Whither Trump?

[Razgovory]

Well, yeah, only the idle rich or the completely mad would take that bet.  The point is to suss out Siege who is all talk.

Bets talk, bullshit walks.  It's amazing how even nominal bet amounts can stop bullshitters dead in their tracks.

It doesn't--in addition to what others have posted, even if Siege is 100% certain Trump will win, is willing to stake his life savings on that knowledge, doesn't mind sending Raz his home address, and is sure Raz will pay up, he would still be stupid to take the bet because he could get much better odds elsewhere.

If he's that hard up for cash I can lower to fifty.  I'm not a gambling man, but betting that Trump won't be President is not really a bet.

[Savonarola]

Only five articles today on CNN.com that mention the Donald by name.  Could this be the end of Trump?

GOP establishment worries about Cruz-Trump showdown
How Donald Trump took the Republican Party by storm
Cruz cites 'Flashdance' in Trump maniac jab
Poll: Clinton beating Trump, Cruz but not Rubio
What Trump will do at Tuesday's debate

[jimmy olsen]

 
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/12/14/the-donald-s-trumped-up-medical-report.html

DR. STRANGE

12.14.156:00 PM ET

Trump's Medical Report Is More Insane Than His Campaign Somehow

Donald Trump's doctor released a medical report so silly that when we asked the American Medical Association about its language, their spokesman started to laugh.

Donald Trump's doctor appears to be just as bombastic as he is.

It's the only conclusion to be drawn from a hilariously bizarre letter that the mogul's doctor—Harold Bornstein—wrote about his yuuuugely terrific health. And the letter raises as many questions as it answers.

Bornstein, a Manhattan gastroenterologist who shared a medical practice with his father, writes he has been Trump's doctor since 1980. His father, Jacob Bornstein, died in 2010 at the age of 93. But that didn't stop Trump from Twitter-thanking Bornstein the elder for writing up his letter.

"I am proud to share this health report, written by the highly respected Dr. Jacob Bornstein of Lenox Hill Hospital," the mogul tweeted, linking to the letter.

Trump later deleted the tweet, probably because Jacob Bornstein is dead. Harold Bornstein, however, is very much alive and says Donald Trump is the picture of health. In the letter, he describes his health over the past few decades using language that veers from standard to bizarre.

For example, he describes Trump's recent physical exam as "show[ing] only positive results."

While it's clear he means to say everything was normal, the word "positive" is an odd use of the term in medicine. Rather, it typically means that some result or finding was present—and those findings aren't always great news (think testing positive for a disease). The wording is clearly chosen more for rhetorical effect than clear medical communication—and that choice left some experts scratching their heads.

"It's very odd for a doctor to say, 'He's had a complete medical examination that showed only positive results,'" said Jonathan Moreno, a professor of medical ethics at the University of Pennsylvania. "Normally a positive result in the language of medicine is not a good thing. Nonetheless, I will not accuse Dr. Bornstein of not writing his own letter."

Bornstein also describes Trump's "laboratory test results" as "astonishingly excellent" (without noting which tests were run). That is a weird thing to say, as not many doctors would describe themselves as "astonished" at their patient's lab results.

Like Trump, Bornstein seems allergic to detail. And there's one conspicuous absence in the letter, according to Moreno: It has no mention of whether the mogul has ever had a colonoscopy. Bornstein is a gastroenterologist—not a general practitioner—so if Trump has had a colonoscopy, Bornstein probably did it. And at 69, Trump is of age to get the routine (if unpleasant) test.

"I think that's a very reasonable question at this point for a journalist to ask: Has he had a colonoscopy?" said Moreno.

If the mogul has had one, Moreno added, voters may be curious as to whether the exam found any colon polyps and, if so, if any had to be removed. A Trump spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment on whether the real estate magnate has had a colonoscopy or had any colon polyps removed.

The letter uses standard language to report that Trump is cancer-free and hasn't had any significant surgeries. An interesting omission, however, in a letter that goes out of its way to praise Trump's "extraordinary" strength and stamina is the status of those bone spurs that were so bad they kept him out of serving in Vietnam. Maybe they got better all on their own, as the report makes clear he's never had any orthopedic surgeries.

And then it goes completely off the rails.

"If elected," Bornstein writes, "Mr. Trump, I can state unequivocally, will be the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency."

This is, of course, hooey. It's embarrassing that a doctor even wrote it—unless, of course, Bornstein time-traveled to the 19th century to check on Millard Fillmore and William Henry Harrison. Reached for comment regarding this, a spokesperson at the American Medical Association just giggled.

They weren't the only ones who found the comment perplexing.

"I don't want to question Dr. Bornstein," said Jeffrey Singer, a practicing general surgeon and adjunct scholar at the libertarian Cato Institute. "But doctors don't usually say that kind of thing."

"I could understand Donald Trump saying that, because that's the kind of thing he says—just like he's the smartest guy and the richest guy and all that," Singer continued. "But doctors don't usually make those kind of superlative comments."

Unless, of course, you're Donald Trump's doctor.

[Monoriu]

Now we only need to get Trump's lawyer to talk for more entertainment 

[jimmy olsen]

Some fantastic analysis of Trump's campaign. It should be noted this was released before the Monmouth poll.

http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/donald-trump-vs-modern-political-campaign

December 11, 2015
Donald Trump vs. the Modern Political Campaign

By Benjamin Wallace-Wells

On Monday night, after Donald Trump had proposed banning all Muslims from entering the United States, some journalists got around to wondering just how far that might go. One enterprising reporter from The Hill e-mailed the campaign's spokesperson, Hope Hicks, a twenty-six-year-old who has never before worked on a political campaign, to try to clarify things. What about Muslim U.S. citizens? the reporter asked. If they happened to travel abroad and then flew home to the States, would they be kept out at the border, too? Hicks wrote back serenely, "Mr Trump said, 'Everyone.' "

The next morning, Trump himself appeared on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" and said that his spokeswoman had his policy wrong. He hadn't meant everyone, after all. Muslim citizens would be allowed to come and go as they always had. Trump never explained the source of the confusion. But that his own spokeswoman got his plan wrong seemed evidence that his campaign had not discussed it in any depth. The plan to exclude Muslims was heinous. It was also so casually assembled.

Surreal little episodes like this have recurred throughout the Trump campaign. So much of it seems so casually assembled. His spokespeople appear on news programs, and yet his policies and major statements always seem to go unexplained. What is most visible in these exchanges is an atmosphere of mutual disdain. The reporters conducting the interviews are career political junkies who give the impression that they are condescending to talk to the Trump people, and the Trump people are often p.r. professionals and corporate attorneys who give the impression that they are condescending to talk politics. Basic information goes unexchanged.

When reporters pointed out that the "big, beautiful wall" Trump proposed to seal off the Mexican border would be extremely expensive, the campaign insisted that Trump was a great negotiator, and would get a better price. Pressed about how immigration officials would determine whether an applicant was Muslim, Trump said that the officers could simply ask, "Are you Muslim?" After Trump claimed that "thousands" of Muslims had cheered the collapse of the Twin Towers from New Jersey, Jake Tapper hosted the candidate's longtime lawyer Michael Cohen on CNN and asked him to provide some evidence. "I've worked for Mr. Trump now for a long time," Cohen said. "I can tell you Mr Trump's memory is fantastic, and I've never come across a situation where Mr. Trump has said something that is not accurate." Tapper started to parry, then collected himself. "Seriously?" he said. Seriously, it turned out.

It has been a long time since we worried about demagogues on the campaign trail. When we talk about politics, we talk more about systems than we once did, and less about human attributes and failings. The machinery of the Obama campaign in particular has been celebrated as a cultural force on its own, separate from the candidate: microtargeting, the science of persuasion, the victory lab.

Just within the past few days, there's been a murmur of anxiety from political professionals, perhaps sensing in Trump the possibility that their own jobs might become obsolete. On Wednesday, Lloyd Grove, of The Daily Beast, published a report titled "How Donald Trump Destroyed the Political Campaign Ad," featuring dark quotes from the pros. Trump seemed to threaten retail politics, too. Earlier in the week, the Times wondered, "What if Going Viral Matters More Than Iowa?" A Republican operative in New Hampshire complained to Politico, "The lesson for future candidates will be, I don't need to troop all over Grafton County in the North Country. I just need to hang out in a cable TV green room and wait for my next cable hit."

From a certain reptilian perspective—from the angle that most closely considers Trump—the whole machinery of the modern campaign serves to constrain an individual candidate's ability to chase votes. Seeking donors requires promoting an economic vision that turns off working-class voters. Winning the favor of élites means presenting detailed policies to show that you are a serious candidate, but policies are trade-offs, and each will alienate someone. Employing political professionals, who will want jobs with other candidates in the future, lessens the likelihood that your campaign will scorch the earth—by demonizing an ethnic group, for instance—in order to win. If the pros sound a little jealous of Trump, it's because he raises the alluring, impossible alternative. What if they could just opt out?

No one knows what Trump's chances at the nomination really are—at this time in 2011, Newt Gingrich was still leading the Republican field—but the support that he has seems solid. His own core will not leave him. The latest CBS News/Times national poll —which was conducted mostly, but not entirely, before Trump announced his proposal to ban Muslim immigrants—found that thirty-five per cent of likely Republican primary voters preferred Trump, more than twice the number who favored Ted Cruz, who is currently in second place. The most recent public poll in New Hampshire, published Tuesday, puts Trump at thirty-two per cent, and the second-place candidate, Marco Rubio, at fourteen per cent. Trump is trailing Cruz in Iowa, but barely, and in South Carolina he is leading, too. Fox News pollsters were in the field there when Trump proposed the ban, and they found that his support climbed even higher (eight per cent higher) after the news broke.

On Tuesday night, the Republican pollster Frank Luntz held a focus group of twenty-nine Trump supporters from the Washington, D.C., area, which he opened to the media, and found that their allegiance was at least as strong to Trump as it was to the party. Nineteen said that they would back Trump as a third-party candidate if Rubio was the Republican nominee; fourteen said that they would do so if the nominee was Ted Cruz. Viewing footage of Trump's gaffes and insults only seemed to increase their enthusiasm for him. "I've never seen anything like this," Luntz said. "There's no sign of them leaving. He has created or found the magic formula."

A more specific thing to say is that he has found the magic voter. The most compelling demographic analysis of Trump's support is that he is leaning on the "missing white voter," a type first identified by the analyst Sean Trende, of Real Clear Politics, just after Obama defeated Romney. Trende concluded that seven million fewer white people had voted in the 2012 election than had in 2008, and that the missing voters had certain identifiable characteristics. They were more rural than suburban, poorer rather than richer, and less rather than more religious. White voters in the South turned out just as strongly in 2012 as they had four years earlier, and so did evangelicals. The missing voters were from the Midwest, the Northeast, the red parts of blue states. "In other words," Trende wrote, "H. Ross Perot voters."

There's probably no organizing genius to the Trump campaign. But maybe there's a kind of accidental genius. That Trump had opted out of the machinery of the modern campaign freed him to chase a group of voters who were traditionally hard to reach. With no need for donors, he could go all in on economic nationalism; with no inclination to woo party élites, he could simply decline to assemble policy proposals; and with no aspirations ever to run again, he could demonize multiple minority groups. (One way to read this last sequence is as a logical escalation: he targeted Hispanics, saw his poll numbers soar, and then targeted another group that was less popular—Muslims.) Early in his campaign, Trump sometimes seemed to be polling the people who turned up at his rallies. "How many people here believe in global warming?" he asked the crowd at a New Hampshire event I attended in September, apropos of nothing. Then he waited to see how many hands rose. "Very few," he said to himself, approvingly. "Very few."

A darkly comic possibility looms. Awaiting the Republican nominee is arguably the most controlled campaign in recent American history, Hillary Clinton's, which is now preparing for the contingency of a contest with Trump. What will her feverish people make of his? Somewhere in Brooklyn, a miserable former Rhodes scholar is surely trying to prepare a briefing book on Trump's policies on transportation and infrastructure, which do not really exist. Maybe a Yale 2L is operating a spreadsheet that lists alleged connections between Trump and the Mob. Possibly Bob Barnett, the Washington superlawyer who traditionally impersonates the Republican opponent to help the Democratic nominee prepare for the debates, has been polishing his Trump impression. Or maybe Trump has made that political job obsolete, too, and the Clinton campaign will just hire Andrew Dice Clay.

   

[Caliga]

Andrew Dice Clay 

[Eddie Teach]

Andrew Dice Clay 

Hard to believe this guy is leading the polls in Southern states. 

[Jaron]

Little Boy Blue  - He needed the money.

[Jacob]

Andrew Dice Clay 

Hard to believe this guy is leading the polls in Southern states. 

It really reminds me of Rob Ford of Toronto. Everyone knows he's an asshole, but there are enough people who enjoy that kind of asshole - especially because it upsets the kind of people who think they're smart and good and shit like that.

[Eddie Teach]

Rob Ford has kind of an everymanishness about his assholery though. Trump is a brash, arrogant New Yorker who thinks he's smarter than everybody he meets. Doesn't usually play well down here.

[Jacob]

Rob Ford has kind of an everymanishness about his assholery though. Trump is a brash, arrogant New Yorker who thinks he's smarter than everybody he meets. Doesn't usually play well down here.

I guess it's a sense that he's even more dismissive of and obnoxious to the "liberal elites" and the "DC insiders" than of the people down there?

I dunno.

[Barrister]

Andrew Dice Clay 

Hard to believe this guy is leading the polls in Southern states. 

It really reminds me of Rob Ford of Toronto. Everyone knows he's an asshole, but there are enough people who enjoy that kind of asshole - especially because it upsets the kind of people who think they're smart and good and shit like that.

I don't know about that comparison.  Rob Ford at least had a political history and consistency.  He was a 10 year city councillor who made his mark endlessly complaining about excessive city spending.  GIven the other candidates I could imagine myself voting for Ford in 2010 based on what we knew about him.

None of thta is true about Trump.

[Malthus]

Andrew Dice Clay 

Hard to believe this guy is leading the polls in Southern states. 

It really reminds me of Rob Ford of Toronto. Everyone knows he's an asshole, but there are enough people who enjoy that kind of asshole - especially because it upsets the kind of people who think they're smart and good and shit like that.

I don't know about that comparison.  Rob Ford at least had a political history and consistency.  He was a 10 year city councillor who made his mark endlessly complaining about excessive city spending.  GIven the other candidates I could imagine myself voting for Ford in 2010 based on what we knew about him.

None of thta is true about Trump.

I agree, it isn't a fair comparison - to Ford.

Ford was a one-note candidate, but his one note was 'cutting spending', not being offensive to minorities (in fact, he often got along rather well with some of 'em - at least, the ones with substance abuse problems in common  ). He was a boor, a drunk and a druggie, who while in office went entertainingly off the rails, but no-one speculated that he was an honest to God fascist.

I guess they are similar in that they both boorishly troll, but Ford was more of a joke (albeit a sad one, in his self-destruction). Trump has long ago ceased to be funny.

[crazy canuck]

Andrew Dice Clay 

Hard to believe this guy is leading the polls in Southern states. 

It really reminds me of Rob Ford of Toronto. Everyone knows he's an asshole, but there are enough people who enjoy that kind of asshole - especially because it upsets the kind of people who think they're smart and good and shit like that.

I don't know about that comparison.  Rob Ford at least had a political history and consistency.  He was a 10 year city councillor who made his mark endlessly complaining about excessive city spending.  GIven the other candidates I could imagine myself voting for Ford in 2010 based on what we knew about him.

None of thta is true about Trump.

I agree, it isn't a fair comparison - to Ford.

Ford was a one-note candidate, but his one note was 'cutting spending', not being offensive to minorities (in fact, he often got along rather well with some of 'em - at least, the ones with substance abuse problems in common  ). He was a boor, a drunk and a druggie, who while in office went entertainingly off the rails, but no-one speculated that he was an honest to God fascist.

I guess they are similar in that they both boorishly troll, but Ford was more of a joke (albeit a sad one, in his self-destruction). Trump has long ago ceased to be funny.

Yeah, I agree.  Ford was really just a bad joke of a politician and a rather tragic human being.  It is astounding anyone voted for him but I guess there will always be a percentage of right wing voters who will support anyone with a spending reduction slogan.  Trump is far more dangerous and destructive and cannot simply be written off as a joke as most did early on.

[Malthus]

Yeah, I agree.  Ford was really just a bad joke of a politician and a rather tragic human being.  It is astounding anyone voted for him but I guess there will always be a percentage of right wing voters who will support anyone with a spending reduction slogan.  Trump is far more dangerous and destructive and cannot simply be written off as a joke as most did early on.

To understand why Ford was elected, it is necessary to understand some peculiarities about the office of Mayor in Toronto. First, the Mayor lacks much in the way of power - most of that lies with the council. Second, Toronto suffers from a forced amalgamation of a bunch of suburbs with the original "city", which have radically different cultures. The city is far more left-wing, and the city has, traditionally, dominated the peripheral suburbs in that the government has focused more on its interests. The suburbs tend to believe that they are being taxed to pay for the follies and frivolities of the city - none of which reach them. Naturally, this creates resentment, which Ford was able to capitalize on. His one-note message was intended to 'send a message' to council to take the burbs more seriously.