Former Trump agency models reportedly worked in US without visas - live

Rush Limbaugh is going to flip when he hears this. Donald Trump’s plan remains to deport all undocumented migrants, Donald Trump Jr tells CNN’s Anderson Cooper. “That’s been the same, correct,” DTJ says.

Yesterday Limbaugh told listeners “I never took [Trump] seriously” on his stated plan to deport all undocumented migrants.

Who looks silly now, Rush Limbaugh.

Transcript via CBS News’ Sopan Deb:

Clinton running mate Tim Kaine gets into the questions about Hillary Clinton’s health raised by Rudy Giuliani and other Trump surrogates.

What about Trump’s health, Kaine asks.

“Every presidential candidate should prove.. that they’re healthy enough,” Kaine says.

As for the “conspiracy theories” about Clinton’s health, “can I give you an up-close-and-personal on this?” Kaine asks.

“I have been on the trail with Hillary for five weeks and I can barely keep up with her. I’ve been on the trail five weeks. She’s been going for 17 months.”

“Trump is the guy who released a medical note from his doctor that... even said, Trump would be the healthiest individual to serve as president in the history of the country.

“I’d like to see him go one-on-one with president Obama, but that’s for another day...”

“Is that the standard that the American voter is entitled to?

“Hillary Clinton has met every test of disclosure we expect... Donald Trump has failed all of these tests miserably.”

Former models who worked with Donald Trump’s Trump Model Management have told Mother Jones that they worked in the United States without the appropriate visas and faced steep expenses charged by their employer.

From the Mother Jones piece:

According to a financial disclosure filed by his campaign in May, Donald Trump earned nearly $2 million from the company, in which he holds an 85 percent stake. Meanwhile, some former Trump models say they barely made any money working for the agency because of the high fees for rent and other expenses that were charged by the company. [...]

Two other former Trump models—who requested anonymity to speak freely about their experiences, and who we are giving the pseudonyms Anna and Kate—said the agency never obtained work visas on their behalf, even as they performed modeling assignments in the United States.

The Trump campaign declined to answer questions about Trump Model Management’s use of foreign labor. Read the full piece here.

A new Monmouth University poll of likely Pennsylvania voters shows Hillary Clinton leading Donald Trump by eight points, 48-40, in a four-way presidential race. Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson gets 6% in the poll and 1% back Jill Stein, while 4% are undecided.

The poll also finds the Democratic candidate, Katie McGinty, with an edge in the US senate race over incumbent Pat Toomey. Polling averages have the race neck-and-neck.

The latest installment of the NBC / Survey Monkey national tracking poll, conducted online from August 22 through August 28 among registered voters, has Clinton ahead of Trump by six points, 48-42. Last week, Clinton led Trump in the tracking poll by 8 points.

Does that mean the race is tightening? FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver points out that Clinton’s numbers appear to have settled a bit, while Trump’s are stagnant:

The Washington Post today posted thousands of documents upon which were built the recently published newsroom book Trump Revealed:

The documents include transcripts of interviews with Trump.

In one of the transcripts, the internet has noticed, Trump refers to the “Mets’ George Steinbrenner.” Steinbrenner, who died in 2010, owned the Yankees, not the Mets. What Trump said is like referring to “Boston Celtics star Michael Jordan” or the “Lakers’ Mark Cuban.”

Conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh, a primary source of information for Republican primary voters, said on his show Monday that “I never took him seriously” on Trump’s vow to deport the 11-12 million undocumented migrants in the United States.

Last fall, Trump repeatedly called for a “deportation force” to conduct the expulsions. Competing primary candidates were not willing to follow him to that policy extreme. They lost.

It appears now that Trump no longer supports a deportation force – the candidate is due to roll out his immigration policy proposals, again, in a speech in Phoenix tomorrow.

A Limbaugh caller challenged the radio host on why he was pretending that Trump was not shifting on immigration. Cornered, Limbaugh revealed that he never took Trump seriously on the issue – a stance he forgot to share with listeners at the time.

It was all sleight of hand, but only some people were in on it? What else does Limbaugh know Trump was faking?

Media Matters has posted audio and a transcript:

CALLER: For you to sit here and say that now that he adopts all the positions of everybody he ridiculed as not even being a flip flop and it’s no big deal? This is why so many Republican voters have such a hard time going to the con man.

RUSH LIMBAUGH (HOST): Well, in the first place, I don’t think Trump has actually changed that much from what he said, and I’m also not aware that he told every Republican they had to agree with him or else -- whatever he was going to do to them he did. I’m just -- the point -- what is it --

CALLER: With all due respect, Rush, on Chuck Todd’s show, he specifically said when asked the question, “you mean you’re going to rip the families apart,” he said, “no, I’m not going to rip the families apart. They all have to go, even the U.S. citizen children.”

[...]

Come on. You were watching the debates as well as the rest of us were. You know exactly what he said and you know exactly the way he ridiculed everybody on that stage.

LIMBAUGH: Yeah. I guess the difference is -- or not the difference. I guess the thing is -- this is going to enrage you. I could choose a path here to try to modify you. I never took him seriously on this.

CALLER: Yeah. But 30 million – 15 – 10 million, excuse me, 10 million people did –

LIMBAUGH: Yeah, and they still don’t care. That’s my point, they still don’t care. They’re going to stick with him no matter what.

Maine governor Paul LePage has told a local radio station that he might “move on” after a string of controversies culminating last week in a voicemail in which he called a state legislator a “little son-of-a-bitch socialist cocksucker” and a video in which he expounded on the criminal nature of people of color.

“I’m looking at all options,” LePage said on WVOM, the Press Herald reported. “I think some things I’ve been asked to do are beyond my ability. I’m not going to say that I’m not going to finish it. I’m not saying that I am going to finish it.

“If I’ve lost my ability to help Maine people, maybe it’s time to move on.”’

Update: LePage tweets an indication that he’s not resigning:

LePage, a top Donald Trump supporter whose daughter works for the Trump campaign in Maine, has bragged about his proximity to Trump: “I was Donald Trump before Donald Trump became popular,” he said in February. “So I think I should support him because we’re one of the same cloth.”

LePage has a long history of controversial, racially tinged statements.

Read further:

The president will guest edit the November issue of Wired, the technology magazine, the publication has announced.

Check out the pocket squares on these guys:

Surely the theme must be technology and elections? Nope, the theme of the issue is “Frontiers,” the magazine advises:

The theme of the issue: Frontiers. Like WIRED, our 44th president is a relentless optimist. For this completely bespoke issue, he wants to focus on the future—on the next hurdles that humanity will need to overcome to move forward. These will include personal frontiers, from precision medicine to human performance; local frontiers, including using data in urban planning and making sure renewable energy works for everyone; national frontiers, from civil rights to medical data; international frontiers, like climate change and cybersecurity; and final frontiers, including space travel and Artificial Intelligence.

Also of note:

The White House is also announcing a Frontiers conference, inspired by the issue, which President Obama will host with the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University on October 13. You can learn more about the event at frontiersconference.org.

(h/t @holpuch)

Speaking of elections... people are actually voting today.

In Florida’s Democratic US senate primary, Representative Patrick Murphy is on track to defeat Representative Alan Grayson and claim the opportunity to face incumbent Republican Marco Rubio in November. Rubio is expected to nuke his primary opponent and averages five points ahead of Murphy in general election polls.

Politico’s Florida oracle Marc Caputo is predicting, meanwhile, a primary win for embattled Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who was toppled from her perch atop the Democratic national committee last month when hacked emails revealed the DNC had a finger on the scale for Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders.

Arizona senator John McCain faces a challenger from the right, state senator Kelli Ward, in a primary contest today. McCain would be glad to come through with a comfortable margin before he braces for what looks like an even more difficult general election battle ahead, against Representative Ann Kirkpatrick.

“It’s not so much I think it’s close. I just don’t think you should heighten expectations,” McCain told Politico in an interview about the primary contest. “The one thing you never want to do in politics is heighten expectations. You always want to lowball it. That’s just the best way to handle it. Plan for the worst and hope for the best.”

As the Donald Trump campaign alternately pokes fun at Hillary Clinton for her policy wonkery and accuses her of an unwillingness to engage “on the issues,” the Associated Press has spent some serious quality time with the candidates’ web sites and determined that Clinton has supplied more information about her policy positions. A lot more. Like 1,253% more:

From the start, Trump has never been the kind of candidate to pore over thick policy books.

Indeed, he has mocked Clinton on the subject.

“She’s got people that sit in cubicles writing policy all day. Nothing’s ever going to happen. It’s just a waste of paper,” he told Time Magazine in June. “My voters don’t care and the public doesn’t care. They know you’re going to do a good job once you’re there.”

To date, Trump’s campaign has posted just seven policy proposals on his website, totaling just over 9,000 words. There are 38 on Clinton’s “issues” page, ranging from efforts to cure Alzheimer’s disease to Wall Street and criminal justice reform, and her campaign boasts that it has now released 65 policy fact sheets, totaling 112,735 words.

Trump’s campaign manager, meanwhile, is taunting Clinton for what she, the manager, paints as a failure to engage on the issues:

One metric at which the Trump campaign has excelled the Clinton campaign is aides making headlines. A Washington Post analysis found that Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook has failed to get his name in half as many headlines as the Trump chairman who has been in his job about two weeks now. As for former Trump chairmans / managers – it’s no contest: