It was but one year ago “Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day” published its original profile of Donald Trump, the real estate billionaire who announced he was running for the Republican nomination for President of the United States, and inexplicably, in spite of a past where he very publicly gave his political opinions on being pro-choice, appearing on the cover of Playboy, having cheated on his first two wives, and a persona that was, if anything, the avatar of greed, won the support of Republican Evangelicals… and in spite of his having spoken in recorded interviews as being in favor of gun control and having a wide, wide pattern of screwing over construction workers, architects, and engineers in his real estate empire… he managed to win over blue collar Republicans.
There was A LOT to sift through in our first profile. We didn't bother explaining specific examples of his narcissism because... well, it's obvious and there are too many to list. Hell, we missed entire stories like the time Donald Trump got caught pretending to be "John Baron" and "John Miller", his "publicists" who would call the New York media with stories about Donald (more on that below). Let's just note that he slapped his name in the largest font available in signs upon casinos, motels, and whatever “classy” establishment he owns a majority stake in, and that his name is associated with nearly every failed business venture he's attempted, from Trump University (still under fraud investigation), Trump Airlines, to Trump Steaks. The egomaniac would-be savior of America, of course, is notorious for getting in childish feuds with anyone who dares to mention him or respond to him on cable news or social media (and sometimes just starts in on other celebrities to raise his own profile), that have no substance beyond name-calling, making the average internet troll look polite in comparison. Trump wants to be a commander of our armed forces and hold the respect of our troops after receiving five deferments from service in Vietnam, one for bone spurs in his foot (don’t ask if it’s right or left, he doesn’t know). Trump also claims he can be an effective steward for the American economy when he repeatedly claims his worth is double of what experts estimate it to be, and has four separate Chapter 11 bankruptcy filings (in 1991, 1992, 2004, and 2009 that he often denies having ever filed for). We noted how his involvement in the USFL and insistence they go head-to-head with NFL games bankrupted the upstart league within two seasons of him becoming involved in it. And, we would be slacking off if we didn't mention Trump's several appearances at Wrestlemania, and the fact that he the only presidential candidate in history to have been on the receiving end of a Stone Cold Stunner (which he did not sell well). He unsuccessfully attempted to get a patent for the phrase, “You’re fired” in 2004. This is the guy running for president because he's "good at business". Some call him a complete clown, others disagree, and say he’s really a cartoon villain. The latter category might be right, as in the 1990s, both Tiny Toon Adventures and Sesame Street, independently of each other, introduced extremely wealthy antagonists with terrible hair (or hairpieces) based on The Donald, and both were named Ronald Grump. Sesame Street's was closer to the real deal, having Joe Pesci portray their Grump and making him a real-estate developer looking to buy up their choice real estate to be remodeled into a “classier” neighborhood. We dove through old press clippings all the way to October 1973 to find the first mention of Trump in an article through August of 2015... We covered the myriad of racially-insensitive comments Trump made about African Americans, Jews, Native Americans, and how he literally started his campaign by calling Mexicans rapists. We also did a rundown of all of his most sexist and misogynist moments, where he sexually objectified women (including his own daughters, once while Tiffany was one year old in an interview on Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous), or alternatively, called women ugly, or demeaned them for their looks.
We covered Trump's flirtations with world politics, including the time he hosted Muammar Qadaffi in a giant tent on his lawn, his effusive praise of Vladimir Putin, his involvement in the Birther Movement, the times he cast suspicion on vaccinations or denied climate change exists, and when saying people should start threatening China and OPEC in negotiations with the word "f***" to get results.
Now... normally, CSGOPOTD just puts down an "update" to new happenings about an entry. This entry... this man... this is what this blog was created for. Donald Trump has become, hands down, the most terrifying candidate ever to seek the office of President of the United States from a major party, from his incitement at violence at his rallies, to his permissive attitude towards white supremacists who support his campaign and its several racist policy ideas, to his authoritarian outlook that isn't just borderline fascism, it's almost the textbook definition.
That is why... we're going to go "all in" on this profile. All of the old, with the daily disgusting comments from the Cheeto Golem who in three months could be the president-elect. We will not, and cannot pull our punches. We're laying it all out, again, and all of the events that unfolded since we left off reporting on Trump's comments about Megyn Kelly after the first GOP debate in Cleveland, Ohio. We know, we know... this is a daunting task...
But it must be done. We have to report on every idiotic, oafish thing we can find reports of from Donald Trump, in the hopes that people who are missing the forest through the trees see it all laid out, with citations, and hope that their conscience will lead them to not cast a vote for this man for president. The thought of him being in command of a nuclear arsenal is, at best, unsettling...
So we'll do our part and tell the whole story, and hope that's enough to sway some minds. So without further ado... here's our full timeline of Donald Trump's worst moments (that we know of, there are probably worse ones that we don't):
- 1955: Per Donald Trump’s book, “The Art of the Deal”, at some point during this year, he is in second grade, and punches his music teacher in the face, giving them a black eye because in the 8 year old Trump’s mind “he didn’t know anything about music”. Today he cites this as an example of his his “tendency to stand up and let my opinions be known in a very forceful way”. Psychologists would classify it as something much different.
- December 1st, 1969: Donald Trump receives his fifth deferment from military service in Vietnam, for heel spurs in one of his feet (undisclosed which, sometimes he says both, but he never had corrective surgery, nor can he recall the name of the doctor who diagnosed him). He oddly participated in sports while attending military academy without any issues prior to this.
- October 16th, 1973: The New York Times has the first mention of Donald Trump in the media, reporting on Donald Trump and his father being sued for racial bias by the Justice Department for housing discrimination against African Americans in developments he and his father owned. In the following months, Trump hired Roy Cohn, the former pal of disgraced Senator Joe McCarthy, to attempt to win a counter-suit with the government for $100 million while hosting a press conference at the New York Hilton to complain that the government was forcing him to rent to “welfare recipients”. This would be his first, and definitely not his last foray into using racial dog whistles.
- March 7th, 1978: The New York Times reports that for the second time, Trump Management is charged with racial bias in their renting practices.
- June 6th, 1980: After promising he would preserve priceless art deco reliefs and statues on the outside of the Bonwit-Teller building after he purchased it, and donate them charitably to a museum, New Yorkers wake up on this morning to discover Donald Trump has reneged on that promise, and has construction workers demolishing what should be cherished national treasures. In the aftermath, Trump could not be reached for comment, but a Trump Corporation spokesman, John Barron, told the New York Times, "the merit of these stones was not great enough to justify the effort to save them." Please remember, going forward, that John Barron is an alias Trump uses to talk to the press over the phone as his own fake publicist, and not an actual person.
- August 2nd, 1983: Trump refuses to rent properties he owns to Polish refugees arriving in New York looking for housing, with a secretary for the Trump organization saying, ''We were talking about people who live in America now - not refugees. I don't think this is something he would consider."
- September 23rd, 1983: Trump buys the New Jersey Generals, a franchise in the promising new USFL, that plays football in the spring. His plans are to apparently threaten the NFL's revenue enough that they are forced to merge the two leagues as they did with the AFL/NFL merger in the 1960s, and then Trump will have found a back-door way to get to be an NFL owner.
- April 8th, 1984: Trump plans on building a 60 story castle made of condominiums in New York City's Madison Avenue, complete with a moat and drawbridge. Prudential Bank was to partner on the deal, and nixed any plans for the insane project, because it would have cost $1.5 million (about $3.5 million today, adjusted for inflation) per apartment to even break even.
- April 20th, 1984: The New York Times runs a story about how terribly the cheerleaders for the New Jersey Generals are treated by the franchise, already having caused 11 of the original 30 to quit due to harassment they were expected to face from fans, and demeaning promotional appearances. Lisa Edelstein, who was a cheerleader at only the age of sixteen (!) gave an interview in 2015 and classified their treatment as having been "like hookers".
- August 12th, 1984: Donald Trump proposes building the tallest building in the world in New York, that would be 500 feet taller than the Sears Tower. Community planners and architecture experts thought the idea was implausible, and a writer for the Chicago Tribune, Paul Gapp, commented on the design as "one of the silliest things anyone could inflict on New York or any other city". So, a few weeks later, Trump sued for libel, to the tune of the modest sum of $500 million. It got thrown out of court, of course.
- July 20th, 1984: Reports begin surfacing of the USFL considering switching to playing its games in the fall, which would put them in direct competition with NFL games. This idea is being kicked around league owner meetings from... Donald Trump.
- October 18th, 1984: Trump convinces the majority of the other owners of the USFL to file an anti-trust lawsuit against the NFL, for $1.2 billion, saying the NFL was deliberately trying to monopolize and cut into the USFL's profits. Stay tuned for the result of that lawsuit...
- November 15th, 1984: Donald Trump gives an interview to the Washington Post where he talks of his desire to handle the United States' nuclear negotiations with the Soviet Union, while admitting he knew little to nothing about missiles, and providing no explanation on his plans. (At least on that last part, a lack of details, he hasn't changed.)
- February 1st, 1985: Trump contacts the media to tell them he had "struck oil" on property he owned on the New York's Upper West Side, saying "we could be pumping here for years". This, of course, was classic Trump exaggeration... the oil was rougly 100,000 gallons of oil that had spilled on the property, an oil rail yard, over the previous decades. It classified more as an environmental hazard than an oil strike. (The fact that Donald can't tell the difference should concern anyone with any concern for the country's environment, should he be elected president.)
- April 2nd, 1985: Donald Trump asks for reimbursement for the contract of New Jersey Generals player Doug Flutie from the USFL office, because he felt he had "overpaid" for him. This is as literal an example of Trump reneging on a business deal as you can get, however, this news story is noteworthy because Trump Organization Vice President (and fake person) John Barron was interviewed a lot in the article...
- July 30th, 1986: After almost two years of litigation... a jury finds the NFL guilty on only one of nine counts in the anti-trust lawsuit Donald Trump filed, and a six-person jury awards the USFL damages of... $1. Not one billion dollars. Not one million dollars. A single dollar. But don't worry, in antitrust cases, damages are tripled... so the USFL got $3. Steve Ehrhart, the USFL's executive director, has kept that check, and never cashed it. The league soon cancels its 1986 season, and goes out of business.
- November 1st, 1987: Trump publishes his first book, "The Art of the Deal" that was co-written by Tony Schwartz (who does not have many kind words to say about The Donald these days, so much so that Trump's lawyers have threatened legal action if he keeps talking). Trump promises that proceeds from the sales of this book will go to charities researching cures for AIDS or multiple sclerosis. The book is a rare success for Trump, sell millions of copies, so one might think, that meant a lot of money to charity, right? Wrong. Investigations in recent years have shown he actually donated far less than promised, and Trump spent more money on his daughter's ballet lessons than he ever did on the charities he pledged to donate to.
- November 2nd, 1987: The day after the huge book release party for "The Art of the Deal", which cost well over $100,000... Trump tries to convince his ghost writer, Tony Schwartz, that since they wrote the book together, they had to split the cost of the party together, evenly. Yes, Trump is this much of a back-stabbing skinflint.
- December 18th, 1988: Just what nobody wanted... Donald Trump releases "Trump: The Game" a board game that is best described as critics as "a really dumb version of Monopoly". We submit to you the commercial for the game upon its release, and please note that Donald Trump promised the proceeds from sales for the game would go to charity. That was also a surprised at the time to Milton Bradley executives, who had never discussed such a donation. (Hint: He never donated the money to charity.)
- September 5th, 1989: Trump expressed his envy towards some African-Americans, in less-than-eloquent terms in an NBC News special about race:
“A well-educated black has a tremendous advantage over a well-educated white in terms of the job market. I think sometimes a black may think they don’t have an advantage or this and that... I’ve said on one occasion, even about myself, if I were starting off today, I would love to be a well-educated black, because I believe they do have an actual advantage.’’
- May 1st, 1989: After a woman was raped in Central Park, the NYPD originally arrested five suspects, four African Americans and one of them Hispanic. Trump did not just comment on the “Central Park Five” at the time, Trump took out a full page ad in all four major New York newspapers saying they should be “given the death penalty”. The problem was, they were innocent, and had been coerced by law enforcement into making false confessions. Eventually a sixth man was caught and was convicted of the crime, confessing to acting alone, and DNA evidence confirmed his story.
- June 8th, 1989: Trump launches Trump Airlines aka Trump Shuttle by purchasing Eastern Airlines. The Wall Street Journal article from the first day already acknowledged Trump's promise of guaranteed seats on each flight was broken, forcing some travelers to book with other airlines. After a few years of mismanagement, and with Trump feeling the impact of the Gulf War causing jet fuel prices to double (likely to be part of the reason he would go on to suggest the United States should just "take the oil" in the Middle East during the second Iraq War), Trump Shuttle was sold off to U.S. Air in 1992, to raise capitol during one of Trump’s bankruptcies.
- March 1st, 1990: Trump appears on the cover of Playboy Magazine. (Unironically, the 2016 Republican Party Platform that Trump is running on has a plank in it that declares pornography to be a public health crisis.)
- July 12th, 1990: Under oath, in court after being accused of hiring 200 illegal immigrants for construction labor (his defense was he didn't know), Donald Trump admits to using the aliases "John Barron" and "John Miller" in business conducted over the phone. This would be the same "John Baron" who called the press ten years earlier during demolitions of the Bonwit-Teller building, and five years earlier in the Doug Flutie story in the New York Times. As we now know today, for well over a decade, Trump would make phone calls, and claim to be one of these other pseudonyms who "represented Donald Trump" as an executive of the Trump corporation, or his publicist.
- September 1st, 1990: A Vanity Fair article discussing the divorce between Donald and Ivana Trump notes an anecdote that per Ivana, Donald Trump keeps a book of Hitler’s speeches on his nightstand for inspiration.
- July 8th, 1991: Trump gets caught pretending to be his own publicist, pretending he's actually "John Miller" while on the phone in an interview with Sue Carswell of People Magazine. It was also how Trump's second wife, Marla Maples, found out that Donald was leaving her, when she was one of the people called upon to listen to the recording of John Miller, and confirm that it was her husband, saying he was leaving her. Oh, and "John Miller" said that Donald was dating Italian supermodel Carla Bruni, who when asked by The Daily Mail if she was, in fact, dating Trump, refuted the claim, and said he was "a lunatic". (We agree with Ms. Bruni.)
- July 14th, 1991: According to a 1991 tell-all book written by a Trump colleague, John O’Donnell, Trump had other thoughts on African Americans working for him as accountants, in relation to Jews:
"Black guys counting my money! I hate it. The only kind of people I want counting my money are short guys that wear yarmulkes every day.”
O’Donnell’s book also notes Trump saying:
“Laziness is a trait in blacks.”
And while you might want to give Trump the benefit of the doubt for saying what O’Donnell quoted him as saying… well, in a 1997 Playboy interview, Trump admitted they were “probably true” before calling O’Donnell a “f***ing loser”.
- May 1st, 1991: Trump laughed off detractors in an interview with Esquire Magazine, saying, “You know, it doesn’t really matter what the media write as long as you’ve got a young and beautiful piece of ass.”
- July 18th, 1991: Donald Trump files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy for the first time, for the Trump Taj Mahal casino. The maneuver costs him a 50% stake in the casino, Trump Shuttle, and a 282 foot yacht.
- January 1st, 1992: The book "Trump: The Greatest Show on Earth: The Deals, The Downfall, The Reinvention" is released, and features a passage where it is revealed he once pitched an idea to Playboy Magazine that they would run a nude photo spread of his most attractive female staffers.
- March 9th, 1992: Trump files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy again, for the second time in a year, this time for Trump Castle and Trump Plaza. He loses half his stake in the New York Plaza to Citibank.
- March 22nd, 1992: After over two years of court battles, Donald Trump finalizes his divorce from his first wife, Ivana, after having an affair with Marla Maples.
- September 12th, 1992: Trump is at a charity event, and spots Marie Brenner, a reporter who wrote a story about his divorce from Ivana Trump in September of 1990, that he didn't care for. So, like a coward, Donald decides to enact petty revenge by dumping wine down the back of her dress. He later brags about this event to others in interviews, but exaggerates that the glass was an entire bottle. (Remember this when Donald talks about his feelings about the freedom of the press.)
- October 6th, 1993: Trump has an ongoing lawsuit with the federal government, because he feels it is an unfair advantage that a Native American tribe, the Pequots, have a casino on their lands in Connecticut and as a result, don't have to pay taxes on it. He was called to testify before Congress about his grievance, where he claimed they would be pulling down half a billion dollars a year, tax free, and warned of organized crime figures leveraging their casinos, saying, "It will be the biggest scandal ever, the biggest since Al Capone ... . An Indian chief is going to tell Joey Killer to please get off his reservation? It's unbelievable to me."But, after discarding his seven-page prepared speech because it was "too politically correct" (yes, he was against political correctness almost a quarter century ago), Trump blew the minds of everyone present when he started insinuating that the Pequot weren't actually Native Americans because, "They don't look Indian to me." This drew a strong rebuke from Congressman George Miller, who pointed out that during an uglier time in our country, people would comment that someone does not "look Jewish" or "look black" and that people would be denied loans based on their ethnicity. Trump, though, seemed unfazed by that sort of prejudice being wrong.
- Summer, 1994: Trump frequently attends parties hosted by financier Jeffrey Epstein, a friend of his at the time for seven years, who eventually would be revealed to frequently hire child prostitutes as "entertainment" for himself and others. It is at four of these parties that he is later accused of having sexual contact with a thirteen year old girl, once by forcing himself upon the victim physically.
- September 1st, 1994: Donald Trump is interviewed by Robin Leach of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, and when asked what parts of his daughter Tiffany inherited from him, versus ones from her mother, Marla Maples, he bizarrely answers:
"She's a very beautiful baby. She's got Marla's legs. We don't know whether or not"—Trump then put his hands to his chest to indicate breasts—"she's got this part yet, but time will tell."
Yes, he just sexualized his one-year old daughter. You may pause from reading now to go take a shower.
- May 1st, 1997: Trump appears in an interview in Playboy Magazine for the second time, where he was interviewed at his Mar-a-Lago estate by Mark Bowden, the man who would go on to write "Black Hawk Down". Among the takeaways... Trump was a pathological liar, terribly vain, and lost his temper when he discovered a water cooler had been installed on his tennis courts that he wasn't expecting. In a rage, he struck it... causing it to fall off its moorings and being a flood on the court, causing him to shuffle away with Bowden embarrassed, and asking if that would end up in the article. It did. Please also note Donald poses on the statues of two parrots having sex in the interview, which he apparently thought was classy. So classy, that he also posed for a photo with his teenage daughter Ivanka on it.
- May 2nd, 1997: Trump files for divorce from his second wife, Marla Maples, certainly not coincidentally only days before the prenuptial agreement the two signed before their wedding was to reach a date that would have changed Marla's settlement in the divorce from $1 million to $5 million. The divorce is finalized in 1999.
- May 19th, 1997: Trump tries petitioning New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani to have a massive statue of Christopher Columbus built in New York City (This would be the same Christopher Columbus that historians often note hunted the native populations of the Caribbean for sport, and had him stripped of his viceroy status by the King and Queen of Spain as a result.), that would be made of bronze, built by a Russian architect (who made statues of Peter the Great in Russia so ugly that people tried to blow them up), and be even six feet taller than the Statue of Liberty.Because Trump's things must always be the biggest, even bigger than the icon that welcomes immigrants into the country.
- October 27th, 1997: Trump releases his second book, "The Art of the Comeback", which features his belief that asbestos is not dangerous, and there is a mafia conspiracy to stop its use.
- 1997-2008: These are scattered through most of the next decade, but feel free to peruse a list of some of the most misogynist and disgusting things said about women by Donald Trump as a guest on the Howard Stern Show over the course of a decade. That includes the time when Stern asked Trump if he would leave his wife, Melania, if she were horribly disfigured in a car accident and he asked for the qualifier, "How are her breasts?"
- November 17th, 1999: While teasing a presidential run, The Donald mused, “I think the only difference between me and the other candidates is that I’m more honest and my women are more beautiful.”
- September 15th, 2000: Donald Trump is sent a letter by film documentary creator Mike Tollin, who includes a rough cut of the story of the USFL, still thanking him and inviting him if he would be interested in attending the premiere. After watching the film, and seeing so many USFL personalities blaming him for killing the league, Trump responds, "A third rate documentary. And extremely dishonest (as you know). Best Wishes, Donald Trump. P.S. : YOU ARE A LOSER." Suffice to say, he did not attend.
- December 19th, 2000: Donald Trump admits in an intervew with the New York Daily News that because he was angry about disputes over the inheritance of his father Fred Trump’s estate having no money go towards the family of Trump’s late brother, Freddie, Donald Trump canceled the health insurance policy of his own nephew William Trump, out of petty revenge.
- September 11th, 2001: What was the relevance of 9-11 to Donald Trump? Well, there’s a recorded interview on that date where he took the time to call into a television news station, and his thoughts were not with the victims or their families, but the pressing news story in it was, in his mind, that he now owned the tallest building in Manhattan.
- September 11th, 2002: On an episode of Howard Stern, Donald Trump is asked if he thinks the United States should go to war in Iraq and says, "I guess so." (These days, Trump insists he was ALWAYS against the Iraq War.)
- March 24th, 2004: Trump gave this misogynistic re-write of reality to the New York Daily News:
"All of the women on The Apprentice flirted with me—consciously or unconsciously. That's to be expected."
- August 10th, 2004: Donald Trump files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy a third time, this time for Trump Hotels and Casino Resorts. It is $1.8 billion in debt at the time.
- September 23rd, 2004: Trump launches "Trump World Magazine", whose monthly content is mostly ads you'd find in Sky Mall, if you were a nouveau-riche wanker trying to look richer than you actually were. Print, they say, is dying or already dead, and it folded in May of 2009, because people really couldn't afford the caviar and yachts that magazine liked to talk about, in between news updates about what hijinks Donald was getting into from publicists that may or may not have still been Donald.
- October 7th, 2004: Donald Trump appears in a story on NBC’s “Dateline” about Carolyn Kepcher, a female executive. Trump comments that “pregnancy is an inconvenience to employers”.
- December 19th, 2004: Just in time for Christmas, Trump releases "Trump: The Cologne", retailing at $60. User reviews were that it smelled like "Jamba Juice", or "upscale strip clubs". Bottles can today be found only on Amazon.com for $10, after Macy's dropped the scent in 2015 because Donald Trump decided to go and say that all Mexicans are rapists.
- May 23rd, 2005: Trump begins Trump University, a real-estate education course whose online, and in-person seminars were quickly noted to be worthless by those taking them. The business model was to make people spend as much money on as many useless classes as they could. It folded in 2010, and class-action lawsuits against the Trump Corporation are still under way to the present day. We will not get to see Donald Trump's depositions in the case before the 2016 election, however, Trump will be required to stand trial for racketeering and fraud in November, after the election.
- July 21st, 2005: Donald Trump testifies before Congress, claiming he could quickly renovate the United Nations Building, and complaining about government regulations against asbestos, which he thinks could have prevented the Twin Towers from falling on 9/11 if more of it was used in the buildings. As intelligent people know, asbestos is highly carcinogenic. Also, they might know that early construction on the World Trade Center did use asbestos in their construction, and the dust from that asbestos being pulverized in the buildings' collapse is a lot of the reason why so many of the 9/11 first responders began developing cancer. So maybe that's not something we should start using again, Donald.
- January 29th, 2006: An investigation by the New York Daily News discovers Donald Trump collected a $150,000 recovery grant meant for small businesses in New York after 9/11, in spite of his businesses not having been physically damaged by the attacks, and that the Trump Corporation is hardly a "small business".
- February 27th, 2006: While promoting The Apprentice Season 5, Trump appears with his children, Ivanka and Donald Jr., and the three are given a math quiz. Trump fails to successfully multiply 17 x 6 as equaling 112, and insists he got the answer correct anyway. (Note, this explains how he ends up filing for bankruptcy so much, and is a prime example of how he just attempts to re-write reality rather than admit when he's wrong.)
- April 3rd, 2006: Trump launches Trump Mortgages LLC, and with his infnite business wisdom and being one of the biggest bankruptcy failures in history already quips, "It's a great time to start a mortgage company!" at the launch. The company is out of business by August 2007, because, y'know, home mortgage crisis. (Still want to grant this man stewardship over the American economy?)
- June 4th, 2006: While doing an interview on The View, Trump is asked if he would be comfortable if his daughter Ivanka posed for Playboy. After brushing off the possibility of it even happening, he added something pretty damned creepy:
“If Ivanka weren’t my daughter, perhaps I’d be dating her.”
- December 6th, 2006: Trump’s feud with Rosie O’Donnell reached its peak, with him making statements about her weight or appearance like, “You take a look at her, she’s a slob. She talks like a, like a truck driver.”
- January 17th, 2007: Donald Trump launches his not-at-all successful venture, Trump Vodka, and promises that proceeds from the liquor's sale would be donated to the charity Mothers Against Drunk Driving. (Hint: Mothers Against Drunk Driving never saw a dime, and told Trump when he originally wanted to work with them that it would be wrong to accept money from liquor sale profits for their charity... yet he promoted his product saying the donation would take place.) Oh, and Trump Vodka's distillery went bankrupt by 2010, and was sold to... wait for it... a Mexican company.
- March 16th, 2007: Donald Trump appears on CNN to be interviewed by Wolf Blitzer, and begins criticizing the United States for not yet withdrawing all troops from Iraq. During his 2016 Presidential campaign, of course, he likes to criticize the Obama administration for doing precisely this, which was required because of a treaty signed by President George W. Bush prior to Obama taking office.
- April 1st, 2007: Trump appears at Wrestlemania XXIII, where he shaves Vince McMahon’s head before falling victim to a Stone Cold Stunner from pro-wrestling legend Stone Cold Steve Austin.
- May 8th, 2007: Donald Trump has the launch party for Trump Steaks, which he wanted to market through the mail-order catalog, Sharper Image. For just $199 you could get two filet mignons, two cowboy bone-in rib-eyes and 12 burgers, or for $999 you got 24 burgers and 16 steaks. People at Sharper Image at the time now recall "we sold almost no steaks". The venture failed within literally two months, but that's because people won't buy $45 mail order steaks and $3 hamburgers when the economy is collapsing. Heck, probably not when the economy is healthy.
- August 20th, 2010: At a charity golf tournament at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago golf course, an offer is made to pay $1 million to any participating player who can get a hole-in-one. A man named Martin Greenberg did just that on the 13th hole, and was congratulated. Then, a short time later, Greenberg was approached by staff members and told because his shot did not travel “at least 150 yards” on that hole, it didn’t count. Offers to play a round of golf versus Trump directly for the prize he already had earned were made (and Trump is notorious for cheating), Greenberg instead sued, and Trump settled out of court for $158,000, reneging on the original proposition for an amount far less than promised. As it would later be determined, Trump paid off the lawsuit using money from the Trump foundation, which is fraud.
- September 9th, 2010: In the buildup to the 2010 elections, FOX News and candidates from the Republican Party in the Tea Party Wave began making a big fuss about a supposed “Ground Zero Victory Mosque” being built on the site of Ground Zero in New York City. The site was actually several blocks away, but several public figures were fanning the flames of anti-Islamic bigotry. And who else would show up to join in for some free publicity based on those sorts of thoughts but… yes, Donald Trump. Trump started hitting the news cycle to offer to “solve” the problem by buying up the real estate from the investors trying to build the Park51 Islamic cultural center, conveniently timed right before the ninth anniversary of 9/11.
- February 10th, 2011: Trump, speaking at CPAC, insists that Barack Obama never attended Colombia University, because no one there "ever saw him" or "knows who he is". Yes, it's a ridiculous claim.
- February 17th, 2009: Donald Trump files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy for the fourth time, this time for all of Trump Entertainment Resorts. This occurred after it missed a bond payment of $53.1 million, and its total debts at this time were $1.74 billion.
- March 30th, 2011: Trump truly starts dipping his toe into the pool of the Birther movement, discussing President Obama’s birth certificate with Laura Ingraham, and saying the “missing one” says he’s a Muslim.
- March 21st, 2011: Trump brags on Fox News about “screwing” Libyan dictator Muammar Qadaffi in a real estate deal.
- March 31st, 2011: Trump gives a rather naïve view of foreign policy, wondering why the United States left Iraq, because we should have stayed and “kept the oil”.
- April 1st, 2011: A New York Times opinion writer receives a copy of one of her articles in the mail, returned to her by Donald Trump with her photo in the byline circled by Trump with the comment, “Face like a dog”.
- April 7th, 2011: Donald Trump dedicated himself even further to the Birther cause, saying he “had real doubts” that President Obama was born in Hawaii, and claimed he had hired private eyes to research the matter in an interview on The Today Show. Note: No investigation's results are ever given.
- April 14th, 2011: Trump had the audacity to say he has “a great relationship with the blacks”.
- April 15th, 2011: Donald Trump is interviewed by Sean Hannity,and says President Obama's real birth name is "Barry Soetero".
- April 28th, 2011: Trump speaks in Las Vegas, and gives his ideas for the global economy… like threatening China and OPEC with the word “f***”.
- April 30th, 2011: Donald Trump is humiliated at the 2011 White House Correspondents Dinner, being lambasted by President Obama himself in front of the assembled media for his active campaign to inflame the Birther Conspiracy Theory, days after the state of Hawaii releases his long form birth certificate.
- May 1st, 2011: Trump gives his thoughts as to why he's against gay marriage to the New York Times:
"It's like in golf … A lot of people – I don’t want this to sound trivial – but a lot of people are switching to these really long putters, very unattractive. It’s weird. You see these great players with these really long putters, because they can't sink three-footers anymore. And, I hate it. I am a traditionalist. I have so many fabulous friends who happen to be gay, but I am a traditionalist.”
“It’s Friday. How many bald eagles did wind turbines kill today? They are an environmental & aesthetic disaster."
Fun fact... wind turbines kill fewer birds than tall buildings do each year. You know, like the tall buildings Trump builds and is compelled by ego to plater his name on.
- August 28th, 2012: For whatever reason, Trump decided to take a shot at Arianna Huffington on Twitter, saying she was “unattractive both inside and out. I fully understand why her former husband left her for a man- he made a good decision.”
- October 11th, 2012: Trump gets on Twitter to link to an article from the paranoid conspiracy website WorldNetDaily that President Obama wears a "secret ring" with "Arabic writing" on it that could mean he's a Muslim.
- October 17th, 2012: Donald Trump, on Twitter, posits his theory that President Obama will "start a war" to help win the upcoming election in four weeks.
- October 24th, 2012: Trump posts on online video where he promises $5 million to charity of Barack Obama ever produces evidence to convince him he was born in the United States. Obama not only released his long-form birth certificate a year prior, he mocked Trump after doing so at the White House Press Correspondents Dinner about it.
- October 28th, 2012: Trump started a feud on Twitter with Bette Midler for no discernible reason, posting this self-contradictory statement on Twitter, that is the only time Trump pretends to be politically correct (and fails at it):
“While @BetteMidler is an extremely unattractive woman, I refuse to say that because I always insist on being politically correct.”
- October 29th, 2012: Donald Trump appears on the Late Show with David Letterman, where he talks about how "their leaders are so much smarter than our leaders" and is saying he thinks "Mitt Romney can turn it around" and help stimulate the American economy versus the Chinese one. Letterman, always pretty honest about being liberal and unafraid to push back against guests, pulls out some of Trump's clothing line, and points out that the tags all say the garments are "Made in Bangladesh" or "Made in China". Trump, visibly embarrassed, sheepishly shrugs it off and agrees with Letterman's sentiment that he should close down his foreign factories and instead open one in Jamaica, Queens, New York . He does not do this, of course. (The interview segment will later be brilliantly used by the Clinton campaign to point out Trump's hypocrisy on outsourcing jobs.)
- November 6th, 2012: Trump again puts his foot in his mouth on Twitter, claiming that global warming was a concept created by the Chinese to find a way to make U.S. manufacturing less competitive.
- April 2nd, 2013: Trump filed a $5 million lawsuit against comedian Bill Maher for making a joke that Donald Trump’s father was a chimpanzee.
- April 7th, 2013:on an episode of Celebrity Apprentice, Trump joked about how he thought it would be a “pretty picture” to see former Playboy model and Baywatch star Brande Roderick “on her knees”.
- May 7th, 2013: Trump decides to tackle the topic of military sexual assault on Twitter, seemingly thinking that it's an expected outcome of an army made up of both sexes:
"26,000 unreported sexual assults in the military-only 238 convictions. What did these geniuses expect when they put men & women together?"
Because every gender-integrated workplace has a problem with rape, right? (No, no they don't. Jesus.)
- June 18th, 2013: Donald Trump goes on Twitter to talk about the Miss Universe pageant, and how he hoped Vladimir Putin would attend and "become my new best friend".
- October 3rd, 2013: Trump appears on Larry King Live where he praises Vladimir Putin for how he has "outsmarted our country".
- November 18th, 2013: Trump gets on Twitter, and claims there are polls that show dead people voted for Obama in the 2012 election.
- December 12th, 2013: Donald Trump suspects foul play when the Hawaiian State Health Director dies in a plane crash, as part of a cover up of Obama’s birth certificate.
- March 21st, 2014: Again, Trump praises Vladimir Putin, saying he would "rebuild the Russian Empire".
- April 17th, 2014: Yet again, Donald Trump goes on Twitter to praise Vladimir Putin, while insulting President Obama.
- April 23rd, 2014: Trump is on Twitter again to claim that the statistics showing the percentage of people without health insurance were coming down since the implementation of the Affordable Care Act were not accurate, and they were "manipulated".
- May 27th, 2014: Before the National Press Club, Donald Trump says President Obama dodged his offer to put $50 million towards charity if he would release his student records, because he believed they contained proof that Obama was Kenyan, or falsely entered information that he was to collect financial aid that he wasn’t entitled to.
Trump also talks at length about having met Vladimir Putin, and his respect for him, saying:
"I was in Moscow recently and I spoke, indirectly and directly, with President Putin, who could not have been nicer, and we had a tremendous success. The show was live from Moscow and we had tremendous success there and it was amazing, but to do well, you have to get the other side to respect you, and he does not respect our president, which is very sad."
- June 21st, 2014: New York City settled a civil suit with the "Central Park Five", young men they wrongly convicted of sexual assault and incarcerated for years, awarding them $40 million for the miscarriage of justice. And who decided to comment on the payout? Donald Trump, of course, the guy who 25 years earlier said they should "be given the death penalty"! Trump referred to the suspect’s 2014 settlement as “the heist of the century”. Yeah, effectively he still thought of them as rapists, and now they were thieves, too. Of course, this wouldn’t be the last time The Donald would accuse minorities of being rapists out of hand…
- August 1st, 2014: Trump got on Twitter to weigh in on the Ebola Virus, and to criticize the decision to take U.S. citizens working as care workers from Africa back to quarantined containment facilities in the United States to be treated.
- August 25th, 2014: Donald Trump, on Twitter, accuses the Obama administration of dealing arms to ISIS. In a later tweet eight days later, he says the gun-running operation was going through Benghazi.
- September 3rd, 2014: Trump goes on Twitter to join up with the anti-vaccination movement and complain about vaccines that treat more than one disease at once, saying, “tiny children are not horses”.
- October 2nd, 2014: Trump gets on Twitter to claim that the Centers of Disease control are lying to the American public about the Ebola Virus, and it is "much easier to transmit than they are admitting".
- October 16th, 2014: Donald Trump warns of Mexican immigrants bringing Ebola Virus into the United States in an interview with Iowa conservative talk show host Steve Deace. (Remember, it's a disease whose origins are in Africa, and there has never been a single case in Mexico.)
- October 23rd, 2014: Trump, on Twitter, demands President Obama resign because of the Ebola Virus crisis.
- November 17th, 2014: Trump, on Twitter, accuses President Obama of manipulating the statistics regarding the number of deportations of illegal immigrants taking place, insisting that the true number is a "record low".
- November 25th, 2014: Trump waxed philosophically about the legacy of President Obama:
“Sadly, because President Obama has done such a poor job as president, you won’t see another black president for generations!”
- April 4th, 2015: Trump goes after Arianna Huffington again on Twitter, calling her a “dog”.
- April 17th, 2015: Trump gets on Twitter to take a sexist pot-shot at Hillary Clinton:
"If Hillary Clinton can't satisfy her husband what makes her think she can satisfy America?"
In a rare moment of retracting his words, the post was quickly deleted.
- April 27th, 2015: Trump also thought his opinion on civil unrest in Baltimore was something worth getting on social media to talk about, blaming the behavior of those present on Barack Obama, as well:
“Our great African American President hasn’t exactly had a positive impact on the thugs who are so happily and openly destroying Baltimore.”
- June 16th, 2015: The day he announced his candidacy for the 2016 Republican Party nomination, Trump of course, decided to talk about illegal immigration for a bit, in less than articulate terms:
“The U.S. has become a dumping ground for everybody else’s problems. When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.”
- June 17th, 2015: Reports surface that the Trump campaign hired paid actors to cheer him at the announcement that he ran for president, with e-mails found being circulated from June 12th offering $50 for people to appear.
- June 24th, 2015: About a week after announcing his presidential run, word gets back to Trump that Neil Young wants him to never, ever again play "Rockin' in the Free World" or any other song he's created for his presidential campaign. Trump tries turning this around by claiming he "never liked that song anyway" and calling Young a "total hypocrite". This is the first, but far from the last time a musician tells the Trump campaign this.
- June 28th, 2015: Trump is humbled by CNN's Jake Tapper, who while discussing Trump's opposition to gay marriage and his support of "traditional" marriage, asks him how traditional his three marriages were.
- June 29th, 2015: After threats over a potential boycott if they continue to do business with Donald Trump because of his comments about Mexicans, NBC-Universal cancels The Apprentice. Trump threatens to sue for breach of contract and defamation. In the coming days, Macy's also announces they will no longer carry Trump products. Trump spitefully calls for a boycott of Macy's.
- July 1st, 2015: Trump not only refused to back off of his statements, and he continued to defend his belief that Mexicans were rapists on social media, and even went on CNN to repeat the claim to Don Lemon. When confronted with the facts of the matter, he gave the meager rebuttal of, “Well, SOMEBODY’S doing the raping…”
- July 6th, 2015: Trump puts out a press release that actually says "the worst elements in Mexico are being pushed into the United States by the Mexican government." That's right, he said the criminals and rapists coming from Mexico were being specifically sent.
- July 13th, 2015: Trump continues railing against Mexico... that is until he gets a bit of a scare and stops talking about it after he name-dropped escaped drug kingpin El Chapo and made the mistake of saying he would "kick his ass". Trump ends up wetting himself in terror when El Chapo responds to his Twitter rants with a promise that he'll "eat his words".
- July 14th,2015: The Trump campaign starts claiming that The Donald is worth $10 billion. That's nearly double what Forbes puts his real net worth at.
- July 15th, 2015: The Donald makes a campaign stop in Phoenix, Arizona, and lies about the size of the crowd in attendance, claiming it is three times larger than even the ballroom of the Phoenix Convention Center can hold.
- July 18th, 2015: A lot of folks were wondering if Trump would still make it to the first GOP Primary debate when at a campaign stop, he said that Sen. John McCain was "not a war hero" because he was taken prisoner. Remember, Trump dodged service in Vietnam with five deferments, one of them for bone spurs in a foot that never appeared while he participated in athletics, while McCain volunteered for service, and refused to be placed anywhere but in the action.
- At another event the same day, Trump is asked, "Have you ever asked God forgiveness?", and in this opportunity to humanize himself and potentially court Evangelical voters, Trump says he isn't sure he has, and talks about taking Communion in less than inspiring terms, calling it, "Drink my little wine, have my little cracker."
July 20th, 2015: Trump starts lying about his John McCain comments, claiming he never said McCain wasn't a war hero (even though it's on tape) and that the media are "taking him out of context".
July 21st, 2015: Sen. Lindsay Graham was quick to defend his amigo, Sen. John McCain after Trump's comments about him not being a war hero because he was taken prisoner, so Trump got his petty revenge over someone saying bad things about him by giving out the phone number of a sitting U.S. Senator, publicly.
July 24th, 2015: Trump is on MSNBC's Morning Joe, and when asked how many illegal immigrants there are in the United States, he gives the answer of "30 to 34 million". That's three times the real number, and Trump cannot cite where he got it from, except "he's heard from some people".
July 27th, 2015: News begins circulating regarding the media reporting on an incident between Donald Trump and his ex-wife Ivana in their divorce proceedings. Back in 1989, Ivana recalled Donald vent his anger at her over a botched scalp reduction surgery by her plastic surgeon, where he physically attacked her, pulling her hair, before aggressively beginning to have sex with her for the first time in over a year. Ivana, at the time, likened the attack to being "like a rape" and that she felt "violated" afterwards but has insisted Donald did not rape her. After the Daily Beast dredged up the story from "The Lost Tycoon", an unauthorized tell-all biography from 1993 that got the information from depositions from their divorce, Trump's lawyer, Michael Cohen released a statement to defend Trump, but definitely botched the public relations end of things when his rousing counter-argument included statements claiming that "you can't rape your spouse".
July 28th, 2015: Trump, all in the same day, both suggests he would find a place for Sarah Palin as a great addition to his administration's cabinet if elected president... goes on a radio talk show to say that "climate change is a myth" and saying we're just seeing "weather changes", and is interviewed by CNN's Jake Tapper where he discusses his proposal to build a border wall along the U.S./Mexico border, now also insisting "and we're going to make Mexico pay for it".
July 29th, 2015: A former Trump lawyer, Elizabeth Beck, gave the media the story that while working for Trump, she once asked to be excused so she could pump breast milk. The Donald replied by calling her “disgusting”.
July 31st, 2015: In Scotland, Trump tells reporters that he thinks he and Vladimir Putin would "get along very well".
August 1st, 2015: While most of America was outraged over Cecil the Lion, actress Mia Farrow went on social media to “out” several big-game safari trophy hunters. Among them? Donald Trump’s two sons. Who Donald defended for killing endangered animals.
August 4th, 2015: Trump called for another Government Shutdown, if necessary, to shut down Planned Parenthood.
August 6th, 2015: The first GOP Presidential Primary debate in Cleveland is held. Trump proudly raises his hand when asked if he would run as an independent if he didn’t win the nomination, and hurt the chances of the actual winner, and when asked about sexist remarks he’s made towards women in the past, denies having made any “except against Rosie O’Donnell”.
August 7th, 2015: Trump spends a whole day complaining about perceived “unfair treatment” by the Fox News moderators. However, he crossed a line with many when he went on CNN to talk to Don Lemon, and insinuated that Megyn Kelly may have only been so terse while asking him about sexist comments he had made in the past because she had “blood coming out of her eyes and her wherever”. (Ah yes. Nothing will convince people you’re not sexist by labeling a disagreement you have with a woman as being an attitude problem brought on by their menstrual cycle.)
August 20th, 2015: Donald Trump gives an interview with TIME Magazine, where he implausibly states that 93 million Americans are unemployed, roughly one quarter of its population, and nearly five times the actual unemployment rate. The same day, he gives a television interview where he says that a low minimum wage "isn't necessarily a bad thing".
August 24th, 2015: Trump gets on Twitter to call Jeb Bush "crazy" because he "Speaks Mexican" sometimes, and not English. He also continues his feud with Megyn Kelly, referring to her as a "bimbo".
September 9th, 2015: Trump gives a speech where he responds to Carly Fiorina getting a boost in polls by insulting Fiorina's looks, saying, "Look at that face! Would anyone vote for that? Can you imagine that, the face of our next president?"
September 15th, 2015: At a GOP Presidential Primary debate, Trump claims he was against the 2003 invasion of Iraq from the start, and said so at least 25 times. Fact-checkers look, and can find no such statements, save for three before the war where he just said, “I guess so” as to whether we should invade, that Iraq was "a mess", and that he felt the invasion would help the stock market. He did not speak out against the Iraq War into well into 2004.
- Trump also mentioned at that debate that he thinks vaccines cause autism.
- September 18th, 2015: Trump appears with a "veterans group" , the Veterans for a Strong America that purports to have over 500,000 members, on the decommissioned ship, the USS Iowa. The media notes the VSA had their tax-exempt status revoked by the IRS in August for failing to file tax returns. The head of the VSA, Joel Arends, was the only actual known member of the "veterans group", and was more well known for being a political consultant for failed U.S. Senate candidate from South Dakota, Annette Bosworth, who took his advice on signing documents with signatures to get her on the ballot that were all forged. In effect, the whole thing was a PR hustle that would have put zero charitable dollars towards any actual veterans not named Joel Arends.
- September 30th, 2015: Trump argues against the United States aiding Syrian refugees because "they could be an ISIS Army in disguise".
- October 11th, 2015: Donald Trump says that he and Vladimir Putin were "stablemates" and talked about how they bonded when they appeared on the same episode of 60 Minutes.
- October 15th, 2015: Trump is interviewed by Iowa talk radio host Simon Conway, and promises to repeal and replace Obamacare, saying that his plan would not be socialism because he wouldn't "put a label on it". (Note: Donald Trump does not understand what socialism is, but just knows Republican voters don't like it.)
- October 19th, 2015: At a campaign rally in South Carolina, Trump tells his audience he has "heard President Obama is thinking about signing an executive order to take your guns away". This is, of course, paranoid nonsense.
- October 23rd, 2015: As Trump rallies continue to get more and more violent, he does not discourage the violence between protesters and his supporters, and instead, continues encouraging it. At a rally in Miami, he says, "See the first group, I was nice. Oh, take your time," he said. "The second group, I was pretty nice. The third group, I'll be a little more violent. And the fourth group, I'll say get the hell out of here!"
- November 3rd, 2015: Trump releases a new book, "Crippled America", and promises that proceeds from it would be donated to charity. (Hint: He never donated money from book sales to any charity.)
- November 9th, 2015: At a campaign rally, Trump tells the crowd that one of the reasons Hillary Clinton was running for president was so that she could "stay out of jail".
- November 10th, 2015: During the fourth GOP debate, Donald Trump again says he and Vladimir Putin were "stablemates" when they were on the same episode of 60 Minutes.
- November 11th, 2015: Donald Trump calls for an end of birthright citizenship in an interview with Bill O'Reilly, incorrectly saying that a simple Congressional vote would be enough to do so (it would take a repeal of the 14th Amendment).
- November 12th, 2015: Trump gives his poorly nuanced strategy for defeating ISIS, "I would bomb the s*** out of them!"
- November 13th, 2015: Donald Trump goes on CNN, nervous about Ben Carson beginning to catch up to him and polls, and starts claiming how mentally unstable Carson is (feel free to appreciate the pot/kettle moment), and begins saying his "pathological temper" cannot be cured, much like "a child molester". Yes, he went there.
- November 16th, 2015: Trump talks about how he was "strongly considering closing down some mosques" after the terror attacks in Paris.
- November 17th, 2015: Donald Trump, in an interview with Laura Ingraham, falsely claims that Syrian refugees are only being sent to Republican-controlled states, and are not vetted properly (in spite of there being a two-year vetting process for them).
- November 18th, 2015: Trump is interviewed by conservative talk radio host Michael Savage, and treads back into Birther territory when he says "a lot of people say" President Obama has "evil intentions" for allowing Muslim refugees into the country, and it's "virtually impossible" for Christian refugees to do the same (which is a lie). Trump also took time in this interview to praise Vladimir Putin for "bombing the hell out of ISIS", which is remarkable because an estimated 90% of Russian air-strikes were not against ISIS, but rebels opposed to the Assad regime.
- November 20th, 2015: Donald Trump says if president, he would implement a national database registry of Muslims.
- November 21st, 2015: Trump discusses his desire to have mosques monitored by surveillance from U.S. Intelligence agencies, and also claims that "thousands of Muslims celebrated" the 9/11 attacks in New Jersey, insisting he saw it with his own eyes. The accusation of this celebration is widely debunked from the media as false.
- November 22nd, 2015: Donald Trump comments on a Black Lives Matter protester who was assaulted by attendees of one of his rallies in Ohio, saying, "Maybe he should have been roughed up because it was absolutely disgusting what he was doing."
- The same day on Twitter, Trump retweets inaccurate crime statistics about black-on-black crime. After some research, it is determined the origin of what he was sharing was a Neo-Nazi website.
- Donald Trump also begins discussing a return to the use of waterboarding in the war on terror in an interview with ABC's This Week.
- November 23rd, 2015: Donald Trump defends his Twitter post where he re-tweeted inaccurate crime statistics as not racist because it came from a "credible source". (Note: He just said a Neo-Nazi website was a credible source.)
- November 24th, 2015: Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski gives an interview with Breitbart News where he says the reason the footage of Muslims celebrating on 9/11 that Trump claims to have seen does not exist is because it is "being suppressed by the media".
- November 25th, 2015: Donald Trump, at a rally in Myrtle Beach, Florida, again began questioning why President Obama would allow Muslim refugees into the United States, again insinuating, "There's something we don't know about" regarding him, and encouraging the crowd to start "reporting their neighbors" if they're suspicious of them, adding, "Most likely you'll be wrong and that's okay."
- November 26th, 2015: Trump mocks the muscular disability of New York Times reporter Serge Kovaleski, wildly shaking at twitching at one of his rallies. Trump, incidentally, was upset that Kovaleski fact-checked his earlier claim that thousands of Muslims celebrated the fall of the World Trade Center in New Jersey on 9/11, and confirmed it was false.
- December 2nd, 2015: Donald Trump is interviewed again by Simon Conway, and insists he has had "hundreds of phonecalls" from eyewitnesses who insist they also saw Muslims celebrating on 9/11.
- December 3rd, 2015: Trump suggests a newer, tougher strategy for defeating ISIS... committing war crimes by "taking out" the families of terrorists in retribution.
- December 4th, 2015: Trump falsely claims in an interview with Bill O'Reilly that the girlfriends and wives of the 9/11 hijackers "knew what was going to happen" and were in the United States but allowed to leave the country for Saudi Arabia. This bit of 9/11 Trutherism is false, because the attackers had no romantic partners, at all.
- December 7th, 2015: Donald Trump proposes a ban on all Muslims traveling to the United States.
- December 8th, 2015: Trump defends criticism of his ideas to ban Muslims and monitor mosques by comparing his ideas to when President Franklin Roosevelt had Japanese internment camps during World War II, and we should enact his anti-Muslim ideas because "we are now at war". Which, y'know, was one of the most shameful chapters in American history.
- December 9th, 2015: Perhaps as the best imaginable metaphor for how Republicans and Americans SHOULD have reacted to a Trump candidacy occurs when during a TIME Magazine photo shoot, Trump attempts to be photographed with an American bald eagle, and the bird attacks him. The animated gif will live on forever.
- December 15th, 2015: At another Republican Primary debate, Trump is asked about the United States' nuclear triad, and as he gives his answer, it becomes painfully clear that he has no business being in charge of the American nuclear arsenal (how no one figured that out already is also a mystery). In the same debate, he repeats his insane conspiracy theory about the wives and girlfriends of 9/11 hijackers being allowed to flee the country, in spite of none of them having been found to have had a romantic partner.
- December 17th, 2015: Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin exchange compliments towards one another in the media, with Trump saying of Putin, "It is always a great honor to be so nicely complimented by a man so highly respected within his own country and beyond."
- December 18th, 2015: Trump is on MSNBC's Morning Joe, and defends Vladimir Putin against the claims that he has ordered the killings of journalists who would report negative things he does, blowing it off by saying, "I think our country does plenty of killing also." He goes on to say "Putin is a leader, unlike our president."
- Later in the same day, he continues praising Putin in an interview with Simon Conway.
- December 19th, 2016: Trump is interviewed by Tony Perkins, the leader of the anti-gay hate group, the Family Research Council, where he talks about how Christians are having their rights taken away from them, and Muslims are not while complaining about how it's not "politically correct to say Merry Christmas".
- January 9th, 2016: Donald Trump praises North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un for the ruthless efficiency in which he maintained a stranglehold on power from potential rivals among the communist nation's generals upon his father's death.
- January 18th, 2016: Trump speaks at Liberty University, where he tries to pretend he's a really dedicated Christian and prove that to Bible scholars. His credibility his hurt when he refers to the book "Second Corinthians" as "Two Corinthians". He also swore... twice.
- January 23rd, 2016: Donald Trump brags about the persistent loyalty of his supporters, boasting at a rally, "I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn't lose voters."
- January 24th, 2016: Trump is at Rep. Steve King's Iowa Freedom Summit, where he claims that the United States Border Patrol is deliberately letting people, potential Islamic terrorists come across the border:
"We have to build a fence and it’s gotta be a beauty. Who can build better than Trump? I build. It’s what I do. I build. I build nice fences but I build great buildings. Fences are easy, believe me. I saw the other day on television, people are just walking across the border, they’re walking, the military is standing there, holding guns and people are just walking right in front, coming into our country. It is so terrible, it is so unfair, it is so incompetent and we don’t have the best coming in, we have people that are criminals, we have people that are crooks, you can certainly have terrorists, you can certainly have Islamic terrorists, you can have anything coming across the border. We don’t do anything about it. So I would say that if I run and if I win, I would certainly start by building a very, very powerful border."
- January 27th, 2016: Trump is interviewed by Michael Savage, and says that Bernie Sanders is a communist who will "destroy the very fabric of who we are".
- The same day, a report is released where it is revealed that several times from 1991 through 2004, Donald Trump petitioned elected officials to throw street vendors off of Fifth Avenue, insisting that the veterans among them were faking their service to the United States.
- January 28th, 2016: Donald Trump chooses to skip a Fox News Republican Primary debate (he was boycotting because of Megyn Kelly) to "host a charity event for veterans". $6 million is supposedly raised that night, with Trump himself donating $1 million.
- The same day, Trump re-tweets an image that is purportedly of Megyn Kelly with Fox News' co-owner, Prince al-Waleed of Saudi Arabia, and a second woman wearing a niqab. The image, of course, is quite obviously Photoshopped, and the account he re-tweeted from is from an unabashed racist who has repeatedly posted images camparing First Lady Michelle Obama to an ape.
- January 29th, 2016: After years of being a Birther conspiracy theorist against Barack Obama, Donald Trump finds a new target for those accusations... Ted Cruz, who he calls a "an anchor baby in Canada" because he was born there (he still is the child of an American woman and eligible for the presidency, but Birther accusations are all about casting doubt).
- February 1st, 2016: At another rowdy campaign rally in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Trump encourages his followers to "knock the crap out of" any protesters, and promises to pay their legal fees that could result from such attacks.
- February 6th, 2016: At a GOP primary debate, after Sen. Ted Cruz talks about bringing back waterboarding as a practice to be used on captured suspects in the war on terror, Donald Trump decides to one-up him by promising he would "bring back a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding".
- February 8th, 2016: Trump, at a rally in New Hampshire, brings attention to a woman in the crowd, and with pride, announces to the whole audience how she just had said Ted Cruz was "a pussy".
- The same day, the Trump campaign offers to make a "charitable donation" to the Liberty House, a charity organization for veterans, if they appear on stage with him at one of his campaign rallies in New Hampshire. They refuse, because they could lose their legal status as a charity if hey endorse a political candidate. At this time, no other evidence exists of the Trump campaign offering money to any veterans' group after their $6 million fundraiser.
- Trump also calls in to conservative talk show host Michael Savage's program to imply that President Obama isn't really trying to fight terrorism, because he won't say "radical Islamic terror":
“It’s radical Islamic terrorism. We have a president that won’t even use the words and if you don’t use the words, you’re never going to get rid of the problem. We have a — maybe he doesn’t want to get rid of the problem. I don’t know exactly what’s going on.”
- February 9th, 2016: Trump claims that the unemployment rate is far higher than is being reported. Rather than the actual number of 4.9%, he says he believes it is "probably 28, 29, as high as 35. In fact, I even heard recently 42 percent."
- February 13th, 2016: At a GOP Primary debate, Trump responds to Sen. Marco Rubio's defense of the George W. Bush presidency, saying he "kept us safe" by blaming Bush for 9/11 and saying it "happened on his watch". This runs counter to much of the narrative the Republican Party would like to broadcast of a historical view of the Bush presidency.
- February 15th, 2016: Donald Trump, always a fan of conspiracy theories, is interviewed by Michael Savage, and discusses the circumstances of the death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, and says it's pretty unusual that he was "found with a pillow on his face".
- February 16th, 2016: A report comes out revealing that the Veterans' Hotline the Trump campaign set up in 2015 to allow our military veterans the ability to give him ideas to reform the VA does nothing but go to voice mail.
- February 17th, 2016: Contrary to the entire report on torture and enhanced interrogation released by the CIA, Donald Trump, on the campaign trail in South Carolina, insists it does, wants it used regardless of if it does or not:
“Don’t tell me it doesn’t work — torture works. Half these guys say: ‘Torture doesn’t work.’ Believe me, it works. They’re chopping off our heads in the Middle East. They want to kill us, they want to kill us. They want to kill our country. They want to knock out our cities. If it doesn’t work. They deserve it anyway, for what they’re doing.”
- February 17th, 2016: Trump goes on Pat Robertson's Christian Broadcast Network program, and promises he will see that Planned Parenthood is defunded, and that he would nominate conservative judges to the Supreme Court to overturn the ruling on same-sex marriage, and see that Roe v. Wade is "unpassed", which isn't a thing, and propbably a word he made up because he’s not smart enough to say “overturned”.
- February 18th, 2016: After Pope Francis criticized Donald Trump's plans to build a wall along the U.S./Mexico border, saying that such an idea was "not Christian", Trump and his limitless ego fired back, saying that it was "disgraceful" for the pontiff to question his faith, and that it showed he was a "pawn" of Mexico.
- The same day, Trump gave an interview with Breitbart News, where he claimed Fox News and the Wall Street Journal were biased against him, and trying to help Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio in the election against him.
- February 19th, 2016: Donald Trump, at a campaign rally in South Carolina, tells the crowd an urban legend about a U.S. Army General, John Pershing, who executed dozens of Muslims in the Phillipines in World War I with bullets covered in pigs' blood, as a way to assure they would be denied entry into Heaven, per their faith, and talks about using it as a threat against terrorists.The crowd, in disturbing fashion, seemed keen on the idea.
- February 21st, 2016: Never afraid to go Birther, Donald Trump finds a new and unexpected target... Marco Rubio, who he refuses to say whether or not he thinks is eligible to be president in an interview.
- February 23rd, 2016: At a campaign rally in Las Vegas, after a protester is escorted out, Trump talks about how he wanted to "punch him in the face", wistfully talking about how "in the old days, they would get carried out on stretchers".
- February 25th, 2016: At a GOP Presidential Primary debate, CNN's Wolf Blitzer asks Trump how he can possibly make Mexico pay for his proposed border wall, and Trump doesn't exactly answer, saying, "I will, and the wall just got 10 feet higher, believe me."
- After the debate, Trump discusses not yet releasing his tax returns, continues to say he cannot release them because he is being audited (which is a lie, Nixon released his tax returns while being audited in '68), and that the IRS is "maybe auditing me because I'm Christian", further playing up the myth of Christian victimization in the United States, when even the Pope has called him out on being one of the worst examples of Christendom.
- February 26th, 2016: At a rally in Texas, Donald Trump proposes that he would "open up libel laws" if elected president, and make it easier to sue media organizations that he feels tell "dishonest" stories about him.
- February 27th, 2016: While speaking in Bentonville, Arkansas, Trump invents another new conspiracy theory... that the lawsuit filed against him in the Trump University case by New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman was only done because Schneiderman was bribed to do so by President Obama. This statement is lost in the shuffle fro months, until August 16th, 2016, when it gets noticed by the media again, because they simply could not kep up with all of the insane things Trump was saying.
- February 28th, 2016: Former CIA Director Michael Hayden is interviewed, and says the U.S. Military would likely have to refuse orders from Donald Trump, if as president he ordered them to commit war crimes.
- On this day, Trump also mentions the Trump University case in an interview with Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday, mentioning that he believes the "judge is very hostile to me", that it may be because he is "strong on the border", and that the judge is "Hispanic". (This would be the first time Trump tries to play connect the dots for his more racist followers to cover up his shady business dealings by discrediting Judge Gonzalo Curiel.)
- February 29th, 2016: Trump is informed that former KKK Grand Wizard David Duke has endorsed him in an interview on CNN's State of the Union, and fails to disavow Duke and other white supremacist groups. At first, he tried to pretend he didn't know who David Duke was (fact checkers found quotes from 2000 where Trump very clearly did, though), and he later blamed his poor response to the question on "a bad earpiece".
- March 3rd, 2016: In a new low for Republican debate politics, at a Fox News presidential primary debate, Trump defends himself from remarks from Marco Rubio where he said of Trump, "You know what they say about a guy with small hands..." by using part of his time in the debate to defend the size of his penis:
"Look at those hands, are they small hands?" the front-runner for the GOP presidential nomination said, raising them for viewers to see. "And, he referred to my hands -- 'if they're small, something else must be small.' I guarantee you there's no problem. I guarantee."
“If you look at the mosques and you go to various places and you look at what’s going on there and it’s virtually 100 percent. Certainly you can say radical Islam is a disaster right now, it’s causing tremendous problems worldwide, not just here. But the question was asked about Islam and there’s a great hatred, there’s no question about it. I think Islam hates us.”
- The same day, Corey Lewandowski, Trump's campaign manager, physically assaults Breitbart reporter Michelle Fields to the ground as she attempts to approach Trump and ask him a question.
- March 10th, 2016: At a Trump rally in Fayetteville, North Carolina, after Trump had said how "weak" we had become for not treating protesters in a more "rough" manner... a protester being escorted out gets sucker-punched in the face by a Trump supporter, on camera.
- March 11th, 2016: During a particularly violent campaign stop in St. Louis, Trump actually expresses frustrations that his rallies are not violent ENOUGH, again wistfully longing for days when battering protesters was celebrated.
- March 12th, 2016: Trump, on the campaign trail in Ohio, cravenly panics at the podium as a protester tries to rush the stage as Secret Service agents surround him. He would later go on Twitter to lie and claim the man "had ties to ISIS".
- March 13th, 2016: On Fox News Sunday, Trump says that "27-35% of Muslims would go to war" against the United States, according to a Pew Research poll. The Pew Research agency responded, and said that they have never even conducted such a poll, and they have no clue what he was talking about.
- March 19th, 2016: At a rally in Fountain Hills, Arizona, Donald Trump claims that the government budget "directly funds sending illegal immigrants through the border and right through Phoenix". Fact-checkers point out how bad of a lie that is.
- March 21st, 2016: In an interview with the Washington Post, Trump questions the need for NATO for the first time, and says that one of his advisers on foreign affairs in regards to counter-terrorism is Walid Phares. Phares is an anti-Muslim conspiracy theorist who thinks the Obama administration is being infiltrated by the Muslim Brotherhood, who himself had ties to Lebanese militias that committed atrocities in 1978. Trump also talked about removing military bases in places like Japan, unless the country where the base was located agreed to pay for 100% of the cost of having the United States there.
- March 23rd, 2016: Trump, in an interview with Mark Halperin of Bloomberg News, refuses to rule out the possibility of using nuclear weapons against ISIS. Remember now, that ISIS is a minority of a few thousand fighters at this point, and using a nuke against them would kill far, far more innocent people who are being attacked and enslaved by ISIS in the same region.
- The same day... after seeing that someone has begun disseminating photos of Melania Trump's nude GQ photo shoot from over a decade before in support of Ted Cruz that asked if people really wanted her to be the first lady, Trump decided to blame the move on Cruz himself, and took to Twitter to start insinuating that Cruz's wife Heidi was ugly.
- March 27th, 2016: In an interview with the New York Times, Donald Trump was asked about his plan to remove military bases from places like Japan if they refused to pay 100% of the cost, and that if there was no military bases in Japan, it could lead to countries like Japan or North Korea building nuclear weapons. Trump flippantly responded to this possibility by saying, "They might be better off." (Note: Trump just expressed little to no concern about North Korea developing a nuclear weapon.)
- March 29th, 2016: Also, Trump's campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski is charged with battery in Florida for his assault on Breitbart reporter Michelle Fields. The Trump campaign had lied and claimed the assault never happened, but it was caught on video. Still, Trump feels the need to accuse Fields of faking the bruises she got when she reported it to the authorities, since she "didn't scream".
- March 30th, 2016: Donald Trump, in a town hall hosted by MSNBC's Chris Matthews, says women should face "some kind of punishment for abortion". It remains a legal, constitutionally granted right. Anyway, the campaign spent the next day giving different excuses for this gaffe, saying at one point that abortion providers should face punishment.
- April 8th, 2016: A TIME Magazine report is released that notes that none of the money raised from Trump's January 28th charity fundraiser for veterans has yet to go to any veterans' group.
- April 25th, 2016: Trump, in a victory speech after the New York Primary, now easily the presumptive nominee of the GOP, begins setting his sights on Hillary Clinton, saying, "Frankly, if Hillary Clinton were a man, I don't think she'd get 5 percent of the vote. The only thing she's got going is the woman's card."Clinton responds by citing her record on supporting women’s issues like equal pay and maternity leave and says, "if that's playing the woman card, then DEAL ME IN." It is easily one of the most personal and memorable moments from Clinton on the campaign trail. The Clinton campaign goes on to use the controversy around Trump's comments to raise roughly $2.5 million in funds.
- April 27th, 2016: GQ reporter Julia Ioffe has an interview with Melania Trump, describing her as a "party person" and upon publishing it, begins receiving anti-Semitic threats from Trump supporters.
- April 28th, 2016: Donald Trump goes on the O'Reilly Factor to brag about how Vladimir Putin said he was "a genius". (This has never happened on record, that anyone can find.)
- April 29th, 2016: Trump, at a rally in California, repeats the urban legend of Gen. John Pershing executing Muslims with bullets coated in pigs' blood. He also calls into Michael Savage's talk radio show to praise Russian leader Vladimir Putin, and incorrectly claim that Putin was bombing ISIS.
- May 3rd, 2016: Trump, in a Fox News interview, begins to float the insane conspiracy theory that Ted Cruz's father, Rafael, associated with the assassin of John F. Kennedy, Lee Harvey Oswald, and that he could have been involved in the assassination himself. People wondering where this insane accusation come from track it to a tabloid story from the National Enquirer about Rafael Cruz.
- May 4th, 2016: CNN's Wolf Blitzer asks Donald Trump about the anti-Semitic threats being made towards GQ's Julia Ioffe after her article about Melania Trump, and Donald says the piece was "nasty", says reporters “shouldn’t be doing that with wives", refuses to condemn the threats, or his fans for making them.
- May 5th, 2016: Trump, on CNBC, pitches a ludicrous idea, saying if president, he would renegotiate the public debt and pay less than 100 cents on the dollar if the economy went bad. Economists were alarmed, because that would almost certainly create further crisis in the Treasury markets.
- This of course, is also Cinco de Mayo, and he tries to pander to Latino voters by posting a picture of himself in Trump Tower eating a taco bowl, and saying "I love Hispanics!" It... backfires.
- May 8th, 2016: Trump tells a crowd that "Hillary Clinton is planning on abolishing the 2nd Amendment". Which would be remarkable, because to pass the repeal she would need an overwhelming 2/3 majority in both the House and Senate to do so, and neither body has the support to do it. You know, even if she actually wanted to, which she doesn’t.
- May 12th, 2016: A long time family friend of Donald Trump, and in-house historian of Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate, Anthony Senecal goes on Facebook to rant about President Obama, leading to the discovery that one of Trump's most trusted friends had a long history of online racism, and belief in racist conspiracy theories:
"To all my friends on FB, just a short note to you on our pus headed "president" !!!! This character who I refer to as zero (0) should have been taken out by our military and shot as an enemy agent in his first term !!!!!”
The Trump campaign attempts to distance themselves, saying that Senecal "This individual has not worked at Mar-a-Lago for several years." That's not entirely honest, because while started working for Trump as a butler in 1985, and retired in 2009, he still gives tours of the historic property.
- May 17th, 2016: For the first, and not the last time, Trump tries to rehabilitate his image for mocking a disabled reporter, Serge Kovaleski with some amazing logic. Trump obviously doesn't have issues with the handicapped, because he has made all of his businesses have wheelchair access for the disabled. Just one fact he left out... ADA compliance is the law, and it's hardly a sign of going "above and beyond" for the disabled, and rather just doing what you're legally required to.
- May 18th, 2016: Trump, in an interview with the New York Times, says that Ferguson, Missouri and Oakland, California are "as dangerous as Iraq" and that "the crime numbers are worse" there.
- May 19th, 2016: At a campaign fundraiser in New Jersey, Trump makes fun of the weight of his own campaign surrogate and New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, telling him, "NO MORE OREOS."
- May 24th, 2016: Donald Trump, in an interview with the Washington Post, brings up the conspiracy theory surrounding the death of Vince Foster in 1993, and that his death was "very fishy" because he "knew everything that was going on with the Clintons" before he suddenly committed suicide.
- May 25th, 2016: Trump speaks before the NRA convention, and says that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are planning on "releasing violent criminals from jail", saying Clinton wants them "all released". President Obama has only commuted the sentences of non-violent drug offenders, and Clinton's criminal justice reform proposals would only reduce the sentences for non-violent crimes.
- The same day, he responds to online criticism from Sen. Elizabeth Warren by calling her the racist nickname "Pocahontas" (Warren's family has told her she has Native American heritage.)
- May 26th, 2016: Talking Points Memo creates a timeline of the history of reports from the Trump campaign regarding donations to veterans' charities after their benefit from January 28th, and note they keep getting conflicting information from Trump, his campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, campaign spokesperson Hope Hicks, and campaign surrogate Katrina Pierson.
- May 27th, 2016: Trump, at a campaign rally in San Diego, starts attacking the integrity of Judge Gonzalo Curiel, the man presiding over the Trump University case:
“The trial is going to take place sometime in November. There should be no trial. This should have been dismissed on summary judgment easily. Everybody says it, but I have a judge who is a hater of Donald Trump, a hater. He’s a hater. His name is Gonzalo Curiel. The judge, who happens to be, we believe, Mexican, which is great, I think that’s fine.”
(Judge Gonzalo Curiel was born in Chicago, and raised in Indiana. He is not Mexican, but has Mexican heritage. But this is the beginning of Trump accusing Curiel of bias because of that heritage. Please also note that Curiel is bound by a judicial code of ethics, and is not allowed to "publicly respond to comments on a matter pending or impending in any court", for risk of tainting the ruling of such a case.)
- May 31st, 2016: Donald Trump and his campaign finally provide a list of the charities they donated money to, and the amounts after weeks of inquiry from the media. Trump insults reporters for asking, calling one ABC News reporter a "sleaze" for doing his job. Interestingly, the $1 million from Trump's own funds was not contributed right up until the last week of May, when the media really was circling in.
- The same day... a shocking court deposition is unsealed in the Trump University case, where former Trump University Sales Manager Ronald Schnackenberg stated, “I believe that Trump University was a fraudulent scheme, and that it preyed upon the elderly and uneducated to separate them from their money.”
- June 1st, 2016: Trump calls up radio host Michael Savage, and says that if elected, on his first day in office, he would begin calling the leaders of allied nations to inform them that the U.S. will no longer honor commitments to defend them in case of a military conflict, saying they would need to "have to pay" much more for protection. (Note: Trump does not understand how treaties work, and would like to run our nation's military like a protection racket.)
- June 2nd, 2016: In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Trump again goes on the offensive against Judge Gonzalo Curiel, saying that he could not fairly preside over the Trump University case because of his Mexican heritage, adding, “I’m building a wall, it’s an inherent conflict of interest.” In the same interview, he criticized German Prime Minister Angela Merkel for her country's policy on taking in Syrian refugees, predicting, "Germany's going down. They're all going down."
- June 3rd, 2016: Donald Trump is interviewed by CNN's Jake Tapper regarding his comments about Judge Curiel, and repeats his false claim that Curiel is Mexican (earning a quick correction from Tapper), and that Curiel's heritage was making him biased against him in the case because of his plans to build a border wall.
- June 7th, 2016: After days of Trump's attacks against Judge Curiel, several Republicans finally get around to chastising the billionaire for it. Even Republican Speaker of the House Paul Ryan begrudgingly admits that Trump's comments are "the textbook definition of racism". They continue to endorse him anyway.
- June 10th, 2016: Donald Trump again responds to criticism from Sen. Elizabeth Warren by calling her "Pocahontas", making many Republicans uneasy about how to defend him from charges of bigotry.
- June 12th, 2016: Trump responds to the worst mass shooting in modern American history in Orlando at the Pulse nightclub by patting himself on the back on Twitter:
"Appreciate the congrats for being right on radical Islamic terrorism, I don't want congrats, I want toughness & vigilance. We must be smart!"
Through the day, he calls for the resignation of President Obama for refusing to say "radical Islamic terrorism", and pretend he would be better at preventing it that his political opponents. Unfortunately for his narrative, it's believed to be incorrect, because investigators have found the shooter had not ties to any terror group, was not a practicing Muslim, and was motivated by self-loathing over being a closeted homosexual himself. So there's that.
- June 13th, 2016: Trump, at a rally in North Carolina, implies that United States troops stole money meant to be used to rebuild Iraq:
“Iraq. Crooked as hell. How about bringing baskets of money, millions and millions of dollars, and handing it out? I want to know who are the soldiers that had that job because I think they're living very well right now, whoever they may be. Think of it, the money that went out.”
After the speech, the Trump campaign went into full spin mode, and spent the next few days trying to say he meant Iraqi troops stole the money, which is still a bit of an insult, as our troops were the ones tasked with guarding it from them.
Reports also surface that Trump has reduced New Jersey Governor Chris Christie to his own personal errand boy, including sending him out to fetch him McDonald's.
- June 14th, 2016: Donald Trump, on Twitter, makes the ridiculous claim that he would be better for the LGBT community than Democratic Nominee Hillary Clinton. Here's why that's ridiculous... a good summary of all of the radically anti-LGBT people Trump has partnered with or employs as Christian liasons, that include pastors who would like to bring back stoning against the gay community, or thinks they are pedophiles who want to usher in the Anti-Christ.
- The same day... Daily Beast reporter David Cay Johnston began researching the tax history of Donald Trump, since he was refusing to release his tax forms. While he cannot find anything too recent, he found affidavits from tax appeals that Trump filed in the 1990s (and lost). In them, it had returns for 1975 through 1979. Of those six years, in three of them, Trump paid no taxes.
- June 17th, 2016: A Washington Post report comes out detailing the extensive business ties between Donald Trump and Russian businesses, and notes his disturbing tendency to praise Vladimir Putin.
- June 20th, 2016: A Jane Doe files a lawsuit against Donald Trump in New York City regarding a sexual assault that took place in the summer of 1994, when she was a thirteen year old prostitute under the manipulation of Jeffrey Epstein. A media inquiry by The Guardian into Trump's background finds he has been accused of sexual assault on two other occasions, once by his first wife Ivana under oath that took place in 1989, and another from an employee in 1997.
- The same day, Trump's campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, is forced to resign after a series of controversies, including his assault of reporter Michelle Fields. For several days, the media has no clear idea who is actually managing the Trump campaign, with best guesses being that it is Paul Manafort.
- June 21st, 2016: An FEC report is released that shows historically anemic fundraising by the Trump campaign, putting them in a big hole going into the final leg of the presidential race. Estimates are there is only $1.3 million in hand to Hillary Clinton's $42 million.
- June 22nd, 2016: Media investigations begin into expenditures by the Trump campaign based on the FEC report, showing that they spent almost twice as much on hats as they had campaign advertisements. And, bizarrely, the Trump campaign had paid $35,000 to an unknown consulting firm in New Hampshire that named "Draper Sterling", apparently as a tribute to the AMC television show "Mad Man" for undisclosed reasons.
- June 24th, 2016: Just as the United Kingdom voted on Brexit, and the vote came back narrowly to have them leave the European Union, sending the British stock market and the value of the British pound into a free fall, Trump was visiting his golf course in Scotland. He gave a bizarre press conference where he was introduced with a flourish by bagpipers, and gave answers to the media that indicated he had no idea what Brexit was, or what its impact had been. It seemed Trump's main takeaway of this political and economic catastrophe, was that he thought it meant more tourists would be coming to visit his golf course. Even stranger, he seemed not to understand that he was in Scotland, where people voted to stay in the EU by a 62% margin, leading to him being mocked on social media by angry Scots.
- June 28th: 2016: A Washington Post report comes out that based on public records, Donald Trump donated less than $10,000 to the charity he does rare philanthropic efforts in over seven years. This, after touting his charitable works for years. (HINT: You shouldn't need hints at this point to know he's lying when he says "proceeds to charity" to market something.) What little money Trump does give to charity, is usually his own, who uses it to throw "charity galas" in his honor. Based on the Washington Post's estimates less than 10% of what goes into the Donald J. Trump Foundation has ever found its way out to other charities. At most, the billionaire has donated $7.8 million in his lifetime, or .08% of his income which pales in comparison to other individuals of such wealth.
- June 29th, 2016: Another development in the Trump University case hits, as a New York Times report discusses how most of the real estate lessons were actually plagiarized from other texts.
- June 30th, 2016: A Gawker report is released that based on interviews with four former employees of Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, who say that Trump used to tap into the phones of guests.
- July 1st, 2016: Ashley Feinberg, a senior writer for Gawker media, publishes an article recapping a long history of media reports and what little medical information is known about Donald Trump, which includes the possibility that he has partaken in prolonged usage of diet pills over decades, which are low-grade amphetamines. This would explain some of his more erratic behavior, his nervous, twitchy speaking style, and his tendency to insult others as being “low energy”. Oh, and any potential "delusions of grandeur".
- July 2nd, 2016: Yet again, Donald Trump manages to re-tweet a white supremacist on Twitter, when he posts an image of Hillary Clinton over a huge pile of money next to a Star of David declaring that she's the "Most Corrupt Candidate Ever". Over the following days, the Trump campaign insists the image wasn't anti-Semitic, and it was "just a sheriff's star", or alternatively, trying to re-release the post with a circle shape instead of a star (where they just filled it in but the points of the star can still be seen). The Trump campaign's Tony Scavino came forward to take credit for the post, and said he couldn't possibly by anti-Semitic because he married a Jewish woman (so did Hitler's father, so...)
- July 5th, 2016: Donald Trump praises Saddam Hussein for being "so good" at killing terrorists without bothering with trials, and that they would not be in Iraq if Hussein was still in power. Not only is his praise for a dictator disturbing, it's incorrect. Saddam Hussein used to reward the families of terrorist suicide bombers.
- July 6th, 2016: In his most incoherent, unhinged speech yet (and that's saying something), Donald Trump speaks in Cincinnatti, if it can be called that. His frantic word-slurry sees him at different points, grow furious over accusations that he is anti-Semitic because of his "Star of David" tweet, his praise for Saddam Hussein, and raging that FBI Director James Comey could not find just cause to press charges against Hillary Clinton over her e-mails. At one point, he became distracted by a mosquito, and started comparing it to Clinton. Trump also comes out in support of North Carolina's transgender bathroom ban, HB2. This is remarkable because he had spoken out against it less than three months earlier.
- July 14th, 2016: A Trump campaign source says that Indiana Gov. Mike Pence is their Vice Presidential pick, however, they were cancelling a formal announcement they had planned for July 15th in New York City due to the truck attack in Nice, France.
- July 15th, 2016: The Trump campaign releases the new logo for the Trump/Pence ticket, and social media laughs their asses off about how easily it is to mock. Among the more popular comments or edits made of it include references to Beavis and Butthead, or the fact that the Trump "T" penetrating the Pence "P" is inadvertently sexual. Animations of the logo "fornicating" start trending so fast (and not in a good way), the Trump campaign pulls the logo off the internet within a day (it will forever live on). A report also surfaces that Trump tried to back out of his pick for Vice Presidential candidate, and while most inside reports were already leaking it would be Mike Pence, internally, reports are that at the last minute, as the midnight hour approached, Trump wanted to instead pick former House Speaker Newt Gingrich. Pence literally had until noon on July 15th to tell Indiana election officials if he would be on the ballot as VP, or run for re-election as governor.
- July 16th, 2016: Trump has one job, give a glowing praise of his VP pick, Mike Pence, and introduce him to a crowd. Instead, he gives a half-an-hour rambling speech where he keeps naming Pence, then seems to lose focus and veer off onto a tangent before completing his task. He finally does introduce Pence, then completely walks off stage without appearing with him. Pundits note it seems like a botched roll out of a VP.
- July 17th, 2016: Donald Trump and Mike Pence appear in a joint interview on CBS' 60 minutes, where Trump and Pence hardly seem like a perfect match. Trump repeatedly interrupts Pence whenever he tries to answer a question, and during a part of the interview, Trump starts trying to attack Hillary Clinton for voting for the Iraq War, leading Leslie Stahl to point out that so did Pence, one of the war's biggest cheerleaders during the Bush administration. Trump refuses to acknowledge any hypocrisy. Overall, it was another disaster.
- July 18th, 2016: As the Republican National Convention kicks off in Cleveland, the schedule of speakers is noted for not only failing to deliver on Trump's promises of big celebrities (Scott Baio and Antonio Sabato, Jr. were the best) and star athletes (a low-ranked LPGA golfer and UFC President Dana White), but also his failure to even get star Republican politicians to show up. No former Republican presidents were in attendance, and the only presidential nominee from the Republican Party to attend was former Senator Bob Dole, well into his nineties, and not invited to speak. Ohio Governor John Kasich refused to attend, causing Trump campaign staff to badmouth him to the media.
Perhaps upset that he didn't want to wait four days to be the center of attention, Donald Trump called into Fox News to claim that the shooter who attacked police in Baton Rouge was a "radical Islamist". The Trump campaign later tried blaming the false claim on it having been too "early in the morning". We also will note in the same interview, Trump disgustingly insinuated that President Obama was not genuine in his support for the fallen officers, because of his "body language":
His need to be in the spotlight wasn't over, though, as Trump insisted on breaking tradition and appearing on the first night of the convention,walking out in silhouette through white smoke like a savior emerging from the gates of heaven to the tune of Queen's "We Are the Champions" to introduce his wife Melania, which earned him warnings to again cease using the band's music from their lawyers. Overall, the entrance was compared to that of a cartoonish pro-wrestler.
Among the first day's disasters included a benediction by a pastor that declared that Democrats were "the enemy”, only 40 women showing up to attend the "Women for Trump" panel, signs laid out for "Latinos para Trump" failed to actually have proper Spanish (well, that and no Latinos to hold them), Congressman and Trump ally Steve King going on cable news to question the idea that any "non-white sub-groups" had ever contributed anything towards civilization, attendees cheering the fact that officers charged in the death of Freddie Gray in Baltimore were acquitted, a speech by former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani screaming at the audience and warning terrorists were coming to kill us all, Iowa Senator Joni Ernst left alone to speak to an almost empty room to close the night.
The big story was the speech from Trump's wife, Melania Trump, that at first seemed inspiring, until the media quickly noticed that she had plagiarized a large part of it from the 2008 DNC speech by current First Lady Michelle Obama. Yup, Trump's genius not only allowed for plagiarism before they loaded the speech in the teleprompter and let his wife embarrass herself, but she had boasted about writing it herself with little help in an interview with Matt Lauer earlier in the day. He managed to trick the assembled GOP delegates into applauding the words of one of the Obamas. As most of the Trump campaign started settling in for the night, a few proxies were left to desperately grasp at straws to try and deny the plagiarism, or come up with some kind of excuse for the haphazard decision that could have been caught with simple teaching software.
- July 19th, 2016: Day 2 of the RNC: The Republican Party Platform Committee releases its 2016 Republican Party Platform, which is the most anti-LGBT one ever, from most estimations, including pledges to support the practice of gay conversion therapy in there. The committee put the idea for Donald Trump's border wall in the platform, as well, but oddly, there was only one part of the entire platform that the main Trump campaign insisted on... they wanted the parts about supporting Ukraine from Russian aggression removed. (Trying to suck up to Putin, maybe?)
- On cable news, Trump surrogates all went onto cable news with excuses for Melania Trump's plagiarism from the previous day, and the main problem was... they obviously hadn't talked to one another, and all gave varying and terrible reasons as to how what occured was "just a coincidence", only making matters worse. Paul Manafort tried blaming Melania's plagiarism on Hillary Clinton (there's a trick), and the RNC's Communications Director, Sean Spicer, tried saying that Melania had plagiarized Hillary as much as she had Twilight Sparkle from My Little Pony (yes, that happened).
- On the floor, the last ditch efforts of the "Never Trump" movement were quickly squelched by the Rules Committee, and every speaker forgot the theme for the day, which was supposed to be a discussion of jobs and the economy called "Make America Work Again", instead deciding to just go ahead and turn the proceedings into a modern recreation of the Salem Witch Trials with Hillary Clinton playing the part of the accused. Some of the highlights included a delegate screaming "NO ISLAM!" as the founder of "Muslims for Trump" spoke, CNN cameras catching a delegate face-palming as Trump was announced the nominee, Arkansas Attorney General Leslie Rutledge trying to prove Hillary Clinton untrustworthy because she doesn't have a Southern accent like she does (which makes sense, because Hillary didn't grow up in Arkansas), Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell being raucously booed as he took the stage, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie playing witchfinder general and using audience participation to perform a show trial where Hillary was found "guilty" by the crowd who began chanting, "LOCK HER UP!", and Ben Carson ending the evening by going off teleprompter during part of his speech to try and play six degrees of separation to link Hillary Clinton to Saul Alinsky, and then to Lucifer himself. It really was shaping up to be a quite Trumpian affair, two days in.
- July 20th, 2016: The third day of the Republican National Convention... Trump still steals headlines away from the floor when an interview he gives to the New York Times gives many pause, where he openly talks of not honoring the United States' commitments to NATO allies, including countries formerly part of the Soviet Union, should Russia try and invade them, saying he would have to revisit the conditions before protecting them. Oh, and he also seemed unaware over what to do about a military coup that was underway in Turkey attempting to overthrough Prime Minister Erdogan, as well.
The controversy surrounding Melania Trump's plagiarism took a whole new term as Meredith McIver, a mystery woman who few people could ever recall meeting with no social media experience, suddenly started social media accounts and put out a press release confessing to having wrote Melania Trump's speech, and that Melania wanted "something like" the lines that Michelle Obama said in 2008. Effectively, Melania is shown to be a liar for claiming she "wrote it herself", and that she was aware of the plagiarism. McIver wrote this statement from Trump Corporation stationary,
Meanwhile, a report comes out that the Trump campaign actually called Ohio Governor John Kasich and offered HIM the vice-presidency before it was offered to Mike Pence. An anonymous Kasich aide claimed Trump's sons called him, offered Kasich the honor of being the "most powerful vice-president ever" if he'd handle "all foreign policy and domestic policy". When asked, "What would Donald do?", they replied, "He would make America Great Again." This... is not an inspiring story about what Trump would do if he gets in the Oval Office.
On the floor of the convention, Sen. Ted Cruz is allowed to speak by Trump, even though he literally spent most of the afternoon outside badmouthing the Republican nominee. When Cruz told the audience to "vote their conscience", he is immediately booed, causing Donald Trump to walk out of a luxury suite and start moving towards the stage in fury, and causing security to escort Heidi Cruz off the convention floor as people began to accost her. Pundits are blown away as to how when a convention is supposed to bring about party unity, the GOP could still be seeing open revolt on the third full day. The entire flap is the biggest story of the day, and distracts yet again, from a successful promotion of Indiana Governor Mike Pence. This isn't entirely a bad thing, considering after his speech, Trump attempts to give him an awkward air-kiss that leaves Pence visibly uncomfortable.
Through the rest of the day, a NASA astronaut also refused to read an endorsement of Donald Trump in her speech aloud, and Fox News personality Laura Ingraham was allowed to speak, and managed to add to the fascist flair of the proceedings by inadvertently (we hope) giving a Nazi salute to the crowd. Oh, and Trump campaign adviser Al Baldasaro got a visit from the Secret Service after he suggested Hillary Clinton should be executed for treason. So that, too.
- July 21st, 2016: Day Four of the RNC... Sen. Ted Cruz is still speaking out against Ted Cruz in ballrooms of the convention, and all of the combined speeches over the previous two days given by Trump's children have failed to show a single anecdote to humanize the perceived-d*** that their father was. The best that was mustered was Tiffany Trump pointing out that her father called her when she had a friend die, which is hardly a ringing endorsement. This pattern continued later in the evening as Trump was introduced by his favorite kid by most estimates, Ivanka Trump, who oddly gave a list of women's issues that she said her father supports, like equal pay for women and paid parental leave. It would be refreshing if it had any basis in reality to anything her father, or any other Republican the whole weekend, had said.
But to the closing speech... Trump himself finishes a four day RNC where Hillary Clinton's name was spoken of more negatively than his own was to endorse him by walking out not to a red, white, and blue patriotic display, but to a golden-themed set with his name in a font the size of Avogadro's Number before blowing up his jack-o-lantern-like head onto the jumbotron like it was an Orwellian nightmare. His speech was the longest acceptance speech by a presidential candidate in history at 75 minutes, and a cursory fact-check found at least 21 glaring lies. The tone described America as a dystopian wasteland, and portrayed himself as our would-be-messiah, the only one who could save us from ruin from threats of terrorism and crime, lifting the "law and order" candidacy of the not-so-beloved President Richard Nixon, whose campaign famously used racial fear and bias in the Atwater "Southern strategy" to win office.
Among the worst reviews for the speech were from Republicans, like Josh Barro, who noted Trump's speech lacked any of his sense of fun that makes him likable, former Bush speechwriter Nicole Wallace who said, "The Republican Party died in this room tonight", and Atlantic writer Norm Ornstein, who wrote, "If Leni Riefenstahl were alive, Trump would hire her to film this speech. Then not pay her." Pundits immediately rate the convention an overall disaster. Almost no policy proposals were discussed, save for an overall hatred of Hillary Clinton, if that counts as a policy.
- 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. The 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". (There's speaking out of both sides of your mouth, but when you manage to contradict your issue positions in the same sentence, you're just a moron.)
- 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 Romne), but insists "it has nothing to do with Russia". Considering the previous week, that Manafort was insisting that Melania Trump's speech did not plagiarize Michelle Obama's speech, and 24 hours later, Meredith McIver confirmed the speech was plagiarized... 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. (Likely lawsuit pending.)
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."
Greg Gutfeld, Fox News Host: "If repubs had championed their principles with specifics rather than embrace autocracy - they wouldn't have yielded this turf to dems."
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."
Amanda Carpenter, former Ted Cruz spokeswoman, CNN pundit: "I am sure hearing a lot more about God and faith at the DNC than the RNC."
- 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 30th, 2016: Trump speaks in Davenport, Iowa, and confesses that while watching speeches from the 2016 DNC that he "wanted to hit speakers so hard it would make their heads spin and they would never recover" in a return to his violent rhetoric. Proof again, that Trump is a bully at heart, he was focused in particular on one "very little guy" that eventually was figured to be former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, based on a Twitter rant trump made later.
- The same day, he speaks in Colorado Springs, and again tries to revisit the controversy surrounding his mocking of disabled reporter Serge Kovaleski by trying to say his businesses were ADA compliant as proof.
- 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, so nothing was being rigged against him, because he wasn't even a factor.
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. Oh, and it caused people to suggest Trump wanted to be the new KFC spokesman if they would change their photo to “tiny finger-lickin’ good”.
- 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: Well, a lot happened... where to start...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". Trump insists for the United States to come to Japan's aid they would "have to pay", 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.
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. Brilliant diplomacy by both men, right there. In the days that followed, lawmakers in the Philippines began discussing banning Donald Trump from entering their country for his offensive comments, and began voiding building contracts Trump had for real estate products in the island nation.
- 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 finally gives a speech laying out his economic plan for the United States (hint: Tax breaks for billionaires like him). 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 administration, the Ford administration, the Reagan administration, and through both Bush administrations.
That afternoon, Trump went back on Twitter with a new conspiracy theory, which was 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.”Don’t think about that one two hard, because it makes positively zero sense.
- August 9th, 2016: Donald Trump campaigns in North Carolina, and is back to being off-teleprompter, and it shows. He again talks about the election being "rigged", before lying to the crowd that Hillary Clinton would "abolish" the Second Amendment with her Supreme Court appointees before seemingly ask for someone to prevent that through violent intervention:
“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. Even the most hawkish members of Congress haven’t been calling for this.
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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 fomenting fears over voter fraud, and for the first time suggesting his supporters become "poll-watchers” to prevent "cheating":
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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" (quite the understatement) 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.
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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. One of the people who helped circulate the story on social media? Corey Lewandowski, the former Trump campaign manager, who hated Manafort.
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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.
In the same speech, he also called for "extreme vetting" of immigrants, which sounds xenophobic as hell unless he just means that during the current immigration process, potential immigrants are given free Mountain Dew.
Trump, also started making statements to question whether Hillary Clinton was healthy enough to be president , playing into conspiracy theories that have long been featured on websites like The Drudge Report and Breitbart News, when he said she "lacks the mental and physical stamina to take on ISIS and all of the many adversaries we face".
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August 16th, 2016: Trump makes the questionable decision to campaign in Wisconsin, a state where he trails by well into the double digits in polls, at this point, and that no Republican has won since Reagan in the 1984 drubbing of Mondale. Bizarrely, Trump speaks in West Bend, 40 miles west of Milwaukee, where there were riots and protests after the police shooting that resulted in the death of an African American man. And Trump, whose polling numbers with African Americans were roughly 1% at this point, tried making the pitch that his policies would be better for the African American community by putting MORE police officers in urban population centers. There's tone deaf, and then there's just clueless.
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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 (and with now only 12 weeks to the election) 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 when it would be given to a man wih ties to Russian interests and a habit of blurting things out at a microphone irresponsiby. 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.
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August 18th, 2016: While Trump spoke in North Carolina from a teleprompter and didn't embarrass himself too much, the same cannot be said for many of his campaign staff and advisers. 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".
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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 for a few days, if not weeks because visiting the state for photo ops would do little but cause law enforcement to have to divest law enforcement resources into security details for those visiting, rather than continue rescue and recovery efforts... Donald Trump and Mike Pence ignore common sense and go anyway for a photo op. So what did Trump need to go "help" with relief efforts to do that distracted all those first responders? He passed out Play-Doh, always a must need in disaster survival kits. For a total of 49 seconds, or the time it would take for him to have a single photo taken.
Friday night, with Trump polling behind Hillary Clinton among African-American voters by a ratio of 92% to 2%, and getting 0% support among that demographic in key swing states Pennsylvania and Ohio, 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?” At least he didn't go with the "I double dog dare you" strategy.
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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. Some of the details are particularly troubling, such as the fact that while Trump constantly rails against the United States owing too much debt to China... that he himself has loans out and is indebted to the Bank of China, which is, yes, run by the Chinese government.
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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...
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August 22nd, 2016: In the early hours of the morning, Trump goes on Twitter and starts attacking the hosts of MSNBC's Morning Joe, more singling out Mika Brzezinski as being "neurotic" and "not very bright". He then referred to Brzezinski and co-host Joe Scarborough as "clowns", while claiming they were a boyfriend and girlfriend and he would "blow the whistle" on them. Y'know, like back when he was threatening to "spill the beans" on Heidi Cruz.
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.
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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 (which may be an illegal practice per the FEC). 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. Maybe not shocking, that these are the people who can get through an interview to work for Trump.
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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. (You know when someone is out of line when you can see the eyes bug out of the heads of supporters right over their shoulder in shock, as was the case while Trump made his remark about Clinton.)
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.
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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”. Meanwhile, online, white supremacists proudly identify themselves as “Alt-Right”, and Trump as their candidate.
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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 only seemed to demonstrate he didn’t know what bigotry actually is. In the meantime, his campaign cancelled a schedule rally for Sept. 1st in Phoenix, the fourth rally that Trump cancelled in a week.
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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.
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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, only noting that a few hours after her death, Trump got around to offering condolences).
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. Also, Clinton had met the long held standard to release her tax returns and Trump... still had not.
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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, another bizarre choice for his campaign, as he has no a prayer of winning the state in the general election. He was merely prepping, though, for a big Wednesday…
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. But he’s the guy who’s serious about being tough on immigration, of course.
- 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. Of course, this is 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. But alas, no one in attendance seemed to have the best cognitive thinking skills on display to question Trump, a serial liar.
- 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”. His poll numbers with Latinos even before that speech were abysmal in record-breaking fashion, at 8% worse support than Romney had in 2012. 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 (but make it less likely that protesters might make a scene). Perhaps his best line was that he DESERVED the vote of African Americans because he was also a Republican, like Abraham Lincoln.
Word also comes out that the Trump campaign has hired David Bossie, a man infamous with launching conservative smear campaigns against Bill and Hillary Clinton since 1992, when he was assailed by the candidate he supported, George H.W. Bush, for sending private detectives to try and re-frame the suicide of a law student of Bill Clinton as having been because she was pregnant with his child out of wedlock (she wasn’t).
- 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.
- 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.
- 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. He doesn’t, however, deny that there’s anything wrong with the things his coterie says or does, proving Clinton right by embracing it even more.
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”. You know, because the scientists were all just misunderstanding phenomenon and using that buzzword. 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”. That’s right, forget the Hippocratic Oath or any humanity… if we can’t prove you’re a citizen, you can bleed to death and no ambulance or medical assistance for you! Donald Trump’s America, yet again, ladies and gentlemen.
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. This makes sense, of course, because churches can lose their tax-exempt status if they become political entities.
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 (the alt-right movement had long since named themselves that), 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 (which an obligation for a candidate to be honest would be even better), 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, but considering all of the ties Donald Jr. has to white supremacists on social media, it is hard to give him the benefit of the doubt.
- 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”, he showed he was terribly thin-skinned. 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, three years after).
- 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!” (When he didn’t.) Literally, in a call-in interview with Fox News, he said, “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”. Wonderful. 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 photo in the meme being used without the photographer’s permission... is a refugee. And 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. That's right, his solution to "African American issues" is to bring back strict totalitarian police tactics that created racial discrimination against African Americans. Can anyone really be surprised?
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".
In spite of being a living caricature of a mega-rich, heartless, bloviating heel who steals all of the air out of the room to serve his own ego and become the alpha windbag present… the Republican Party and Fox News thought it would be a great idea if he joined their field of candidates in 2016, and watched a “novelty candidate” who they wanted to drive up ratings for the first few debates snag the whole nomination. They were impotent, watching as he became an instant an obvious detriment to their party’s image, as he says offensive things about women and minorities. The party began having white supremacists associate with them, and the candidate shared their thoughts on his own social media account. And we watched as the GOP began to look like a mad scientist create an unstoppable juggernaut killer robot, and then when it becomes self-aware and goes on an uncontrolled killing spree, seeing them climb all over it desperately trying to remember where they put the “off” switch to shut it down. Reince Priebus, once filled with so much hope for winning back the White House, these days resembles Gob Bluth from Arrested Development.
Seeing Trump wreak havoc upon the GOP during the debates was one thing... seeing the train wreck of a Republican National Convention that he threw will be laughable one day... but it was terrifying to see that for a moment, it actually drew him into a dead heat with Hillary Clinton. Now that the 2016 DNC has reset the polling scoreboard, and Trump's most offensive moments to date (seroiusly, when you start getting around to insulting the families of deceased soldiers and being a d*** to babies, it's like you're trying to complete a full checklist of every group that you haven't offended to catch 'em all like Pokemon)... we cannot help but appreciate the irony that after almost eight years of the GOP trying to convince us that President Obama was some secret "other" in league with foreign powers with a socialist agenda and the goal of creating a dictatorship, that it's the Republican candidate they chose who actually embodies fascism and who suddenly has secret ties to Russian oligarchs.
Well, the polls are starting to look better. But we cannot stress this enough... goddamn it, vote for Hillary Clinton. She's overqualified. She has a list of accomplishments a mile long going back decades, and we can give you scores of reasons why you should vote for her. I'm with her. You should be with her.
The biggest one, though, is obviously, she is not Donald Trump, a proto-fascist, thin-skinned, tiny-fingered maniac without a clue about how to do anything in the world but exploit wealth where he could only for himself. We used to think he's a cartoon villain, now we actually think of him as a threat to all that is right with the world should he be given the most powerful office in the world. Power, by its nature they say, corrupts. What would it do in the hands of a man who is already a revolting, bigoted, self-obsessed stain on our public consciousness?