Tag: politics

Donald Trump is making both Fox News and the RNC his bitches. Like a boss:

Monday’s Republican presidential primary debate has been canceled after GOP front-runner Donald Trump declined to participate, citing a scheduling conflict.

“On Feb. 20, the Republican National Committee announced that a GOP presidential primary debate would be held on March 21 in Salt Lake City. They offered that debate to Fox News Channel to host, provided there were enough candidates actively campaigning,” Fox News Executive Vice President Michael Clemente said in a statement.

“This morning, Donald Trump announced he would not be participating in the debate. Shortly afterward, John Kasich’s campaign announced that without Trump at the debate, Kasich would not participate. Ted Cruz has expressed a willingness to debate Trump or Kasich — or both. But obviously, there needs to be more than one participant. So the Salt Lake City debate is cancelled,” Clemente said.

So much for the idea of a brokered convention. At this rate, if Donald Trump decides not to show up for the Republican National Convention, they’ll cancel that too.

Scott Adams explains the situation from the Master Persuader perspective:

Trump could frame Clinton as anti-male without ever saying “anti-male.” The exact words matter less than the concept. But the words do need to be catchy in some way, so everyone wants to repeat them.

My gut feeling is that men will abandon Clinton every day from now until November unless Trump murders a baby on live television. Otherwise, I think Trump wins easily with men.

But women are the interesting wild card in this scenario. For the sake of discussion, let’s say half of Clinton’s female supporters have a grudge against men. That seems about right if you consider all the attention on gender discrimination. Now add to that all the abusive relationships women have experienced, both personally and professionally, and you have plenty of reasons for women to be anti-male, even if only subconsciously.

But the hypothetical half of women that do not have a grudge against men would run like the wind to avoid being labelled anti-male. It goes to identity. And identity is always the strongest level of persuasion. The only way to beat it is with dirty tricks or a stronger identity play.

Trump is well on his way to owning the identities of American, Alpha Males, and Women Who Like Alpha Males. Clinton is well on her way to owning the identities of angry women, beta males, immigrants, and disenfranchised minorities.

If this were poker, which hand looks stronger to you for a national election?

I think Trump will crush Hillary myself, but not based on any particular communication tactics. Hillary is a ridiculously corrupt member of a corrupt elite who is a terrible candidate almost entirely dependent upon a) the Clinton machine clearing the path for her and b) her opponents refusing to hit her because she’s a girl. So to speak.

Trump knows how the machines work and he’s not even remotely hesitant to launch both rhetorical and dialectical attacks on anyone. Hillary has a glass jaw, she doesn’t handle criticism well, and I expect she would not only fold, but collapse completely, before the kind of pressure Trump would bring to bear.

I’ll update this with more accurate data from Missouri when it is reported. But the results of the primaries and caucuses since the last analysis have been generally favorable for Trump, and contra the media naysayers, he’s in a slightly stronger position than I expected him to be after failing to pick up Ohio.

In my previous analysis, I said that Trump’s minimum expected delegate count after March 15 if he took Ohio would be 750 (719 + 31 from NC) and that “he will need somewhere between 271 and 325 delegates from the 606 that remain in the winner-takes-all states.” According to Real Clear Politics, his delegate count going into yesterday was 460. On top of that, yesterday he picked up:

99 Florida
52 Illinois
35 Missouri (est)
30 North Carolina
09 Northern Marianas

That brings him to 685 delegates. Now, there are 297 proportional delegates remaining to be assigned, and Trump is regularly winning about 44 percent of them. (For example, I estimated 31 for NC and his actual count was 30.) So, he can reliably count on 127 of those proportional delegates, which will bring his total to 812, 425 short of the 1,237 required for the nomination. The more he outperforms in the proportionals, and Rubio’s dropout should help him there, the more room for error he will have.

But perhaps the easiest way to understand it is this: there are 606 delegates left to be won in the 12 remaining winner-takes-all states. Trump has enough leeway that he could lose California and still win the nomination outright. He needs around two-thirds of the winner-takes-all delegates, which, given the way he has won 5 of the 6 winner-takes-all contests, losing only to a sitting governor in his home state, still tends to favor him.

From Decision Desk HQ:

45.3% Donald Trump
27.6% Marco Rubio
16.5% Ted Cruz

That’s with 60 percent reporting. Ohio and Missouri don’t have any statistically significant results in yet. Remember to ignore the media spin. I’ll have a full mathematical analysis tomorrow, but the reality is that Trump needs either OH or MO to pretty much lock in the nomination.

He doesn’t absolutely need either, but if he gets both, he will get the necessary delegates.

UPDATE: The New York Times writes about Rubio’s dropout. The missing word? You guessed it.

Did you know that “one crucial shortcoming” was his youth?  I actually never ever read or heard that mentioned.

On the other hand: this entire article explains his failure to attract Republican voters without once mentioning “immigration”, “amnesty”, or “gang of eight”.

Those guys at the NYT are really on top of things.

At a certain point, you begin to realize they’re not stupid, they’re deceivers.

UPDATE 2: Fox has called Ohio for Kasich now. Not a drubbing, but not very close either. Missouri still looks pretty good for Trump, at 43-34 over Cruz, but only 3 percent of the vote is in.

If that holds up, the results are good, but not the hoped-for four-state KO. Trump would take 160 of the 226 available winner-takes-all delegates, so based on my general recollection, he’ll need something like 330 of the 606 remaining winner-takes-all delegates. (I’ll provide a more accurate number tomorrow, but I’d guess that estimate is on the high side.)

That should be doable, considering that he appears likely to take 71 percent of them today.

As I pointed out previously, a Trump victory in two of the three large states today, Florida, Ohio, and Missouri, pretty much guarantees him the nomination… barring the RNC overturning the entire primary process:

New state polls released ahead of critical primaries on Tuesday find Donald Trump poised to deliver a knockout blow to Florida Sen. Marco Rubio in his home state, while the Republican front-runner is tied with Ohio Gov. John Kasich on his turf.

On the Democratic side, Hillary Clinton leads Bernie Sanders by a wide margin in Florida, while her advantage over Sanders in Ohio is narrower.

According to the new polling from Quinnipiac University published Monday, Trump has a wide lead on the Republican field in Florida, where he tops Rubio 46% to 22%. Texas Sen. Ted Cruz follows in third place with 14% support, with Kasich in last at 10%.

The new results mirror CNN’s poll of polls in Florida, where Trump leads Rubio at an average of 40% to 26%. Despite Rubio’s public optimism, the new poll suggests Florida — where Rubio has staked his campaign’s future — might serve as a humbling barrier for his White House bid.

On the GOP side in Ohio, the new poll shows Trump and Kasich are tied at 38% each. Cruz places third with the support of 16% of Ohio Republicans, while Rubio finishes a distant fourth at 3% — after his campaign told supporters to back Kasich in Ohio, as part of a strategic effort to prevent Trump from padding his delegate lead there.

Meanwhile, Rubio supporters on Twitter have been going berserk all weekend talking about the very small sampling of early voters favoring Rubio. I wouldn’t put any stock in that, considering the same people have been predicting electoral failure for Trump since before the primaries started.

Regardless, we’ll find out soon enough.

Michael Sebastian concludes that the “Trump is violence” meme being pushed by the media this week is the result of the Stop Trump meeting at Sea Island:

After Trump won the Michigan and Missouri primaries with strong numbers, the establishment went into panic mode. They arranged a meeting between execs of top technology companies Apple, Facebook, and Google, and the members of the GOP establishment including Karl Rove, Mitch McConnell, Paul Ryan, Ben Sasse and Kevin McCarthy.

The conspirators met on a private island off the coast of Georgia called Sea Island. Their goal? To plot how to stop the GOP front runner—Donald Trump. We don’t know what plans the elite concocted at this meeting because it was invitation-only. However, we may glean the nature of the plan from the events that followed.

After the meeting, the next Republican debate in Miami was a muted affair. Rubio, Cruz, and Kasich mostly laid back. While they did throw some light punches in Trump’s direction, it was probably the most civil debate to date. Did the other candidates know that the establishment had something in store for Trump?

The very next day, Trump was scheduled to have a rally in Chicago. MoveOn.org, Bernie Sanders supporters, and other leftwing groups coordinated a massive protest. This was combined with hundreds of threats of violence on social media, including threats against Trump’s life. To preserve the safety of his supporters, Trump canceled the rally.

Immediately after the cancellation, I noticed that all the networks suddenly were carrying the same story—how Donald Trump’s words provoke his followers to violence. There was nothing about the threats on social media to assassinate Trump. Only this unprovable allegation that Trump’s words somehow caused his supporters turn violent.

The major newspapers carried the same message:

One of the most startling things about is how quickly all of the mainstream media outlets adopted the “Trump’s rhetoric causes violence” message. It’s notable because Trump’s rhetoric has never been violent. At most, Trump told his supporters that if someone throws a punch at them at a rally, they should punch right back. To me, that is not a violent message. It is just common sense self-defense. It is the same advice my mom gave to me on my first day of kindergarten.

Some of the media outlets say that Trump’s message about building a wall and putting a temporary ban on Islamic immigration are somehow inherently violent. But those policies are several months old. Why did the violence narrative suddenly take hold? I believe that this was a coordinated attack by the media, which is owned and controlled by the elite.

If you would have asked me one year ago, I would have said that this was a crazy idea. But after we all lived through the attack upon Return of Kings surrounding the meetups, where dozens of news outlets in different countries all carried the same false message, it is clear that media coordination does take place.

The good news is that it is not working. The now-obvious fact of the establishment support for Cruz (which you may recall I observed from the start), to say nothing of Cruz’s own missteps, is driving many of his supporters to Trump.

For those readers here who are not yet behind Trump, what I would ask you is this: do you support the US establishment? If not, then why aren’t you lined up with the man they obviously hate and fear more than anyone?

Rubio, Kasich, and Cruz are all owned by them. Trump, for all of his ideological and personal flaws, is not. They are not pulling out all the stops in a desperate attempt to try to stop him in some sort of elaborate charade. Nor do they believe that Hillary Clinton can beat him, or they would simply let him enjoy his moment in the sun before defeat in the general election.

They fear him. So, ask yourself this: why?

Seriously, what American gives a damn what these morally bankrupt morons think?

The neocons who led the George W. Bush administration into Iraq are now touting a fresh crusade to save American democracy — and the Republican Party — from an authoritarian foe: Donald J. Trump.

Their campaign began with an impassioned essay in The American Interest last month by Eliot A. Cohen, a former Bush State Department official, who depicted Mr. Trump as symptomatic of the broader “moral rot” of America. Then, in an open letter, more than 100 Republican foreign policy mavens, including neocons such as Mr. Cohen and Robert Kagan, as well as more traditional Republican foreign policy figures like the former World Bank president Robert B. Zoellick, announced they were “united in our opposition to a Donald Trump presidency.”

Now, in a last-ditch effort, leading neocon thinkers have established what they call the National Security Advisory Council to support Senator Marco Rubio. And many are announcing that if push comes to shove, they will support Hillary Clinton over Mr. Trump. Indeed, in the magazine Commentary, the neoconservative historian Max Boot wrote, somewhat hyperbolically, that Mr. Trump is “the No. 1 threat to American security” — bigger than the Islamic State or China.

They wanted to remake Iraq, so let’s hope that God-Emperor Trump sends them there. They are the architects of one of the most pointless, hapless, anti-democratic foreign policies in American history; the fact that they are vociferously opposed to Trump is alone enough reason to support him.

Furthermore, the New York Times is blatantly playing games with economic history here:

So-called mossback Republicans supported the punitive Immigration Act of 1924, which included provisions barring Asians and restricting African immigrants. The party also backed protectionism: In June 1930 Herbert Hoover signed the Smoot-Hawley tariff, which worsened the Great Depression and stoked nationalism around the world.

The Smoot-Hawley tariff is often blamed for the Great Depression. It’s a complete load of nonsense, as anyone who has read RGD knows. Heilbrunn is attempting to avoid being caught in a lie, because a generic term like “worsened” is virtually unquantifiable.

An immigration act that barred Asians and restricted Africans would look pretty damned good right now to most Republicans. And more than a few Democrats too. But the end of the article is inadvertently optimistic.

Once George W. Bush and the neocons led us into Iraq, it was probably
only a matter of time before the neocons were called to account.

We can certainly hope so, anyhow.