Jim Hauter Brilliant! Exactly what I want to do every time I see and hear the POS.
Marilyn Stykes Now that's what the bully Trump has needed since childhood.
The Official Donald Trump Thread
Jim Hauter Brilliant! Exactly what I want to do every time I see and hear the POS.
Marilyn Stykes Now that's what the bully Trump has needed since childhood.
Saturday Night Live channels final presidential debate as ‘entire planet’ laughs at Donald Trump
BYCHRIS SOMMERFELDT
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
Updated: Sunday, October 23, 2016, 7:37 AM
"Of course I do, I'm completely innocent," Baldwin said. "I'll say it again, no one has more respect for women than I do."
SNL takes on 'worst' debate with stalker Trump, confident Clinton
Echoing what happened during the real debate in Las Vegas on Wednesday, people in the crowd started giggling. But then things went haywire as giggles turned into laughter, which in turn triggered the camera to zoom out so far that it overlooked the entire planet laughing.
The SNL crew took on the third and final presidential debate Saturday.
(NBC)
"Settle down entire planet, settle down," Hanks said.
Earlier in the mock debate, Kate McKinnon, starring as Hillary Clinton, had a "Trump Bingo" moment when Baldwin brought up Trump's bizarre"bad hombres" gaffewhile talking about immigration policy.
"She wants open borders and that is crazy, people are just pouring into the country and a lot of them are just really bad hombres," Baldwin said.
SNL channels Trump’s women in scathing 'Melanianade' song
"Oh, oh, oh, bingo, bingo, bingo," McKinnon yelled excitedly, flashing a bingo board showing that Trump's many and frequent gaffes had her scoring big time.
The whole crowd erupted in laughter when Donald Trump said that no one respects women more than him.
(NBC)
As the mock debate raged on, Hanks eventually got to a sobering moment.
"Mr. Trump, you're probably going to lose," he said.
And Baldwin, admitting something Trump would probably have a hard time doing, blurted out "correct."
While talking about celebrity endorsements, Baldwin took a slight jab at his younger brother, Stephen Baldwin, who recently said hedidn't find his brother's Trump impersonationparticularly funny.
(NBC)
(NBC)
Kate McKinnon flashed her "Trump Bingo" board after Alec Baldwin repeated Alec Baldwin's "bad hombres" gaffe.
"I'm the one with the heavy hitters. I have Sarah Palin, I've got Chachi, and get this, I even got the best Baldwin brother, Stephen Baldwin," he said to cheers from the audience.
Wrapping up the debate, Hanks swapped identities and became a Trump supporter playing a variant of the classic "Jeopardy" game show called "Black Jeopardy."
"Our final jeopardy category is, 'Lives That Matter,'" the mock game show host said.
"I got a lot of things to say about this," Hanks, dressed in a jean jacket and a red "Make America Great Again" cap, said.
After the debate, Hanks swapped identities and became a jean jacket wearing Trump supporter playing "Black Jeopardy."
(NBC)
"Well, it was fun while it lasted," the black game show host said as the end credits rolled over the screen. "We'll play the national anthem and see what happens."
Later in the show, during the "Weekend Updates" segment, Colin Jost ripped into Trump's laundry list of recent scandals, and ended on a note that all Americans can most likely relate to.
"I'm going to miss these debates — they were just such great television," Jost said.
BYCHRIS SOMMERFELDT
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
Updated: Sunday, October 23, 2016, 7:37 AM
- Tweet
"Of course I do, I'm completely innocent," Baldwin said. "I'll say it again, no one has more respect for women than I do."
SNL takes on 'worst' debate with stalker Trump, confident Clinton
Echoing what happened during the real debate in Las Vegas on Wednesday, people in the crowd started giggling. But then things went haywire as giggles turned into laughter, which in turn triggered the camera to zoom out so far that it overlooked the entire planet laughing.
The SNL crew took on the third and final presidential debate Saturday.
(NBC)
"Settle down entire planet, settle down," Hanks said.
Earlier in the mock debate, Kate McKinnon, starring as Hillary Clinton, had a "Trump Bingo" moment when Baldwin brought up Trump's bizarre"bad hombres" gaffewhile talking about immigration policy.
"She wants open borders and that is crazy, people are just pouring into the country and a lot of them are just really bad hombres," Baldwin said.
SNL channels Trump’s women in scathing 'Melanianade' song
"Oh, oh, oh, bingo, bingo, bingo," McKinnon yelled excitedly, flashing a bingo board showing that Trump's many and frequent gaffes had her scoring big time.
The whole crowd erupted in laughter when Donald Trump said that no one respects women more than him.
(NBC)
As the mock debate raged on, Hanks eventually got to a sobering moment.
"Mr. Trump, you're probably going to lose," he said.
And Baldwin, admitting something Trump would probably have a hard time doing, blurted out "correct."
While talking about celebrity endorsements, Baldwin took a slight jab at his younger brother, Stephen Baldwin, who recently said hedidn't find his brother's Trump impersonationparticularly funny.
(NBC)
(NBC)
Kate McKinnon flashed her "Trump Bingo" board after Alec Baldwin repeated Alec Baldwin's "bad hombres" gaffe.
"I'm the one with the heavy hitters. I have Sarah Palin, I've got Chachi, and get this, I even got the best Baldwin brother, Stephen Baldwin," he said to cheers from the audience.
Wrapping up the debate, Hanks swapped identities and became a Trump supporter playing a variant of the classic "Jeopardy" game show called "Black Jeopardy."
"Our final jeopardy category is, 'Lives That Matter,'" the mock game show host said.
"I got a lot of things to say about this," Hanks, dressed in a jean jacket and a red "Make America Great Again" cap, said.
After the debate, Hanks swapped identities and became a jean jacket wearing Trump supporter playing "Black Jeopardy."
(NBC)
"Well, it was fun while it lasted," the black game show host said as the end credits rolled over the screen. "We'll play the national anthem and see what happens."
Later in the show, during the "Weekend Updates" segment, Colin Jost ripped into Trump's laundry list of recent scandals, and ended on a note that all Americans can most likely relate to.
"I'm going to miss these debates — they were just such great television," Jost said.
Last edited:
An Expert Explains What Would Happen if Trump Lost the Election and Didn't Concede
By [URL='http://www.vice.com/author/allie-conti']Allie Conti
Staff Writer
[/URL]
October 20, 2016
Donald Trump during a Republican primary debate in November 2015. Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images
During the final presidential debate on Wednesday, Donald Trump told moderator Chris Wallace that he wouldn't necessarily concede if he lost the race. ""I'll keep you in suspense, OK?" he said, as a million journalists started writing their debate recaps.
As Wallace told Trump, losing graciously and respecting the results of elections is a long tradition in America. Losers always make noises about how important and great the process is—even if they suffer a controversial or close defeat, a la Al Gore, and even if they sympathize with Dick Tuck (seriously that was his name), who after losing the 1966 race for California State Senate quipped, "The voters have spoken, the bastards."
Has anyone ever flat-out refused to concede, and what would happen if someone did? To answer these questions, I called up James McCann, a political scientist at Purdue University who specializes in concession speeches and comparative politics. Here's what he told me:
VICE: Have we ever had a major presidential candidate not concede after losing the election?
James McCann: The concession speech is always given, but there are choices a candidate makes in how to give a concession speech. So one way to do it would be like the Al Gore example. Even when the most unusual thing happens, you show a kind of civil-spiritedness by conceding and very publicly kind of acknowledging the importance of democracy, etc. etc. even if there were irregularities or very unusual things happening during the election and the vote count afterwards. To others, the concession speech is meant to set them up for a later contest, so when you concede, you say, "Yes, I acknowledge we lost, but the fight goes on. Our ideas did not lose. We'll have another day to shine." That kind of thing. And that's very understandable, too. People in public life are careerists, for the most part. And you wanna always think about the next thing.
But Trump's not a careerist that way. He's never held public office.
In Trump's case, I don't know what his next thing would be. He doesn't have the same incentive to be big-hearted. If he says this is gonna be a one-off and he's never gonna run for president again, but if he does want to set himself up for some other professional activity, like start a new media network that could rival Fox [News], then you could see how he would have an incentive to be extremely defiant.
What happens if he just doesn't concede or says the election was rigged?
Say he's claiming fraud or irregularities in the vote or hijacking or espionage or people stuffing ballots. If that's his argument, then there's a heavy burden of proof on that. You can't just say that. You need some evidence if you're gonna be compelling.
I say this as a guy who has been an election observer and is familiar with the system here in the US—it would be extremely hard to have major election fraud. Our system of electioneering is so fragmented. We have this principle of federalism in the United States where it's really on a local level that you see election administration. There can be all manner of errors: A voter, for instance, could mistakenly cast a ballot for a candidate he or she doesn't like. But it's very hard to imagine any systematic violence.
Could he sue the election board, and would that hold up the process?
He could litigate it out and there would be a relevant court depending on the nature of the charges. Everything is subject to litigation if you want to press charges. If Trump wants to engage lawyers in various parts and if he has deep pockets to fund a lot of legal action, we might see a lot of challenges. But you would need evidence at the end of the day. He's sort of litigating this out in the public opinion right now. He's trying to say that the entire world is against him, and it's the mass media. That obviously is not something you litigate. It's just a rhetorical claim.
But there would be no disruption that I could foresee. In fact, the electoral vote is the one that counts. And electors, in principle, at a kind of abstract level, have the freedom to vote however they want. There's an avenue of litigation, I suppose, if Trump wanted to argue about improprieties with the selection of electoral voters or if he wanted to systematically cherry-pick or fight certain state results. It all depends on how the vote ultimately shapes out.
I seriously doubt that [Trump refusing to concede] would be disruptive. What it can do is be very destabilizing. We've already seen unrest, some firebombing, this kind of thing [during this campaign]. So it's possible that the worst-case scenario would be if Trump claims in nonspecific ways that the system was rigged and that he was robbed and encourages people in ways to be violent—then it's a law and order challenge. And I have no doubt the authorities would respond to whatever riot situation would occur.
Is conceding just a symbolic gesture then?
Well a symbolic gesture, I think, is important. It's like when some NFL players don't stand up during the national anthem––that means something, it's conveying important information about an opinion they have and it's getting people to talk. But the consent of the loser to democratic norms is a big deal.
Let's put it this way: If you were a comparative political scientist evaluating the quality of democracy abroad in one of these newer democracies, one of the indicators you'd be on the lookout for is whether the losers stay beaten or whether they militate outside your formal institutions. If you see the latter, that would be indicative of democracy turning into something else––authoritarianism or something bad. There's a ceremonial part of elections, which is I think critically important in terms of maintaining a democratic system, because at the end of the day, there has to be a reservoir of trust and good will and the ability to let bygones be bygones.
By [URL='http://www.vice.com/author/allie-conti']Allie Conti
Staff Writer
October 20, 2016
Donald Trump during a Republican primary debate in November 2015. Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images
During the final presidential debate on Wednesday, Donald Trump told moderator Chris Wallace that he wouldn't necessarily concede if he lost the race. ""I'll keep you in suspense, OK?" he said, as a million journalists started writing their debate recaps.
As Wallace told Trump, losing graciously and respecting the results of elections is a long tradition in America. Losers always make noises about how important and great the process is—even if they suffer a controversial or close defeat, a la Al Gore, and even if they sympathize with Dick Tuck (seriously that was his name), who after losing the 1966 race for California State Senate quipped, "The voters have spoken, the bastards."
Has anyone ever flat-out refused to concede, and what would happen if someone did? To answer these questions, I called up James McCann, a political scientist at Purdue University who specializes in concession speeches and comparative politics. Here's what he told me:
VICE: Have we ever had a major presidential candidate not concede after losing the election?
James McCann: The concession speech is always given, but there are choices a candidate makes in how to give a concession speech. So one way to do it would be like the Al Gore example. Even when the most unusual thing happens, you show a kind of civil-spiritedness by conceding and very publicly kind of acknowledging the importance of democracy, etc. etc. even if there were irregularities or very unusual things happening during the election and the vote count afterwards. To others, the concession speech is meant to set them up for a later contest, so when you concede, you say, "Yes, I acknowledge we lost, but the fight goes on. Our ideas did not lose. We'll have another day to shine." That kind of thing. And that's very understandable, too. People in public life are careerists, for the most part. And you wanna always think about the next thing.
But Trump's not a careerist that way. He's never held public office.
In Trump's case, I don't know what his next thing would be. He doesn't have the same incentive to be big-hearted. If he says this is gonna be a one-off and he's never gonna run for president again, but if he does want to set himself up for some other professional activity, like start a new media network that could rival Fox [News], then you could see how he would have an incentive to be extremely defiant.
What happens if he just doesn't concede or says the election was rigged?
Say he's claiming fraud or irregularities in the vote or hijacking or espionage or people stuffing ballots. If that's his argument, then there's a heavy burden of proof on that. You can't just say that. You need some evidence if you're gonna be compelling.
I say this as a guy who has been an election observer and is familiar with the system here in the US—it would be extremely hard to have major election fraud. Our system of electioneering is so fragmented. We have this principle of federalism in the United States where it's really on a local level that you see election administration. There can be all manner of errors: A voter, for instance, could mistakenly cast a ballot for a candidate he or she doesn't like. But it's very hard to imagine any systematic violence.
Could he sue the election board, and would that hold up the process?
He could litigate it out and there would be a relevant court depending on the nature of the charges. Everything is subject to litigation if you want to press charges. If Trump wants to engage lawyers in various parts and if he has deep pockets to fund a lot of legal action, we might see a lot of challenges. But you would need evidence at the end of the day. He's sort of litigating this out in the public opinion right now. He's trying to say that the entire world is against him, and it's the mass media. That obviously is not something you litigate. It's just a rhetorical claim.
But there would be no disruption that I could foresee. In fact, the electoral vote is the one that counts. And electors, in principle, at a kind of abstract level, have the freedom to vote however they want. There's an avenue of litigation, I suppose, if Trump wanted to argue about improprieties with the selection of electoral voters or if he wanted to systematically cherry-pick or fight certain state results. It all depends on how the vote ultimately shapes out.
I seriously doubt that [Trump refusing to concede] would be disruptive. What it can do is be very destabilizing. We've already seen unrest, some firebombing, this kind of thing [during this campaign]. So it's possible that the worst-case scenario would be if Trump claims in nonspecific ways that the system was rigged and that he was robbed and encourages people in ways to be violent—then it's a law and order challenge. And I have no doubt the authorities would respond to whatever riot situation would occur.
Is conceding just a symbolic gesture then?
Well a symbolic gesture, I think, is important. It's like when some NFL players don't stand up during the national anthem––that means something, it's conveying important information about an opinion they have and it's getting people to talk. But the consent of the loser to democratic norms is a big deal.
Let's put it this way: If you were a comparative political scientist evaluating the quality of democracy abroad in one of these newer democracies, one of the indicators you'd be on the lookout for is whether the losers stay beaten or whether they militate outside your formal institutions. If you see the latter, that would be indicative of democracy turning into something else––authoritarianism or something bad. There's a ceremonial part of elections, which is I think critically important in terms of maintaining a democratic system, because at the end of the day, there has to be a reservoir of trust and good will and the ability to let bygones be bygones.
Trump No Longer Really Running for President
If it wasn't clear before Wednesday night's debate, it should be obvious now that Donald Trump is no longer seriously running for president. He is using his campaign to become the leader of what he calls “our movement”—a white supremacist, nativist, and nationalist crusade—to boost his ego, settle scores (including with many Republicans), and make it impossible for Hillary Clinton to govern. He intends to become America's first celebrity demagogue.
For at least the past month, Trump had realized that he is going to lose the race for president on November 8. Indeed, every day, it looks more and more likely that Clinton will beat him by landslide margins in both the popular vote and the Electoral College.
If he were still running for president, and trying to win 270 Electoral College votes, Trump would be appealing to swing voters in battleground states. But during his performances in all three debates—as well as in his speeches at Trump rallies since the GOP convention—he has appealed entirely to his base of fervent supporters. In the third and final debate Wednesday, he doubled down on his most extremist positions—on abortion and immigration, in particular. By inviting President Obama's Kenyan-born half-brother to attend the event, he was slyly signaling his supporters that he still has ways to promote the racist “birther” myth that Obama was not born in the United States and is not a legitimate president.
As his poll numbers have dropped, Trump has become increasingly inflammatory. After his campaign advisers realized that they could not control him and that he could not control himself—that he was prone to impulsive and self-destructive behavior—they tried to turn his worst character traits into an asset by claiming that they were encouraging "Trump to be Trump." It was all on display on the debate podium at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas. Trump's performance offered no surprises. What Americans saw was the same racist, sexist, thin-skinned, nativist bully—dispensing paranoid conspiracy theories, unable to make a coherent argument, going ballistic whenever Clinton criticized him—that we've watched for more than a year on the campaign trail.
For the past few months, Trump has been using his campaign to set the stage for a new white supremacist right-wing media empire with Breitbart News head Stephen Bannon (his campaign chair) and adviser Roger Ailes (the former Fox News head fired for flagrant sexual assault and harassment). Their goal is to create a media vehicle that will serve as the voice of the right-wing movement Trump intends to lead and to compete with, and outfox, Fox News.
What we witnessed Wednesday night was not a presidential debate but a dress rehearsal for the battle between Trump's right-wing movement and the Clinton administration that will begin on November 9, when Trump refuses to acknowledge Clinton's victory but continues to claim—as he said at the debate—that the election was “rigged” against him. Trump's unprecedented refusal to say that he'd accept the results of the election was the clearest indication that his campaign will morph into an anti-Clinton crusade even before she takes the oath of office in January.
Throughout his campaign, Trump's comments have “normalized” many forms of extremist bigotry, including anti-Semitism, hostility to immigrants and Muslims, attacks on Mexicans and African Americans, insults toward women, slanders against veterans like Senator John McCain, and mocking derision of people with disabilities. He has poisoned the culture by encouraging hate and division. He has encouraged his fervent followers to engage in violence and to threaten and intimidate voters on Election Day.
Trump did not invent this ugly aspect of American society but he has given voice to, galvanized, emboldened, and mobilized it.
When this election is over, he will seek to reconstruct the remnants of his campaign, which he has increasingly referred to as “our movement,” into a political force that will make the Tea Party and Fox News look tame, leveraging the media savvy of Ailes and Bannon, and the financial support of right-wing billionaires like hedge-fund manager Robert Mercer. Whether they can motivate and mobilize Trump's hard-core supporters into an effective political movement is an open question. But surely they will utilize their new media empire to provide Trump with a public stage on which to act out his ego-driven fantasies. He will seek to settle scores with his many enemies, including Republicans who refused to support him, withdrew their support for him, or (like Paul Ryan) failed to fall on their swords for him.
But his biggest target will be Hillary Clinton, whose administration's initiatives he will try to thwart at every turn. He will be a thorn and a tormentor, hoping to put her on the defensive and to rally Clinton haters to pressure Congress to block her Supreme Court nominees and kill her legislative priorities, including raising the minimum wage, expanding Obamacare, and jump-starting jobs with a public infrastructure program.
The closest precedent to what Trump hopes to become is Charles Coughlin, the Michigan-based Roman Catholic “radio priest,” who was the one of first political leaders to use radio to reach a nationwide mass audience. During the Great Depression, Coughlin exploited people's fears and anxieties to advance an anti-Semitic, nativist, isolationist right-wing agenda, as well as his fervent opposition to President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal. He used his radio program to promote anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and to support Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini. At the peak of his influence, 30 million listeners tuned in to his weekly broadcasts.
Coughlin was a dangerous force in America for almost a decade. In 1934, he started a political organization called the National Union for Social Justice and a newspaper called Social Justice to mobilize his followers in elections. But the NUSJ was poorly organized on the local level, and he was unable to translate his media appeal into an effective grassroots organization. By 1939, he was forced off the air.
Like Coughlin, Trump has brilliantly used the mainstream media to gain attention and stoke the fears and anxieties of millions of Americans. His greatest talent is that of a self-promoting publicist, marketing his celebrity TV shows, his hotels and apartments, his beauty pageants, his steaks and clothing lines, and of course, himself. His campaign rallies have been remarkable spectacles filled with zealous true believers.
Surely, after the election, some of Trump's most fervent admirers—many of them already part of white supremacist hate groups, immigrant-bashing militias, anti-abortion zealots, and gun rights fanatics—will join forces with Trump to stoke hatred and dissension at rowdy rallies and online.
But, also like Coughlin, Trump has shown no talent for building a grassroots political operation. Under his three different campaign managers—Corey Lewandowski, Paul Manafort, and Kellyanne Conway—Trump showed no inclination or capacity for developing the ground operation—voter registration efforts, local precinct organizations, and a get-out-the-vote apparatus—that is essential to any successful political campaign. So perhaps, like Father Coughlin, Trump's next incarnation will be more that of a controversial right-wing carnival barker than a real movement leader who can mobilize his followers to protest, disrupt and vote.
Of course, when the election is over, Trump will have other matters to worry about. He will have to spend time in court, before Judge Gonzalo Curiel, defending his phony Trump University con operation. He may have to defend himself against lawsuits brought by women whom he sexually assaulted. He will have to pay attention to his troubled real-estate empire, golf courses, and casinos that are deeply in debt, and perhaps even face boycotts of his businesses by consumers and former corporate partners. Surely he will hand over many of those tasks to his lawyers and his children, so he can devote time to his next career as the leader of a right-wing movement.
Whether Trump can translate his megalomaniac fantasy into political reality remains to be seen. But as America hits the home stretch of this bizarre election season, it is clear that after the votes have been counted, we won't have seen the last of Donald Trump.
http://www.alternet.org/print/election-2016/trump-no-longer-really-running-president
If it wasn't clear before Wednesday night's debate, it should be obvious now that Donald Trump is no longer seriously running for president. He is using his campaign to become the leader of what he calls “our movement”—a white supremacist, nativist, and nationalist crusade—to boost his ego, settle scores (including with many Republicans), and make it impossible for Hillary Clinton to govern. He intends to become America's first celebrity demagogue.
For at least the past month, Trump had realized that he is going to lose the race for president on November 8. Indeed, every day, it looks more and more likely that Clinton will beat him by landslide margins in both the popular vote and the Electoral College.
If he were still running for president, and trying to win 270 Electoral College votes, Trump would be appealing to swing voters in battleground states. But during his performances in all three debates—as well as in his speeches at Trump rallies since the GOP convention—he has appealed entirely to his base of fervent supporters. In the third and final debate Wednesday, he doubled down on his most extremist positions—on abortion and immigration, in particular. By inviting President Obama's Kenyan-born half-brother to attend the event, he was slyly signaling his supporters that he still has ways to promote the racist “birther” myth that Obama was not born in the United States and is not a legitimate president.
As his poll numbers have dropped, Trump has become increasingly inflammatory. After his campaign advisers realized that they could not control him and that he could not control himself—that he was prone to impulsive and self-destructive behavior—they tried to turn his worst character traits into an asset by claiming that they were encouraging "Trump to be Trump." It was all on display on the debate podium at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas. Trump's performance offered no surprises. What Americans saw was the same racist, sexist, thin-skinned, nativist bully—dispensing paranoid conspiracy theories, unable to make a coherent argument, going ballistic whenever Clinton criticized him—that we've watched for more than a year on the campaign trail.
For the past few months, Trump has been using his campaign to set the stage for a new white supremacist right-wing media empire with Breitbart News head Stephen Bannon (his campaign chair) and adviser Roger Ailes (the former Fox News head fired for flagrant sexual assault and harassment). Their goal is to create a media vehicle that will serve as the voice of the right-wing movement Trump intends to lead and to compete with, and outfox, Fox News.
What we witnessed Wednesday night was not a presidential debate but a dress rehearsal for the battle between Trump's right-wing movement and the Clinton administration that will begin on November 9, when Trump refuses to acknowledge Clinton's victory but continues to claim—as he said at the debate—that the election was “rigged” against him. Trump's unprecedented refusal to say that he'd accept the results of the election was the clearest indication that his campaign will morph into an anti-Clinton crusade even before she takes the oath of office in January.
Throughout his campaign, Trump's comments have “normalized” many forms of extremist bigotry, including anti-Semitism, hostility to immigrants and Muslims, attacks on Mexicans and African Americans, insults toward women, slanders against veterans like Senator John McCain, and mocking derision of people with disabilities. He has poisoned the culture by encouraging hate and division. He has encouraged his fervent followers to engage in violence and to threaten and intimidate voters on Election Day.
Trump did not invent this ugly aspect of American society but he has given voice to, galvanized, emboldened, and mobilized it.
When this election is over, he will seek to reconstruct the remnants of his campaign, which he has increasingly referred to as “our movement,” into a political force that will make the Tea Party and Fox News look tame, leveraging the media savvy of Ailes and Bannon, and the financial support of right-wing billionaires like hedge-fund manager Robert Mercer. Whether they can motivate and mobilize Trump's hard-core supporters into an effective political movement is an open question. But surely they will utilize their new media empire to provide Trump with a public stage on which to act out his ego-driven fantasies. He will seek to settle scores with his many enemies, including Republicans who refused to support him, withdrew their support for him, or (like Paul Ryan) failed to fall on their swords for him.
But his biggest target will be Hillary Clinton, whose administration's initiatives he will try to thwart at every turn. He will be a thorn and a tormentor, hoping to put her on the defensive and to rally Clinton haters to pressure Congress to block her Supreme Court nominees and kill her legislative priorities, including raising the minimum wage, expanding Obamacare, and jump-starting jobs with a public infrastructure program.
The closest precedent to what Trump hopes to become is Charles Coughlin, the Michigan-based Roman Catholic “radio priest,” who was the one of first political leaders to use radio to reach a nationwide mass audience. During the Great Depression, Coughlin exploited people's fears and anxieties to advance an anti-Semitic, nativist, isolationist right-wing agenda, as well as his fervent opposition to President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal. He used his radio program to promote anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and to support Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini. At the peak of his influence, 30 million listeners tuned in to his weekly broadcasts.
Coughlin was a dangerous force in America for almost a decade. In 1934, he started a political organization called the National Union for Social Justice and a newspaper called Social Justice to mobilize his followers in elections. But the NUSJ was poorly organized on the local level, and he was unable to translate his media appeal into an effective grassroots organization. By 1939, he was forced off the air.
Like Coughlin, Trump has brilliantly used the mainstream media to gain attention and stoke the fears and anxieties of millions of Americans. His greatest talent is that of a self-promoting publicist, marketing his celebrity TV shows, his hotels and apartments, his beauty pageants, his steaks and clothing lines, and of course, himself. His campaign rallies have been remarkable spectacles filled with zealous true believers.
Surely, after the election, some of Trump's most fervent admirers—many of them already part of white supremacist hate groups, immigrant-bashing militias, anti-abortion zealots, and gun rights fanatics—will join forces with Trump to stoke hatred and dissension at rowdy rallies and online.
But, also like Coughlin, Trump has shown no talent for building a grassroots political operation. Under his three different campaign managers—Corey Lewandowski, Paul Manafort, and Kellyanne Conway—Trump showed no inclination or capacity for developing the ground operation—voter registration efforts, local precinct organizations, and a get-out-the-vote apparatus—that is essential to any successful political campaign. So perhaps, like Father Coughlin, Trump's next incarnation will be more that of a controversial right-wing carnival barker than a real movement leader who can mobilize his followers to protest, disrupt and vote.
Of course, when the election is over, Trump will have other matters to worry about. He will have to spend time in court, before Judge Gonzalo Curiel, defending his phony Trump University con operation. He may have to defend himself against lawsuits brought by women whom he sexually assaulted. He will have to pay attention to his troubled real-estate empire, golf courses, and casinos that are deeply in debt, and perhaps even face boycotts of his businesses by consumers and former corporate partners. Surely he will hand over many of those tasks to his lawyers and his children, so he can devote time to his next career as the leader of a right-wing movement.
Whether Trump can translate his megalomaniac fantasy into political reality remains to be seen. But as America hits the home stretch of this bizarre election season, it is clear that after the votes have been counted, we won't have seen the last of Donald Trump.
http://www.alternet.org/print/election-2016/trump-no-longer-really-running-president
Megyn Kelly’s explosive interview with Newt Gingrich proves those still gunning for Trump are living in some alternate reality
GERSH KUNTZMAN
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
Wednesday, October 26, 2016, 7:57 AM
One of the right wing's biggest stars just stood up and told Donald Trump that the game is over.
And it happened, of all places, on Fox News.
Megyn Kelly's evisceration of Trump-supporter Newt Gingrich last night confirms not only what everyone knows at this point — that American voters have rejected Trump's dark, hateful vision for the country — but also that the last few Trump dead-enders like Gingrich and Rudy Giuliani are living in an alternate universe so distant from Planet Earth that even Fox News can't communicate with them.
Oddly, it was Gingrich who started out accusing Kelly of living in the wrong reality after she reminded him that numerous polls show that Trump is trailing badly and that the Republicans are likely to lose the Senate, too.
Gingrich didn't want to listen to that reality. He even suggested that Trump will win in Pennsylvania, where, as Kelly pointed out, "all the polls" have Trump losing the Keystone State soundly.
Megyn Kelly shut Newt Gingrich down in an interview last night.
(VICTORIA WILL/VICTORIA WILL/INVISION/AP)
"I know, we're living in parallel universes," Gingrich said, suggesting that his is the real one, though Fox's own analysts who have put some red states into the blue column in the days after Trump's debate and "Access Hollywood" debacles.
Once Kelly had gotten under Gingrich's skin, she didn't merely slip in the knife, she plunged it. And he walked right into it because men who think they know everything tend to not realize that they don't.
When Gingrich sputtered that Hillary Clinton is "the most corrupt dishonest person ever nominated by a party," Kelly mocked him.
Trump still abusing women — his wife Melania the latest victim
"She was just as corrupt three weeks ago and three months ago," she said, changing her voice to suggest, "Hey, Newt, find another issue because this one isn't working."
Kelly shut Gingrich down — even when he attempted to remedy the situation by mansplaining.
(FOX NEWS)
Then she continued, her voice rising. "He had a rough first debate. He took the bait on [Miss Universe] Alicia Machado...and the 'Access Hollywood' tape came out which was not produced by Hillary Clinton. That was Trump. On camera. Talking about grabbing women."
Kelly was angry — and not just for herself, but for all women. Gingrich responded in the worst possible way: by mansplaining.
"Oh, I know where you're coming from," he said, condescendingly. "Let me point out something to you." He then went on to complain about the media for "attacking" Trump's just unearthed history of apparent sexual assault and for not going after Clinton when transcripts of some "secret" speeches revealed that she's basically the person we always knew she was.
Kelly wasn't having any of it, reminding Gingrich that if Trump is a "sexual predator" as he boasted on the tape, it's a pretty big story.
11 PHOTOSVIEW GALLERY
The women accusing Donald Trump of sexual assault
Not to Gingrich.
"You are fascinated by sex and you don't care about public policy," he said, suggesting that if a candidate has a plan to cut taxes and strengthen the southern border, it should not matter to the public if he ever raped anyone.
Kelly wasn't buying it.
"I'm not fascinated by sex," she said. "But I am fascinated by protection of women and understanding what we're getting in the Oval Office."
Kelly reminded Gingrich that if Donald Trump is a sexual predator, it’s a pretty big story.
(MARK RALSTON/AFP/GETTY IMAGES)
And it's not the first time that real questions reveal that even Fox's biggest star is seeing this election clearly. Earlier this month,Kelly blasted Trump and her colleague Sean Hannitybecause Trump "will go on 'Hannity' and pretty much only 'Hannity' and will not venture out to the unsafe spaces these days which doesn't exactly expand the tent for either one of them." That jibe came one week after she had observed that Trump was again appearing on Hannity's 10 p.m. echo chamber, "We've got Trump speaking to our own Sean Hannity," she said. "We'll see if he speaks to the journalists in this room after that interview."
Trump never did. And Gingrich is probably regretting that he did, especially after Kelly ended the interview by asking Gingrich to get some help with his "anger issues."
It wasn't merely just fun watching the suddenly vegan Kelly push away the plate of Republican red meat. It was an eight-minute education in the gender gap that Trump's candidacy has only served to widen.
In Kelly's outrage you could also see one small reason why it'll be great to have a woman president — if only because women see things differently than men (especially men like Gingrich, Trump and Giuliani who dump their wives regularly). Every time Gingrich tried to deflect attention from the very real issue of Trump's misogyny, Kelly kept bringing it back to the very real way in which women perceive that misogyny, and, indeed, the larger issue of how they are treated in our society.
Gingrich also took to shouting about Bill Clinton being a sexual predator.
(J. SCOTT APPLEWHITE/AP)
Every time Gingrich shouted, "Why don't you say the words, 'Bill Clinton sexual predator,' Megyn?" he might as well have been shouting, "Stay in the kitchen and bake cookies," "Come on, you know you love it when a powerful man gropes you on an airplane" or "Men deserve better pay for the same job and you know it."
Trump and his ilk didn't get it when Anita Hill revealed how Clarence Thomas created a hostile work environment, and they still don't get it now.
But Megyn Kelly does. And so do voters — except the one's in Newt Gingrich's parallel universe.
GERSH KUNTZMAN
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
Wednesday, October 26, 2016, 7:57 AM
- Tweet
One of the right wing's biggest stars just stood up and told Donald Trump that the game is over.
And it happened, of all places, on Fox News.
Megyn Kelly's evisceration of Trump-supporter Newt Gingrich last night confirms not only what everyone knows at this point — that American voters have rejected Trump's dark, hateful vision for the country — but also that the last few Trump dead-enders like Gingrich and Rudy Giuliani are living in an alternate universe so distant from Planet Earth that even Fox News can't communicate with them.
Oddly, it was Gingrich who started out accusing Kelly of living in the wrong reality after she reminded him that numerous polls show that Trump is trailing badly and that the Republicans are likely to lose the Senate, too.
Gingrich didn't want to listen to that reality. He even suggested that Trump will win in Pennsylvania, where, as Kelly pointed out, "all the polls" have Trump losing the Keystone State soundly.
Megyn Kelly shut Newt Gingrich down in an interview last night.
(VICTORIA WILL/VICTORIA WILL/INVISION/AP)
"I know, we're living in parallel universes," Gingrich said, suggesting that his is the real one, though Fox's own analysts who have put some red states into the blue column in the days after Trump's debate and "Access Hollywood" debacles.
Once Kelly had gotten under Gingrich's skin, she didn't merely slip in the knife, she plunged it. And he walked right into it because men who think they know everything tend to not realize that they don't.
When Gingrich sputtered that Hillary Clinton is "the most corrupt dishonest person ever nominated by a party," Kelly mocked him.
Trump still abusing women — his wife Melania the latest victim
"She was just as corrupt three weeks ago and three months ago," she said, changing her voice to suggest, "Hey, Newt, find another issue because this one isn't working."
Kelly shut Gingrich down — even when he attempted to remedy the situation by mansplaining.
(FOX NEWS)
Then she continued, her voice rising. "He had a rough first debate. He took the bait on [Miss Universe] Alicia Machado...and the 'Access Hollywood' tape came out which was not produced by Hillary Clinton. That was Trump. On camera. Talking about grabbing women."
Kelly was angry — and not just for herself, but for all women. Gingrich responded in the worst possible way: by mansplaining.
"Oh, I know where you're coming from," he said, condescendingly. "Let me point out something to you." He then went on to complain about the media for "attacking" Trump's just unearthed history of apparent sexual assault and for not going after Clinton when transcripts of some "secret" speeches revealed that she's basically the person we always knew she was.
Kelly wasn't having any of it, reminding Gingrich that if Trump is a "sexual predator" as he boasted on the tape, it's a pretty big story.
11 PHOTOSVIEW GALLERY
The women accusing Donald Trump of sexual assault
Not to Gingrich.
"You are fascinated by sex and you don't care about public policy," he said, suggesting that if a candidate has a plan to cut taxes and strengthen the southern border, it should not matter to the public if he ever raped anyone.
Kelly wasn't buying it.
"I'm not fascinated by sex," she said. "But I am fascinated by protection of women and understanding what we're getting in the Oval Office."
Kelly reminded Gingrich that if Donald Trump is a sexual predator, it’s a pretty big story.
(MARK RALSTON/AFP/GETTY IMAGES)
And it's not the first time that real questions reveal that even Fox's biggest star is seeing this election clearly. Earlier this month,Kelly blasted Trump and her colleague Sean Hannitybecause Trump "will go on 'Hannity' and pretty much only 'Hannity' and will not venture out to the unsafe spaces these days which doesn't exactly expand the tent for either one of them." That jibe came one week after she had observed that Trump was again appearing on Hannity's 10 p.m. echo chamber, "We've got Trump speaking to our own Sean Hannity," she said. "We'll see if he speaks to the journalists in this room after that interview."
Trump never did. And Gingrich is probably regretting that he did, especially after Kelly ended the interview by asking Gingrich to get some help with his "anger issues."
It wasn't merely just fun watching the suddenly vegan Kelly push away the plate of Republican red meat. It was an eight-minute education in the gender gap that Trump's candidacy has only served to widen.
In Kelly's outrage you could also see one small reason why it'll be great to have a woman president — if only because women see things differently than men (especially men like Gingrich, Trump and Giuliani who dump their wives regularly). Every time Gingrich tried to deflect attention from the very real issue of Trump's misogyny, Kelly kept bringing it back to the very real way in which women perceive that misogyny, and, indeed, the larger issue of how they are treated in our society.
Gingrich also took to shouting about Bill Clinton being a sexual predator.
(J. SCOTT APPLEWHITE/AP)
Every time Gingrich shouted, "Why don't you say the words, 'Bill Clinton sexual predator,' Megyn?" he might as well have been shouting, "Stay in the kitchen and bake cookies," "Come on, you know you love it when a powerful man gropes you on an airplane" or "Men deserve better pay for the same job and you know it."
Trump and his ilk didn't get it when Anita Hill revealed how Clarence Thomas created a hostile work environment, and they still don't get it now.
But Megyn Kelly does. And so do voters — except the one's in Newt Gingrich's parallel universe.
- With 12 Days Left To The Election, Donald Trump Pledges a "New Deal for Black America"
Jezebel
October 27, 2016, 3:38 am
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Photo:
Donald Trump, an inflated pig stomach full of rotten pierogi, made a desperate plea for the black vote today, telling a largely-white audience at a rally in North Carolina that if elected, he would make a “new deal for black America.”
Trump's latest campaign appearance was clearly an attempt to move the needle with a huge swath of the electorate that he's routinely ignored. The Washington Post
that Trump assured the audience that if elected, he will be black American's “greatest champion.” This curious bit of rhetoric comes only a month after Trump declared his intent to reinstate the terrifically racist and ineffective
policy that unfairly profiled young minorities for years in New York City.
Trump argued that he “will never ever take the African American community for granted. Never, ever.” He also kept the outbursts and the extemporaneity to a minimum. Clearly someone has taken him aside and told him that in the last weeks leading up to this goddamn election, he has to stop whisper-yelling about
and calling on his minions to
.
Trump's narrative about black people in America has been gravely misinformed and
for the entirety of his campaign, waxing rhapsodic at any chance he can get about the “inner cities” and mixing up facts. ABC News
:
At one point Trump said: “58 percent of African-American youth are not currently employed.”
But this number includes black youth who are not legally working age — therefore unable to work even if there were jobs available.
In addition to selling a heady mix of falsehoods and half-truths, Trump also tried once again to pin the blame for all of America's problems on immigrants. “One of the greatest betrayals has been the issue of immigration. Illegal immigration violates the civil rights of African-Americans that's what's been happening,” he said.
Thankfully, all of this horseshit probably won't do a lick of good. The Post reports that Trump is “barely registering” with black voters. According to an ABC News poll released Sunday, Trump has about 3 percent of that vote. Good luck with this last-ditch effort, bud. It's not going to work.
Comments - Sarge Laborn
2016-10-27 11:43
Mother Fu_K You Frump, just take your bigot, Tom crow ass somewhere and hide. You are worse than any deadly infection I know of.
10
applesinurface
2016-10-27 10:49
- Myrna E2016-10-26 23:52
I don't want or need him making any "new deals" for me.
No I won't, George Bush did that, than started a war, put us in a huge recession, than blamed Obama.
92
Andrew McDonald
2016-10-27 9:23
"Black America?" So much for healing divides. There's America, not White America or Black America, just America.
LOOOOONNNNG but interesting article, especially with how Facebook is being used to drum up Trump's support
Inside the Trump Bunker, With 12 Days to Go
Win or lose, the Republican candidate and his inner circle have built a direct marketing operation that could power a TV network—or finish off the GOP.
On Oct. 19, as the third and final presidential debate gets going in Las Vegas, Donald Trump’s Facebook and Twitter feeds are being manned by Brad Parscale, a San Antonio marketing entrepreneur, whose buzz cut and long narrow beard make him look like a mixed martial arts fighter. His Trump tie has been paired with a dark Zegna suit. A lapel pin issued by the Secret Service signals his status. He’s equipped with a dashboard of 400 prewritten Trump tweets. “Command center,” he says, nodding at his laptop.
Parscale
Photographer: Alex Welsh for Bloomberg Businessweek
Parscale is one of the few within Trump’s crew entrusted to tweet on his behalf. He’s sitting at a long table in a double-wide trailer behind the debate arena, cheek to jowl with his fellow Trump staffers and Reince Priebus, chairman of the Republican National Committee. The charged atmosphere and rows of technicians staring raptly at giant TVs and computer screens call to mind NASA on launch day. On the wall, a poster of Julian Assange reads: “Dear Hillary, I miss reading your classified emails.”
10:02 p.m.: Trump, onstage, criticizes Hillary Clinton for accepting foreign money. “Fire it off!” Parscale barks. Instantly, a new Trump tweet appears: “Crooked @HillaryClinton’s foundation is a CRIMINAL ENTERPRISE. Time to #DrainTheSwamp!”
10:04 p.m.: Trump blames Clinton for $6 billion that went missing during her tenure at the State Department (actually a bookkeeping error). “Hit that hard,” shouts Jason Miller, Trump’s senior communications adviser. Parscale already has: “Crooked’s top aides were MIRED in massive conflicts of interest at the State Dept. WE MUST #DrainTheSwamp.”
10:09 p.m.: Trump deploys a carefully rehearsed WikiLeaks attack: “Podesta said some horrible things about you—and he was right.” The trailer erupts. “There it is!” someone shouts. “Push that,” Parscale commands. Within seconds, Trump’s roiling social mediasphere is bestowed with a curated Clinton burn from their leader: “Bernie Sanders on HRC: Bad Judgement [sic]. John Podesta on HRC: Bad Instincts #BigLeagueTruth.”
When the debate wraps, Parscale leaps up, open laptop still in hand, and bolts from the trailer with Priebus and the rest of the senior staff to congratulate Trump as he comes off the stage. In the wings, Parscale joins Steve Bannon, Trump’s Machiavelli and campaign chairman, on leave from Breitbart News Network; Dan Scavino Jr., his social media director; and a clutch of Trump children and their spouses, including Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, whom Parscale considers nearly a brother. Up on stage, Trump had been visibly upset, snapping at Clinton (“nasty woman”) and tearing a page from his notebook. But a moment later, when he emerges from a dark corridor with a phalanx of Secret Service agents, he’s thronged by his worshipful band of advisers, quasi-celebrities, and hangers-on. Parscale, tweeting as he walks, nearly misses him. Trump leans over to whisper into Bannon’s ear, and a Secret Service officer ushers Trump, Bannon, and Parscale toward a row of black SUVs. A moment later, they’re gone. Trump reclaims possession of his virtual self.
Parscale, now tweeting from his own account, celebrates the night’s haul: “HUGE 24hrs of online donations for @realDonaldTrump. 125,000+ unique donors grossing over $9,000,000! Thank you America! #MAGA.”
Featured in Bloomberg Businessweek, Oct. 31-Nov. 6, 2016. Subscribe now.
Photographer: Caroline Tompkins for Bloomberg Businessweek
Almost every public and private metric suggests Trump is headed for a loss, possibly an epic one. His frustrated demeanor on the campaign trail suggests he knows it. Yet even as he nears the end of his presidential run, his team is sowing the seeds of a new enterprise with a direct marketing effort that they insist could still shock the world on Election Day.
Beginning last November, then ramping up in earnest when Trump became the Republican nominee, Kushner quietly built a sprawling digital fundraising database and social media campaign that’s become the locus of his father-in-law’s presidential bid. Trump’s top advisers won’t concede the possibility of defeat, but they’re candid about the value of what they’ve built even after the returns come in—and about Trump’s desire for influence regardless of outcome. “Trump is a builder,” says Bannon, in a rare interview. “And what he’s built is the underlying apparatus for a political movement that’s going to propel us to victory on Nov. 8 and dominate Republican politics after that.”
If Trump wants to strengthen his hold on his base, then his apocalyptic rhetoric on the stump begins to make more sense. Lately he’s sounded less like a candidate seeking to persuade moderates and swing voters and more like the far-right populist leaders who’ve risen throughout Europe. Most Republican Party officials ardently hope he’ll go away quietly if he loses. But given all that his campaign—and Kushner’s group especially—has been doing behind the scenes, it looks likelier that Trump and his lieutenants will stick around. They may emerge as a new media enterprise, an outsider political movement, or perhaps some combination of the two: an American UK Independence Party (UKIP) that will wage war on the Republican Party—or, rather, intensify the war that Trump and Bannon have already begun.
To outsiders, the Trump campaign often appears to be powered by little more than the candidate’s impulses and Twitter feed. But after Trump locked down the GOP nomination by winning Indiana’s primary, Kushner tapped Parscale, a political novice who built web pages for the Trump family’s business and charities, to begin an ambitious digital operation fashioned around a database they named Project Alamo. With Trump atop the GOP ticket, Kushner was eager to grow fast. “When we won the nomination, we decided we were going to do digital fundraising and really ramp this thing up to the next level,” says a senior official. Kushner, this official continued, “reached out to some Silicon Valley people who are kind of covert Trump fans and experts in digital marketing. They taught us about scaling. There’s really not that much of a difference between politics and regular marketing.”
When Bannon joined the campaign in August, Project Alamo’s data began shaping even more of Trump’s political and travel strategy—and especially his fundraising. Trump himself was an avid pupil. Parscale would sit with him on the plane to share the latest data on his mushrooming audience and the $230 million they’ve funneled into his campaign coffers. Today, housed across from a La-Z-Boy Furniture Gallery along Interstate 410 in San Antonio, the digital nerve center of Trump’s operation encompasses more than 100 people, from European data scientists to gun-toting elderly call-center volunteers. They labor in offices lined with Trump iconography and Trump-focused inspirational quotes from Sheriff Joe Arpaio and evangelical leader Jerry Falwell Jr. Until now, Trump has kept this operation hidden from public view. But he granted Bloomberg Businessweekexclusive access to the people, the strategy, the ads, and a large part of the data that brought him to this point and will determine how the final two weeks of the campaign unfold.
“We have three major voter suppression operations under way”
Several things jump out. Despite Trump’s claim that he doesn’t believe the polls, his San Antonio research team spends $100,000 a week on surveys (apart from polls commissioned out of Trump Tower) and has sophisticated models that run daily simulations of the election. The results mirror those of the more reliable public forecasters—in other words, Trump’s staff knows he’s losing. Badly. “Nate Silver’s results have been similar to ours,” says Parscale, referring to the polling analyst and his predictions at FiveThirtyEight, “except they lag by a week or two because he’s relying on public polls.” The campaign knows who it must reach and is still executing its strategy despite the public turmoil: It’s identified 13.5 million voters in 16 battleground states whom it considers persuadable, although the number of voters shrinks daily as they make up their minds.
Trump’s team also knows where its fate will be decided. It’s built a model, the “Battleground Optimizer Path to Victory,” to weight and rank the states that the data team believes are most critical to amassing the 270 electoral votes Trump needs to win the White House. On Oct. 18 they rank as follows: Florida (“If we don’t win, we’re cooked,” says an official), Ohio, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Georgia.
Trump believes he possesses hidden strength that may only materialize at the ballot box. At rallies, he’s begun speculating that the election will be like “Brexit times five,” implying that he’ll upend expectations much as the Brexit vote shocked experts who didn’t believe a majority of Britons would vote to leave the European Union. Trump’s data scientists, including some from the London firm Cambridge Analytica who worked on the “Leave” side of the Brexit initiative, think they’ve identified a small, fluctuating group of people who are reluctant to admit their support for Trump and may be throwing off public polls.
Still, Trump’s reality is plain: He needs a miracle. Back in May, newly anointed, he told Bloomberg Businessweek he would harness “the movement” to challenge Clinton in states Republicans haven’t carried in years: New York, New Jersey, Oregon, Connecticut, California. “I’m going to do phenomenally,” he predicted. Yet neither Trump’s campaign nor the RNC has prioritized registering and mobilizing the 47 million eligible white voters without college degrees who are Trump’s most obvious source of new votes, as FiveThirtyEight analyst David Wasserman noted.
To compensate for this, Trump’s campaign has devised another strategy, which, not surprisingly, is negative. Instead of expanding the electorate, Bannon and his team are trying to shrink it. “We have three major voter suppression operations under way,” says a senior official. They’re aimed at three groups Clinton needs to win overwhelmingly: idealistic white liberals, young women, and African Americans. Trump’s invocation at the debate of Clinton’s WikiLeaks e-mails and support for the Trans-Pacific Partnership was designed to turn off Sanders supporters. The parade of women who say they were sexually assaulted by Bill Clinton and harassed or threatened by Hillary is meant to undermine her appeal to young women. And her 1996 suggestion that some African American males are “super predators” is the basis of a below-the-radar effort to discourage infrequent black voters from showing up at the polls—particularly in Florida.
Campaign staff in Trump Tower.
Photographer: Alex Welsh for Bloomberg Businessweek
On Oct. 24, Trump’s team began placing spots on select African American radio stations. In San Antonio, a young staffer showed off a South Park-style animation he’d created of Clinton delivering the “super predator” line (using audio from her original 1996 sound bite), as cartoon text popped up around her: “Hillary Thinks African Americans are Super Predators.” The animation will be delivered to certain African American voters through Facebook “dark posts”—nonpublic posts whose viewership the campaign controls so that, as Parscale puts it, “only the people we want to see it, see it.” The aim is to depress Clinton’s vote total. “We know because we’ve modeled this,” says the official. “It will dramatically affect her ability to turn these people out.”
The Trump team’s effort to discourage young women by rolling out Clinton accusers and drive down black turnout in Miami’s Little Haiti neighborhood with targeted messages about the Clinton Foundation’s controversial operations in Haiti is an odd gambit. Campaigns spend millions on data science to understand their own potential supporters—to whom they’re likely already credible messengers—but here Trump is speaking to his opponent’s. Furthermore, there’s no scientific basis for thinking this ploy will convince these voters to stay home. It could just as easily end up motivating them.
Regardless of whether this works or backfires, setting back GOP efforts to attract women and minorities even further, Trump won’t come away from the presidential election empty-handed. Although his operation lags previous campaigns in many areas (its ground game, television ad buys, money raised from large donors), it’s excelled at one thing: building an audience. Powered by Project Alamo and data supplied by the RNC and Cambridge Analytica, his team is spending $70 million a month, much of it to cultivate a universe of millions of fervent Trump supporters, many of them reached through Facebook. By Election Day, the campaign expects to have captured 12 million to 14 million e-mail addresses and contact information (including credit card numbers) for 2.5 million small-dollar donors, who together will have ponied up almost $275 million. “I wouldn’t have come aboard, even for Trump, if I hadn’t known they were building this massive Facebook and data engine,” says Bannon. “Facebook is what propelled Breitbart to a massive audience. We know its power.”
Since Trump paid to build this audience with his own campaign funds, he alone will own it after Nov. 8 and can deploy it to whatever purpose he chooses. He can sell access to other campaigns or use it as the basis for a 2020 presidential run. It could become the audience for a Trump TV network. As Bannon puts it: “Trump is an entrepreneur.”
Whatever Trump decides, this group will influence Republican politics going forward. These voters, whom Cambridge Analytica has categorized as “disenfranchised new Republicans,” are younger, more populist and rural—and also angry, active, and fiercely loyal to Trump. Capturing their loyalty was the campaign’s goal all along. It’s why, even if Trump loses, his team thinks it’s smarter than political professionals. “We knew how valuable this would be from the outset,” says Parscale. “We own the future of the Republican Party.”
Like so many Trump die-hards, Parscale, 40, is an up-from-nothing striver who won a place in the Trump firmament by dint of his willingness to serve the family’s needs—and then, when those needs turned to presidential campaigning, wound up inhabiting a position of remarkable authority. He oversees the campaign’s media budget and supervises a large staff of employees and contractors, a greater number than report for duty each day at Trump Tower headquarters. “My loyalty is to the family,” he says. “Donald Trump says ‘Jump’; I say, ‘How high?’ Then I give him my opinion of where I should jump to, and he says, ‘Go do it.’ ”
Parscale was born in a small town outside Topeka, Kan., a self-described “rural jock” whose size—6-foot-8, 240 pounds—won him a basketball scholarship to the University of Texas at San Antonio. When injuries derailed his playing career, his interest turned to business. “The day I graduated, I skipped the ceremony to go straight to California for the dot-com boom,” he says. It was 1999. He became a sales manager for a video streaming company, taught himself programming, and eventually bought some of the company’s intellectual property, in digital video and 3D animation, and struck out on his own. But after the dot-com crash, his company failed, he got divorced, and by 2002 he was back in San Antonio, broke and unemployed.
Parscale and his colleagues in his Trump Tower office.
Photographer: Alex Welsh for Bloomberg Businessweek
He hustled consulting gigs, going door to door and cold-calling local businesses. “My first year, I tapped on shoulders in a bookstore to get my first customers, people who were buying web books, and asked if they needed help,” he says. One day in 2010, the phone rang. It was Kathy Kaye, the new head of Trump International Realty. “She said, ‘Would you like to bid on building the Trump website?’ ” Parscale recalls. “I said yeah. I bid $10,000 on the first website. I think they were shocked how cheap it was. Next thing I know, I’m talking to Ivanka. So they signed a contract with me, and I wrote the website by myself. I told ’em I’d give all the money back if they didn’t like it.”
The Trumps liked it. He eventually built sites for Trump Winery and the Eric Trump Foundation. When Trump launched a presidential exploratory committee, he knew who could build a website for him on the cheap: Parscale charged $1,500.
By then he’d partnered with a local designer and expanded into a design and marketing agency, Giles-Parscale. Trump’s own approach to self-promotion, reinforced by Kushner’s advice, was at odds with the highly targeted logic of the web. “If you’re running a burger shop, you have to let people know that your burgers are good and get them into your shop to buy them,” says a source close to the candidate. “It’s pretty similar with voting: You have to find out what people want and then convince them why your product is the right one.”
A poll map.
Photographer: Alex Welsh for Bloomberg Businessweek
Trump’s digital operation was focused primarily on tracking down the people who already liked his burgers and getting them to buy more. Parscale began toying with a list of registered voters acquired from a nonpartisan database vendor to learn more about who Trump’s backers were. Because the campaign hadn’t cultivated his supporters as donors or volunteers, most of what it knew about them came from requests for tickets to his rallies. After a March event in Chicago devolved into a melee, Parscale decided to stop relying on the ticketing service Eventbrite and build his own tool to accept RSVPs. He says he coded the program himself in two days so eventgoers would have to confirm via mobile phone. The added layer would weed out fraudulent requests placing tickets in protesters’ hands—and also collect supporters’ phone numbers.
Parscale was given a small budget to expand Trump’s base and decided to spend it all on Facebook. He developed rudimentary models, matching voters to their Facebook profiles and relying on that network’s “Lookalike Audiences” to expand his pool of targets. He ultimately placed $2 million in ads across several states, all from his laptop at home, then used the social network’s built-in “brand-lift” survey tool to gauge the effectiveness of his videos, which featured infographic-style explainers about his policy proposals or Trump speaking to the camera. “I always wonder why people in politics act like this stuff is so mystical,” Parscale says. “It’s the same shit we use in commercial, just has fancier names.”
As Kushner, who shares his father-in-law’s disdain for political professionals, became more active in the campaign’s operations, Parscale emerged from among dozens of vendors into a unique role. “Once Jared found Brad,” says a campaign official, “we were able to avoid building a big team and ran a lot of our back end through his office in San Antonio.”
After Trump won the Indiana primary, vanquishing his remaining rivals, Parscale had to integrate his do-it-yourself operation with two established players who would jostle for primacy as supplier of Trump’s data. The first was Cambridge Analytica, on whose board Bannon sits. Among its investors is the hedge fund titan Robert Mercer and his daughter, Rebekah, who were about to become some of the largest donors to the Trump cause. Locations for the candidate’s rallies, long the centerpiece of his media-centric candidacy, are guided by a Cambridge Analytica ranking of the places in a state with the largest clusters of persuadable voters. The other was the Republican National Committee, to which Trump relinquished control over many of its tactical decisions. “I told him he’s going to want to use the RNC once he’s the nominee,” says Newt Gingrich. “Reince has built a real system, and it can be very valuable to him.”
“That willingness to embrace what the RNC built allowed them to harness that movement”
Soon after Trump secured the nomination, a team from the RNC flew to San Antonio to meet Parscale at his favorite Mexican restaurant and discuss what party officials began describing as “the merger.” Priebus boasted then of having put “more than $100 million into data and infrastructure” since Mitt Romney’s 2012 loss. More than 10 percent of that cash went solely to beefing up the RNC’s e-mail list, which now has a dedicated department of a dozen people managing a list of more than 6 million supporters. To win access to them, Trump negotiated a partnership. The party’s online fundraising specialists would use his name and keep 80 percent of the revenue, while Trump’s campaign would get the remainder. “This is exactly what the party needed the RNC to do—building assets and infrastructure and the nominee gets to benefit from it,” says Chief Digital Officer Gerrit Lansing.
Trump’s team, which hadn’t actively raised money during the primaries, was unprepared. “I was put in the position of ‘We need to start fundraising tomorrow,’ ” says Parscale. That turn was so hasty that when, in late June, Trump sent out his first e-mail solicitation, it ended up in recipients’ spam folders 60 percent of the time. Typically marketers in that situation would have begun quietly blasting less important messages from a new server to familiarize spam filters with the sender’s address. Parscale shrugs off the ensuing criticism from technologists. “Should I have set up an e-mail server a month earlier? Possibly,” he says. “We also raised $40 million in two weeks. Woo-hoo, spam rating.”
Parscale was building his own list of Trump supporters, beyond the RNC’s reach. Cambridge Analytica’s statistical models isolated likely supporters whom Parscale bombarded with ads on Facebook, while the campaign bought up e-mail lists from the likes of Gingrich and Tea Party groups to prospect for others. Some of the ads linked directly to a payment page, others—with buttons marked “Stand with Trump” or “Support Trump”—to a sign-up page that asked for a name, address, and online contact information. While his team at Giles-Parscale designed the ads, Parscale invited a variety of companies to set up shop in San Antonio to help determine which social media ads were most effective. Those companies test ad variations against one another—the campaign has ultimately generated 100,000 distinct pieces of creative content—and then roll out the strongest performers to broader audiences. At the same time, Parscale made the vendors, tech companies with names such as Sprinklr and Kenshoo, compete Apprentice-style; those whose algorithms fared worst in drumming up donors lost their contracts. Each time Parscale returned to San Antonio from Trump Tower, he would find that some vendors had been booted from their offices.
Parscale’s department not only paid for itself but also was the largest source of campaign revenue. That endeared it to a candidate stingy with other parts of the budget. When Trump fired his campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, Parscale’s responsibilities grew, then further still when Lewandowski’s replacement, Paul Manafort, flamed out. In June, Parscale, whose prior political experience was a Bexar County tax assessor’s race (his client lost), became Trump’s digital director and, in many ways, the linchpin of his unusual run.
By the time Bannon became chief executive officer, Parscale had balanced the competition between the RNC and Cambridge Analytica, with different sources of data being tapped for the campaign’s fundraising appeals, persuasive communication, and get-out-the-vote contacts. “I’m the only one that hasn’t gained from any of this,” he says pointedly about the data rivalry.
In June, Parscale granted his first national interview, to Wired, to preemptively explain why the Federal Election Commission was about to report that an unknown agency in San Antonio was the Trump campaign’s largest vendor. In August, Giles-Parscale handled $9 million in business from Trump’s campaign; two months later, the company’s total haul had cleared $50 million, most of it money passing through to online ad networks at little markup. Parscale was delivering his services at such a discount that Kushner even worried that the agency’s efforts might have to be classified as an in-kind contribution. “Jared’s a big part of what gave me my power and ability to do what I’ve been doing,” says Parscale, who sees himself as more than just a staffer. “Because you know what I was willing to do? I was willing to do it like family.”
There are signs that Trump’s presidential run has dealt a serious blow to his brand. His inflammatory comments about Mexican “rapists” and demeaning comments about women triggered a flood of busted deals and lost partnerships. Macy’s stopped making Trump-branded menswear, Serta halted its line of mattresses emblazoned with his logo, and celebrity chefs fled his new luxury hotel in Washington. Booking websites show that visits to Trump-branded hotels are down. Win or lose, Trump’s future may well lie in capitalizing on the intense, if limited, political support he has cultivated over the past year.
According to a source close to Trump, the idea of a Trump TV network originated during the Republican primaries as a threat Kushner issued to Roger Ailes when Trump’s inner circle was unhappy with the tenor of Fox News’s coverage. The warring factions eventually reconciled. But Trump became enamored by the power of his draw after five media companies expressed interest. “One thing Jared always tells Donald is that if the New York Times and cable news mattered, he would be at 1 percent in the polls,” says the source. “Trump supporters really don’t have a media outlet where they feel they’re represented—CNN has gone fully against Trump, MSNBC is assumed to be against Trump, and Fox is somewhere in the middle. What we found is that our people have organized incredibly well on the web. Reddit literally had to change their rules because it was becoming all Trump. Growing the digital footprint has really allowed us to take his message directly to the people.”
It’s not clear how much of this digital audience will remain in Trump’s thrall if he loses. But the number should be substantial. “Trump will get 40 percent of the vote, and half that number at least will buy into his claim that the election was rigged and stolen from him,” says Steve Schmidt, John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign chief and an outspoken Trump critic. “That is more than enough people to support a multibillion-dollar media business and a powerful presence in American politics.”
Kushner and Bannon at a Trump rally in Canton, Ohio, on Sept. 14.
Photographer: Alex Welsh for Bloomberg Businessweek
Digital strategists typically value contact lists at $3 to $8 per e-mail, which would price Trump’s list of supporters anywhere from $36 million to $112 million. The Trump enterprise could benefit from it in any number of ways. The easiest move would be for Trump to partner with Bannon’s global Breitbart News Network, which already has a grip on the rising generation of populist Republicans. Along with a new venture, Trump would gain a platform from which to carry on his movement, built upon the millions of names housed in Project Alamo. “This is the pipe that makes the connection between Trump and the people,” says Bannon. “He has an apparatus that connects him to an ever-expanding audience of followers.”
As it happens, this cross-pollination of right-wing populist media and politics is already occurring overseas—and Trump’s influence on it is unmistakable. In early October, the editor-in-chief of Breitbart London, Raheem Kassam, a former adviser to Nigel Farage, announced he would run for leader of UKIP. His slogan: “Make UKIP Great Again.”
The final ignominy for a Republican Party brought low by Trump is that its own digital efforts may undermine its future. The data operation in which Priebus and the RNC invested so heavily has fed into Project Alamo, helping Parscale build Trump’s base. “They brought to the table this movement and people who were willing to donate and activate, and we brought to the table a four-year investment and said we can process that for you,” says Sean Spicer, the RNC’s chief strategist. “That willingness to embrace what the RNC built allowed them to harness that movement.”
If the election results cause the party to fracture, Trump will be better positioned than the RNC to reach this mass of voters because he’ll own the list himself—and Priebus, after all he’s endured, will become just the latest to invest with Trump and wind up poorer for the experience.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-10-27/inside-the-trump-bunker-with-12-days-to-go
Inside the Trump Bunker, With 12 Days to Go
Win or lose, the Republican candidate and his inner circle have built a direct marketing operation that could power a TV network—or finish off the GOP.
On Oct. 19, as the third and final presidential debate gets going in Las Vegas, Donald Trump’s Facebook and Twitter feeds are being manned by Brad Parscale, a San Antonio marketing entrepreneur, whose buzz cut and long narrow beard make him look like a mixed martial arts fighter. His Trump tie has been paired with a dark Zegna suit. A lapel pin issued by the Secret Service signals his status. He’s equipped with a dashboard of 400 prewritten Trump tweets. “Command center,” he says, nodding at his laptop.
Parscale
Photographer: Alex Welsh for Bloomberg Businessweek
Parscale is one of the few within Trump’s crew entrusted to tweet on his behalf. He’s sitting at a long table in a double-wide trailer behind the debate arena, cheek to jowl with his fellow Trump staffers and Reince Priebus, chairman of the Republican National Committee. The charged atmosphere and rows of technicians staring raptly at giant TVs and computer screens call to mind NASA on launch day. On the wall, a poster of Julian Assange reads: “Dear Hillary, I miss reading your classified emails.”
10:02 p.m.: Trump, onstage, criticizes Hillary Clinton for accepting foreign money. “Fire it off!” Parscale barks. Instantly, a new Trump tweet appears: “Crooked @HillaryClinton’s foundation is a CRIMINAL ENTERPRISE. Time to #DrainTheSwamp!”
10:04 p.m.: Trump blames Clinton for $6 billion that went missing during her tenure at the State Department (actually a bookkeeping error). “Hit that hard,” shouts Jason Miller, Trump’s senior communications adviser. Parscale already has: “Crooked’s top aides were MIRED in massive conflicts of interest at the State Dept. WE MUST #DrainTheSwamp.”
10:09 p.m.: Trump deploys a carefully rehearsed WikiLeaks attack: “Podesta said some horrible things about you—and he was right.” The trailer erupts. “There it is!” someone shouts. “Push that,” Parscale commands. Within seconds, Trump’s roiling social mediasphere is bestowed with a curated Clinton burn from their leader: “Bernie Sanders on HRC: Bad Judgement [sic]. John Podesta on HRC: Bad Instincts #BigLeagueTruth.”
When the debate wraps, Parscale leaps up, open laptop still in hand, and bolts from the trailer with Priebus and the rest of the senior staff to congratulate Trump as he comes off the stage. In the wings, Parscale joins Steve Bannon, Trump’s Machiavelli and campaign chairman, on leave from Breitbart News Network; Dan Scavino Jr., his social media director; and a clutch of Trump children and their spouses, including Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, whom Parscale considers nearly a brother. Up on stage, Trump had been visibly upset, snapping at Clinton (“nasty woman”) and tearing a page from his notebook. But a moment later, when he emerges from a dark corridor with a phalanx of Secret Service agents, he’s thronged by his worshipful band of advisers, quasi-celebrities, and hangers-on. Parscale, tweeting as he walks, nearly misses him. Trump leans over to whisper into Bannon’s ear, and a Secret Service officer ushers Trump, Bannon, and Parscale toward a row of black SUVs. A moment later, they’re gone. Trump reclaims possession of his virtual self.
Parscale, now tweeting from his own account, celebrates the night’s haul: “HUGE 24hrs of online donations for @realDonaldTrump. 125,000+ unique donors grossing over $9,000,000! Thank you America! #MAGA.”
Featured in Bloomberg Businessweek, Oct. 31-Nov. 6, 2016. Subscribe now.
Photographer: Caroline Tompkins for Bloomberg Businessweek
Almost every public and private metric suggests Trump is headed for a loss, possibly an epic one. His frustrated demeanor on the campaign trail suggests he knows it. Yet even as he nears the end of his presidential run, his team is sowing the seeds of a new enterprise with a direct marketing effort that they insist could still shock the world on Election Day.
Beginning last November, then ramping up in earnest when Trump became the Republican nominee, Kushner quietly built a sprawling digital fundraising database and social media campaign that’s become the locus of his father-in-law’s presidential bid. Trump’s top advisers won’t concede the possibility of defeat, but they’re candid about the value of what they’ve built even after the returns come in—and about Trump’s desire for influence regardless of outcome. “Trump is a builder,” says Bannon, in a rare interview. “And what he’s built is the underlying apparatus for a political movement that’s going to propel us to victory on Nov. 8 and dominate Republican politics after that.”
If Trump wants to strengthen his hold on his base, then his apocalyptic rhetoric on the stump begins to make more sense. Lately he’s sounded less like a candidate seeking to persuade moderates and swing voters and more like the far-right populist leaders who’ve risen throughout Europe. Most Republican Party officials ardently hope he’ll go away quietly if he loses. But given all that his campaign—and Kushner’s group especially—has been doing behind the scenes, it looks likelier that Trump and his lieutenants will stick around. They may emerge as a new media enterprise, an outsider political movement, or perhaps some combination of the two: an American UK Independence Party (UKIP) that will wage war on the Republican Party—or, rather, intensify the war that Trump and Bannon have already begun.
To outsiders, the Trump campaign often appears to be powered by little more than the candidate’s impulses and Twitter feed. But after Trump locked down the GOP nomination by winning Indiana’s primary, Kushner tapped Parscale, a political novice who built web pages for the Trump family’s business and charities, to begin an ambitious digital operation fashioned around a database they named Project Alamo. With Trump atop the GOP ticket, Kushner was eager to grow fast. “When we won the nomination, we decided we were going to do digital fundraising and really ramp this thing up to the next level,” says a senior official. Kushner, this official continued, “reached out to some Silicon Valley people who are kind of covert Trump fans and experts in digital marketing. They taught us about scaling. There’s really not that much of a difference between politics and regular marketing.”
When Bannon joined the campaign in August, Project Alamo’s data began shaping even more of Trump’s political and travel strategy—and especially his fundraising. Trump himself was an avid pupil. Parscale would sit with him on the plane to share the latest data on his mushrooming audience and the $230 million they’ve funneled into his campaign coffers. Today, housed across from a La-Z-Boy Furniture Gallery along Interstate 410 in San Antonio, the digital nerve center of Trump’s operation encompasses more than 100 people, from European data scientists to gun-toting elderly call-center volunteers. They labor in offices lined with Trump iconography and Trump-focused inspirational quotes from Sheriff Joe Arpaio and evangelical leader Jerry Falwell Jr. Until now, Trump has kept this operation hidden from public view. But he granted Bloomberg Businessweekexclusive access to the people, the strategy, the ads, and a large part of the data that brought him to this point and will determine how the final two weeks of the campaign unfold.
“We have three major voter suppression operations under way”
Several things jump out. Despite Trump’s claim that he doesn’t believe the polls, his San Antonio research team spends $100,000 a week on surveys (apart from polls commissioned out of Trump Tower) and has sophisticated models that run daily simulations of the election. The results mirror those of the more reliable public forecasters—in other words, Trump’s staff knows he’s losing. Badly. “Nate Silver’s results have been similar to ours,” says Parscale, referring to the polling analyst and his predictions at FiveThirtyEight, “except they lag by a week or two because he’s relying on public polls.” The campaign knows who it must reach and is still executing its strategy despite the public turmoil: It’s identified 13.5 million voters in 16 battleground states whom it considers persuadable, although the number of voters shrinks daily as they make up their minds.
Trump’s team also knows where its fate will be decided. It’s built a model, the “Battleground Optimizer Path to Victory,” to weight and rank the states that the data team believes are most critical to amassing the 270 electoral votes Trump needs to win the White House. On Oct. 18 they rank as follows: Florida (“If we don’t win, we’re cooked,” says an official), Ohio, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Georgia.
Trump believes he possesses hidden strength that may only materialize at the ballot box. At rallies, he’s begun speculating that the election will be like “Brexit times five,” implying that he’ll upend expectations much as the Brexit vote shocked experts who didn’t believe a majority of Britons would vote to leave the European Union. Trump’s data scientists, including some from the London firm Cambridge Analytica who worked on the “Leave” side of the Brexit initiative, think they’ve identified a small, fluctuating group of people who are reluctant to admit their support for Trump and may be throwing off public polls.
Still, Trump’s reality is plain: He needs a miracle. Back in May, newly anointed, he told Bloomberg Businessweek he would harness “the movement” to challenge Clinton in states Republicans haven’t carried in years: New York, New Jersey, Oregon, Connecticut, California. “I’m going to do phenomenally,” he predicted. Yet neither Trump’s campaign nor the RNC has prioritized registering and mobilizing the 47 million eligible white voters without college degrees who are Trump’s most obvious source of new votes, as FiveThirtyEight analyst David Wasserman noted.
To compensate for this, Trump’s campaign has devised another strategy, which, not surprisingly, is negative. Instead of expanding the electorate, Bannon and his team are trying to shrink it. “We have three major voter suppression operations under way,” says a senior official. They’re aimed at three groups Clinton needs to win overwhelmingly: idealistic white liberals, young women, and African Americans. Trump’s invocation at the debate of Clinton’s WikiLeaks e-mails and support for the Trans-Pacific Partnership was designed to turn off Sanders supporters. The parade of women who say they were sexually assaulted by Bill Clinton and harassed or threatened by Hillary is meant to undermine her appeal to young women. And her 1996 suggestion that some African American males are “super predators” is the basis of a below-the-radar effort to discourage infrequent black voters from showing up at the polls—particularly in Florida.
Campaign staff in Trump Tower.
Photographer: Alex Welsh for Bloomberg Businessweek
On Oct. 24, Trump’s team began placing spots on select African American radio stations. In San Antonio, a young staffer showed off a South Park-style animation he’d created of Clinton delivering the “super predator” line (using audio from her original 1996 sound bite), as cartoon text popped up around her: “Hillary Thinks African Americans are Super Predators.” The animation will be delivered to certain African American voters through Facebook “dark posts”—nonpublic posts whose viewership the campaign controls so that, as Parscale puts it, “only the people we want to see it, see it.” The aim is to depress Clinton’s vote total. “We know because we’ve modeled this,” says the official. “It will dramatically affect her ability to turn these people out.”
The Trump team’s effort to discourage young women by rolling out Clinton accusers and drive down black turnout in Miami’s Little Haiti neighborhood with targeted messages about the Clinton Foundation’s controversial operations in Haiti is an odd gambit. Campaigns spend millions on data science to understand their own potential supporters—to whom they’re likely already credible messengers—but here Trump is speaking to his opponent’s. Furthermore, there’s no scientific basis for thinking this ploy will convince these voters to stay home. It could just as easily end up motivating them.
Regardless of whether this works or backfires, setting back GOP efforts to attract women and minorities even further, Trump won’t come away from the presidential election empty-handed. Although his operation lags previous campaigns in many areas (its ground game, television ad buys, money raised from large donors), it’s excelled at one thing: building an audience. Powered by Project Alamo and data supplied by the RNC and Cambridge Analytica, his team is spending $70 million a month, much of it to cultivate a universe of millions of fervent Trump supporters, many of them reached through Facebook. By Election Day, the campaign expects to have captured 12 million to 14 million e-mail addresses and contact information (including credit card numbers) for 2.5 million small-dollar donors, who together will have ponied up almost $275 million. “I wouldn’t have come aboard, even for Trump, if I hadn’t known they were building this massive Facebook and data engine,” says Bannon. “Facebook is what propelled Breitbart to a massive audience. We know its power.”
Since Trump paid to build this audience with his own campaign funds, he alone will own it after Nov. 8 and can deploy it to whatever purpose he chooses. He can sell access to other campaigns or use it as the basis for a 2020 presidential run. It could become the audience for a Trump TV network. As Bannon puts it: “Trump is an entrepreneur.”
Whatever Trump decides, this group will influence Republican politics going forward. These voters, whom Cambridge Analytica has categorized as “disenfranchised new Republicans,” are younger, more populist and rural—and also angry, active, and fiercely loyal to Trump. Capturing their loyalty was the campaign’s goal all along. It’s why, even if Trump loses, his team thinks it’s smarter than political professionals. “We knew how valuable this would be from the outset,” says Parscale. “We own the future of the Republican Party.”
Like so many Trump die-hards, Parscale, 40, is an up-from-nothing striver who won a place in the Trump firmament by dint of his willingness to serve the family’s needs—and then, when those needs turned to presidential campaigning, wound up inhabiting a position of remarkable authority. He oversees the campaign’s media budget and supervises a large staff of employees and contractors, a greater number than report for duty each day at Trump Tower headquarters. “My loyalty is to the family,” he says. “Donald Trump says ‘Jump’; I say, ‘How high?’ Then I give him my opinion of where I should jump to, and he says, ‘Go do it.’ ”
Parscale was born in a small town outside Topeka, Kan., a self-described “rural jock” whose size—6-foot-8, 240 pounds—won him a basketball scholarship to the University of Texas at San Antonio. When injuries derailed his playing career, his interest turned to business. “The day I graduated, I skipped the ceremony to go straight to California for the dot-com boom,” he says. It was 1999. He became a sales manager for a video streaming company, taught himself programming, and eventually bought some of the company’s intellectual property, in digital video and 3D animation, and struck out on his own. But after the dot-com crash, his company failed, he got divorced, and by 2002 he was back in San Antonio, broke and unemployed.
Parscale and his colleagues in his Trump Tower office.
Photographer: Alex Welsh for Bloomberg Businessweek
He hustled consulting gigs, going door to door and cold-calling local businesses. “My first year, I tapped on shoulders in a bookstore to get my first customers, people who were buying web books, and asked if they needed help,” he says. One day in 2010, the phone rang. It was Kathy Kaye, the new head of Trump International Realty. “She said, ‘Would you like to bid on building the Trump website?’ ” Parscale recalls. “I said yeah. I bid $10,000 on the first website. I think they were shocked how cheap it was. Next thing I know, I’m talking to Ivanka. So they signed a contract with me, and I wrote the website by myself. I told ’em I’d give all the money back if they didn’t like it.”
The Trumps liked it. He eventually built sites for Trump Winery and the Eric Trump Foundation. When Trump launched a presidential exploratory committee, he knew who could build a website for him on the cheap: Parscale charged $1,500.
By then he’d partnered with a local designer and expanded into a design and marketing agency, Giles-Parscale. Trump’s own approach to self-promotion, reinforced by Kushner’s advice, was at odds with the highly targeted logic of the web. “If you’re running a burger shop, you have to let people know that your burgers are good and get them into your shop to buy them,” says a source close to the candidate. “It’s pretty similar with voting: You have to find out what people want and then convince them why your product is the right one.”
A poll map.
Photographer: Alex Welsh for Bloomberg Businessweek
Trump’s digital operation was focused primarily on tracking down the people who already liked his burgers and getting them to buy more. Parscale began toying with a list of registered voters acquired from a nonpartisan database vendor to learn more about who Trump’s backers were. Because the campaign hadn’t cultivated his supporters as donors or volunteers, most of what it knew about them came from requests for tickets to his rallies. After a March event in Chicago devolved into a melee, Parscale decided to stop relying on the ticketing service Eventbrite and build his own tool to accept RSVPs. He says he coded the program himself in two days so eventgoers would have to confirm via mobile phone. The added layer would weed out fraudulent requests placing tickets in protesters’ hands—and also collect supporters’ phone numbers.
Parscale was given a small budget to expand Trump’s base and decided to spend it all on Facebook. He developed rudimentary models, matching voters to their Facebook profiles and relying on that network’s “Lookalike Audiences” to expand his pool of targets. He ultimately placed $2 million in ads across several states, all from his laptop at home, then used the social network’s built-in “brand-lift” survey tool to gauge the effectiveness of his videos, which featured infographic-style explainers about his policy proposals or Trump speaking to the camera. “I always wonder why people in politics act like this stuff is so mystical,” Parscale says. “It’s the same shit we use in commercial, just has fancier names.”
As Kushner, who shares his father-in-law’s disdain for political professionals, became more active in the campaign’s operations, Parscale emerged from among dozens of vendors into a unique role. “Once Jared found Brad,” says a campaign official, “we were able to avoid building a big team and ran a lot of our back end through his office in San Antonio.”
After Trump won the Indiana primary, vanquishing his remaining rivals, Parscale had to integrate his do-it-yourself operation with two established players who would jostle for primacy as supplier of Trump’s data. The first was Cambridge Analytica, on whose board Bannon sits. Among its investors is the hedge fund titan Robert Mercer and his daughter, Rebekah, who were about to become some of the largest donors to the Trump cause. Locations for the candidate’s rallies, long the centerpiece of his media-centric candidacy, are guided by a Cambridge Analytica ranking of the places in a state with the largest clusters of persuadable voters. The other was the Republican National Committee, to which Trump relinquished control over many of its tactical decisions. “I told him he’s going to want to use the RNC once he’s the nominee,” says Newt Gingrich. “Reince has built a real system, and it can be very valuable to him.”
“That willingness to embrace what the RNC built allowed them to harness that movement”
Soon after Trump secured the nomination, a team from the RNC flew to San Antonio to meet Parscale at his favorite Mexican restaurant and discuss what party officials began describing as “the merger.” Priebus boasted then of having put “more than $100 million into data and infrastructure” since Mitt Romney’s 2012 loss. More than 10 percent of that cash went solely to beefing up the RNC’s e-mail list, which now has a dedicated department of a dozen people managing a list of more than 6 million supporters. To win access to them, Trump negotiated a partnership. The party’s online fundraising specialists would use his name and keep 80 percent of the revenue, while Trump’s campaign would get the remainder. “This is exactly what the party needed the RNC to do—building assets and infrastructure and the nominee gets to benefit from it,” says Chief Digital Officer Gerrit Lansing.
Trump’s team, which hadn’t actively raised money during the primaries, was unprepared. “I was put in the position of ‘We need to start fundraising tomorrow,’ ” says Parscale. That turn was so hasty that when, in late June, Trump sent out his first e-mail solicitation, it ended up in recipients’ spam folders 60 percent of the time. Typically marketers in that situation would have begun quietly blasting less important messages from a new server to familiarize spam filters with the sender’s address. Parscale shrugs off the ensuing criticism from technologists. “Should I have set up an e-mail server a month earlier? Possibly,” he says. “We also raised $40 million in two weeks. Woo-hoo, spam rating.”
Parscale was building his own list of Trump supporters, beyond the RNC’s reach. Cambridge Analytica’s statistical models isolated likely supporters whom Parscale bombarded with ads on Facebook, while the campaign bought up e-mail lists from the likes of Gingrich and Tea Party groups to prospect for others. Some of the ads linked directly to a payment page, others—with buttons marked “Stand with Trump” or “Support Trump”—to a sign-up page that asked for a name, address, and online contact information. While his team at Giles-Parscale designed the ads, Parscale invited a variety of companies to set up shop in San Antonio to help determine which social media ads were most effective. Those companies test ad variations against one another—the campaign has ultimately generated 100,000 distinct pieces of creative content—and then roll out the strongest performers to broader audiences. At the same time, Parscale made the vendors, tech companies with names such as Sprinklr and Kenshoo, compete Apprentice-style; those whose algorithms fared worst in drumming up donors lost their contracts. Each time Parscale returned to San Antonio from Trump Tower, he would find that some vendors had been booted from their offices.
Parscale’s department not only paid for itself but also was the largest source of campaign revenue. That endeared it to a candidate stingy with other parts of the budget. When Trump fired his campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, Parscale’s responsibilities grew, then further still when Lewandowski’s replacement, Paul Manafort, flamed out. In June, Parscale, whose prior political experience was a Bexar County tax assessor’s race (his client lost), became Trump’s digital director and, in many ways, the linchpin of his unusual run.
By the time Bannon became chief executive officer, Parscale had balanced the competition between the RNC and Cambridge Analytica, with different sources of data being tapped for the campaign’s fundraising appeals, persuasive communication, and get-out-the-vote contacts. “I’m the only one that hasn’t gained from any of this,” he says pointedly about the data rivalry.
In June, Parscale granted his first national interview, to Wired, to preemptively explain why the Federal Election Commission was about to report that an unknown agency in San Antonio was the Trump campaign’s largest vendor. In August, Giles-Parscale handled $9 million in business from Trump’s campaign; two months later, the company’s total haul had cleared $50 million, most of it money passing through to online ad networks at little markup. Parscale was delivering his services at such a discount that Kushner even worried that the agency’s efforts might have to be classified as an in-kind contribution. “Jared’s a big part of what gave me my power and ability to do what I’ve been doing,” says Parscale, who sees himself as more than just a staffer. “Because you know what I was willing to do? I was willing to do it like family.”
There are signs that Trump’s presidential run has dealt a serious blow to his brand. His inflammatory comments about Mexican “rapists” and demeaning comments about women triggered a flood of busted deals and lost partnerships. Macy’s stopped making Trump-branded menswear, Serta halted its line of mattresses emblazoned with his logo, and celebrity chefs fled his new luxury hotel in Washington. Booking websites show that visits to Trump-branded hotels are down. Win or lose, Trump’s future may well lie in capitalizing on the intense, if limited, political support he has cultivated over the past year.
According to a source close to Trump, the idea of a Trump TV network originated during the Republican primaries as a threat Kushner issued to Roger Ailes when Trump’s inner circle was unhappy with the tenor of Fox News’s coverage. The warring factions eventually reconciled. But Trump became enamored by the power of his draw after five media companies expressed interest. “One thing Jared always tells Donald is that if the New York Times and cable news mattered, he would be at 1 percent in the polls,” says the source. “Trump supporters really don’t have a media outlet where they feel they’re represented—CNN has gone fully against Trump, MSNBC is assumed to be against Trump, and Fox is somewhere in the middle. What we found is that our people have organized incredibly well on the web. Reddit literally had to change their rules because it was becoming all Trump. Growing the digital footprint has really allowed us to take his message directly to the people.”
It’s not clear how much of this digital audience will remain in Trump’s thrall if he loses. But the number should be substantial. “Trump will get 40 percent of the vote, and half that number at least will buy into his claim that the election was rigged and stolen from him,” says Steve Schmidt, John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign chief and an outspoken Trump critic. “That is more than enough people to support a multibillion-dollar media business and a powerful presence in American politics.”
Kushner and Bannon at a Trump rally in Canton, Ohio, on Sept. 14.
Photographer: Alex Welsh for Bloomberg Businessweek
Digital strategists typically value contact lists at $3 to $8 per e-mail, which would price Trump’s list of supporters anywhere from $36 million to $112 million. The Trump enterprise could benefit from it in any number of ways. The easiest move would be for Trump to partner with Bannon’s global Breitbart News Network, which already has a grip on the rising generation of populist Republicans. Along with a new venture, Trump would gain a platform from which to carry on his movement, built upon the millions of names housed in Project Alamo. “This is the pipe that makes the connection between Trump and the people,” says Bannon. “He has an apparatus that connects him to an ever-expanding audience of followers.”
As it happens, this cross-pollination of right-wing populist media and politics is already occurring overseas—and Trump’s influence on it is unmistakable. In early October, the editor-in-chief of Breitbart London, Raheem Kassam, a former adviser to Nigel Farage, announced he would run for leader of UKIP. His slogan: “Make UKIP Great Again.”
The final ignominy for a Republican Party brought low by Trump is that its own digital efforts may undermine its future. The data operation in which Priebus and the RNC invested so heavily has fed into Project Alamo, helping Parscale build Trump’s base. “They brought to the table this movement and people who were willing to donate and activate, and we brought to the table a four-year investment and said we can process that for you,” says Sean Spicer, the RNC’s chief strategist. “That willingness to embrace what the RNC built allowed them to harness that movement.”
If the election results cause the party to fracture, Trump will be better positioned than the RNC to reach this mass of voters because he’ll own the list himself—and Priebus, after all he’s endured, will become just the latest to invest with Trump and wind up poorer for the experience.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-10-27/inside-the-trump-bunker-with-12-days-to-go
Donald Trump supporter in Iowa arrested for voter fraud, as Trump continues to call election 'rigged' against him
BYCHRIS SOMMERFELDT
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
Updated: Saturday, October 29, 2016, 6:17 AM
Terri Rone was arrested on first-degree election misconduct charges after trying to vote for the GOP nominee at two separate polling stations.
(DES MOINES REGISTER DATA CENTRAL)
Des-Moines Register.
Rote, a registered Republican, first showed up to the Polk County Election Office to submit an early ballot, and shortly thereafter went to a county satellite voting location with a second ballot. The voter fraud offense she was booked on is a Class D felony that could land her in jail for up to five years if convicted.
She was initially being held at the Polk County Jail on a $5,000 bond, but was later released, according to records.
Here are five things more likely to occur than voter fraud
View image on Twitter
Follow
Leigh Munsil✔@leighmunsil
Terri Rote plans to caucus tonight for@realDonaldTrumpdown on the east side of Des Moines
5:36 PM - 1 Feb 2016
Rote’s voter fraud arrest comes as the man she voted for is doubling-down on claims that the election is “rigged.” Trump has repeatedly refused to say whether he would accept the outcome of the election if he ends up not winning, which political experts say could have very serious – and violent – consequences.
Early voting in the Hawkeye State started on Sept. 29, and Polk County alone had reported three cases of suspected voter fraud as of Saturday. Rote was however the only one to be arrested.
Atweet from Februaryshowed Rote toting a Trump sign with a caption saying she was planning on caucusing for the Republican nominee.
Polk County alone had reported three cases of suspected voter fraud as of Saturday. Rote was however the only one to be arrested.
(KCCI 8 NEWS)
The election fraudster’sFacebook pagefeatures numerous blatantly racist posts as well as a slew of grammatically challenged pro-Trump rants.
Trump wins trouble-plagued Nevada GOP caucuses
“You black lives doesn’t matter (sic),” she wrote in a post sharing a newscast from the riots in Charlotte, N.C. after the fatal police-involved shooting of a black man there in last month.
“Run their assess over (sic),” she captioned another post sharing a video of more Charlotte protesters.
BYCHRIS SOMMERFELDT
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
Updated: Saturday, October 29, 2016, 6:17 AM
- Tweet
Terri Rone was arrested on first-degree election misconduct charges after trying to vote for the GOP nominee at two separate polling stations.
(DES MOINES REGISTER DATA CENTRAL)
Des-Moines Register.
Rote, a registered Republican, first showed up to the Polk County Election Office to submit an early ballot, and shortly thereafter went to a county satellite voting location with a second ballot. The voter fraud offense she was booked on is a Class D felony that could land her in jail for up to five years if convicted.
She was initially being held at the Polk County Jail on a $5,000 bond, but was later released, according to records.
Here are five things more likely to occur than voter fraud
View image on Twitter
Follow
Leigh Munsil✔@leighmunsilTerri Rote plans to caucus tonight for@realDonaldTrumpdown on the east side of Des Moines
5:36 PM - 1 Feb 2016
Rote’s voter fraud arrest comes as the man she voted for is doubling-down on claims that the election is “rigged.” Trump has repeatedly refused to say whether he would accept the outcome of the election if he ends up not winning, which political experts say could have very serious – and violent – consequences.
Early voting in the Hawkeye State started on Sept. 29, and Polk County alone had reported three cases of suspected voter fraud as of Saturday. Rote was however the only one to be arrested.
Atweet from Februaryshowed Rote toting a Trump sign with a caption saying she was planning on caucusing for the Republican nominee.
Polk County alone had reported three cases of suspected voter fraud as of Saturday. Rote was however the only one to be arrested.
(KCCI 8 NEWS)
The election fraudster’sFacebook pagefeatures numerous blatantly racist posts as well as a slew of grammatically challenged pro-Trump rants.
Trump wins trouble-plagued Nevada GOP caucuses
“You black lives doesn’t matter (sic),” she wrote in a post sharing a newscast from the riots in Charlotte, N.C. after the fatal police-involved shooting of a black man there in last month.
“Run their assess over (sic),” she captioned another post sharing a video of more Charlotte protesters.
Media
WATCH: Louis CK’s EPIC Answer on Trump vs. Hillary
By Grant Stern
Posted on November 2, 2016
Conan O’Brien asked comedian Louis CK who he’s choosing between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump in this years election, his answer was amazing! He said:
“I’m going to vote for Hillary because… I think she’s great! It’s not a lesser of two evils. I think she’s great, she’s really talented and I think she’s super smart, I would take her over anybody else that would do it. To me it’s really exciting to have the first mother in the White House, it’s not just about the first woman, it’s about the first mom. Because a mother she’s got it! A mother just does IT. She feeds you, and teaches you, she protects you. She takes care of shit.”
“We’ve had 240 years of fathers. Father after father. Bald Father. Fat Father. Every kind of Father. Fathers are ok. I’m a dad, you’re a dad. A GREAT father can give his kids about 40% of their needs. Any mother, even a not even trying mother can give 200%!”
Watch the rest here, because the ending is truly the best part:
WATCH: Louis CK’s EPIC Answer on Trump vs. Hillary
By Grant Stern
Posted on November 2, 2016
Conan O’Brien asked comedian Louis CK who he’s choosing between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump in this years election, his answer was amazing! He said:
“I’m going to vote for Hillary because… I think she’s great! It’s not a lesser of two evils. I think she’s great, she’s really talented and I think she’s super smart, I would take her over anybody else that would do it. To me it’s really exciting to have the first mother in the White House, it’s not just about the first woman, it’s about the first mom. Because a mother she’s got it! A mother just does IT. She feeds you, and teaches you, she protects you. She takes care of shit.”
“We’ve had 240 years of fathers. Father after father. Bald Father. Fat Father. Every kind of Father. Fathers are ok. I’m a dad, you’re a dad. A GREAT father can give his kids about 40% of their needs. Any mother, even a not even trying mother can give 200%!”
Watch the rest here, because the ending is truly the best part:
dkos diary...
Sure, Donald Trump has connections to the Russian mafia—but don’t forget his ties to the plain old American variety. Those connections included deals with mob-owned concrete companies to build Trump Tower.
No other candidate for the White House this year has anything close to Trump’s record of repeated social and business dealings with mobsters, swindlers, and other crooks.
Many of Trump’s mob connections come from his billion-dollar failure in Atlantic City. Among underworld figures frequenting Trump casinos was Robert LiButti, who was closely connected to Mafia boss John Gotti.
Libutti was banned from New Jersey casinos because of his ties to organized crime, but that ban didn’t keep Trump from taking care of the mobster. Trump’s Atlantic City casinos had to pay $650,000 in fines for repeatedly violating the ban and accommodating LiButti. Donald Trump has testified frequently that he didn’t know LiButti, but then, Donald Trump doesn’t seem to understand the concept of recording.
A newly uncovered video appears to contradict Donald Trump’s claim that he never knew a high-stakes gambler who was banned from New Jersey casinos for alleged ties to organized crime. ... according to his daughter, Edith Creamer, who also attended the event. “We were his guests,” she told Yahoo News in a text message this week.
The video shows Trump and LiButti side by side, but the relationship went a lot deeper than just being in the same place. Why were Trump’s casinos fined? Not just for serving LiButti. They were fined for serving up racism and sexism on demand.
The video could raise fresh questions about two separate investigations by casino regulators that led to the huge fines levied in 1991. In one of those cases, Trump’s hotel was fined $200,000 for violating state anti-discrimination laws. Investigators found that the casino accommodated LiButti’s demand — couched in what one state official described as the “vilest” language, including racial and obscene slurs — that blacks and women be kept away from him at the gambling tables. Trump was never questioned as part of the state’s investigation, files reviewed by Yahoo News show.
Trump’s casino was willing to exclude women and minorities at the request of a mafioso. That’s charming. And while Trump has denied being a pal of the mobster, there are plenty of others who know better.
Creamer, LiButti’s daughter, said then the casino mogul was a “liar,” adding that “it pisses me off that he denies knowing my father.” In fact, she said, her father gambled millions of dollars at the Trump Plaza, flew frequently on Trump’s private Super Puma helicopter and partied aboard his yacht.
The relationship between Trump and LiButti even stretched into a business deal … one that ended in a typical manner for a Donald Trump deal.
Jack O’Donnell, former president of Trump Plaza, said that Trump and LiButti even did a business deal together. During a trip the two of them took aboard Trump’s private helicopter, Trump agreed to pay $500,000 for one of LiButti’s prized thoroughbreds — a racehorse he promptly renamed “D.J. Trump.”
How did that turn out? Because we haven’t heard Trump bragging about his horse, and a winning horse is something Trump would definitely brag about.
But when the horse later went lame, Trump “reneged” on the deal, O’Donnell said.
Ah. Of course he did. While the relationship may have survived Trump’s typical reluctance to part with actual dollars, what soured the relationship between Don and don was even more typical for Trump.
… the mogul “lavished gifts” on LiButti, while also trying to seduce Creamer, who was married at the time. The mogul’s advances toward Creamer enraged LiButti, who, in Johnston’s account, threatened Trump, saying: “Donald, I’ll f***ing pull your balls from your legs.”
In a nutshell, Donald Trump violated the law to hang with a mobster, served up racism and sexism on request, reneged on a business deal, and tried to seduce a married woman.
In Donald Trump land that’s called Tuesday. Unfortunately, the press has the same attitude.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2016/...g-emerges-and-this-time-it-s-a-mob-connection
Sure, Donald Trump has connections to the Russian mafia—but don’t forget his ties to the plain old American variety. Those connections included deals with mob-owned concrete companies to build Trump Tower.
No other candidate for the White House this year has anything close to Trump’s record of repeated social and business dealings with mobsters, swindlers, and other crooks.
Many of Trump’s mob connections come from his billion-dollar failure in Atlantic City. Among underworld figures frequenting Trump casinos was Robert LiButti, who was closely connected to Mafia boss John Gotti.
Libutti was banned from New Jersey casinos because of his ties to organized crime, but that ban didn’t keep Trump from taking care of the mobster. Trump’s Atlantic City casinos had to pay $650,000 in fines for repeatedly violating the ban and accommodating LiButti. Donald Trump has testified frequently that he didn’t know LiButti, but then, Donald Trump doesn’t seem to understand the concept of recording.
A newly uncovered video appears to contradict Donald Trump’s claim that he never knew a high-stakes gambler who was banned from New Jersey casinos for alleged ties to organized crime. ... according to his daughter, Edith Creamer, who also attended the event. “We were his guests,” she told Yahoo News in a text message this week.
The video shows Trump and LiButti side by side, but the relationship went a lot deeper than just being in the same place. Why were Trump’s casinos fined? Not just for serving LiButti. They were fined for serving up racism and sexism on demand.
The video could raise fresh questions about two separate investigations by casino regulators that led to the huge fines levied in 1991. In one of those cases, Trump’s hotel was fined $200,000 for violating state anti-discrimination laws. Investigators found that the casino accommodated LiButti’s demand — couched in what one state official described as the “vilest” language, including racial and obscene slurs — that blacks and women be kept away from him at the gambling tables. Trump was never questioned as part of the state’s investigation, files reviewed by Yahoo News show.
Trump’s casino was willing to exclude women and minorities at the request of a mafioso. That’s charming. And while Trump has denied being a pal of the mobster, there are plenty of others who know better.
Creamer, LiButti’s daughter, said then the casino mogul was a “liar,” adding that “it pisses me off that he denies knowing my father.” In fact, she said, her father gambled millions of dollars at the Trump Plaza, flew frequently on Trump’s private Super Puma helicopter and partied aboard his yacht.
The relationship between Trump and LiButti even stretched into a business deal … one that ended in a typical manner for a Donald Trump deal.
Jack O’Donnell, former president of Trump Plaza, said that Trump and LiButti even did a business deal together. During a trip the two of them took aboard Trump’s private helicopter, Trump agreed to pay $500,000 for one of LiButti’s prized thoroughbreds — a racehorse he promptly renamed “D.J. Trump.”
How did that turn out? Because we haven’t heard Trump bragging about his horse, and a winning horse is something Trump would definitely brag about.
But when the horse later went lame, Trump “reneged” on the deal, O’Donnell said.
Ah. Of course he did. While the relationship may have survived Trump’s typical reluctance to part with actual dollars, what soured the relationship between Don and don was even more typical for Trump.
… the mogul “lavished gifts” on LiButti, while also trying to seduce Creamer, who was married at the time. The mogul’s advances toward Creamer enraged LiButti, who, in Johnston’s account, threatened Trump, saying: “Donald, I’ll f***ing pull your balls from your legs.”
In a nutshell, Donald Trump violated the law to hang with a mobster, served up racism and sexism on request, reneged on a business deal, and tried to seduce a married woman.
In Donald Trump land that’s called Tuesday. Unfortunately, the press has the same attitude.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2016/...g-emerges-and-this-time-it-s-a-mob-connection
Donald J. Trump tells a massive, whopping, flagrant, blatant, complete lie about the way President Obama handled one of his supporters
Reconstruction
Reconstruction refers to the period following the Civil War of rebuilding the United States. It was a time of great pain and endless questions. On what terms would the Confederacy be allowed back into the Union? Who would establish the terms, Congress or the President?
Reconstruction [ushistory.org]
Reconstruction refers to the period following the Civil War of rebuilding the United States. It was a time of great pain and endless questions. On what terms would the Confederacy be allowed back into the Union? Who would establish the terms, Congress or the President?
Reconstruction [ushistory.org]
David Duke is a white nationalist who unsuccessfully ran for Louisiana Senate. | AP Photo
David Duke: Trump win a great victory for 'our people'
By Adam Cancryn
11/09/16 02:57 AM EST
Share on Facebook Share on Twitter
Former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke is calling Donald Trump's electoral victory "one of the most exciting nights of my life."
Duke, a white nationalist who unsuccessfully ran for Louisiana Senate, tweeted early Wednesday that his supporters played a major part in paving Trump's road to the presidency.
"Make no mistake about it, our people have played a HUGE role in electing Trump!" he wrote.
Trump faced criticism early on in his candidacy for failing to denounce the KKK and disavow Duke, who had endorsed Trump for president. But more recently, the Trump campaign made several attempts to distance itself from the former KKK grand wizard, with Eric Trump saying earlier this month that Duke "deserves a bullet."
THIS WAS QUOTED
He was elected by white mostly uneducated or high school graduates in the Midwest and South. Look at the map demographics depicting red states voting Trump. There are extreme instances of unemployment there due to manufacturing jobs losses exacerbating class and racial divisions. There was also a substantially low voter turnout amongst Blacks AND Hispanics. Probably due to the strategic propaganda that neither candidate would be beneficial to them leading to 3rd party balloting. This was the masterplan set in motion a long time ago. The South Has Risen......
President Trump Gets Himself A Fancy New 'Beast' Limousine When He Takes Office
Patrick George
Yesterday 5:00pm
Filed to: Presidential Limo
34.9K
2384
Photo credit Brian Williams/SpiedBilde
When he takes the oath of office on January 20, President Donald Trump won’t just do so with the abject horror of half the country—he’ll do it with a fancy new limousine, too. The replacement for President Obama’s General Motors-built armored car known as “The Beast” has been in development for nearly two years and it’s expected to debut at Trump’s inauguration.
This Will Be The Next Presidential Limousine
Barring a military coup d’etat like they have in other countries, the U.S. will have selected a new … Read more
We don’t know exactly what the new presidential limousine will look like, except that it is again a Cadillac-branded vehicle on a heavy truck frame that this time is expected to wear the new front grille you see on the XT5 and CT6. (There’s historical precedent for Trump getting Cadillac to build crazy cars for him, you know.) The outgoing car debuted in 2009 for Obama’s inauguration.
Despite the face change, we shouldn’t expect any truly radical alterations. Autoweek reports this limousine version will largely be a repeat of the 2009 limousine on the inside, with a 2+3+2 layout, heavy armor and various emergency security features. It may also get an adaptive suspension this time.
As Fox News notes, the current car’s specs are shrouded in secrecy, but it’s more truck than car, weighing in between 15,000 and 20,000 pounds and able to take a rocket-propelled grenade hit or IED blast. The cars cost about $1.5 million each. GM was reportedly paid at least $15.8 million to develop the new cars, which have been seen in testing this year.
Something something yuuuuuge, bigly, the greatest thing you’ve ever seen, etc.
Patrick George
Yesterday 5:00pm
Filed to: Presidential Limo
34.9K
2384
Photo credit Brian Williams/SpiedBilde
When he takes the oath of office on January 20, President Donald Trump won’t just do so with the abject horror of half the country—he’ll do it with a fancy new limousine, too. The replacement for President Obama’s General Motors-built armored car known as “The Beast” has been in development for nearly two years and it’s expected to debut at Trump’s inauguration.
This Will Be The Next Presidential Limousine
Barring a military coup d’etat like they have in other countries, the U.S. will have selected a new … Read more
We don’t know exactly what the new presidential limousine will look like, except that it is again a Cadillac-branded vehicle on a heavy truck frame that this time is expected to wear the new front grille you see on the XT5 and CT6. (There’s historical precedent for Trump getting Cadillac to build crazy cars for him, you know.) The outgoing car debuted in 2009 for Obama’s inauguration.
Despite the face change, we shouldn’t expect any truly radical alterations. Autoweek reports this limousine version will largely be a repeat of the 2009 limousine on the inside, with a 2+3+2 layout, heavy armor and various emergency security features. It may also get an adaptive suspension this time.
As Fox News notes, the current car’s specs are shrouded in secrecy, but it’s more truck than car, weighing in between 15,000 and 20,000 pounds and able to take a rocket-propelled grenade hit or IED blast. The cars cost about $1.5 million each. GM was reportedly paid at least $15.8 million to develop the new cars, which have been seen in testing this year.
Something something yuuuuuge, bigly, the greatest thing you’ve ever seen, etc.
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In this powerful monologue from Saturday Night Live, world-famous comedian Dave Chappelle speaks on the results of this week’s shocking election results and gives an important perspective on how black Americans were sadly unsurprised by the results.
Touching on a wide range of subjects from the mass shootings that continue to rob our nation of so many innocent souls to the Black Lives Matter movement, Chappelle wields his trademark wit and irreverence like a rapier, deftly making light of serious issues but still laying down some profound truths that all of us need to hear right now.
His praise for President Obama shone through and presented a painful contrast between the our President and his replacement. “Trump went to see Obama last week. Did you see Trump’s face afterwards? Trump got son’d. Trump looked shook!”
But it was his recounting of a recent party, mostly of black attendees, at the White House that really stood out.
“And I saw how happy everybody was. These people who had been historically disenfranchised. And it made me feel hopeful. And it made me feel proud to be an American. And it made me very happy about the prospects of our country. And in that spirit, I’m wishing Donald Trump luck. And I’m gonna give him a chance. And we, the historically disenfranchised, demand he give us one too.”
After the election, a racial reckoning: Whites backed Trump, and not for economic reasons
BYRON HOWELL
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
Sunday, November 13, 2016, 5:00 AM
Stop pretending race didn’t matter
(JEFF KOWALSKY/AFP/GETTY IMAGES)
Calif. student gives ‘deportation’ letters to minority classmates
Election night was like the unexpected death of a loved one, she said.
As for me, I have hope: that the election of Trump will bring racial and cultural minorities together and will help them gain political power as they assert themselves in self-protective ways.
151 PHOTOSVIEW GALLERY
Protests erupt around the country after Donald Trump is elected president
The campuses of the city’s public colleges are becoming “safe spaces” for otherwise marginalized students who can emote and grow during the Trump years. One black student spoke of a social media exchange that devastated him. A white acquaintance from high school, now a Trumpite, told him black people should not be upset about having been slaves. The black student teetered between shock and anger as he spoke.
Many of us, especially older ones, understand that this country has been about race since its founding. Clinton, not a radical when it comes to black interests, has called slavery America’s “original sin.” It’s a sin for which the country has tried to offer penance, as in 2008 and 2012 when it elected Barack Obama to the presidency. But the atonement quickly dissolved.
Mass. postal worker hurls Trump-inspired insults at Hispanic man
The insults directed at Obama were remarkable. In 2009 a Republican congressman shouted “You lie!” to the President, as the executive was speaking from a podium at a joint session of legislators. Giggling with delight, Trump began flinging the “birther” meme, suggesting Obama was not born in the United States, and therefore an illegitimate occupant of the office.
The U.S. media committed a professional crime of nonfeasance in this past election cycle. It failed to tell us how determinative race would be as an issue. Yes, sure, the pollsters blew it. But so did journalists.
This purely racial aspect of white America’s embrace of Trump became evident on Election Day. It was all in the exit polls.
President-elect Donald Trump meets with President Obama during an update on transition planning in the Oval Office at the White House on November 10, 2016.
(JIM WATSON/AFP/GETTY IMAGES)
We learned that it was not just about poor whites who lost jobs making cars or working in coal mines. That’s what we had been led to believe. No, exit polls showed that, in fact, Trump got more support from the white upper classes than the lower ones. He did better than Clinton with Americans making $100,000 or more a year. Clinton did better than Trump among the poorer white voters.
Nearly 1,000 anti-Trump protesters march in NYC, 11 arrested
So much for the pervasive nonsense that educated whites would reject the race-baiter as only the ignorant yelled their support for him.
We’ll be forced to reckon with what this reveals about New York City, too. Some of my white students have said that many of their neighbors and relatives are Trump loyalists. They acknowledge especially strong fervor in Italian communities in the southern part of Brooklyn and on Staten Island. Blacks, especially, feel confirmed in their belief that many workaday New Yorkers are anti-black.
But take my word, this will produce positive change. Black, brown and gay New Yorkers will coalesce as a new force in New York City and around the nation. The U.S. Census Bureau says racial and ethnic minorities are now a majority of children under the age of 5.
In the long run, Trump will not succeed.
‘Million Women March’ planned for Donald Trump’s inauguration
Howell is an English and journalism professor at Brooklyn College.
BYRON HOWELL
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
Sunday, November 13, 2016, 5:00 AM
- Tweet
Stop pretending race didn’t matter
(JEFF KOWALSKY/AFP/GETTY IMAGES)
Calif. student gives ‘deportation’ letters to minority classmates
Election night was like the unexpected death of a loved one, she said.
As for me, I have hope: that the election of Trump will bring racial and cultural minorities together and will help them gain political power as they assert themselves in self-protective ways.
151 PHOTOSVIEW GALLERY
Protests erupt around the country after Donald Trump is elected president
The campuses of the city’s public colleges are becoming “safe spaces” for otherwise marginalized students who can emote and grow during the Trump years. One black student spoke of a social media exchange that devastated him. A white acquaintance from high school, now a Trumpite, told him black people should not be upset about having been slaves. The black student teetered between shock and anger as he spoke.
Many of us, especially older ones, understand that this country has been about race since its founding. Clinton, not a radical when it comes to black interests, has called slavery America’s “original sin.” It’s a sin for which the country has tried to offer penance, as in 2008 and 2012 when it elected Barack Obama to the presidency. But the atonement quickly dissolved.
Mass. postal worker hurls Trump-inspired insults at Hispanic man
The insults directed at Obama were remarkable. In 2009 a Republican congressman shouted “You lie!” to the President, as the executive was speaking from a podium at a joint session of legislators. Giggling with delight, Trump began flinging the “birther” meme, suggesting Obama was not born in the United States, and therefore an illegitimate occupant of the office.
The U.S. media committed a professional crime of nonfeasance in this past election cycle. It failed to tell us how determinative race would be as an issue. Yes, sure, the pollsters blew it. But so did journalists.
This purely racial aspect of white America’s embrace of Trump became evident on Election Day. It was all in the exit polls.
President-elect Donald Trump meets with President Obama during an update on transition planning in the Oval Office at the White House on November 10, 2016.
(JIM WATSON/AFP/GETTY IMAGES)
We learned that it was not just about poor whites who lost jobs making cars or working in coal mines. That’s what we had been led to believe. No, exit polls showed that, in fact, Trump got more support from the white upper classes than the lower ones. He did better than Clinton with Americans making $100,000 or more a year. Clinton did better than Trump among the poorer white voters.
Nearly 1,000 anti-Trump protesters march in NYC, 11 arrested
So much for the pervasive nonsense that educated whites would reject the race-baiter as only the ignorant yelled their support for him.
We’ll be forced to reckon with what this reveals about New York City, too. Some of my white students have said that many of their neighbors and relatives are Trump loyalists. They acknowledge especially strong fervor in Italian communities in the southern part of Brooklyn and on Staten Island. Blacks, especially, feel confirmed in their belief that many workaday New Yorkers are anti-black.
But take my word, this will produce positive change. Black, brown and gay New Yorkers will coalesce as a new force in New York City and around the nation. The U.S. Census Bureau says racial and ethnic minorities are now a majority of children under the age of 5.
In the long run, Trump will not succeed.
‘Million Women March’ planned for Donald Trump’s inauguration
Howell is an English and journalism professor at Brooklyn College.