Category Archives: 2016 President Election

GOP insiders: Polls don’t capture secret Trump vote

Politico reports: Those battleground state polls that paint such a grim picture of Donald Trump’s prospects against Hillary Clinton? Most Republican insiders don’t believe they’re accurately capturing Trump’s true level of support.

That’s according to the POLITICO Caucus — a panel of activists, strategists and operatives in 11 key battleground states. More than seven-in-10 GOP insiders, 71 percent, say the polls understate Trump’s support because voters don’t want to admit to pollsters that they are backing the controversial Republican nominee.

With Trump falling behind in the majority of swing states, an overwhelming polling error may represent his best hope to win next month — and even that may not be enough. At the same time GOP insiders say there are “shy Trump” voters out there who aren’t showing up in the polls, a 59-percent majority still say Clinton would win their state if the election were held today. [Continue reading…]

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In the age of Trump, Muslim voters mobilize

Religion & Politics reports: Equipped with burner phones and laptops, the volunteers took their seats. A dozen voices echoed around the Muslim community space in Alexandria, Virginia, as they cold-called phone numbers from a database. “As-salamu Alaikum,” read the traditional Arabic greeting in their script.

“Are you planning on voting in the upcoming election?” Farheena Mustafa, 22, asked the person on the other line. A recent University of Virginia graduate, Mustafa came to the phone-banking event with two of her sisters.

They came to mobilize Muslim voters, even though Donald Trump may well do that on his own. The Republican presidential nominee has proposed banning Muslim immigration to the United States. He has accused Muslim Americans of harboring terrorists, and he has insulted the Muslim parents of a fallen American soldier. Just a few hours south in Virginia, one of Trump’s steadfast supporters, Liberty University Chancellor Jerry Falwell Jr., has suggested concealed-carry weapons may be the solution to “end those Muslims,” only later clarifying that he meant terrorists.

In northern Virginia, though, the phone bank was about getting out the vote, not telling people how to vote. Still, it was hard to escape Trump. [Continue reading…]

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The man at the center of ‘Bill Clinton Inc.’

The Atlantic reports: Who is Doug Band, and what did he do for Bill Clinton?

A little bit of everything, it turns out.

He helped launch the Clinton Foundation, came up with the idea for the Clinton Global Initiative, brokered deals for paid speeches that enriched Clinton, and then started a private consulting firm called Teneo that made the Foundation, Bill Clinton, and Band himself even wealthier.

All of that became clear in the latest batch of hacked emails released by WikiLeaks, which include messages from Band and a 12-page memo that he wrote both explaining and defending his and his company’s work on Clinton’s behalf. For Hillary Clinton’s campaign, the publication of the Band memo is yet another WikiLeaks-induced headache, as it provides even more detail into the unsavory-if-not-illegal intersection of interests at the heart of her family’s philanthropic work.

Band, now 44, was to Bill Clinton what Huma Abedin has been to Hillary. He started as a junior staffer in the White House straight out of college in the 1990s, and once the Clintons left office in 2001, he never left Bill’s side. [Continue reading…]

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Some Donald Trump supporters call for revolution if Hillary Clinton becomes president

The New York Times reports: Big crowds still mob Donald J. Trump when he comes to town, with fans waiting in long lines to attend his rallies, where they eagerly jeer his Democratic rival and holler happily at his message.

But beneath the cheering, a new emotion is taking hold among some Trump supporters as they grapple with reports predicting that he will lose the election: a dark fear about what will happen if their candidate is denied the White House. Some worry that they will be forgotten, along with their concerns and frustrations. Others believe the nation may be headed for violent conflict.

Jared Halbrook, 25, of Green Bay, Wis., said that if Mr. Trump lost to Hillary Clinton, which he worried would happen through a stolen election, it could lead to “another Revolutionary War.”

“People are going to march on the capitols,” said Mr. Halbrook, who works at a call center. “They’re going to do whatever needs to be done to get her out of office, because she does not belong there.”

“If push comes to shove,” he added, and Mrs. Clinton “has to go by any means necessary, it will be done.” [Continue reading…]

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Jill Stein’s ideology says one thing — her multi-million dollar investment portfolio says another

The Daily Beast reports: According to the financial-disclosure form she filed with the U.S. Office of Government Ethics on March 30, 2016, [Green Party presidential nominee Jill] Stein and her husband, Richard Rohrer, have investments (with the exception of real estate) valued at anywhere from $3,832,050 to $8,505,000.

Stein’s controversial investments include:

Big Carbon. On Oct. 26, 2015, Stein’s campaign sent out a statement calling for Exxon to get the death penalty for its “climate-change fraud.” (it should be noted that Stein has called for the abolition of the death penalty for human beings). She has also repeatedly called for public pension funds to divest from companies in the fossil-fuel industry.

Yet Stein has invested $995,011 to $2.2 million in funds such as the Vanguard 500 fund that maintain significant stakes in Exxon and other energy companies like Chevron, Duke Energy, Conoco Phillips, and Toho Gas, a Japanese company that engages in the sale of natural gas, tar, and coke, a fuel made from coal.

Financial Industry. Like Sen. Bernie Sanders, Stein has consistently denounced the banking industry and Wall Street. She has said that big banks should be nationalized or broken up. And she has refused to agree that there is a stark difference between how the Democrats have regulated the financial-services industry and how Republicans have approached the same task.

Yet Stein has invested roughly $1.2 to $2.65 million in funds like the TIAA-CREF Equity Index that have big stakes in the financial-services industry. Holdings in these funds include big banks like JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup, and Deutsche Bank as major parts of their investment portfolios. Five of the funds that Stein invests in maintain large positions in Wells Fargo, which has come under fire recently amid charges that its employees were pressured to open up fraudulent new accounts for clients.

One of the funds Stein has invested in maintains a significant position in Goldman Sachs bonds. Stein once referred to Goldman Sachs as Hillary Clinton’s best friend. She has also invested in a fund that contains significant investments in mortgage-backed securities, including subprime mortgage-backed securities, and mortgage-backed derivatives. These financial instruments played a significant role in the financial crisis of 2008. [Continue reading…]

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Trump moves to protect his assets as he faces electoral bankruptcy

The New York Times reports: As his poll numbers have declined in the closing weeks of the presidential race, Donald J. Trump has begun to engage in barely veiled promotions of his business brand off the campaign trail, dragging reporters to his marquee properties in between his campaign events.

On Tuesday, Mr. Trump added an abrupt appearance at the Trump National Doral, one of his gilded golf courses and resorts in Florida, ostensibly to demonstrate how many employees he has there and how much they admire him as a boss.

On Wednesday, instead of spending the morning in one of the battleground states where polls show him trailing Hillary Clinton, Mr. Trump planned to attend a ribbon-cutting at his elaborately remade hotel at the Old Post Office on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington.

The stops are a remarkable display of personal promotion by a presidential nominee, raising questions about whether the businessman, who has lived by the mantra that “all publicity is good publicity,” is at least partly casting his eye past the 2016 race, and toward bolstering the brand that bears his name.

In a telephone interview, Mr. Trump rejected such questions and said he was demonstrating his credentials for the presidency at such events by showing the type of efficiencies he would bring to government.

“Today it was about jobs. Tomorrow it’s about being under budget and ahead of schedule,” Mr. Trump said, referring to the Washington hotel.

His critics saw a different motive.

“This is the worst message to send to all of those true and loyal Trump supporters out there who actually did believe in him and actually did have a stake in this election,” said Kevin Madden, a former adviser to Mitt Romney, the 2012 Republican nominee.

“With less than two weeks to go until Election Day,” Mr. Madden added, “Mr. Trump is repaying them by using their campaign to showcase his hotel. He said he wouldn’t let them down, but he already has. They have a right to be disappointed.” [Continue reading…]

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Trump adviser says Israeli settlements are ‘not illegal’

Middle East Eye and agencies reports: Donald Trump’s adviser on Israel said on Wednesday that Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank are not illegal, adding that he believes the candidate agrees with him, putting the pair at odds with much of the world.

Speaking to AFP at a rooftop restaurant on Jerusalem’s Mount Zion after a pro-Trump rally, David Friedman also said the US presidential candidate was “tremendously sceptical” about the prospects for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

About 150 people, including right-wing Israelis and evangelical Christians, attended Wednesday’s Trump rally outside the walls of Jerusalem’s Old City, near the flashpoint Al-Aqsa mosque compound.

The compound is holy to both Muslims and Jews, who refer to it as the Temple Mount. Located in East Jerusalem, it was occupied by Israel in 1967 and later annexed in a move never recognised by the international community.

Asked whether Trump viewed the West Bank as part of Israel, as many far-right Israelis do, Friedman did not answer directly.

“I don’t think he believes that the settlements are illegal,” Friedman said. [Continue reading…]

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Donald Trump’s deep-seated fear of public embarrassment

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The New York Times reports: The intense ambitions and undisciplined behaviors of Mr. Trump have confounded even those close to him, especially as his presidential campaign comes to a tumultuous end, and he confronts the possibility of the most stinging defeat of his life. But in the more than five hours of conversations — the last extensive biographical interviews Mr. Trump granted before running for president — a powerful driving force emerges: his deep-seated fear of public embarrassment.

The recordings reveal a man who is fixated on his own celebrity, anxious about losing his status and contemptuous of those who fall from grace. They capture the visceral pleasure he derives from fighting, his willful lack of interest in history, his reluctance to reflect on his life and his belief that most people do not deserve his respect.

In the interviews, Mr. Trump makes clear just how difficult it is for him to imagine — let alone accept — defeat.

“I never had a failure,” Mr. Trump said in one of the interviews, despite his repeated corporate bankruptcies and business setbacks, “because I always turned a failure into a success.”

When people lose face, Mr. Trump’s reaction is swift and unforgiving.

And when Mr. Trump feels he has been made a fool of, his response can be volcanic. Ivana Trump told Mr. D’Antonio [the author of a biography of Trump called The Truth About Trump] about a Colorado ski vacation she took with Mr. Trump soon after they began dating. The future Mrs. Trump had not told her boyfriend that she was an accomplished skier. As she recalls it, Mr. Trump went down the hill first and waited for her at the bottom:

IVANA TRUMP: So he goes and stops, and he says, “Come on, baby. Come on, baby.” I went up. I went two flips up in the air, two flips in front of him. I disappeared. Donald was so angry, he took off his skis, his ski boots, and walked up to the restaurant. … He could not take it. He could not take it. [Continue reading…]

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Fearing being bullied by Trump, American Bar Association stifled report that called him a ‘libel bully’

The New York Times reports: Alarmed by Donald J. Trump’s record of filing lawsuits to punish and silence his critics, a committee of media lawyers at the American Bar Association commissioned a report on Mr. Trump’s litigation history. The report concluded that Mr. Trump was a “libel bully” who had filed many meritless suits attacking his opponents and had never won in court.

But the bar association refused to publish the report, citing “the risk of the A.B.A. being sued by Mr. Trump.”

David J. Bodney, a former chairman of the media-law committee, said he was baffled by the bar association’s interference in the committee’s journal.

“It is more than a little ironic,” he said, “that a publication dedicated to the exploration of First Amendment issues is subjected to censorship when it seeks to publish an article about threats to free speech.”

In internal communications, the bar association’s leadership, including its general counsel’s office and public relations staff, did not appear to dispute the report’s conclusions. [Continue reading…]

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The definitive compendium of insults made by Donald Trump on Twitter

The New York Times reports: The mixed martial arts fighter Ronda Rousey is “not a nice person.” The golf swing of the actor Samuel L. Jackson is “not athletic.” A lectern in the Oval Office “looks odd,” and the mobile carrier T-Mobile’s service “is terrible.”

These comments are not private thoughts, nor are they the result of an embarrassing hidden camera, an off-the-record comment or a document release. They are public statements made by Donald Trump to his 5.9 million Twitter followers.

We know this because we’ve read, tagged and quoted them all.

The end result is “Donald Trump’s Twitter Insults: The Complete List (So Far).” It’s not a sample of some insults, or just those about his political rivals — though plenty of those exist. It’s the full count — a 100 percent sample, in polling terms — representing our best effort to categorize more than 4,000 tweets Mr. Trump has made since he declared his candidacy in June 2015.

Of those, we found that one in every eight was a personal insult of some kind. [Continue reading…]

Julie Irwin writes: Research shows that one of the primary reasons to denigrate people is to signal membership in a group: They are out, so you are in. People are always looking to belong, and Trump may represent, for some people, a particularly attractive membership opportunity. He is clear about what “his kind” of people are — the winners, the big men on campus.

When he insults people as not having these qualities, he is providing an opportunity for others to affirm themselves by joining him in the insulting chorus. They can call back to him by being insulting to the losers, too. It becomes a signaling contest, and humans engage in this type of behavior all the time, insulting people while other people are watching, chirping on Twitter and at rallies, looking for their groups.

One of my favorite social psychology experiments makes the point: Students in fraternities and sororities who wanted to signal their loyalty were especially likely to denigrate people other fraternities and sororities by judging them as “foolish” or “unintelligent” if the insults were public. The insults are not for the insulted but for the group calling out to them.

This process only works if it is linked with warmth within the group.

On Twitter, Trump is friendly and chatty with people who support him, especially if they try to get his attention by insulting nonbelievers. “Trump pummels his opponents — and the press” one recent tweet said from someone named John to a few hundred followers — and Trump retweeted it to 5.75 million. He commonly quotes ordinary folks’ tweets and says “Thanks!!!!” to them as if they were his best friends. [Continue reading…]

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Clinton’s careful courtship of Muslim voters

The Atlantic reports from Alexandria, Virginia: This Democratic headquarters one warm October night could have been practically anywhere in the country. Volunteers crammed into a dingy, decrepit office suite, complete with fake wood paneling from the era when Hillary Clinton still wore bell-bottoms, filling up every space—crouched over rickety tables or into corners, reciting a script as they called worked through long lists of voters, checking to see if people were supporting Hillary Clinton and whether they’d be willing to volunteer.

The only clue that this was an unusual event was sartorial: Several women wore headscarves, and a man sported a stylish kaffiyeh. The phone bank is one of dozens of Muslims for Hillary events that the Clinton campaign has arranged this year, part of what the campaign contends is an unprecedented effort to court a small but growing population.

On Friday, the Clinton campaign released an ad featuring Khizr Khan, the father of U.S. soldier Humayun Khan, who was slain fighting in Iraq. The ad, set to air in seven battleground states, is notable for its direct invocation of Islam. Telling the story of his son’s death saving comrades, Khan says, “He was 27 years old, and he was a Muslim American. I want to ask Mr. Trump, would my son have a place in your America?”

 

Such an ad would have been unthinkable as recently as four years ago, as Barack Obama grappled with false rumors that he was a secret Muslim. It’s surprising even now, amid a national campaign that has seen direct demonization of Muslims. But Donald Trump’s decision to demonize Islam has created what the Clinton team sees as an opening, leading the Democrat to court Muslim votes more boldly and methodically than any predecessor. [Continue reading…]

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Iran is enjoying the U.S. presidential election

Robin Wright writes: The first season of “House of Cards,” the Netflix series about the demonic American politician Frank Underwood and his duplicitous wife, Claire, recently made its début on Iranian television, just in time for the finale of the American elections. The show has been dubbed in Farsi — as “Khaneh Poushaly,” or “House of Straw” — by a state-run television channel. It ran every night for two weeks. The timing seemed deliberate, and authorized from the top: the Islamic Republic vigorously censors most American programs, and the director of Iran’s broadcasting authority, I.R.I.B., is appointed by the Supreme Leader.

Among hard-liners, the response to the series has been gleeful. It fits their profile of the United States as the Great Satan. Mashregh, a Web site linked to the Revolutionary Guards, commented, “House of Cards has skillfully shown the deception in the complicated political sphere of liberal American civilization, as well as the treason, power-hungriness, promiscuities and crimes behind those ruling in the country.”

Iran’s media has generally been obsessed with the upcoming American contest, even more than with the country’s own Presidential election, scheduled for next May. Mashregh has an entire page devoted to it. For the first time, Iranian television broadcast an American Presidential debate live, in simultaneous translation — the October 9th encounter, in which Donald Trump denied sexually assaulting women and threatened to put Hillary Clinton in prison if he is elected. [Continue reading…]

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Donald Trump’s threat to reject election results alarms scholars

Max Fisher writes: Donald J. Trump’s suggestions that he might reject the results of the American election as illegitimate have unnerved scholars on democratic decline, who say his language echoes that of dictators who seize power by force and firebrand populists who weaken democracy for personal gain.

“To a political scientist who studies authoritarianism, it’s a shock,” said Steven Levitsky, a professor at Harvard. “This is the stuff that we see in Russia and Venezuela and Azerbaijan and Malawi and Bangladesh, and that we don’t see in stable democracies anywhere.”

Throughout October, Mr. Trump has claimed, without evidence, that the vote will be “rigged” and “taken away from us.” At the final presidential debate, he refused to say he would accept the election’s outcome, and later joked at a rally that he would accept the results “if I win.”

In weak democracies around the world, scholars warned Friday, political leaders have used the same language to erode popular faith in democracy — often intending to incite violence that will serve their political aims, and sometimes to undo democracy entirely.

The United States is not at risk of such worst-case scenarios. American democratic norms and institutions are too strong for any one politician to destabilize. But Mr. Trump’s language, the scholars say, follows a similar playbook and could pose real, if less extreme, risks. [Continue reading…]

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Trump Organization is using horribly insecure email servers

Zack Whittaker reports: If you thought Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s private email server was a mess, Donald Trump’s company is running email servers that look like a dumpster fire by comparison.

Security researcher Kevin Beaumont said in a tweet on Monday that the Trump Organization, the parent company of the alleged billionaire’s portfolio of realty, steaks, golf, and hotels, is running a set of email servers that are horribly outdated and long past the end-of-life, meaning they haven’t received security patches in over a year.

Beaumont said he found that the company’s email system is running the decade-old Windows Server 2003 and Internet Information Servers 6, both of which haven’t been supported in over a year.

Both sets of software are so old that Microsoft no longer patches even known security vulnerabilities. Instead, users should upgrade. Patches remain as one of the best ways for preventing hackers from exploiting security flaws.

A spokesperson for Trump, now the Republican presidential candidate, could not be reached on Tuesday. [Continue reading…]

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David Duke applauds his hero, Julian Assange

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Trump can’t just be defeated — he must be humiliated

Dana Millbank writes: The need to deal Trump a humiliating defeat has a sociological basis in the “degradation ceremony,” in which the perpetrator (Trump) is held by denouncers (officeholders and others in positions of influence) to be morally unacceptable, and witnesses (the public) agree that the perpetrator is no longer held in good standing.

Psychologist Wynn Schwartz, who teaches at Harvard Medical School, explained to me that what’s needed to have a successful degradation of Trump is an epic defeat. “If it is lopsided enough,” he said, “you don’t have critical masses of people who feel disenfranchised” or “who feel justified in saying that it was stolen.”

But if Clinton’s victory is narrow, the degradation ceremony fails, because a large chunk of the population feels swindled and remains loyal to Trump. “The margin matters a lot,” Schwartz said.

Trump’s recent actions — talking about a “rigged” election while laying the foundation for a Trump TV network — suggest that he will attempt to defy the degradation ceremony that a loss typically confers. Hence the importance of a landslide.

Arizona would offer an ideal rebuke. Carolyn Goldwater Ross, granddaughter of the conservative icon, introduced Obama on Thursday by saying, “I come from a long line of Republicans and I’ve stayed independent. . . . But this time it’s different.” She submitted that Trump violates her grandfather’s “basic values.”

Apparently, many Arizonans agree. Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, the anti-immigrant icon and Trump backer, is trailing his Democratic opponent by 15 points in polling by the Republic. The newspaper endorsed Clinton, its first embrace of a Democrat for president in its 126-year history. Arizona’s junior Republican senator, Jeff Flake, is an outspoken Trump critic, its senior Republican senator, John McCain, has been attacked by Trump, and former Republican attorney general Grant Woods has endorsed Clinton. [Continue reading…]

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