, founder of Latinos for Trump, who went on MSNBC to declare that in a Clinton presidency, we would see “taco trucks on every corner” because of illegal immigration. Critics hailed it in two ways. One being, that it was totally racist, and second being that taco trucks everywhere would actually be a good thing, economically, and in convenience.
But that wasn’t the only story about botched minority outreach by the Trump campaign on this day. The New York TImes’ Yamiche Alcindor broke the news that Trump’s visit to a black church scheduled for September 3rd had not just scripted questions that Trump would know ahead of time, but there were also pages of the answers he was supposed to give.
- September 2nd, 2016: Trump leads off the day continuing his ongoing feud with MSNBC’s Morning Joe, including accusing Mika Brzezinkski of having a “mental breakdown” on air. (She didn’t.)
Reports show up about Trump, ever the cheapskate, not having paid several members of his campaign staff. But the real news on Trump staff members is that Trump hired a new deputy campaign manager to work with Kellyanne Conway… a guy by the name of David Bossie. Bossie is famous for two reasons… since 1992, he relentlessly worked on political "dirty tricks” campaigns to smear Bill and Hillary Clinton. And the other reason? Bossie was the leader of the Citizens United movement that led to unlimited donations to political campaigns.
- September 3rd, 2016: Trump tries proving he’s not that racist to his supporters by attending his staged, scripted appearance at a black church in Detroit. The media, however, break the illusion that the black community all welcomed him with open arms by releasing a photo from the event that showed only a handful of churchgoers were even allowed in to attend, just enough to crop a photo of the first few rows and make it appear full. Perhaps his best line was that he DESERVED the vote of African Americans because he was also a Republican, like Abraham Lincoln.
- September 4th, 2016: Trump resumes his feud with Republican Senator Jeff Flake, who criticized Trump that morning on CNN’s State of the Union. Trump got on Twitter to call Sen. Flake “weak and ineffective” and claim Flake flip-flopped on immigration (while himself repeatedly flip-flopping on immigration several times in the past few weeks).
- September 5th, 2016: In an interview with CBS News’ David Muir, Donald Trump again changes his tune on immigration saying that “it could be” that some immigrants would be allowed to stay during his presidency, which was markedly different from the 2 million deportations he promised in the first hour. He also said that Hillary Clinton “does not look presidential” and touted that his volatile temperament was his “greatest asset”. Oh, and described his debacle of a trip to Mexico as “successful”.
- September 6th, 2016: Trump goes on the O’Reilly Factor to get some softballs from Fox News, but perhaps stumbles when he’s asked if he thinks his previous inquiries into President Obama’s birth certificate hurt his credibility with African American voters. "I don’t know. I have no idea. I don’t even talk about it anymore," Trump answered, finally surmising,"I guess with maybe some.I don’t know why."
Meanwhile, after a few weeks of the Trump campaign trying to make hay out of the Clinton Foundation supposedly having a “pay-to-play" arrangement, media reports being to confirm that Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi decided not to pursue a class action lawsuit for fraud submitted by Floridians scammed by Trump University, and then coincidentally had $25,000 donated to her re-election campaign in 2014 by Trump, as well as having the Trump Foundation host a $150,000 fundraiser for her. This violation was enough to cause the IRS to fine the Trump Foundation for doing so. Trump denied ever being solicited personally by Pam Bondi, but wouldn't you know it, there was already on-record reporting from Bondi and her staff that they did personally meet with Donald Trump. So the real "pay-to-play" scandal of someone using their charity deliberately for political motives wasn't Hillary Clinton, it was Donald Trump. You may pretend to be shocked now.
Trump also gives a national security speech, where he claims our military is in “bad shape”, and only one third of our troops are actually combat ready. (This is not just false, but insulting to our troops.)
- September 7th, 2016: MSNBC hosts the “Commander in Chief Forum”, moderated by Matt Lauer (badly), where both presidential candidates are asked questions from military veterans. In 30 minutes, Trump manages to deny he ever supported the Iraq War after Hillary Clinton specifically had listed the interviews in which he had, again offered praise for Vladimir Putin and his “high approval ratings” in Russian polls, insanely attributed the rise of ISIS as being an effect of “not taking the oil in Iraq”, which he promised he would start doing in a “to the victor go the spoils” approach to conflict (which is now classified as a war crime), defended his assertion in his Twitter post from May 7th, 2013, that sexual assaults in the military are a predictable result of men and women serving together, opted to correct a female veteran who asked what he would do about 20 veteran suicides a day by saying the number was “actually 22” (she was right, go figure, Trump’s inflating numbers), insinuated he would replace all the current generals in the joint chiefs of staff within the first 30 days of his presidency, started revealing details from his classified security briefings and accusing President Obama of ignoring advisers, something he could tell when he "reads body language” (but more importantly, showing how careless he might be about handling classified info), and all but admitting he doesn't have a secret plan to defeat ISIS, as he has often claimed, because his plan is to just ask generals to give him one.
- September 8th, 2016: Donald Trump, while campaigning in Ohio, says he would have caught Osama bin Laden prior to 9-11 ever taking place.
Meanwhile, the Trump campaign and specifically, Donald Trump, Jr. start accusing Hillary Clinton of using an earpiece to have answers funneled to her during the Commander in Chief Forum the previous night. This conspiracy theory originated at lunatic fringe website InfoWars.
Meanwhile, at the Washington, D.C. office of Senator Jeff Sessions, he was busy hosting Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak… again. This while the U.S. Intelligence community was making public statements about how the Russians were definitely trying to meddle in the U.S. elections, and Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid had written a public letter asking for an investigation into the matter.
- September 9th, 2016: Trump gives an interview with a long-time friend (who always gave him free media airtime for years), Larry King. The interview, however, does not air on King’s podcast, as the Trump campaign claims to think it would, but on Russia Today, the media channel owned by Russian state television, and thus, under the auspices of Vladimir Putin. In the interview, Trump complained about the “dishonesty of the media” that had already given him billions of dollars in free airtime, to criticize American intervention in Iraq (that he advocated until it went badly), and to say he thought it was “pretty unlikely” that Russian hackers had hacked into the DNC, despite all of the American intelligence services that had been investigating the hack, and concluded precisely that. Both Trump and his campaign spend the rest of the day trying to explain how he could unknowingly give an exclusive interview on Kremlin-backed television without knowing it, because that is clueless, even for him.
Trump also campaigned in Pensacola, Florida, where he told a crowd about how he’d heard (he always hears from someone) that in the Persian Gulf, U.S. ships and Iranian ships had faced off and the United States Navy had fired warning shots to get the Iranians back to safe distance. He said the Iranians would make “rude hand gestures”, and as a result, if he were president, he would order the Iranians be “shot out of the water”. Yep, he’d take us to war over an 18 year old sailor from another country flipping the bird to one of ours. And again, he’s lying, there are no reports of these exchanges between our two navies.
- September 10th, 2016: A day after Hillary Clinton addresses how the Trump campaign has embraced a “basket of deplorables” that is half racists, sexists, homophobes, xenophobes, and bigots… Trump demands an apology for those poor intolerant souls on Twitter, and his campaign follows suit.
Trump himself, later in the day, speaks at the funeral for racist, sexist, anti-feminist conspiracy theorist and Eagle Forum founder Phyllis Schafly, where most of his eulogy for her is complimentary to her simply because she liked him.
- September 11th, 2016: Trump attends 9-11 memorial rallies, hoping no one mentions that his thoughts during the actual attacks were that his building would now be the biggest in Manhattan, or that even though none of his buildings were damaged in the attacks, he applied for and received $150,000 of relief aid for victims of the attacks.
- September 12th, 2016: In the morning, a CNBC interview with Trump airs, where in one interview he 1) Calls Sen. Elizabeth Warren “Pocahantas” again. 2) Claimed with no evidence that Fed Chair Janet Yellen was manipulating monetary policy to help President Obama and “should be ashamed of herself”. 3) Said the FBI and Dept. of Justice were no longer independent. 4) Alleged that the presidential debates would be “rigged” and the only way they would be fair was to have no moderator, at all. 5) Falsely claimed that his schedule has been busier than Hillary Clinton’s. 6) Repeated his claim that Iranian sailors are taunting U.S. sailors with rude hand gestures (that is a lie). 7) Claimed British people refer to him as “Mr. Brexit” even though he had nothing to do with the vote, and in all honesty, they have far more colorful nicknames for him, and there is no reported instance of anyone in the U.K. referring to Donald Trump as “Mr. Brexit”. 8) Said “I am the king of illegal immigration. I will stop it.” which ignores repeated investigations that he has employed illegal immigrants in both construction and modeling industries 9) Falsely claimed Hillary Clinton wants “open borders”. 10) Said he would refuse to exit Air Force One and turn around to fly home, if on a diplomatic mission, a foreign country were not at the airport to greet him. 11) Responded to nuclear proliferation by North Korea by saying, “We should get China to fix that problem”, which certainly isn’t the first instance of Donald Trump outsourcing labor to China. 12) Lied and said he was leading in the polls. 13) Falsely claimed he has visited numerous black communities other than in his recent staged visits to Philadelphia and Detroit, that were highly staged. THAT WAS ALL IN ONE INTERVIEW.
Donald Trump and his campaign actually run an ad in swing states over the comments by Hillary Clinton that Trump’s racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, and bigoted supporters are “deplorable”, as if those traits are commendable.
Trump himself, on the campaign trail, followed up by, no joke, calling on Clinton to “apologize or drop out of the race" over the “deplorable” remark. Which isn't at all hypocritical for a guy running on the principle of not being politically correct. Later in the night, in a CNN interview with Wolf Blitzer, Trump’s VP pick, Mike Pence, refused to say that David Duke, yes THAT David Duke, the former KKK Wizard, was “deplorable”.
- September 13th, 2016: A non-profit organization known as Science Debate provided a survey on the 20 most pressing scientific issues of our time to all four party candidates for president to determine the knowledge, policy positions, and proposed solutions to problems. And if the results had to be graded like an exam, Donald Trump would have either got an “F” or an “incomplete”. His answer to a question about oceanic health failed to mention the ocean, any aquatic wildlife, or anything related to what makes up 70% of the Earth’s geography, instead choosing to give an answer that would have been a mediocre response to an essay question on a civics course. He chose to answer a question about climate change by putting quotation marks around the word in his answer, so it appeared as “climate change”. In discussing the need to provide clean water to drink in another question, Trump talks about protecting that resource… which would be good, except Trump’s actual policy stances include dismantle the EPA, the organization that specifically enforces the Clean Water act and makes sure that it’s protected. The amazing part of all of this is… the Trump campaign effectively could have answered any of these questions with detailed answers and supplied research or articles to back their stances up… but it looked as if it was filled out hastily by a disinterested high school student who didn’t want to be bothered with homework.
- September 14th, 2016: Trump sits for his bizarre interview with Dr. Mehmet Oz, where he selectively reveals what medical information he chooses to, claims when he looks in the mirror at himself, that he sees “a 35-year-old”, and discusses his alternative for the Affordable Care Act, once it’s repealed, making the empty and vague promise of his idea that “In fact, plans you don't even know about will be devised because we're going to come up with plans – health care plans – that will be so good.” Please note, this is also his plan for defeating ISIS. The two things about his healthcare plan that he DID say, showed he didn’t have a clue. Because while “Use Medicaid to Expand Insurance Coverage” might sound like a good idea… That’s something the Affordable Care Act already did. The second thing, of course, was just horrible threats toward undocumented immigrants, “Under my plan, the undocumented, or as you would say illegal immigrant, wouldn’t be in the country. They only come in the country legally”.
Late in the day, Trump gives an interview on his private jet as it waits on the tarmac, where he refused to answer whether or not he still believed President Obama was born in the United States.
Trump’s daughter, Ivanka continued to try and lie about her father's company having an excellent maternity leave program in an interview with Cosmopolitan. However, she quickly fled that interview after reporter Prachi Gupta fact-checked her, and then began to read back previous statements made by Donald Trump on the issue, including in 2004 about how "pregnancy was an inconvenience for a person running a business". Ivanka refused to acknowledge her father ever having made such a statement and abruptly ended the interview.
- September 15th, 2016: Trump goes to Flint, Michigan, early in the day, and is interrupted while speaking by Pastor Faith Green Timmons , who reminds him he’d promised he wouldn’t be “electioneering” in her church.
Trump also meets Little Miss Flint, a 9 year old girl who wrote President Obama a letter about the Flint Water Crisis and got to meet him back in April. Now in September, she would get to meet Donald Trump, and… let's just say she looked like she was not as excited to be there. Or that she looked terrified of Trump.
Trump gave an interview with Fox News, and in it, lied and said that Ford Motor Company was planning to “fire all its employees in the United States". Ford’s CEO immediately fact-checked that claim as false. No American jobs were being sent anywhere.
Trump met with The Economic Club of New York where he repeated his lie that the Federal Reserve was being controlled politically.
Trump also called in to an Albany, New York radio station, and discussed America’s inner cities, saying, "They're crime-ridden, there's no jobs, there's no nothing." He also said that upstate New York was “a death zone”.
Donald Trump begins his evening rally in Laconia, New Hampshire by disrespecting the media corps covering his campaign, telling the crowd, "I just heard that the press is stuck on their airplane. "They can't get here. I love it. So they're trying to get here now. They're going to be about 30 minutes late. They called us and said, 'Could you wait?' I said absolutely not. Let's get going. Right?" Apparently Trump forgot that their still were some reporters present from outside his press corps, because he began lying at a prolific pace, even for him. Trump lied and said Hillary Clinton and her campaign invented the term “alt-right” for his supporters, falsely claimed that Hillary Clinton had not released her Cholesterol or EKG information (she had) while saying she “had an obligation to be healthy” while running for president, repeats his lie that Clinton sold government favors, said he’d “spent a lot of time in Flint” (when he was only there for two hours, and only earlier in the day), criticized the pastor who interrupted his criticism of Hillary Clinton in her Flint church for having “set him up" and that she was “a nervous mess” before also lying and saying that the crowd then began to chant, “LET HIM SPEAK” when she did it (when there is video evidence from earlier in the day that he’s brazenly lying), mendaciously lied when he said his “popularity with black voters jumped like a rocket ship" (he is polling at 0 to 1% with African American voters), repeated his lie that he always opposed the Iraq War, repeated his lie that repealing Obamacare "would instantly save 2 million jobs”, repeated a lie he tells that “our veterans are treated worse than illegal immigrants”, repeated a lie he tells that our trade deficit with China exceeds $500 billion (when it’s actually less than $350 billion, and he unironically sells suits, ties, shirts that were “Made in China”, and all the linens in his hotels were “Made in China”), repeated his false claim that Hispanic poverty has increased during the Obama administration, began promising to cut back on food regulations and crack down on what he called the “FDA Food Police", took credit for the public’s distrust of the media and said the New York Times’ Jonathan Martin should be fired, audaciously promised economic growth of more than 4% (a level not seen in over a decade, and far from what economists claim his policies would create), promised to scrap the EPA’s "Clean Power Plan" and the "Waters of the U.S. rule" (which kind of negates his interest in the country having a clean water supply), referred to his insults of women as “having fun’, and that he and the women he’s insulted were just “having fun together”, bragged that he is the only person who could have so seamlessly transitioned from reading a speech from notes to instead reading it from a Teleprompter (after years of criticizing people who speak from teleprompters), and refused to answer questions about his previous claims that Barack Obama was not born in the United States.
Donald Trump, Jr., meanwhile, gives an interview on a conservative talk radio station, and says that the media has been favoring Hillary Clinton throughout the campaign, and that if she was a Republican, they would have “warming up the gas chamber". The Trump campaign spent the next several days insisting Donald Jr. was not referencing the Holocaust while blaming the media for reporting on his comments.
September 16th, 2016: Donald Trump promises a press conference at his new Washington, D.C. hotel where he’ll address his former obsession with Barack Obama's birth certificate and the media obliges. After Trump spends almost the entire press conference plugging his new hotel (which incidentally, is filled with linens that are “Made in China”), Trump proceeds to blame the Birther controversy on Hillary Clinton, and claim that he knows Barack Obama was born in the United States, and takes credit for beings the one who found out the truth about it years earlier (despite having been mocked about it at a White House correspondents dinner, before the whole media, publicly for having fanned the flames on it, and never revealing what he’d “found” in Hawaii about it, after Obama had presented the certificate to the public). Not long after Trump's statement, the stage his campaign set up collapses, perhaps under the weight of all the bulls*** that had just been dropped on it by Trump. There is one interesting wrinkle to all of this… Trump promised he’d donate $5 million to charity if evidence that Obama ever produced evidence that he was born in the United States. Obama delivered. Trump never did.
At a rally in Miami, Florida, later in the day Trump again hints that he’d like to see Hillary Clinton face an assassination attempt, saying, The Secret Service bodyguards assigned to her should disarm, saying:
“I think that her bodyguards should drop all weapons. I think they should disarm. Immediately. Let’s see what happens to her. Take their guns away, O.K. It’ll be very dangerous.”
On Twitter, Trump starts whining about President Obama campaigning on behalf of Hillary Clinton, saying that he was “not working”. The best reply he gets is from legendary actor George Takei, who responded, “As Commander-in-Chief, he is sworn to protect us from threats both foreign and domestic. You, sir, are the latter.”
- September 17th, 2016: Trump’s day seems to revolve mostly around him watching cable news, then getting on Twitter to attack his critics. Whether he was answering to former Defense Secretary Robert Gates describing him as “beyond repair”, or the New York Times’ Maureen Dowd going on CNN to talk about how Trump enjoyed the violence at his rallies because it “increases excitement”. Per his pattern of attacking female reporters, Trump called Dowd “crazy”, “wacky” and a “neurotic dope”.
- September 18th, 2016: Trump surrogates flood Sunday morning news shows, and actually double down on Trump’s lies about his own Birtherism, including RNC Chaiman Reince Priebus (who also threatens the Republicans who beat Trump in the primary to start endorsing him or there will be “consequences”), New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, Kellyanne Conway, and Alex Castellanos, who tries justifying the attacks because President Obama has an “otherness” about him. They go with the most egregious lies Trump stated on Friday about the Birther conspiracy theory… that Hillary Clinton started it, Trump ended it, and stopped bringing it up for years after Obama produced his birth certificate (which Christie was fact-checked for, because Trump was still touting the conspiracy theory as late as 2014).
September 19th, 2016: Over the weekend, a homemade explosive device was detonated in New York City during a Military 5k run, and a second explosive device was recovered before it could be detonated. Police and federal investigators catch a suspect, Ahmad Khan Rahami, a naturalized citizen of the United States born in Afghanistan (not an immigrant). Donald Trump responds to the attack, as he has previous tragedies… by boasting, “I CALLED IT!”
“I should be a newscaster because I called it before the news. This is something that will happen, perhaps, more and more all over the country. Because we’ve been weak. Our country’s been weak. We’re letting people in by the thousands and tens of thousands. We’re allowing these people to come into our country and destroy our country, and make it unsafe for people. We don’t want to do any profiling. If somebody looks like he’s got a massive bomb on his back, we won’t go up to that person … because if he looks like he comes from that part of the world, we’re not allowed to profile. Give me a break.”
So, now Trump is flat-out pitching racial profiling as a law enforcement technique and continued to define not racially profiling as a result of “political correctness”. Anything else? Well, later on in the day at a rally in Florida, Trump began grousing about how the suspect was taken to the hospital after being shot by police while captured, and then was allowed to have a lawyer (which is another one of those Constitutional rights all people have via the 6th Amendment).
Trump also went on The O’Reilly Factor again, where he denigrated our armed forces, calling them “the gang that couldn’t shoot straight”, because a bombing raid in Syria hit Assad loyalists, and “Russia is absolutely furious with us”. Because if there’s one thing we know, it’s that Trump is beholden to Vladimir Putin and Russia.
- September 20th, 2016: A detailed report in the Washington Post looks at the Trump Foundation’s donations, and expenditures, and discovers that Donald Trump put none of his own money into the charity for years, but used it to purchase luxury items for himself, and even used it to pay off lawsuits or legal fees from his own personal businesses.
Later on in the day, Trump speaks at a rally in Kenansville, North Carolina, a town named for a slave owner, where he says “We’re going to rebuild our inner cities because our African-American communities are absolutely in the worst shape that they’ve ever been in before. Ever, ever, ever.” Which… kind of neglects the whole slavery thing. And the whole Jim Crow South. And… well, you get the idea.
Then Trump goes on the O’Reilly Factor yet again... where he starts whining about the debates being rigged against him, citing as his proof that the first debate moderator is Lester Holt, who's a Democrat. Fact-checking Trump, as usual, shows he's lying, and that Lester Holt actually is a registered Republican.
Meanwhile, Donald Trump Jr. decides to help out his father's campaign by modifying a meme on social media that compares Syrian refugees to Skittles candy that has been poisoned. The logic used to argue the logic against trusting a large group of people? Well, that's lifted from a Nazi hung at Nuremberg for crimes against humanity who wrote a children's story about not trusting Jews. So, yet again, Trump's kid is recycling the thoughts and memes of anti-Semites. Good times.
- September 21st, 2016: Where to start… The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget did a study on Donald Trump’s proposed tax plan, and estimated that it would add a staggering $5.3 TRILLION yes, TRILLION dollars to our national debt (or about 25 times what Hillary Clinton’s plan would) with of course, the main reason being tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans.
At a church in Ohio in the afternoon, Trump holds a forum on “African American issues". But because it's a Trump event, all of three African Americans show up, and it looks like a polar bear in a snowstorm, as he pontificates to the almost entirely white crowd about how bad things are for African Americans (without offering any real solutions). One of the trio of African Americans present is boxing promoter, longtime Trump business associate, and former convicted killer (Yeah, King went to prison for manslaughter back in 1966) Don King, who provides Trump with an introduction that includes an anecdote where he uses the dreaded n-word. Trump then praises New York City’s failed "Stop and Frisk" policy by police, which was discovered to eventually be, surprise... an easy pathway to racial discrimination and harassment of minorities by police, that was found to be an unconstitutional violation of the 4th Amendment back in 2013. Trump, though, suggests it should be not just brought back, but expanded an adapted nationally.
In the evening, Trump gave an interview on a Columbus, Ohio ABC News television affiliate, and still didn’t apologize for the Birther controversy, saying that he came out to finally say the current president was an American citizen not because he was incorrect about it for at least half a decade, but because, "I wanted to get on with the campaign".
- September 22nd, 2016: Trump’s Ohio Mahoning County chair, Kathy Miller, resigns abruptly after making racist statements. Among her remarks were that racism didn’t exist in the United States in the 30 years prior to Barack Obama being elected president, or that African American voter turnout is sometimes low because of “how they are raised”. She apologizes, and insists however, that she isn’t a racist (of course not, you just made horribly racist statements and were working on the presidential campaign of a man who makes them nearly as much as he breathes.)
An ABC News report by David Ross also comes out that while Donald Trump insisted in late July that he didn’t have any business dealings in Russia, their investigative journalism had discovered Trump had actually over a $100 million paid to him by Russian oligarchs.
Donald Trump himself, meanwhile, goes on Fox and Friends to discuss civil protests following the police shooting death of Keith Lamont Scott, and decides to blame them on… President Obama. Also, Trump comments on our nation’s race relations, saying there “just seems that there’s a lack of spirit between the white and the black.”
Oh, and Trump again commented on debate moderator Lester Holt, warning against him fact-checking any of his lies mid-debate, and saying, “we don’t want another Candy Crowley”, who famously fact-checked Mitt Romney in the middle of his 2012 debate with President Obama.
- September 23rd, 2016: Several stories make the rounds regarding Donald Trump’s background in the news. One being that during the second GOP Presidential Primary debate, when Jeb Bush accused Trump of trying to curry favor with him while he was Governor of Florida to legalize gambling in the state. Trump denied ever having done so, however, under oath in a lawsuit years earlier, Trump had admitted he was trying to pressure politicians in Florida to legalize gambling… so he either lied at the debate, or under oath. There were also two reports out about Trump businesses, one that showed how the repeatedly did nothing about preventing credit card fraud for their customers and then failed to notify them after the breach happened, and another that revealed they were sued eight separate times for a lack of compliance with ADA policies for disabled people. Meanwhile, another investigative report came out from Newsweek regarding Carter Page, a Trump foreign policy adviser who was almost a total cipher regarding both foreign policy and Russia, which had something to do with the fact that Carter Page is totally unqualified to give advice on either subject. Plus, Page may have violated the Logan Act by going to Russia to wheel and deal with Russian oligarchs.
The Trump campaign itself was prepping for his first 90 minute debate on Monday the 26th against Hillary Clinton, except that Donald Trump was eschewing most traditional preparation, including by not conducting any mock debates. Many pundits began commenting that this was another example of Trump “lowering the bar” for expectations of how he would do in the debate.
And then Donald Trump blamed ongoing protests due to the death of Keith Scott on… the protesters all being on drugs.
- September 24th, 2016: A little known detail about presidential debates… the candidates are allowed to invite a guest to the proceedings. Donald Trump, being a complete s*** heel, decided to drag Gennifer Flowers out of mothballs to throw Bill Clinton’s infidelities in Hillary Clinton’s face in front of millions of Americans. Because it’s Hillary’s fault Bill cheated, in his mind.
- September 25th, 2016: On the eve of the first presidential debate, the Trump campaign backs off of having Gennifer Flowers present in the audience. However, in their statement, the Trump campaign cited Flowers as an example of “Hillary’s failures”.
Word also comes out that Donald Trump attempted to pay a visit to a North Carolina Civil Rights Museum, but his bullying attitude about access he would be allowed, and his presidential campaign explicitly campaigning against several protected civil rights made the museum make the decision to not just deny him a visit to his campaign, but to bar him from the premises.
- September 26th, 2016: The moment everyone was waiting for… the first Presidential Debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. With the bar for expectations set shockingly low for Trump, he had to effectively show up, not throw up on himself, and appear relatively sane and he would be awarded the victory. He… did not meet those simple goals. He made fact-checkers put in overtime. In a 90 minute debate before an audience of an estimated 100 million Americans, Trump:
- Came out and was audibly sniffling in between his responses at the microphone (which is terribly ironic after the hell he and his campaign gave poor sickly Hillary Clinton for getting pneumonia only two weeks prior). He also was jittery, twitchy, and could not stand still, leading many, including former DNC Chair Howard Dean to speculate if he had been using cocaine (a high energy guy, that Donald).
- Trump, in total, interrupted Hillary Clinton over 51 times.
- During discussion about job creation, Trump repeated his lie that Ford was sending American jobs to Mexico, and got fact-checked by Ford Motor Company, itself.
- Trump claimed jobs were leaving Ohio and Michigan in the thousands. Fact checkers note that unemployment is 4.7% and 4.5%, respectively in those two states, lower than the national average.
- Trump also blamed Hillary Clinton’s husband for signing the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), calling it the worst trade deal the U.S. ever signed (which is most certainly hyperbole, if not false, especially because American jobs boomed during the 1990s in the wake of its signing). Please note, as well that NAFTA was signed on December 17th, 1992 by President George H.W. Bush, and not Bill Clinton, who was still president-elect at the time.
- Trump took exception to Hillary Clinton pointing out that he got $14 million in loans from his father, Fred Trump, to start his empire, and only got a “small loan” to start out. Per the Wall Street Journal, Trump was lying, and Clinton was correct.
- Hillary Clinton cited Donald Trump’s climate change denial, and his belief that it is a hoax invented by the Chinese. Trump claims, “I never said that.” Fact-checkers can easily show Trump’s Twitter account where he has posted about it several times, and finds several speeches through the years where he’s said climate change is a hoax.
- He accused Hillary Clinton of, in effect, “giving away her plan to fight ISIS” by laying out some of the overall strategy and philosophy on her website, which “General Douglas MacArthur would not like too much”. He also said Clinton had been “fighting ISIS her whole life” which fact-checkers were obligated to point out is ridiculous, because ISIS is believed to have existed for five, maybe ten years at most and Clinton is just a wee bit older than that (by about sixty years or so). Also, would it be a bad thing to have battled the worst of humanity for one’s lifetime?
- Trump claimed that President Obama’s management of the economy has been “the worst since the Great Depression”. Again, fact-checkers to the rescue to point out that 15.1 million jobs have been added since 2010, and unemployment was cut in half while the GDP increased.
- Trump repeated his conspiracy theory that Fed Chair Janet Yellen was making the Federal Reserve act politically.
- Repeated that he would not release his tax returns, being the first presidential candidate from a major party to refuse to do so in 40 years, and demanded that Hillary Clinton “first release her e-mails”, trying to change the subject. He was fact-checked by Lester Holt (his first of the night) for claiming that he could not release his taxes while the IRS was auditing him (which is a lie).
- Clinton responded by speculating about WHY Trump did not release his tax returns, pointing out that he might be trying to hide how much he’s actually worth, how much he actually gives to charity, who he has business dealings with, or perhaps, that he did not pay any federal income tax. Trump, for whatever reason, chose not to deny that last charge, but ADMITTED to it when he said, “That makes me smart.” He thus became the first presidential candidate to boast about being a tax cheat, outright.
- Clinton went on to attack Trump on being a cheat in business and refusing to pay contractors he owed money to, instead opting to pay amounts far less than agreed upon. She even noted this applied to his stance on the national debt, which he talked about trying to negotiate down. Trump immediately interrupted saying, “WRONG”. Fact-checkers, again, pointed out, YES, Donald Trump did say that in May of 2016.
- Trump again lied about a variety of crime statistics in the United States, falsely claiming that violent crime was at staggeringly high levels (it isn’t). Clinton would eventually point out that crime is down half from where it was in the 1990s, and property crime was down 40%.
- Trump touted New York City’s “Stop and Frisk” policy as successful. Statistics show it wasn’t. Moderator Lester Holt then pointed out that a judge ruled “Stop and Frisk” to be unconstitutional. Trump then told the moderator he was “WRONG” and that a “very against police judge” and was taken away because of the actions of New York City’s “new mayor”. Bad English aside on the first claim, there is no proof that federal judge is in any way “against police”, and while “new mayor” Bill de Blasio campaigned on ending Stop & Frisk, it actually was ended prior to his taking office by former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg after its lack of results.
- While Clinton took a moment to praise the African American community for its vibrancy, Trump audibly sighed in digust.
- Donald Trump gave Clinton grief for preparing for the debate, prompting her epic comeback line of, “I think Donald just criticized me for preparing for this debate. And yes I did. And you know what else I prepared for? I prepared to be president, and I think that's a good thing.”
- Lester Holt asked Trump about the Birther controversy. He still tried blaming it on Hillary Clinton, but his statement was even longer and nonsensical this time, where he tried implicating Sidney Blumenthal. Still, after Trump tried claiming President Obama should THANK HIM for forcing him to release his birth certificate to end the controversy, Lester Holt didn’t let him off the hook, and pointed out Trump continued making statements to fuel the controversy in 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, and even as late as January of 2016. Trump also yet again failed to apologize for furthering the conspiracy, himself.
- Trump lied and claimed that he was the first candidate endorsed by Immigration Customs and Enforcement (they of course denied it).
- During a segment on cyberterrorism, Trump bizarrely downplayed Russia’s involvement of the hack of the DNC (which is weird, because he previously called on them to hack Hillary Clinton on his behalf and the FBI investigation continues to point in that direction), and instead began speculating about others who may have done it, instead, closing by saying it could have been done by “someone sitting on their bed who weighs 400 pounds”. He provided no solutions on what could be done to stop hackers, or prevent them from hacking, instead even more bizarrely adding that his 10 year old son Barron was “good with these computers”.
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- Trump segued back to talk of fighting ISIS, and repeated his strategy of “taking the oil”, which remains a war crime.
- Clinton pointed out Donald Trump supported the Iraq War in interviews in 2002, with caused him to again start interrupting to say, “WRONG.” Lester Holt fact-checked him again, causing an exchange where Trump began gibbering “ask Sean Hannity” about his opposition to the war before it started. Since Sean Hannity appeared in campaign ads for the Trump campaign to endorse the candidate, as well as knowing anything about him as a faux-journalist to begin with, he’s a hard source to trust.
- Trump tried claiming that he had a “better temperament” than Hillary Clinton to be president. The audience in the debate hall audibly laughed at him for his complete lack of self-awareness.
- Clinton pointed out, during her response, that Donald Trump has openly discussed “blowing Iranian ships out of the water” if their sailors taunted American sailors with rude hand gestures. Trump did not deny making the statement, but ridiculously tried assuring the American people, “That wouldn’t start a war” and continued to lie and claim Iranian sailors were doing this without any evidence.
- Trump again began to assert his demands that our allies like South Korea, Japan, Germany, and Saudi Arabia should treat us like a protection racket and pay us for our military alliances. (South Korea actually does pay the United States over $850 million a year, so he’s not surprisingly without a clue here as well.). Perhaps what was more terrifyingly insane than that was that Trump suggested diplomatic issues with North Korea could be handled if we simply asked China to invade them for us.
- Trump yet again repeated his lie that over $100 million was “given” to Iran as part of the nuclear treaty between their nation and the United States. Of course, these were bank assets seized by the United States in 1979 that were actually being returned to Iran.
- When asked by Lester Holt why he had said earlier in the month that Clinton “didn’t have a presidential look”, Trump lied and claimed he actually commented on her “stamina”. Holt read his quote back for him. Trump continued rambling about her stamina, and Clinton, when given a chance to respond, noted that as Secretary of State she travelled to 112 countries in four years, and that she had endured 11 hour Congressional hearings without her stamina ever faltering.
- Clinton then began to bring up Trump’s long history of misogyny, including saying that pregnant women were an inconvenience to their employers. Trump interrupted to lie and claim he never said that (there’s a videotaped interview of him doing so). Clinton then followed up further by reminding everyone about Trump’s disparaging remarks to former Miss Universe Alicia Machado (from Venezuela), when he called her “Miss Piggy” and “Miss Housekeeping”.
- Lester Holt concluded the evening by asking if either candidate lost, if they would accept the will of the people. Hillary Clinton gave the perfect answer, about respecting our nation’s democracy. Donald Trump, who has already insisted that the results of this election will be “rigged”… gave an incoherent response about 800 people that were going to be deported and someone “pushed the wrong button” and they were made citizens instead. But it was “800 and now it turns out it might be 1800”. This made Lester Holt repeat his question again, asking if Trump would respect America’s democracy. He still faltered, said he “wanted to make America great again”, said he didn’t think Clinton would accept him as winner if he won (in spite of her just having said she would), and begrudgingly and unconvincingly finally saying he would accept the results.
Less than an hour after the debate, while candidate Trump was trying to flee the building with his family and advisers (we could read “the body English” as he so advised), he gave an interview to CNN’s Dana Bash, where she asked him about how he had said he was “smart” to have not paid income taxes. Trump denied he had ever said he thought it was smart to not pay income taxes. He had just done so, within the hour, in front of roughly 100 million American viewers.
- September 27th, 2016: Disaster control time! Or, maybe it would have been if Trump didn’t somehow find ways to make most of his slip-ups from the previous night even worse, creating a quicksand effect for himself.
- First up, fact-checkers determined Trump made about one false statement every 2.65 minutes in the debate.
- Trump supporters from the websites 4chan and Reddit attempted to “skew the polls” about who won the debate on websites that allowed multiple votes from the same location to give him a “win” overnight. They got caught talking about it in their own forums. By the end of the day, though, they started turning on Trump, admitting to each other that their so-called “God Emperor” got utterly wrecked, and nobody was falling for it, and many even began to take exception of Trump blaming the hack on the DNC on “some 400 pound guy on a bed”, feeling it was derogatory towards them.
- Republican Senators and Congressman mostly fled reporters, refusing to comment on his calamitous performance.
- Trump surrogate Rudy Giuliani made the outrageous demand that the next debate should have no moderator and no fact-checking or Trump might not show up. Oh, and Guiliani would also “help” by telling reporters that “Hillary Clinton is too stupid to be president because she didn’t know about Bill Clinton’s affairs”. (This would be the same Rudy Giuliani who was on his fourth wife, and announced at a press conference he was divorcing his wife and leaving her for his mistress without first telling HER or HIS CHILDREN.)
- Trump himself went on Fox & Friends to make as many excuses for his terrible performance as he could, including that his microphone “was broken” or “too short”, or that Lester Holt did not treat him fairly (in spite of being a Republican). He tried to give himself credit for not bringing up Bill Clinton’s affairs… but then began to threaten that he would in the next debate. Perhaps the worst part of the interview for his long term chances in the race was when he commented on the up until then unheard of comments he had made towards Alicia Machado where he called Miss Universe “Miss Piggy”. Yes, Donald Trump defended fat-shaming a beauty queen, saying, “She gained a massive amount of weight.” Had he not uttered a word, that part of the debate, and his overall misogyny would have possibly been forgotten.
- Trump’s performance in the debate was abysmal enough that the Arizona Republic, a newspaper that had endorsed Republicans for president in every election since its inception 126 years ago endorsed Hillary Clinton, thrashing Trump as a candidate in the process.
- September 28th, 2016: Trump, campaigning in Wisconsin (a state he is highly unlikely to win based on polls and election history), tells a crowd no less than 16 lies. Among them, that Lester Holt was incorrect about “stop and frisk” being ruled unconstitutional, about post-debate poll numbers, and poll numbers on Tim Kaine and his own fortunes in the state of Virginia, about Brexit, and crime statistics.
- September 29th, 2016: The full rundown for Trump on this date:
- Trump hosts a rally in Iowa, where he asks Christians to raise their hands, and then asks the mostly Christian audience with their hands up if they should throw out the non-Christians (welcome to the Fourth Reich, it seems). Trump then continues, attempting to double down on his remarks from Monday’s debate where he admitted to not paying income taxes, calling it “smart”, by defending that and saying not paying taxes is a GOOD THING. Oh, and he mentions a new conspiracy theory, that originates on Russian news sites, that Google suppresses bad news about Hillary Clinton (it doesn’t).
- Newsweek announces their top story of the week is proof that Donald Trump violated the former trade embargo on Cuba in the 1990s, attempting to build hotels in casinos there. Even more implausibly, his campaign manager Kellyanne Conway admits to it when asked about it in an interview on CNN.
- Meanwhile, Trump media proxies begin trying to defend Donald Trump’s fat-shaming of Alicia Machado by instead slut-shaming her, and falsely claiming she appeared in a pornographic movie.
- Audio surfaces from an old Howard Stern show where Trump was a guest, and they talk about how at Trump’s wedding to Marla Maples, he told Stern, “Vagina is Expensive.”
- The Los Angeles Times runs a story about labor lawsuits against Trump through the past decade for trying to fire waitresses and hostesses for “not being attractive enough” at his Southern California Golf Course.
- PBS releases a documentary about the 2016 election called “The Choice”, that features a supercut of all the times where Donald Trump talked about his superior genes, noting the uncomfortable similarity between what Trump believes and the logic behind eugenics.
- September 30th, 2016: The Trump campaign was already going to have to go into full damage control over Trump’s bad week getting worse, but for whatever reason, Donald Trump made their jobs harder by waking up at 3 AM, getting on Twitter, and among his Tweetstorm was the posting, “Did Crooked Hillary help disgusting (check out sex tape and past) Alicia M become a U.S. citizen so she could use her in the debate?Did Crooked Hillary help disgusting (check out sex tape and past) Alicia M become a U.S. citizen so she could use her in the debate?Did Crooked Hillary help disgusting (check out sex tape and past) Alicia M become a U.S. citizen so she could use her in the debate?” This would be the first time in history a presidential candidate from any party encouraged people to go looking for a sex tape (that doesn’t exist, as we noted earlier when Trump proxies were claiming it did), and adds the latest conspiracy theory, that somehow Hillary Clinton could tamper with immigration services in the country as a private citizen to give Machado citizenship. By midday, Buzzfeed broke the story that while Machado had not appeared in a “sex tape”, Trump had, giving a cameo in a Playboy soft core porno in late 1999, adding to his hypocrisy.
- October 1st, 2016: With things falling apart for him so quickly, particularly because Trump was looking like quite the hypocritical misogynist for attacking Hillary Clinton for Bill Clinton cheating on HER, while he himself had cheated on his first TWO WIVES… Trump decided to just start wondering out loud about the possibility that Hillary Clinton may have, in turn, cheated on Bill Clinton, without any evidence whatsoever.
This may have had something to do with the fact that the New York Times acquired three pages of tax documents from Donald Trump in 1995, where it was revealed that he claimed a financial loss of $916 million in a single year, and as a result, was eligible for a tax break on up to $50 million of income that made him eligible to receive a tax break on up to $50 million of income annually for at least until 2010, which he is believed to have used to avoid paying income taxes, at all.
- October 2nd, 2016: Trump proxies Chris Christie and Rudy Giuliani both take to the Sunday morning talk shows to try and do damage control over the New York Times having published 3 pages from Donald Trump’s 1995 tax returns, calling him a “genius”. Giuliani gets a lot of people from both sides of the aisle to slap their foreheads in disgust when he also defends Donald Trump’s infidelities and his own, as well as accusing Hillary Clinton of having cheated on Bill Clinton without evidence saying, “Everyone does it.” (This is the GOP that was the “party of family values”, remember.)
- October 3rd, 2016: Donald Trump, speaking before a group of veterans in Pennsylvania, begins discussing PTSD in less-than-accurate and less-than-sensitive terms, indicating that he doesn’t feel soldiers who come home with PTSD are “strong” because they “can’t deal with it”, as compared to others.
The other big stories from that day regarding Trump? The Donald J. Trump Foundation was given a cease and desist letter from New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, who was investigating its many irregularities including that it solicited donations without a license. Oh, and a report came out that Donald Trump rented out space in Trump Tower for five whole years to an Iranian bank widely known to have sponsored terrorism. So there’s that, too.
- October 4th, 2016: The Vice-Presidential debate takes place, and while Democratic VP candidate takes many opportunities to attack stances of Donald Trump, or disgusting quotes he’s actually said… Gov. Mike Pence does nothing to defend any of Trump’s rhetoric, except here and there denying Trump ever said things he actually said. Trump, meanwhile, couldn’t stand to sit on the sidelines and let Pence have the whole spotlight, and chose to Live-blog the debate on Twitter, and like he has many times before, managed to re-Tweet a white supremacist who talks about “white genocide”.
- October 5th, 2016: There are whispers that Trump was upset about Mike Pence not defending him more in the debate last night, or upset for looking more competent than he did in his own debate 8 days earlier. So, not surprisingly, Donald Trump started taking credit for Mike Pence’s debate performance.
Then news broke that CNN had unearthed two more Playboy soft core pornographic films featuring Donald Trump. One, from 2001, featured him backstage at a Playboy fashion show with his girlfriend (and future third wife, Melania Knauss. A far creepier one from 1994 featured Trump taking pictures of Playboy models with a Polaroid camera, and questioning them on whether or not they could be the cover model for Playboy’s 40th Anniversary in between soft core pornographic sex scenes. This brought the confirmed number of appearances in Playboy magazine to two, and three Playboy films Trump was in. All while the 2016 Republican Party Platform had declared pornography a public health crisis.
Trump himself was campaigning in Henderson, Nevada, where he gave a lousy lesson on how to pronounce “Nevada" to people who lived there, pronouncing it incorrectly. When the crowd tried correcting them, in classic "can never be wrong" style, Trump insisted he had it right, and the people who lived there were wrong. Even his supporters had to wonder what his problem was. At the same rally, Trump was kidding/not kidding when he begged for older and terminally ill supporters of his to not die before the election so they could still vote for him. At this point, it couldn’t get more surreal, could it?
- October 6th, 2016: In the morning, still in Nevada, Trump gave an interview to a local TV reporter who asked about his long history of sexist comments towards women, and Trump tried dismissing the majority of them by saying, “A lot of that was done for the purpose of entertainment, there's nobody that has more respect for women than I do”.
Trump then flew back to the east coast, where he hosted a rare town hall in New Hampshire, where all of the questions were pre-screened softballs, some of them even asked not by audience members at all, but Trump campaign staffers. He admitted it was a tune-up for Sunday’s town hall debate with Hillary Clinton… and then got bored after only fielding twelve of twenty questions, and left about 30 minutes into what was supposed to be a much longer event, ignoring the two minute timer his staff had set up for his responses.
Oh, and in an interview with CNN’s Miguel Marquez, Donald Trump defended his thirty year crusade against New York’s Central Park Five, who even though their confessions were long since established to have been forced, the actual person who committed the crime they were accused from coming forward, them being exonerated, and winning a court settlement against New York City… Trump refused to admit to ever being wrong for calling for their execution in newspaper editorials, saying, “they admitted they were guilty”.
- October 7th, 2016: A flurry of Trump stories hit this day:
A U.S. Senator wrote a letter to the U.S. Department of Justice to begin an investigation into Trump Model Management for human trafficking.
Nearly 100 Evangelical leaders published a letter renouncing Donald Trump, declaring him a threat to “the integrity of our faith". The Evangelical wing of the GOP had not faltered in their support in decades.
At Trump Tower in New York, Trump spoke to the National Border Patrol Council, and continued questioning the legitimacy of U.S. Elections, claiming the government was letting undocumented immigrants “pour into the country so they can go and vote”.
Trump campaign staffer Roger Stone, formerly of Richard Nixon’s “Dirty Tricks” crew, had been boasting about having a link to Russian hacker Guccifer 2.0 to the media, and suddenly went on Twitter to ominously post, “Trust me, it will soon be the Podesta’s time in the barrel #CrookedHillary” days after he began posting about Julian Assange, and a “payload coming”.
Audio emerges from 2005 of Trump, just a few months into his marriage to Melania Trump, openly and vulgarly discusses trying to have sex with women with Access Hollywood’s Billy Bush on the set of Days of Our Lives. While on the soap opera’s set to film a cameo, he told Bush, “When you’re a star they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab them by the p---y. You can do anything.”
- October 8th, 2016: Trump releases an apology for his comments. The first sentence alone has two lies in it:
"I never said I was a perfect person...nor pretended to be someone I'm not."
1. Trump did say he was perfect. The Twitter post where he did is still up.
2. As we've noted, Trump has pretended to be John Barron and John Miller, his own non-existent PR employees in phone calls with members of the media. Audio exists of him calling a People magazine reporter and pretending to be someone else, and Trump has admitted to doing this under oath before in court cases.
Dozens of elected Republicans retract their endorsement or support for Donald Trump. The RNC stops funding his campaign for president. Emergency meetings take place with the highest ranking members of the Republican Party, asking Trump to drop out of the race… and he responds to those calls by putting out a post on Twitter, in ALL CAPS so you know he’s serious, saying he’ll never drop out of the race.
He is then, of course, still not doing any debate prep, having to focus on all the chaos.
- October 9th, 2016: Trump prior to the second presidential debate, hosts a short, impromptu press conference with four women who have accused Bill Clinton of sexually harassing or assaulting them decades ago.
That was a prelude to another outrageous debate performance, wherein:
- Trump still is audibly sniffing into his microphone, like he did in the first debate.
- Trump still repeatedly interrupted Clinton, 18 times in this debate.
- Trump argues with moderators who press him about trying to evade questions, gripes when they stop him from interrupting, and whines out loud about getting equal time (even though he spoke longer than Clinton).
- Trump wanders around the stage aimlessly, including when he creeps right up behind Hillary Clinton while she’s speaking to attendees asking questions.
- Trump appears to start molesting the stool provided for him to sit in (which he doesn’t use for sitting).
- Trump never smiles. Not once.
- Trump said nothing when Hillary Clinton said he hadn’t paid income taxes in 20 years, apparently conceding the point.
- Trump defended the actions of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, before turning around and contradicting his own running mate on a proper strategy for handling the crisis in Aleppo.
- Trump states that he “thinks Aleppo has fallen” (it hadn’t).
- Trump, during the question about Aleppo, starts talking about Mosul, which is in Iraq, and wondering out loud why the military would announce an attack there ahead of time, leading moderator Martha Raddatz to give him obvious examples like, “psychological warfare” against the enemy or “to warn civilians to get out”.
- Trump threatens to, if president, appoint a special prosecutor to investigate Hillary Clinton, and see her thrown in jail, like a madman dictator in a banana republic.
- Called Hillary Clinton “the Devil”.
- When confronted about his comments about “grabbing women by the p****” by Anderson Cooper, Trump lied about what he actually said and meant, and Anderson Cooper had to ask him if he understood he was actually describing sexual assault. Trump repeatedly tried explaining it away as “locker room talk”, and ignored the numerous reports of women alleging he kissed or groped them without consent, as he bragged about doing in the video.
- Trump repeated his ridiculous claim that “nobody has more respect for women than I do.” Which demonstrates a complete lack of self-awareness, or understanding of what respect actually looks like.
- Trump was tasked with giving the first answer to what could be done to help stop the rise of Islamophobia from an undecided voter who was also a Muslim woman, and then proceeded to give an Islamophobic answer where he talked about “radical Islamic terror” and being suspicious of Muslims who might carry out terror attacks.
- In that answer, he lied about the San Bernardino shooting, claiming other Muslims knew about the couple’s plans to commit murder, saying, “In San Bernardino, many people saw the bombs all over the apartment of the two people that killed 14 and wounded many, many people…Muslims have to report the problems when they see them.” (Nobody saw bombs in the home of the terrorists.)
- Lied when he said, “I've gotten to see some of the most vicious commercials I've ever seen of Michelle Obama talking about you, Hillary.” (There are no Michelle Obama attack ads against Clinton, and former ’08 Obama campaign chairman David Alexrod took to Twitter to correct Trump.)
- Lied when he claimed that Hillary Clinton had “viciously” attacked women who made accusations of sexual impropriety against her husband, Bill Clinton. No evidence of any such retribution exists, unless you count Clinton disbelieving some of the accusers in interviews.
- Trump lied when he said, “We have the slowest growth since 1929.” (The economy is growing. According to CNBC, it contracted in eight individual years since 1930.)
- Repeated a lie he submitted in the first debate, that “ICE just endorsed me. They've never endorsed a presidential candidate.” (Trump was not endorsed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a branch of the government, but by a union of its employees.)
- Lied when he said, “She is raising everybody’s taxes, massively.” (Clinton’s tax hikes are for very wealthy people. Says the Tax Policy Center: “Nearly all of (Clinton’s) tax increases would fall on the top 1 per cent; the bottom 95 per cent of taxpayers would see little or no change in their taxes.”)
- Lied when he accused Clinton of laughing at a 12-year-old rape victim: “Her client she represented got him off and she's seen laughing at the girl who was raped.” (Clinton laughed at various points of a 1980s interview about the case – but never at the victim. For example, she said that her client had passed a polygraph lie test, and she added, with a laugh, “which forever destroyed my faith in polygraphs.”)
- Lied when he accused Clinton and Sidney Blumenthal of starting the Birther Conspiracy theory, saying, “You know very well, your campaign Sidney Blumenthal … he's the one that got this started along with your campaign manager and they were on television just two weeks ago, she was, saying exactly that.” (There is no evidence that Blumenthal or Clinton’s campaign manager started the conspiracy theory that Trump promoted for years.)
- Misrepresented Clinton’s stance on healthcare, saying, “She wants to go to a single-payer plan, which would be a disaster. Somewhat similar to Canada.” (Clinton wants to add a “public option” to the current system, but is not calling for a single-payer system like Canada’s.)
- Trump also fibbed when he claimed most Canadians were unhappy with their healthcare system which, according to actual polls, is a lie. His claim that Canadians were coming across the border for U.S. healthcare has no basis in reality. For years, the opposite was true, and Americans were sometimes going to Canada for cheaper healthcare. Today, less than 1% of Canadians come to the U.S. for healthcare. Suffice to say, many Canadians online told him he was a hoser as a result.
- Trump lied when he said Bill Clinton “paid an $850,000 fine to one of the women, Paula Jones who is also here tonight.” (Clinton paid a $25,000 fine to Arkansas authorities, but his $850,000 payment to Jones was a settlement, not a fine.)
- Trump told two lies about Syrian Refugees, lying when he said, “Hundreds of thousands of people coming in from Syria when we know nothing about them. “ (He inflated the number of Syrian refugees by at least 8 times to put it over 100,000 so far, as the U.S. has accepted about 12,500 Syrian refugees at this time. And of course, those refugees are subjected to an extensive vetting process.)
- Lied about the U.S. trade deficit (that he also adds towards by having many of his company’s products made in China or other countries in Southeast Asia), saying, “Last year, we had almost $800 billion trade deficit. Other words, trading with other countries. We had an $800 billion deficit.” (The trade deficit last year was $532 billion. It was $746 billion when trade in services, at which the U.S. excels, is excluded from the count.)
- Incorrectly said, “Just today policeman were shot — two, killed.” (Two officers were shot and killed the day before the debate, not that day.)
- Lied about his own tax plan when he said “I will tell you we are cutting (taxes) big league for the middle-class.” (The vast majority of Trump’s tax cuts go to the rich, and some analyses suggest the middle-class will actually pay more taxes. The Tax Foundation found that the middle quintile of earners would get an income boost of 1.3 per cent.)
- Trump again lied about his support for the Iraq War, saying, “I was against the war in Iraq. Has not been debunked.” (Trump expressed only support for the war before the invasion. His claim has been repeatedly debunked.)
- Repeated his lie about statistics on American tax rates, saying, “Our taxes are so high. Just about the highest in the world.” (The U.S. has below-average taxes for the industrialized world. It is among the highest with regard to corporate taxes alone, but Trump did not specify.)
- Lied about his tweet about Alicia Machado: “No, there wasn’t ‘’check out a sex tape.’” (That is precisely what Trump wrote in a post still online, and not deleted, just over a week ago: “Check out sex tape.”)
- Trump tried insinuating that Hillary Clinton did not pull off a “3 AM phone call” because of what happened in Benghazi. Which is incredible, because Benghazi happened at 3:45 in afternoon, Eastern Time and Clinton was kept informed as the situation unfolded.
- Again lied about murder statistics when he falsely said, “Chicago; you take a look at Washington, D.C., we have an increase in murder within our cities.” (Murder is down in D.C. this year. There were 106 homicides as of Oct. 7, compared to 120 at the same time last year.)
- Falsely said of Clinton, “She made $250 million by being in office. She used the power of her office to make a lot of money.” (Forbes magazine found $230 million in combined income for the Clintons between 2001 and 2014, but the majority of that was income Bill Clinton earned after he left office. “Hillary didn’t bring in the sort of money her husband did until 2013, when she left her post as Secretary of State,” Forbes wrote.)
- In discussing energy policy, Trump began talking about “clean coal”, which isn’t really a thing.
- Lied yet again when he said he was “pretty much self-funding” his campaign. (This was not true even early in the primaries, but especially not now. Trump has accepted tens of millions in donations from others.)
- Lied when he said of Libya, “ISIS has a good chunk of their oil. I'm sure you probably have heard that.” (ISIS has not done so. “They wanted to disrupt it, destroy it, not to run it," energy analyst Matthew Bey told CNBC in September.)
- Lied when he said Clinton is pledging to leave the carried interest tax loophole untouched: “Very interesting why she's leaving carried interest.” (Clinton is even vowing to get rid of the loophole by executive action if she has to.)
- Trump alleged, quite stupidly, and showing a lot of ignorance about technology when he said that Clinton went through a “very expensive process” to “acid wash” or “bleach” her deleted emails. (The emails were deleted with a free software program, called BleachBit, that involves neither actual acid, nor bleach.)
- Repeated a lie about the Iran deal by saying, “It's a one-sided transaction where we're giving back $150 billion to a terrorist state.” (As the Washington Post explains, the deal allowed Iran to get access to its own money that was frozen in foreign bank accounts, estimated at about $100 billion. The U.S. didn’t give Iran $150 billion.)
- Outright lied when he said of the DNC hack, “Maybe there is no hacking. But they always blame Russia. And the reason they blame Russia because they think they're trying to tarnish me with Russia.” (There was hacking. The U.S. intelligence community last week accused Russia of responsibility, as independent cybersecurity experts did previously. Trump was specifically debriefed about Russia being responsible in September, and there is no evidence cybersecurity experts are mentioning Russia to insinuate anything about Trump.)
- Repeated his lie that he has no business dealings in Russia, even though there is evidence, and he and his son Donald Jr. have both previously boasted of Trump business dealings in Russia.
- Lied about the U.S. and Russia trying to negotiate a ceasefire in Syria, “Just take a look at Russia, and look at what they did this week where I agree, she wasn't there but possibly she's consulted. We sign a peace treaty. Everyone's excited.” (There was no “peace treaty” about Syria, nor any agreement this week. The U.S. and Russia agreed to a temporary ceasefire in September.)
- Trump repeated two lies he tells regarding Bill Clinton signing NAFTA, which he says “is the greatest disaster trade deal in the history of the world”. President George H.W. Bush actually signed NAFTA, and it did not create any of the job losses or economic losses Trump claims it does.
- Lied about the Affordable Care Act, saying, “…some horrible things like Obamacare, where your health insurance and health care is going up by numbers that are astronomical, 68 per cent, 59 per cent, 71 per cent.” (It is a major exaggeration to suggest that most people will see such increases. While a small number of Obamacare plans may spike this much, the vast majority will not. Estimates of various kinds put the increase at 5 per cent to 25 per cent. And non-Obamacare premiums are rising slower than they did under George W. Bush.)
- Repeated his lie about Clinton and Obama being responsible for the creation of ISIS, saying “Her and Obama, whether you like it or not, the way they got out of Iraq, the vacuum they've left, that's why ISIS formed in the first place.” (ISIS was formed long before Obama’s troop withdrawal; it even started using the name “Islamic State” during the Bush presidency. At least Trump did not refer to Clinton or Obama as the “founders” of the group, sarcastically or otherwise.)
- Outright lied about the Benghazi attack, “Ambassador Stevens sent 600 requests for help. And the only one she talked to was Sidney Blumenthal who is her friend and not a good guy by the way.” (The Washington Post, which looked deeply into the “600 requests” claim, found that “few if any” of the messages were from Stevens himself, and that many of the 600 were identified as “concerns,” not “requests,” which have different meanings in bureaucratic parlance. The requests did not go directly to Clinton, and not all of them were denied. As for Blumenthal, the New York Times wrote, “It is manifestly untrue to suggest, as Mr. Trump did, that he was only person she listened to on Benghazi.” This bizarre conspiracy theory apparently is from… Russian news website Sputnik, run by Vladimir Putin and the Russian government.)
- Repeated a lie he tells about his hotel development in a historic building near the White House, “The United States government, because of my balance sheet, which they actually know very well, chose me to do the Old Post Office…one of the primary area things, in fact, perhaps the primary thing was balance sheet.” (Trump did not win the project primarily because the government approved of his balance sheet, numerous news stories from the time of the decision make clear.)
- Lied when he said “jobs are essentially nonexistent” in the “inner cities.” (Of course, millions of people living in urban cores are employed; many inner cities are thriving.)
- Falsely said, “African- Americans now 45 per cent poverty in the inner cities.” (It has never been clear how Trump defines “inner cities” – he appears to use the phrase synonymously with “black neighborhood” – but he appeared to be mangling the statistic he usually uses in his speeches: “45 per cent of black children under the age of six live in poverty.” That statistic is also grossly incorrect, as overall black poverty is 24 per cent; it is well under 45 per cent even in several cities with a significant black poverty challenge, such as Memphis (35 per cent). What’s really more alarming is that when fielding a question from an African American, Trump immediately dove into talk of inner cities.
- Trump seemed confused about what power a U.S. Senator has, when he slammed Clinton, claiming she could have changed the tax code “years ago” had she tried to do so. (Clinton was correct that her powers on such issues were very limited with a Republican president in office.)
Trump, who was griping about not getting equal time, spoke for 40 minutes to Hillary Clinton’s 39. He told 40 lies, by our count, in that time, literally one per minute of time he spoke. Yeah, “pathological liar” is putting it mildly.
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- October 10th, 2016: An NBC News/Wall Street Journal Polls hits that shows Donald Trump trailing Hillary Clinton by 11 points, and if Gary Johnson and Jill Stein are not included, he trails by 14 points. The same poll had the generic Congressional vote shifting to +7 in favor of Democrats, and some GOP insiders even admitted that their own internal polls looked WORSE. Chaos breaks out, as Paul Ryan vows to no longer campaign for Trump (but doesn’t rescind his endorsement). The RNC stops helping fund the Trump campaign, which leads to the Virginia Trump Campaign Chairman mounting a protest… at RNC headquarters, leading to their firing. Rumors swirling that Mike Pence wants to quit the ticket get quashed by Pence, but then other rumors begin to swirl about Kellyanne Conway quitting the Trump campaign.
And so, Donald Trump decided to try and stop the avalanche of bad press rising against him by threatening to continue to bash Bill Clinton for his sexual improprieties if more taped footage of Trump being a sexist or racist continued to be released to the media. Because that’s a healthy response. Still healthier than Trump fan Alex Jones claiming Hillary Clinton “smelled of Sulphur” like President Obama does, and that’s how you know the both of them are possessed by demons (seriously, Alex Jones is insane).
He also held a rally in Beaver Valley, Pennsylvania, which being in a place that’s another pseudonym for the female anatomy might not be the best idea for a guy who admits to thinking to “just grab them by the p****”. Also bad optics? Giving a shout out to Steelers quarterback Ben Roethilsberger, who while he is a hero around those parts, Big Ben’s also been twice accused of sexually assaulting women, who he paid off to drop charges.
- October 11th, 2016: Donald Trump declares “a plague on both your houses” and starts a Tweetstorm where he begins not just attacking the Clintons, but starts trash-talking Republican Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, and U.S. Senator John McCain, declaring “war” on the establishment GOP. He continues railing against McCain and Ryan at a late rally in Florida, where he tells everyone to get out and vote on November 28th. (Hint: The election is a bit earlier than that.)
Other than that, a Republican Congressman, Blake Farenthold managed to only CONSIDER dropping his endorsement of Trump if he were to boast literally, “I like raping women”, and at a Mike Pence rally, one of the more deplorable Trump supporters began to openly begin discussion of fomenting a revolution if Hillary Clinton should win in four weeks. So, y’know, just another normal, run of the mill day in politics.
- October 12th, 2016: As the Trump campaign starts talking openly of running a “scorched earth” campaign in our United States, with Trump Campaign CEO Steve Bannon bragging that the would “make Bill Clinton look like Bill Cosby”. That would prove difficult as the day went on, as the media had not just three, but four women come forward to accuse Donald Trump of sexually assaulting them in a day.
And with polls showing Donald Trump winning only the demographic of the male vote, his deplorable supporters decide to start a social media hashtag calling for the repeal of the 19th Amendment of our Constitution, that gave women the right to vote. But they’re not sexist, of course, and they’re nothing like the radical Islamist terrorists they hate, heavens no.
Meanwhile, Wikileaks (run by Julian Assange) posts e-mails acquired in cyberattacks by Russian hackers that were stolen from Democratic staffers, including Clinton campaign manager John Podesta. It’s interesting that people within the Trump campaign, like Roger Stone, predicted this crime and where it would be proven before it was public knowledge, huh?
- October 13th, 2016: With a handful of women emerging to contradict Donald Trump’s claim that his boasts of having “locker room talk” with Billy Bush were not just talk, and actual attacks he committed upon them, Trump began to come even more unraveled. He had his law firm threaten to sue the New York Times for running a story about two women accusing him of sexually assaulting them, and the Times responded brilliantly by pointing out their article does nothing worse to Donald Trump’s reputation than his own remarks on the public record have already done, effectively saying, “you’ve admitted to being such a s***ty person that you have no real character left to besmirch.”
And so, with public opinion rapidly turning against him, the egomaniac Trump did the only rational thing- I’m just kidding. Like a moron, Trump decided to litigate the accusations at a rally he was holding in West Palm Beach, Florida, where he singled out the accusations from People Magazine reporter Natasha Stoynoff, in particular, and basically told the audience that she was making it all up because she wasn’t attractive enough that he would have wanted to sexually assault her. And then Trump REALLY got paranoid, beginning to lay out a conspiracy theory where the world was actually being run by people like the Clintons, under the direction of the banks and major media outlets. Which would play with people who get their news from InfoWars, but probably would turn off undecided voters.
And out transcripts from interviews, appearances on Howard Stern, and on-set stories about Donald being a terrible person on The Apprentice continued to leak out, each worse than the next. The worst was probably the revelation that he called deaf Oscar-winning actress Marlee Matlin, who appeared on The Celebrity Apprentice, “retarded”. Or given the state of the campaign with all the sexual assault allegations, maybe it was his Howard Stern appearance when Stern and co-host Robin Quivers joked around that Trump would know about sexual predators, because he was one, and Donald responded, “It’s true.”
- October 14th, 2016: Two more accusers come forward to accuse Donald Trump of sexual assault, one is a former contestant on The Apprentice, Summer Zervos, and another, Kristin Anderson, was a model working in New York in the 1990s who recalled Trump sneaking up on her in a nightclub, reaching up her skirt, and touching her vagina through her underwear (and had told friends the story well before Trump ever ran for president). Meanwhile, tales from the set of The Apprentice continued to leak out, including multiple members of the crew saying that Trump kept referring to rapper Lil' Jon, a contestant on Celebrity Apprentice in 2013 as “Uncle Tom” when he put on an Uncle Sam outfit. (Several crew members had to stop filming and explain to Trump why that was racially insensitive and couldn't go to air to get a take where he didn’t do it).
On the campaign trail, Trump continued to come unhinged, using a North Carolina rally to continue to claim that the election was “rigged” because of a vast conspiracy of media and banking elites united against him, that now included Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim. He insisted that the women accusing him of sexual assault (now numbering near ten, were all liars, and continued to try to use the revolting defense in some cases that the women were not attractive enough for him to want to sexually assault them, and mockingly pantomimed what “grabbing them by the p****” might look like. The Trump campaign had promised evidence to refute the victims’ claims, and in the instance of his assault on Jessica Leeds on a plane in the 1980s, a British man named Anthony Gilberthorpe emerged to claim he was on the aircraft, that Leeds told him, a perfect stranger, she wanted to seduce and marry Trump (who was already married), and that Donald Trump was innocent. The problem was, Gilberthorpe is already a very known quantity in British politics for being a serial liar, and no record of him being in first class on a Transatlantic flight at the age of 18 to have seen this exists.
In Trump's second North Carolina rally of the day, he absolutely lost it, and began tearing apart the teleprompters on the stage, claiming they didn’t work, and bragging that he wouldn’t be paying the company that provided them as a result (which is a negative part of his history as someone who weasels out of paying debts, that he shouldn’t be announcing to a crowd with the media present he’s going to do to further that narrative). Then the sound started to not come through as well, which he also blamed on the AV company, but when you think about it, may have had something to do with a lunatic yanking wires out in the middle of his speech without having the first idea of what they did.
- October 16th, 2016: Trump campaigns in Maine, and New Hampshire, where he comes up with a new paranoid conspiracy theory… Hillary Clinton is on drugs, which would explain why she had the stamina to compete with him in the presidential debates, and he would like her to be submitted to drug testing prior to the third debate on Wednesday the 19th. He also referred to President Obama as the “president” using quotation marks, indicating he still doesn’t actually feel the outgoing president with the highest approval ratings in history in his final year in office is legitimate.
Oh, and after the North Carolina GOP’s headquarters was firebombed by unknown assailants, Democrats started a GoFundMe to help them raise money to replace it, and Hillary Clinton criticized whoever the attackers were for their acts. Donald Trump, yet again failing a test as a potential Commander in Chief, got on Twitter to blame it on Hillary Clinton and Democrats, without any evidence to back up his paranoid ramblings.
Meanwhile, the number of women coming forward accusing Donald Trump of sexual assault reached nine.
- October 17th, 2016: Donald Trump, who had appeared a few times on Saturday Night Live, suddenly lost his sense of humor as for the third week in a row, the show’s “cold open” began with Alec Baldwin playing a caricature of him in skits with an awkward Hillary Clinton played by Kate McKinnon. Still, the real Donald was not amused, and Trump hit social media to say SNL should be cancelled. Because that’s a good look. Trump surrogates, meanwhile, continued to push the narrative that the whole election was “rigged" against Trump not just by the media, but pushing a variety of wild conspiracy theories about voter fraud. There was, however, one interesting development... on-again/off-again Trump surrogate Roger Stone, on Sunday Afternoon, posted on Twitter that he was not bound by the non-disclosure agreement he signed with the Trump campaign, intimating that he was about to go public about details of the Trump campaign.
- October 18th, 2016: Trump continues raging against Hillary Clinton, Paul Ryan, and establishment Republicans, beginning to chastise the GOP elites for not voicing support for his insane claims of a “rigged election”. His conspiracy theory about massive voter fraud changes to now include illegal immigrants being able to vote. Oh, and 1.8 million DEAD people will be able to vote, according to Trump. Bizarrely, Trump also brings up a new issue stance but three weeks until the election… he suddenly believes in establishing Congressional term limits (maybe he’s trying to find some loophole to screw over Paul Ryan?)
Trump’s claims that all of the women accusing him of sexual assault are “liars” was pretty hard to believe, but People Magazine didn’t let him disparaging Natasha Stoynoff lightly, as they produced six witnesses to back Stoynoff’s story.
On the eve of the third presidential debate, Trump announces his two guests at the debate… Barack Obama’s half-brother Malik (because let’s remind everyone of whatever foreign ties there are to the “illegitimate” president’s background), and the mother of one of the Americans who died in Benghazi.
- October 19th, 2016: A lot of other election years, a campaign having its campaign manager say their candidate had a five-point-plan to defeat a religion would have been far away the most shocking news on any given day, like when Kellyanne Conway said Donald Trump had a plan to defeat Islam (note: not radical Islamic terror, not ISIS, but Islam). But on this day, it was the final presidential debate in Las Vegas that drew all the headlines, and again, there’s a laundry list of why Donald Trump was a disaster…
- Trump was STILL audibly sniffing into his microphone, albeit less than the first two debates.
- Trump chose to use the opening question about the Supreme Court to waste time so he could remind everyone about a grudge he was holding against Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg for criticizing him. He lied, however, claiming that Ginsberg was forced to apologize to him, which she did, but voluntarily, calling her commentary on a presidential candidate “ill-advised”.
- Trump then advocated for the Constitution to be interpreted as “our founders intended”. Critics note that the founders also didn’t think of outlawing slavery, or of giving women the right to vote, and that’s why the Constitution is meant to be amended.
- On abortion, Trump floundered, saying he felt that abortion should “go back to the states” to decide on its legality, before saying he would appoint “pro-life judges” who would “automatically” overturn Roe v. Wade, and then began to show a lack of understanding about late-term abortions, saying they “rip the baby out of the womb” a day before the due date (which, they don’t, at that late a time, doctors perform a c-section and try to deliver a baby).
- During the immigration portion of the debate, Trump lied and claimed Clinton supports amnesty for undocumented immigrants (she doesn’t) and repeated the lie he told at the first two debates that he had just been endorsed by ICE, then lied and claimed they were backing his plan to build a border wall, when some have in fact questioned its viability. He then referred to drug dealers as “bad hombres” which drew the ire of many Latino commentators.
- Trump then repeated two lies he told in all the debates about NAFTA. The first being that President Bill Clinton signed it (it was President George H.W. Bush who signed it), and the second that it was a “disaster”, as economists have said the trade agreement’s overall impact on the United States was, if anything, modestly good.
- Clinton then reminded the audience that Trump had hired undocumented workers to build Trump Tower. Trump did not argue the point (because it’s true). Instead, visibly flustered, he bizarrely gave praise of President Obama’s record number of deportations.
Then he lied and claimed Hillary Clinton wants us to have “open borders”, which her comment about those two words from an e-mail seized by Wikileaks, in context, was regarding energy and trade agreements.
- Clinton pivoted, pointing out Trump was referencing Wikileaks, and commented not just on the fact that the documents were stolen by Russian hackers, but that Trump has either denied their involvement, or alternatively, encouraged Russia to commit cyber-terrorism against American organizations to benefit him. Trump then began to sputter and not only AGAIN refused to condemn what intelligence agencies have confirmed where acts of cyber-terrorism committed by Russian hackers, but started to claim he didn’t know Vladimir Putin, in spite of all of the times he had said he did on record. He then inflated the number of nuclear warheads in the American and Russian stockpiles from the 1500 that the S.T.A.R.T. Treaty limited them to, back up to 1800, because Donald Trump is terrible with facts that involve numbers.
- Clinton then said Putin would prefer Trump as president to her, so he could have a puppet, and Donald comes completely unhinged, shouting back, “You’re the puppet!” This is not a good response, as presidential candidates are expected to do better than, “I know you are, but what am I?” in debates. After again denying 17 intelligence agencies’ reports that Russia was behind the hacks, Trump praised Putin for “outsmarting” Clinton “every step of the way”. Chris Wallace had to again ask Trump if he would condemn cyber-attacks committed by Russia before he finally relented.
- Clinton then segued back to Trump’s discussion of nuclear weapons from a moment earlier into pointing out how he had openly discussed more countries having them, and Trump went back to how he lost the first debate, starting to interrupt and yelling, “WRONG.” Somewhere, Alec Baldwin was grinning, as Trump became completely unraveled.
- In the next portion of the debate on tax policy, Trump lied and briefly said Hillary Clinton would "double or triple" Americans' taxes, before immediately ignoring the question by trying to steer the conversation back to nuclear proliferation, because he had so badly been pummeled in that part of the debate.
- Trump then lied and claimed because he had raised questions about members of NATO not paying their share of the cost of its defense, other countries in it had suddenly opened their wallets. Again, not only was this untrue, this was in the portion of the debate where Trump was supposed to be talking about tax policy.
- Trump then misrepresented facts about the jobs report that came out for September 2016, saying it was “terrible”, when in fact, the economy added 156,000 jobs, and the only negative was that unemployment ticked up slightly… less than one tenth of one percent.
- Clinton, in a brief misdirection, pointed out Donald Trump uses Chinese steel in building his hotels and casinos. Trump does not deny it (because it's true).
- Trump accused Hillary Clinton of doing nothing for the country while losing $6 billion while running the State Department. Unfortunately for him, that’s not true. With delight, Clinton responded as much, and then honored Trump’s request to compare what she’s been doing for three decades versus what Trump has (HINT: He walked right into that one).
- Chris Wallace then had to ask Trump about the women coming forward with accusations that he sexually assaulted them, and Trump lied, saying the reports had been "debunked” (Hint: They Haven't). Trump then claimed violence that has repeatedly occurred at his rallies was instigated by Hillary Clinton, without any proof. Clinton repeated Trump’s non-answer, and then added that through the week, he had dismissed the accusations by the women, saying they were “not attractive enough”, or “were not my first choice”. Trump interrupts, saying, “I never said that,” in spite of there being videotape of him saying that from only days earlier (it’s a habit he has). By the end of the segment, Trump could only meager offer up his untrue brag about himself that “nobody has more respect for women than I have.”
- Clinton gave the laundry list of Trump’s most offensive moments, and when she mentions that he mocked a disabled reporter, Trump says, “WRONG.” (He did.)
- Chris Wallace tried insinuating that the Clinton Foundation operated on a “pay to play” basis, and Hillary pointed out its 90% rating from watchdog groups, downplayed any supposed wrongdoing, and then compared it to the Trump Foundation, which Trump had stopped putting his own money into, illegally solicited donations without a license, and used the Trump Foundation’s money to buy portraits of himself. Wallace then asked Trump if his foundation had also been used to pay off lawsuits, and he lied and said it hadn't (it did, and he was fined for doing so).
- Clinton pointed out we would know more about Trump’s charitable giving if he ever released his tax returns, and he began to say whatever taxes he dodges were no worse than what some of Hillary’s top donors like Warren Buffet do, a claim he made in the second debate that Buffet himself released information to debunk. Still, Trump repeated the same line that failed in the last debate.
- In the most damning part of the debate, Trump refuses to say that he would respect the outcome of the election if he lost, saying he will “keep you in suspense” if he will or not. Before the night is over, elected Republicans like Sen. Jeff Flake and Sen. Lindsey Graham blast him for this.
- Clinton lists a series of occasions where Trump has claimed that things were rigged against him, including the Iowa Caucus and Wisconsin Primary (to name a few), and when she mentions how he claimed the Emmy Awards were rigged against him when The Apprentice didn’t win one for him, he interrupts to say, “Should have gotten it.”
- The topic then changed to the fight with ISIS, and Trump’s answer on Mosul was nonsensical, including how he called our military generals “stupid”. Post debate, Republican strategist Steve Schmidt summed up Trump’s answer as “like an old man in the park feeding squirrels and talking to himself.”
- Clinton again reminded those watching that Donald Trump had supported the Iraq War after he has claimed he never did, telling them to just Google search it. He interrupts with “WRONG,” twice. (Hint: She’s correct.) By the end of the segment, devoid of any reason or proof, Trump blurts out, “Iran is taking over Iraq.”
- Chris Wallace then tries to steer the debate to Syria, and the city of Aleppo. Trump starts interrupting him before he can even finish the question. He again appears clueless, and even Breitbart News fact check his incorrect assessment that “Aleppo has fallen” as incorrect.
- In the portion of the debate about the national debt, Clinton points out Trump, in 1987, was vocally critical of even President Ronald Reagan. Trump, for whatever reason, unprovoked, takes time to criticize the trade policy of the GOP's biggest icon.
- Trump mentions that he wants to repeal and replace Obamacare, claiming that insurances premiums are about to go up “sixty, seventy, eighty percent”. He’s off by about fifty percent on his figures, which at most will be 25%.
- Clinton offers her solution of how higher taxes on the rich will stabliize Social Security, mention she would get Trump to pay his fair share, leading him to have his other biggest blunder of the debate, misogynistically saying, “Such a NASTY woman.” It doesn’t rattle her, in the least.
- Trump, in his closing statement, describes an America outside of reality where people are “shot going to the store”. Remember, nationally, violent crime is down over the past several years.
- At the end of the debate, Trump wouldn't have to wait for the polls to know he lost. He knew he got crushed. He was caught on camera gritting his teeth, seething, and tearing up his debate notes in rage. He did not engage the audience after the debate, choosing only to briefly huddle with his family, before retreating for the night and leaving his kids to handle the media spin room after the debate, which featured Donald Trump Jr. tersely barking at reporters, and telling them that the presidency is actually a “step down” for his father.
- October 20th, 2016: Your two Trump headlines for the day… in spite of moderator Chris Wallace insisting at the start of the previous night’s debate, that candidates were not provided the questions ahead of time, Donald Trump posted on social media that Hillary Clinton was given the debate questions ahead of time… at a FOX News run debate. Oh, and Trump and Clinton attended the Alfred E. Smith Memorial Dinner in New York City, where a typically Republican-friendly crowd tries to get the presidential candidates to gently poke fun at each other, and to laugh along with one another as a way to come together prior to the election. Donald Trump, however, treated the proceedings not just as a roast of Hillary Clinton, but started calling her corrupt, talking about not pardoning her when she’s thrown in jail, and accusing her of “pretending you don’t hate Catholics”. And again, in a room that leans right… Donald Trump was heckled and booed for being such a mean-spirited ***hole.
- October 21st, 2016: Fallout from the previous night at the Al Smith Memorial Dinner… the host, Al Smith V, voiced his disappointment, saying Trump “crossed the line” by claiming Clinton hates Catholics. Others noted that Trump’s two best jokes were plagiarized. A joke at Melania Trump's expense about Plagiarism was swiped from a cartoon by Roll Call editorial cartoonist R.J. Matson, and his joke about Hillary bumping into people and saying, "Pardon Me" was stolen from an episode from Season Two of 30 Rock. If we’re not being clear enough, here… Trump plagiarized a joke about how his wife plagiarized a speech, unironically.
Meanwhile, on the campaign trail… Donald Trump, against the advice of his campaign, and against warnings from the White House, started verbally attacking Michelle Obama for campaigning for Hillary Clinton, and trying to repeat his debunked claim that the FLOTUS had lashed out against Hillary during the ‘08 campaign. Because when you’re accused of being a misogynist, it's a good luck to single out a woman campaigning against you, right? Especially one whose approval ratings as First Lady are in the mid-60s?
Elsewhere, in the idiocy of Trump surrogates, the press were conducting interviews with campaigns in Arizona, and asking about the possibility that with expected higher voter turnout among Hispanics, that the state might flip blue for the first time in 20 years. Dedicated racist moron and former Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer, on behalf of Trump, scoffed at the idea, saying, “Latinos don’t vote". Social media in the Grand Canyon State exploded from Latinos looking forward to proving her wrong. Great job, Jan. Great job. You’re living proof that Trump is full of it when he says he “only hires the best people.”
- October 22nd, 2016: Abraham Lincoln, the founder of the Republican Party, gave his most famous speech, the Gettysburg Address, in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. On this date, however, the current standard bearer for his party, Donald J. Trump, was to give a speech about what his first 100 days in office would look like. And Trump, ever inspiring, decided to use that hallowed ground to threaten the women accusing him of sexual assault with lawsuits. Speaking of that, the number of women accusing Trump of sexual assault hit twelve.
- October 23rd, 2016: It was a rare quiet day from Trump and his campaign, where only Kellyanne Conway turned up on Meet the Press to indicate that the only reason Trump hadn’t made good on his threat to sue the women accusing him of sexual assault by laughing and saying that it was only because they were “too busy winning the presidency”.
- October 24th, 2016: Trump finally addresses the accusation of his twelfth accuser, adult film star Jessica Drake, by blowing it off and saying, “Oh, I’m sure she’s never been grabbed before.” Do not adjust your screens, a presidential candidate just played what amounts to the “you can’t rape a hooker” defense.
Also, Trump’s “The Election is Rigged” hit parade continued, as Trump declared that all the polls were also influenced unfairly by the Democratic Party, and rigged against him. These would be the same polls that when he was leading in them through the Republican Party, and at points in statistical ties with Hillary Clinton after the Republican National Convention hat he proudly touted.
- October 25th, 2016: Donald Trump, while campaigning in Tallahassee, Florida, responds to remarks from the previous week when Vice President Joe Biden said “I wish I was still in high school so I could take him behind the gym...” after the VP heard Trump’s tape bragging to Billy Bush. Trump’s response:
"Did you see where Biden wants to take me to the back of the barn? Me. I'd love that. I'd love that. Mr. tough guy. You know, he's Mr tough guy. You know when he's Mr. Tough Guy? When he's standing behind a microphone by himself."
Please note... Donald Trump was standing behind a microphone by himself when he said this. Also, he’s a terrible listener, because Biden wanted to take him behind a gym, not a barn. (Twenty bucks on Biden if it happens, incidentally.)
Two weeks to Election Day…
- October 26th, 2016: Trump, for whatever reason, decided to start off his day working hard in the battleground state of Washington, D.C. No joke, he prioritized the grand opening of his new hotel (which faces a wide boycott) over continuing to run for president. At the press conference, he also took time out to praise Newt Gingrich’s embarrassing interview with Megyn Kelly from the previous day.
Later in the day, Trump appeared on the radio show of former failed presidential candidate Herman Cain, where he continued railing against alternative energies, insisting wind turbines “kill all the birds".
- October 27th, 2016: Trump opens up his day with a Good Morning America interview, where he continues to insist he didn’t sexually assault any women with his wife Melania, who he promises will be giving “two or three big speeches” before Election Day, which is about double or triple the number of speeches she had given up until that point. Even Melania seems surprised by this news.
Yet another woman came forward to accuse Trump of sexual assault, this time a former Miss Finland.
Late in the evening, Trump talks about just cancelling the election, and declaring him the winner at a campaign rally. Meanwhile, in a perfect metaphor, Mike Pence’s plane skids out of control off the runway at LaGuardia airport.
- October 28th, 2016: The news media falls all over itself when FBI Director James Comey leaks out a statement claiming that “more Hillary e-mails were found” (as it turned out, they only found e-mails sent from Huma Abedein TO Hillary, while investigating Anthony Weiner). Still, once the story hits, Donald Trump starts acting like he just won the election, claiming the red herring story proved Clinton executes “corruption on a scale we have never seen before”. By the next day, the story was re-examined as an unprecedented partisan maneuver by the FBI Director.
- October 29th, 2016: Even though the latest “revelation” into Hillary Clinton’s e-mails was a non-starter, Donald Trump continued clinging to it like a life preserver on the campaign trail, in both Colorado, and in Phoenix (where he was still fighting to make sure he wouldn’t lose Arizona). At the former rally, Trump claims election officials would throw away mail-in ballots with votes for him. At the latter rally, a protester who was totally not anti-Semitic, I’m sure, chanted “Jew-S-A!” at the media pen. Ten days to election day.
- October 30th, 2016: For the second straight day, Donald Trump is campaigning in Colorado, and claims that mail-in voting is an easy system to commit voter fraud, and suggests that people could vote twice by requesting a second ballot after already sending a first one (he’s wrong, of course). Nine days to election day.
- October 31st, 2016: Trump campaigns in New Mexico (a bizarre choice, given polling showing he has no prayer of winning there), and tells an audience that Hillary Clinton would be so terrible as president with illegal immigration that the U.S. Population “would triple her first week in office”. That… is beyond stupid. He literally says “650 million” people would cross our border in a week. That’s over five times the entire population of the entire country of Mexico. That’s more than the population of all of the countries in North America combined
, including the United States’ 325 million.
Oh, and a group of computer scientists began doing research into finding out if Russian hackers were influencing the American election after learning they had hacked the DNC. So, they concluded that they might have also attacked Republicans, or interfered with the Trump campaign, so they began to check to see if they did that. They… didn’t find anything to show the GOP was attacked. They did not, however, but instead discovered there is a computer server owned by Trump’s businesses that showed they were directly communicating with a Russian bank.
8 days to the election.
- November 1st, 2016: With national polls tightening again, Trump is revealed to have stiffed one of his own internal polling agencies to the price tag of over three-quarter of a million dollars.
7 days to the election.
- November 2nd, 2016: Donald Trump continues raving on the campaign trail in Florida, calling Hillary Clinton unstable, and for a second time, singling out NBC News reporter Katy Tur by name so his crowd of supporters can threaten her.
6 days to the election.
- November 3rd, 2016: Donald Trump, at a rally in Florida, loses his ability to have internal monologue, telling himself at the podium, “We’re going to be nice and cool, nice and cool, stay on point, Donald, stay on point. No side tracks Donald, nice and easy.” Later in North Carolina, scoffs at the idea of Hillary Clinton being Commander-in-Chief, because the men who make up our generals and admirals would refuse to listen to “her”.
5 days to the election.
- November 4th, 2016: The Wall Street Journal releases a report about Donald Trump having an affair with a former Playboy Playmate, Karen McDougal who sold the story to the National Enquirer for $150,000, but the paper, a longtime Trump ally, chose not to publish it. It is believed that Melania Trump was pregnant at the time of the affair.
Meanwhile, conclusive evidence emerged about Melania Trump that she had worked as a model illegally without a work visa.
Trump surrogate Rudy Giuliani, meanwhile, brags that he had advanced knowledge of the FBI's investigations into Hillary Clinton’s e-mails, he turns around and starts claiming he didn’t know anything about the leaks. Several investigative journalists begin rooting out the cause of leaks from the FBI, and find many old Giuliani loyalists who still leak information to him (while he’s working for the Trump campaign), and Jim Kallstrom, who often appears on Fox News to claim inside knowledge of investigations within the New York FBI office.
4 days to the election.
- November 5th, 2016: Trump, at a campaign rally, lies that President Obama was “screaming” at a Trump supporter who turned up at a Hillary Clinton rally the day before. The media covered that story, though, and noted the President was chiding the crowd of Democratic supporters, and encouraging them to allow the man to speak. He also tried fanning the flames of the already weakening case against Clinton her e-mails, telling a crowd, “Can you imagine Anthony Weiner has probably every classified email ever sent?”
Trump also throws out a 12-year old protester with cerebral palsy in a wheelchair out of his rally, as his deplorable supporters kick the young man’s wheelchair as security escorts him out.
3 days to the election.
- November 6th, 2016: FBI Director James Comey releases another statement regarding e-mails found on Anthony Weiner’s computer… they are all duplicates of ones Clinton and her State Department staff had already turned over to the FBI, and she was cleared of wrongdoing.
Only eight days after the FBI nearly handed the election back to Donald Trump by commenting on this, earning Trump’s praise… at a rally stop in Michigan, he railed against the FBI was part if the system being rigged against him:
“Right now, she is being protected by a rigged system. It’s a totally rigged system,” Trump told supporters in Michigan. “You can’t review 650,000 new emails in eight days. You can’t do it, folks.”
Two days to election day.
- November 7th, 2016: Trump holds multiple rallies at various stops throughout the country, the highlights of which include him lying about leading in several polls in several states where he is not, in fact, leading, and a celebrity guest appearance by Ted Nugent, who grabs his testicles in front of the audience. Hillary Clinton’s home stretch, meanwhile, sees her appear at rallies with Beyoncé, Jay-Z, Jon Bon Jovi, Bruce Springsteen, Katy Perry, Lady Gaga, her husband, former President Bill Clinton, and President Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama (among others).
One day to the election.
- November 8th, 2016: Almost ALL of the polls and projections for swing states prove to be incorrect, not just in the presidential races, but down-ballot races, and Donald Trump wins the electoral college (while losing the popular vote) to become president-elect. The public would later learn that on this night, Chris Christie falls from Trump’s graces because he offered Trump his cell phone to use to take a phone call from President Obama, and the germaphobic Trump reamed him out in front of all of his senior campaign staff for it.
Up Next: Donald Trump: Full Timeline Part Four: The Trump Transition