US Politics Mega-thread - Page 5263

Some of Donald Trump's advisers are discussing an overhaul in how he prepares for his second face-off with Hillary Clinton, and one option being floated internally is asking Chris Christie to take a leading role to get the Republican nominee ready.

The New Jersey governor, a long-time friend of Trump's, is one of "the few" in the billionaire's inner circle who has always been straight with him, and was "brutally honest" about his shortcomings after this week's debate, according to a source familiar with the discussions.

On September 30 2016 08:31 Plansix wrote:
http://www.cnn.com/2016/09/29/politics/donald-trump-debate-chris-christie/



Like, for real? No one else would fall on the sword?

On September 30 2016 08:37 JinDesu wrote:


No you don't understand. It's because Chris Christie is too willing to fall on the sword. Fall on Donald's sword. If you get what I mean.

*wink wink*

On September 30 2016 08:47 hunts wrote:


I heard it's really short, really more of a dagger.

On September 30 2016 09:33 Doodsmack wrote:
"Imagine what America could be if we were one country, under one God, saluting one flag."

- D. Trump, 9/29/16

Trump Foundation lacks the certification required for charities that solicit money

Donald Trump’s charitable foundation — which has been sustained for years by donors outside the Trump family — has never obtained the certification that New York requires before charities can solicit money from the public, according to the state attorney general’s office.

Under the laws in New York, where the Donald J. Trump Foundation is based, any charity that solicits more than $25,000 per year from the public must obtain a special kind of registration beforehand. Charities as large as Trump’s must also submit to a rigorous annual audit that asks — among other things — whether the charity spent any money for the personal benefit of its officers.

If New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman (D) finds that Trump’s foundation raised money in violation of the law, he could order the charity to stop raising money immediately. With a court’s permission, Schneiderman could also force Trump to return money his foundation has already raised.

The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment Thursday.

Everyone but Donald Trump and his most ardent supporters recognize that Donald Trump lost Monday night’s debate. And because of the candidate’s stubborn disbelief in his ability to do anything but win, Trump lost the post-debate period too.

Now he’s doubling down.

Despite warnings from fellow Republicans against insulting a beauty queen he disparaged for gaining weight and launching an attack on Hillary Clinton for her husband’s well-known infidelities, Trump is now directing his surrogates to do just that.

“Mr. Trump has never treated women the way Hillary Clinton and her husband did when they worked to destroy Bill Clinton’s accusers,” reads one of the talking points the campaign sent to surrogates on Thursday as the controversy surrounding the story of former Miss Universe Alicia Machado continued to dominate headlines of the race.

And during a rally Thursday afternoon in Bedford, N.H., Trump himself referenced the scandals of the 1990s that he’s been congratulating himself for not talking about all week. “The Clintons are the sordid past,” he said. “We will be the very bright and clean future.”

For three days since Clinton’s dominant debate performance, Trump and his team have been flailing wildly to change the meta-narrative coming out of the showdown. And they have yet to alight on anything to effectively spin the result, challenge the conventional wisdom that Clinton won or to change the subject to anything less damaging for the GOP nominee.

Inside Trump Tower, his inner circle of advisers has been in turmoil: while some have attempted to reach to the hard-headed candidate by suggesting to reporters that he must prepare more thoroughly for the second debate, others have spit-balled ideas aimed at changing the subject, including a last-minute trip to Israel that might replicate the more presidential optics and media saturation coverage they achieved with last month’s surprise summit with the Mexican president.

Trump himself has reportedly chided aides who have privately acknowledged to reporters that Clinton bested him on the debate stage.

But that private uncertainty and unease about what was so clearly a disappointing performance has oozed into public view. Since the debate Monday night, surrogates and Trump himself have both praised and criticized the moderator, Lester Holt. One of Trump’s closest confidants at the moment, Rudy Giuliani, said immediately after the debate that he’d advise Trump to skip the next two and on Wednesday indulged a conspiracy, propagated by a Russian state-controlled news site, that Clinton might have gotten the questions in advance. And on Thursday, campaign manager Kellyanne Conway said she had indeed told her candidate not to call women “fat pigs” but quickly tried to dismiss his insults as “beside the point” because he in fact supports women.

“With Trump, it’s always the tyranny of the urgent and right now it is he has to have people believe he won, or that if he didn't it was rigged and unfair,” said Rick Tyler, a GOP operative who worked on Ted Cruz’s presidential campaign. “The purpose of having 84 million people watch is to get more people on his campaign; that's winning. In his mind, it's just about winning the debate. The objective is actually winning the election.”

Trump’s backers have been more consistent in their adherence to another fatuous talking point, stating that Trump deserved credit for being “gentlemanly” and even “courageous” for not bringing up the subject of Bill Clinton’s infidelities that they are themselves bringing up, increasingly in less uncertain, veiled terms.

And the candidate has compounded the damage by failing or refusing to recognize the damage done by his assertion that avoiding paying income taxes “makes me smart” and his repetition of comments about how a former Miss Universe “gained a massive amount of weight” after he awarded her crown was “a real problem.”

In reality, both Trump’s tacit references to the Lewinsky scandal and his explicit references to the Miss Universe story—something Clinton’s campaign used knowingly to bait Trump and has since pushed into the news cycle—are likely to prevent him from expanding support among undecided women voters, a bloc that may tip the balance of the election more than any other.