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Donald Trump is now running Mitt Romney’s campaign plus racism.

After perhaps the most damaging political week any presidential candidate has ever endured, Trump went to Detroit to deliver a hastily prepared economic speech intended to make peace with the Republican Party leadership.

As the terms of his surrender, Trump offered two key concessions: He adopted House Speaker Paul Ryan’s tax policy and the GOP’s gaffe-centered 2012 campaign strategy of misquoting or misrepresenting the Democratic candidate’s words.

These may seem like unrelated items, but they work in tandem. By advancing a supply-side tax reform that would allow him to bequeath his estate to his children tax-free, Trump has surrendered his claim to populism, and left himself vulnerable to criticism from Hillary Clinton, who proposes a more genuinely populist tax increase on rich people. To head off those attacks, Trump could have promised to tax the wealthy in other, comparable ways, or propose income support measures for the poor and working class. But those ideas offend GOP leaders like Ryan, so instead of seeking policy balance, he decided to lie about Hillary Clinton’s tax plan instead, and claim that she pledged to raise middle-class taxes.

This never happened, not even in a slip-of-the-tongue kind of way. Clinton specifically promises not to raise taxes on the middle class. But pretending otherwise is the only way Trump can neutralize the weaknesses his new tax policy creates. As a rhetorical gambit this closely resembles the way Republicans distorted and decontextualized President Obama’s words four years ago, to make him seem hostile to business owners, and blunt Democratic criticism of Mitt Romney’s regressive economic policies. It was a dishonest and ineffective strategy then, and it won’t work any better today. But it’s telling that reaching detente with GOP leaders required Trump to adopt the same tactics Republicans rode to defeat in 2012. Trump has savaged Romney and Ryan for losing that race. But faced with the threat of mass defections, Trump recognized the main thing holding the party together is Ryan’s willingness to tolerate racism and authoritarianism out of blind faith that Trump will sign the House GOP agenda into law. So Trump adopted much of that agenda.

August 09, 2016

Bernie Sanders picked a weird time to start caring about Brazilian politics.

Sanders waited until Monday night—weeks after forfeiting his presidential campaign soapbox, and weeks after it could have made a difference, anyway—to release the following statement on Brazil’s slow-moving crisis of democracy:

I am deeply concerned by the current effort to remove Brazil’s democratically elected president, Dilma Rousseff. To many Brazilians and observers the controversial impeachment process more closely resembles a coup d’état.

After suspending Brazil’s first female president on dubious grounds, without a mandate to govern, the new interim government abolished the ministry of women, racial equality and human rights. They immediately replaced a diverse and representative administration with a cabinet made up entirely of white men. The new, unelected administration quickly announced plans to impose austerity, increase privatization and install a far right-wing social agenda.

The effort to remove President Rousseff is not a legal trial but rather a political one. The United States cannot sit silently while the democratic institutions of one of our most important allies are undermined. We must stand up for the working families of Brazil and demand that this dispute be settled with democratic elections.

Why now? Maybe Sanders got caught up on all the shady machinations afoot in the world’s fifth-largest country in his newfound downtime. The other possibility is that Sanders shied away from foreign policy during the campaign to avoid going full lefty. Many commentators—myself included—suspected as much, when he studiously avoided criticizing Hillary Clinton’s role in the 2010 overthrow of Honduran President Manuel Zelaya, a far more clear-cut coup than even the naked political power play taking place in Brasília. Just last month, at the start of the Democratic National Convention, 40 of his congressional colleagues signed a letter calling on Secretary of State John Kerry to do more on Rousseff’s behalf. Sander’s name wasn’t on it.

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Despite his new economic plan, Donald Trump is still stuck in the primaries.

Appearing on Fox Business Network and Fox & Friends Tuesday morning to discuss his plan, Trump was clearly trying to kickstart his stalled campaign. He compared his tax cut to Reagan’s, warned that we’re in a “bubble,” and basically made the case that he was the candidate to Make America Filthy Rich Again. But more than anything Trump’s media blitz was a reminder that he is still stuck in May, both strategically and psychologically.

A few months ago, it looked like Trump could break with the Paul Ryan wing of the party. Trump was winning bigly in the primaries, which gave him the flexibility to propose whatever policies he felt like. That’s not the case anymore. If the election were held today, FiveThirtyEight says he has a less than 5 percent chance of winning. So Trump is forced to do in August what traditional campaigns do in the early summer: unite the party. Hence the plan, which was heavy on supply-side policies.

But in an interview with Fox Business’s Maria Bartiromo, Trump also revealed that he hasn’t quite adjusted to the new environment. Asked if he feels he needs to make changes because he’s losing, Trump responded by saying that winners don’t change:

This is an insane thing to say in the middle of a general election campaign. Anyone with a passing familiarity with presidential elections knows that a candidate’s job after winning a primary is to broaden his appeal. Trump got fewer than 15 million votes in the primaries; Barack Obama won the 2012 election with 66 million. But Trump is someone who needs constant positive reinforcement—he needs to be reminded of the fact that he is a winner on a minute-by-minute basis. That’s the only explanation for a statement like this: After a catastrophic three-week period, Trump is desperately clinging to the last time he was a winner, which was three months ago.

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Susan Collins not endorsing Trump isn’t exactly a profile in courage.

In an editorial in The Washington Post making the case for why the Maine senator cannot support Trump, his more controversial policies—like the wall or the Muslim ban—are not mentioned. Instead, Collins argues that Trump is unstable, unfit for the office, and, most of all, that he’s a dick. “My conclusion about Mr. Trump’s unsuitability for office is based on his disregard for the precept of treating others with respect, an idea that should transcend politics,” she writes. “Instead, he opts to mock the vulnerable and inflame prejudices by attacking ethnic and religious minorities.” Collins then cites three examples of Trump being a jerk: His mocking of disabled New York Times reporter Serge Kovaleski, his insistence that the American judge overseeing a Trump University lawsuit can’t be impartial because he is “Mexican,” and his feud with the Khan family, whose son died in Iraq.

In keeping with much of the opposition to Trump from within the GOP, Collins stresses that Trump is not a Republican. “I revere the history of my party, most particularly the value it has always placed on the worth and dignity of the individual, and I will continue to work across the country for Republican candidates,” she writes. “It is because of Mr. Trump’s inability and unwillingness to honor that legacy that I am unable to support his candidacy.”

That would be a more compelling argument if Collins et al were more willing to discuss policy, instead of relying solely on temperament. Until that happens, the argument is based solely on aesthetics: The problem with Trump is not what he proposes, but how he proposes it. While Collins has a bipartisan reputation in the Senate, until she and her GOP colleagues reckon with the toxic proposals that appeal to the party’s base, disavowals like this mean little.

August 08, 2016

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The Clinton campaign’s fetish for Henry Kissinger is getting out of hand.

Politico reports that the Clinton campaign is wooing Condoleezza Rice, James Baker, George Shultz, and Kissinger, the granddaddy of them all. This is in keeping with the strategy the Clinton campaign unveiled at the DNC: It really, really wants to win over Republicans who are disgusted with their party’s nomination of Donald Trump.

In the abstract, there is some merit to this strategy. The only path Donald Trump has to victory is by winning an overwhelming margin of the white vote. To make up for an expected loss of non-college-educated white voters, the Clinton campaign has set its sights on college-educated suburban Republicans—the last two days of the DNC were all about these voters. Winning over Republicans, who are by definition white, creates a firewall, especially in the key swing states of Pennsylvania and Ohio.

But what does Kissinger, a veritable war criminal, do to help win over these voters? Are there pockets of Main Line Philadelphia waiting to hear what Kissinger thinks about the election? In truth, he represents no single constituency besides foreign policy elites based in Washington, D.C. And, while there can be no doubt that Clinton is a hawk, the decision to chase after Kissinger, who is anathema to the party’s left-wing and any person with a sense of morality, further alienates progressives. (Sanders voters, who are also quite white, could also serve as a firewall, but many are reluctant to vote for Clinton because of shit like this.)

Another, more troubling way of thinking about this outreach, however, is that it’s earnest. There has always been something insecure about the hawkishness of the Clintons—a willingness to prove to the country and the world that the Democratic Party is no longer the party of draft-dodgers and hippies. The wooing of bomb-happy right-wingers is in keeping with that insecurity: The Clinton campaign knows it has a negligible electoral benefit, but seeks the endorsement of a discredited status quo to seem respected and important. Of course, for Clinton, Kissinger has never been discredited—instead, he’s been her mentor for years.

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George P. Bush wins Son of the Year award.

It’s that awkward moment when a man emasculates your father for months and months and disparages your mother multiple times and then you endorse that man to be president.  

We’re talking here about Jeb Bush’s son, George P. Bush, an up-and-comer in Texas politics, who just threw his support behind Donald Trump, just a few months after Trump drummed his “low energy” father out of politics in humiliating fashion, and claimed Jeb’s immigration platform was relatively dovish toward “Mexican illegals” because his wife, Columba, is Mexican. 

That’s the juicy Bush family psychodrama angle of this story, but the endorsement is also a preview of an even juicier political drama that’ll begin to play out after the election. George P.’s decision is an inauspicious one for Republicans hoping this election will discredit Trumpism. At least in states like Texas, Trump’s footprint is large enough that young conservatives building political careers feel they can’t be seen opposing him—blowout or no blowout. Even if Trump loses badly, in other words, there will be a price to pay in Texas for those Republicans who resisted Trump’s candidacy. If Liddle George is right about that, then Republican politics will remain a white ethno-nationalist redoubt for a long time to come. 

George’s fellow Texan Ted Cruz (among others) is making the opposite bet. Only one of them can be right. 

If Trump has lost Andrea Peyser...

then it’s hard to see how he pulls out a victory in November. It’s hard to think of a person more inclined to vote for Trump than the longtime New York Post columnist. She’s called cyclists in New York “terrorists on wheels” and “assassins in Spandex.” Her favorite jokes are prison-rape jokes. She prefers Jay Leno. She described Huma Abedin as a “furious internet cuckold” during the Anthony Weiner sexting controversy (the second one). She once implied that President Obama is gay, questioning whether one of his gaffes was a “minor slip” or “a rude insight into the brain of Obama, a man as comfortable in the company of women as Tom Cruise.” This woman, Andrea Peyser, now declares, “I can no longer justify calling myself a Trump supporter,” citing his feud with the Khans and his general “lunacy and bigotry.” She’s also had it with his sexism:

When I visited about two months after his lovely wife, Melania, now 46, gave birth to the couple’s son, Barron, now 10, the infamous germophobe boasted that after fathering five children, he’d never changed a diaper.

I enthused that Melania, who stood quietly nearby aboard 5-inch stilettos, had lost all her baby weight. Trump corrected me: “She’s almost lost all the baby weight.’’

I was embarrassed for the mother of his youngest kid, who ignored the dig. Trump staffers asked a photographer and me to put sterile cotton booties over our shoes so as not to sully the carpet. It was time to get the hell out of the loony bin.

I can’t believe I’m saying this, but Andrea Peyser is right.

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The Rio Olympics is turning into Dilma Rousseff’s revenge.

Maybe this hasn’t come through on NBC’s tape-delayed infomercial of an exclusive broadcast, but the 2016 Summer Games aren’t going over too hot in Brazil. Videos of protests being quashed with rubber bullets and tear gas have gone viral. Over the weekend, police removed spectators from Olympic stadium grounds for displaying signs calling for the resignation of interim President Michel Temer.

Demonstrations were always to be expected, with Brazil hosting an unprofitable $12 billion corporate giveaway even as its economy slides into crisis. But in a country just decades removed from military dictatorship, the authoritarian nature of the crackdown—there are 85,000 security forces patrolling the streets of Rio, twice as many as in London 2012—has raised understandable concerns. 

This is especially true given that a congressional coup may be underway in Brasília. Later this week, twice-elected President Dilma Rousseff will likely be impeached on fraudulent charges by Temer’s PMDB—“the party that ruined Rio,” as The New York Times has referred to it. What might otherwise have been a diffuse backlash at the Games now seems to be consolidating around Fora Temer—Out With Temer.   

The irony is that it was Dilma’s Workers’s Party that brought the Games to Brazil and approved the atrocious Olympic Law now being used to suppress dissent. Temer hoped the Olympics would strengthen his tenuous grip on power. It may end up strengthening his grip on a ticking time bomb instead. 

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Never Trumpers have found a new guy no one has heard of to run for president.

Challengers have been hard to come by, but the #NeverTrump dream will never die. The problem is that no Republican with a national profile would want to run as a third-party candidate because every Republican with a national profile has their eye firmly planted on 2020. So the schemers trying to stop Trump have had to settle for people with no national experience or any realistic chance whatsoever of striking a meaningful blow against Trump.

First, there was David French, the National Review weirdo who was Bill Kristol’s chosen candidate. That hope died, however, when French himself said he wasn’t into the idea. Now, Republican strategist and dogged anti-Trumpkin Rick Wilson has found his horse: Evan McMullin, a former CIA operative who is the chief policy director of the House Republican conference. How does McMullin compare to French, you ask? Here’s BuzzFeed’s McKay Coppins, who broke the story:

Unlike National Review writer David French, another conservative courted by anti-Trump Republicans to launch a long-shot third-party bid, McMullin has virtually no public profile. He doesn’t appear regularly on television, and has just 135 followers on Twitter. His most high-profile recent appearance seems to have been a TEDx talk about genocide he gave at London Business School in April.

Lol.

But McMullin does have one thing going for him: He’s a Mormon and a graduate of Brigham Young University and is expected to campaign in Utah, whose Mormon-heavy electorate does not like the profligate and profane Trump. Could he swing enough votes away from Trump to turn Utah blue? The election is 90 days from now and this guy has 135 Twitter followers.

August 05, 2016

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What will Donald Trump hate about the Olympics opening ceremony?

Besides the usual reports hyping the elaborate, existentially fraught pageantry, some interesting political subplots have emerged during the buildup to the start of Rio Games. Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and Dilma Rousseff, the former presidents who brought the Olympics to Brazil and presided over the (disastrous) preparations, will not be attending the spectacle. (The former is being tried for obstructing the investigation of a massive political kickback scheme. The latter is staring down fraudulent impeachment charges.) Wary of the precarious optics, a number of world leaders, including U.S. President Barack Obama, are expected to stay away as well. Interim President Michel Temer, whom 62 percent of Brazilians would like to see resign, has said he is “extremely prepared” to be received with a chorus of boos.

Add to this a cryptic tweet earlier today from the ceremony’s director, Fernando Meirelles, of City of God fame:

It translates as: “Bolsnaro is going to hate the ceremony. Trump too. At least we got that much right.”

Grievance is the orange spray tan Donald Trump swims in, so that really doesn’t tell us much about what Meirelles has in store for tonight. He does provide another clue, but like Trump, Jair Bolsnaro, the right-wing member of Brazil’s lower legislative body, is pretty much a walking dumpster fire of misogyny, racism, and homophobia. No help there, either.

That leaves plenty of room for speculation, but for now, let’s just point out that Trump has already become a cross-cultural stand-in for all things loathsome and backward in the world. In that, at least, his campaign seems to be bringing people together.

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Donald Trump is going to endorse Paul Ryan, but will anyone care?

Fox News reports that Trump will endorse Ryan at a rally in Green Bay, Wisconsin, on Friday evening. This will be something of a turnaround for Trump, who when asked about the possibility of an endorsement earlier this week passive-aggressively said he is “not quite there yet.”

Ryan is in a primary battle against Paul Nehlen, a motorcycle-riding whack job who wants to deport all Muslims and is being supported by Ann Coulter and Michelle Malkin. Earlier this week, it was reported that some of Trump’s former aides were helping Nehlen’s campaign.

Trump’s refusal to endorse Ryan (and John McCain and Kelly Ayotte) revived the storyline that Trump has started a civil war within the GOP. His endorsement is clearly meant to put out that fire, or at least to try to move the conversation elsewhere. (It’s worth pointing out that, despite dragging his feet, Ryan did tepidly endorse Trump.)

If history is any judge, Trump’s endorsement will mostly be negging, or talking about Trump. Donald Trump does not do full-throated endorsements. And no matter what Mike Pence says, the distance between Ryan and Trump is very real. Furthermore, Ryan doesn’t even need the endorsement; he is leading Nehlen by 66 points. This is an endorsement that only serves one purpose: to try to stop a narrative that has dominated the last year of Republican politics. It probably won’t.