2016 elections - because it's never too early

[Tonitrus]

One of those happy coincidences of election season...

While watching an episode of "Louie" on FX at 4am local time, there is a Clinton ad filled with Trump vignettes talking down women's attributes "Is this the president we want for our daughters?"

The next ad?  One of those late night "talk with HOTT women" ads filled with HOTT women spilling their attributes all over the screen. 

[Legbiter]

[jimmy olsen]

At times like these one wonders if he's trying to lose.

http://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2016-election/analysis-trump-may-have-had-worst-week-presidential-campaign-history-n658071

Analysis: Trump May Have Had the Worst Week in Presidential Campaign History
by BENJY SARLIN and ALEX SEITZ-WALD

October didn't wait 24 hours before delivering a surprise. It came in an envelope delivered to the New York Times containing portions of Donald Trump's tax returns, which he has been refusing to release.

Political attacks are only really damaging when they confirm an already existing narrative. Mike Dukakis was seen as too weak to be commander-in-chief when he rode in a tank with an oversized helmet, Dan Quayle was thought to be slow-witted when he misspelled "potato," and Mitt Romney was painted as a cartoon Monopoly Man before the "47 percent" tape dropped.

In what must rank among the worst weeks of any recent presidential campaign, Donald Trump managed to play into almost every one of Democrats' talking points about him.

The New York Times story alone, which both reported that Trump declared he had lost a staggering $916 million in 1995 tax forms, and that experts believe that loss could have allowed him to pay no federal income taxes for up to 18 years, fed into three lines of attack that Hillary Clinton had used to needle him in Monday's debate.

One: That his refusal to release his taxes suggested he was concealing something important. Two: That his returns might show his business acumen was overstated. Three: That he paid little or no taxes despite his vast wealth.

And it lent credence to her larger argument that Trump is a heartless scrooge who left a trail of financial destruction on his path to wealth, and who according to the Times even refused to check off a box on his tax form to donate to a veterans' memorial fund.

As if that wasn't enough, Trump has a long history of both bragging about his efforts to avoid paying taxes while shaming others for paying too little.

But Trump didn't need an outside story to damage his campaign. He was busy having a live meltdown onstage in Pennsylvania at the very moment the news dropped Saturday night. Already behaving erratically since his debate on Monday, Trump imitated Clinton's pneumonia-induced collapse from last month and fired off the most grotesque, personal, and fact-free attack at the nominee yet.

"Hillary Clinton's only loyalty is to her financial contributors and to herself," Trump said of the first female major party nominee. "I don't even think she's loyal to Bill, you wanna know the truth. And really folks really, why should she be, right? Why should she be?"

The combination of a multiple damaging stories, all made dramatically worse by the candidate's impulsive response, may be without precedent. It's as if Dukakis were photographed riding in the tank, saw the mocking news coverage, then climbed back into the tank and drove cross-country with Willie Horton riding shotgun as his own staff begged him to pull over.

One week ago, Trump's campaign was at its high point. He had surged to a tie or even a lead in national polls as well as key battleground states, prompting a round of panic in Democratic circles. Clinton supporters feared he would beat low expectations in Monday's debate before a record-setting audience simply by avoiding any obvious errors, giving him further momentum.

On the eve of the debate, Trump for the first time surpassed the 50% threshold on Nate Silver's prediction model. Democrats anxiously refreshed the FiveThirtyEight.com website as many began to take seriously for the first time the possibility Trump could win.

Clinton's post-convention high started to look more like an anomaly caused by Trump's last self-sabotage — his prolonged fight with a Gold Star family — rather than the race's natural equilibrium. With Trump appearing more disciplined, the two looked set for a tight race through Election Day.

But the debate ended up being a rout with Clinton the clear winner after Trump managed to tunnel underneath the rock-bottom expectations set for him.

With under six weeks to go before Election Day, polls had yet to fully digest the impact of the debate before Trump was buried by basket after basket of deplorable headlines.

Almost every day, Trump did something that would send a typical presidential campaign into a tailspin.

The most dramatic self-inflicted wounds concerned his response to Clinton's accusation in the debate that he humiliated a former Miss Universe, Alicia Machado, for gaining weight.

On Tuesday, Trump called into Fox News to essentially repeat the behavior Clinton had raised: He said Machado "gained a massive amount of weight and it was a real problem."

On Wednesday, Trump went back on Fox to tell Bill O'Reilly that Machado should thank him for demanding she lose a few pounds: "I saved her job," he said.

On Thursday, Trump's own campaign manager Kellyanne Conway told "The View" that she had personally reprimanded him for his language regarding women, even as she defended him over the Machado story. Even some of Trump's surrogates seemed unwilling to defend his comments last week and the campaign asked them to pivot to attacks on Bill Clinton's sex scandals instead.

"You know it's going to be so much better when he begins to focus on the real issues," Ben Carson, who has been of Trump's most loyal defenders, told MSNBC.

Then came Friday, where Trump issued a series of rage-filled tweets against Machado in the wee hours of the morning, in which he calls on his 12 million followers to "check out [a] sex tape" of the former Miss Universe winner.

The sex tape of Machado did not appear to exist. But Buzzfeed that day found a pornographic video by Playboy featuring a brief cameo by Trump in which he poured champagne on a limo with a gaggle of models.

But even setting aside the vulgarity of the tweets, Trump's vengeful response affirmed — almost to the point of parody — Clinton's core charge that he was temperamentally unfit to manage the world's most powerful military.

"You can't tweet at 3 o'clock in the morning. Period. There's no excuse. Ever. Not if you're going to be president of the United States," former Speaker Newt Gingrich, another of Trump's most prominent supporters, said on Fox News.

The Machado story has been so dominant that it overshadowed any number of stories that would be potential extinction-level events for virtually every other major party nominee in history.

There was a Newsweek expose that alleged Trump's businesses had illegal dealings in Cuba — some details of which Trump's campaign manager appeared to confirm on television. There was Trump's rambling debate answer on nuclear weapons, where he seemed to announce what would be a historic shift towards a "no first use" policy only to contradict himself in the next sentence, alarming national security experts days later.

The Washington Post continued its investigation into Trump's charitable foundation. The Post has already found compelling evidence Trump previously violated the law by using the foundation to settle lawsuits against his private businesses.

All the while, an array of old comments by Trump about women over the years, from ogling and hiring a teenage waitress to promising his then-17 year old daughter he wouldn't date anyone younger than her, resurfaced in various outlets. As did a lawsuit alleging he demanded unattractive women working at one of his golf resorts be fired and replaced with prettier women.

USA Today, the country's widest circulation newspaper, broke with its 34-year policy of neutrality in the presidential race to declare Trump "unfit for the presidency." Several historically Republican newspapers endorsed Clinton outright, along with an editorial board member at the arch-conservative Wall Street Journal, Dorothy Rabinowitz.

Meanwhile, Forbes downgraded Trump's net worth by $800 million dollars.

In short, Trump was arguably having the worst week in campaign history already. Then Saturday happened.

The good news for Trump is that there may be too many distinct negative stories surrounding his campaign for the average voter to fully process or a nightly news show to recap in depth. The expectations for his second debate, already minimal, are now on the ocean floor. But that's little consolation. At the exact moment Trump needed to be his best, with the most people watching and the stakes at their highest, he choked like never before.

If he loses in November, it's hard to imagine this week won't be seen as a turning point.

[Martinus]

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/02/us/politics/donald-trump-taxes.html?hp=&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=a-lede-package-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news

Looks like Trump is in a good company:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffreydorfman/2016/01/31/new-york-times-hypocrisy-on-corporate-taxes-reaches-record-high/#1fccb6f76577

[CountDeMoney]

As news of Trump's taxes breaks, he goes off script at a rally in Pennsylvania

He took the stage nearly two hours late, and it was clear that he was worked up about something as he quickly rushed through his usual talking points.

MANHEIM, Pa. — Donald Trump's campaign announced Saturday evening that the candidate would soon deliver a nine-sentence critique of comments Hillary Clinton made months ago about many of the millennials supporting her primary rival, Bernie Sanders. It was an attempt to latch onto a new headline in hopes of finally escaping the controversies that had consumed his week.

It didn't work.

It took Trump nearly 25 minutes to read the brief statement because he kept going off on one angry tangent after another — ignoring his teleprompters and accusing Clinton of not being "loyal" to her husband, imitating her buckling at a memorial service last month, suggesting that she is "crazy" and saying she should be in prison. He urged his mostly white crowd of supporters to go to polling places in "certain areas" on Election Day to "watch" the voters there. He also repeatedly complained about having a "bum mic" at the first presidential debate and wondered if he should have done another season of "The Apprentice."

As Trump ranted in this rural Pennsylvania town, The New York Times reported it had anonymously received Trump's 1995 income tax returns, which show he declared a loss of $916 million -- a loss that he could use to avoid paying any federal income taxes for up to 18 years.

[Jacob]

"And she's being totally protected by The New York Times and The Washington Post and all of the media and CNN — Clinton News Network, which nobody is watching anyways so what difference does it make," Trump said.

[Legbiter]

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/02/us/politics/donald-trump-taxes.html?hp=&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=a-lede-package-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news

Looks like Trump is in a good company:

Trump probably leaked this himself to the NYT, the absolute madman.

The three documents arrived by mail at The Times with a postmark indicating they had been sent from New York City. The return address claimed the envelope had been sent from Trump Tower.

[Tonitrus]

Could be.  Especially as he can now say that the NYT violated federal law.

[Admiral Yi]

Could be.  Especially as he can now say that the NYT violated federal law.

How's that?

[Tonitrus]

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/26/7213

It shall be unlawful for any person to whom any return or return information (as defined in section 6103(b)) is disclosed in a manner unauthorized by this title thereafter willfully to print or publish in any manner not provided by law any such return or return information. Any violation of this paragraph shall be a felony punishable by a fine in any amount not exceeding $5,000, or imprisonment of not more than 5 years, or both, together with the costs of prosecution.

[Savonarola]

Sanders: Trump's taxes prove system rigged

That struck me as an amusing attitude for a man who has spent a quarter century in congress.  At that point I don't think you can pretend to be an innocent bystander in our whole rotten system anymore.

[dps]

Just back from vacation on the Outer Banks, where I saw my first Trump for President posters.   Some of them had a Confederate flag on them, which certainly doesn't do anything to lessen my desire to vote against him (though to be fair, down here you can probably find Hilary for Prez posters with Confederate flags on them).  Also saw some "Clinton for Prison 2016" posters, which is just stupid, even if it is a bit funny.

[CountDeMoney]

That struck me as an amusing attitude for a man who has spent a quarter century in congress.  At that point I don't think you can pretend to be an innocent bystander in our whole rotten system anymore.

In Bernie's defense, it's not like there were a lot of people lining up next to him when he was raging against the machine.

[jimmy olsen]

Christ, just when you think Trunp can no longer shock you with what a scumbag he is.

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/01/03/us/politics/for-donald-trump-lessons-from-a-brothers-suffering.html?_r=1&referer=http://www.alternatehistory.com/forum/threads/the-official-american-politics-thread-xl-citizen-kaine.399409/page-255

But the drama was hardly put to rest. Freddy's son, Fred III, spoke at the funeral, and that night, his wife went into labor with their son, who developed seizures that led to cerebral palsy. The Trump family promised that it would take care of the medical bills.

Then came the unveiling of Fred Sr.'s will, which Donald had helped draft. It divided the bulk of the inheritance, at least $20 million, among his children and their descendants, "other than my son Fred C. Trump Jr."

Freddy's children sued, claiming that an earlier version of the will had entitled them to their father's share of the estate, but that Donald and his siblings had used "undue influence" over their grandfather, who had dementia, to cut them out.

A week later, Mr. Trump retaliated by withdrawing the medical benefits critical to his nephew's infant child.

"I was angry because they sued," he explained during last week's interview

[DGuller]

Shows he can play hardball.  We need that quality when negotiating with Putin.