President Elect, Donald Trump, Speaks To A Worried Nation ... And The World. Watch.

Trump Vs. Clinton Is A Verdict On America

Trump vs. Clinton is a verdict on America.

Hillary Clinton was on a path to become the most widely and deeply disliked major party candidate in recent U.S. history. Then Donald Trump came along and beat her to it.

I'm glad they are unpopular. Their names read together are a verdict on American society. They are a reflection of our self-hatred. The Clinton-Trump election is like history dragging our country across the carpet and putting our nose in our own filth. Breathe deep.

Clinton is a maximally corrupt figure. Her great fortune in this election is that hers is a conventional sort of corruption that does not seem to directly threaten law and order in the United States, or destabilize the world order. She is loose about the security of her private email server on which she conducts the business of state, but just try to get the transcript of the speech she delivered to Goldman Sachs for a hefty fee.

Although she's happy to take six-figure paychecks from American public colleges for her speeches, Clinton's main business has been the globalist do-gooding grifter circuit. The outlines of it are simple enough. Give to the Clinton global outfits and get favorable treatment in return. The Clintons get to travel around the world for more networking and buck-raking opportunities, and keep their staff of flunkeys and friends well-paid. It's a family business. Try to imagine Clinton being tough on financial services, when its firms have paid her husband nearly $20 million to speak to them since his presidency ended.

Clinton is a political coward. See her perfectly calibrated zero-courage shift on same-sex marriage over the last two decades. She embodies the sick American culture of exaggerated victimhood. See her response to every political criticism, or her active imagination about being shot at by snipers in Bosnia.

And she is fantastically incompetent. Obama defeated her by asking, "Who got the single most important foreign policy decision since the end of the Cold War right, and who got it wrong?" Then he inexplicably made her secretary of state and she made the worst foreign policy decision since Iraq, knocking over Libya's government and making another safe harbor for ISIS.

Trump's corruption is more exotic and destabilizing. His life has been built on breaking his promises to everyone: other property developers, creditors, even his own wives. He brags about this. He makes fun of his own supporters when he says that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and still receive their support. He has also used the government to beat up small competitors and bully property owners who stand in his way.

His corruption is worse than Clinton's in that it makes a normal person squeamish. He outwardly relishes the opportunity to command American troops to commit war crimes and to torture our enemies, or suspected enemies. He injects conspiracy theories into our politics — whether they are about Obama's birth certificate, vaccines, or the JFK assassination. He openly admires governments, like those of China and Russia, that crush internal dissent. He praises a fictive story about desecrating Muslim bodies as a foreign policy strategy.

He benefits from corruption. Donald Trump has gotten hundreds of hours of uninterrupted and free media coverage from a ratings-chasing cable news business. He has gotten bathroom-tissue soft coverage from some in the conservative-entertainment complex. The tumor-like growth on the body politic, Sean Hannity, has a deep conflict of interest: He benefits when his audience is handed political defeats and humiliations. Nothing is better for opinion journalism than opposition, and this counts even more for talk radio and prime-time Fox News.

Donald Trump has a money problem
The case against either candidate becoming president is so strong that it is nearly impossible to blame anyone for voting any which way in this election. More than 100 million Americans will cast a ballot for Clinton or Trump in November.

But these days American self-government is indistinguishable from self-incrimination. Our domestic policy is a nest of rent-seeking corruption, our social insurance system is an act of theft against posterity. And our foreign policy, described fairly, resembles the last weeks of a bloodthirsty crime family, led to its bitter end by demented octogenarians. Clinton or Trump 2016: a just punishment.

How Donald Trump Locked Up The Jerk Vote. LOL.

How Donald Trump Locked Up The Jerk Vote.

Lest there be any doubt that Donald Trump attracts the most thoughtful people to his cause, his most important endorsement in advance of Tuesday's Indiana primary came from former basketball coach Bobby Knight. When asked by NPR what domestic issues attracted him to Trump, Knight said, "What the hell do I know anything about domestic issues? That's for somebody a lot smarter than I am. And you got to understand that I'm just talking about a guy that I think and all those things that need to be done, like domestic issues and whatever, here's my choice of the guy to do it. It's just that simple." The interviewer followed up by asking whether Knight believed Trump can unify the country. "How the hell would I know that?" Knight responded. It was as inspiring as any halftime pep talk.

But we know the real reason for this most weighty of endorsements: Bobby Knight is a jerk, and he supports Donald Trump because Trump is a jerk, too.

And it isn't just Knight. Among Trump's most prominent endorsers are a convicted rapist, the jerkiest governor in America, the NFL's best-known bully, conservatism's foremost performance artist of hate, and various members of the Ku Klux Klan. If there's a dirtbag or scumbag in America who isn't on Team Trump, it'd be hard to find him.

We all know that Trump has harnessed the disgruntlement and anger of the Republican base and used it to feed his campaign. But it would be a mistake to see it only as a temporary state of mind that Trump has exploited. It is that, but there's also the fact that America's worst people, who were terrible before this election began and will be terrible after it's over, have found their champion.

You can see it in Trump's running critique of "political correctness" and his supporters' insistence that they're attracted to him because unlike other politicians, he "tells it like it is." In truth, Trump doesn't tell it like it is — he spews more inaccuracies, distortions, and outright lies than any other candidate. But there's no doubt that he says things other politicians won't. That's not because they're some kind of deep truth that the powers-that-be find threatening, but because they're vulgar and offensive. When Trump says that Mexicans are criminals and rapists, or invents belittling nicknames for his opponents, or sends all kind of misogyny Hillary Clinton's way, he may be saying things others are unwilling to say, but that's nothing to be proud of.

Nevertheless, it's undeniable that there's something compelling about a candidate who doesn't talk like other politicians, and most politicians try very hard to convince everyone that they're nice. They try to be approachable, likeable, genuine, and authentic. They try to make us feel as though, if we had the chance to get to know them, we'd become great friends. And yes, most of the time it's phony.

But that doesn't make Trump's persona any more real, and it doesn't mean that if you make an effort not to offend people you're just being "politically correct." When someone says that political correctness is being used against them, what they usually mean is that they said something offensive, and somebody else told them not to be such a jerk.

But many people find Trump's jerkiness intoxicating, for the same reason they feel the same way about certain talk radio hosts. Trump can be a jerk on your behalf, saying the things you think but are reluctant to say out loud, because the norms of politeness in a civilized society prevent it. It's fitting that Trump comes to politics from reality TV, a genre which allows us to watch "real" people act like monsters to one another. Trump talks about how bored we'd all be with him if he acted "presidential," and since he seems to think being presidential just means not insulting people, he's probably right. A Donald Trump who treated other human beings with kindness and consideration wouldn't be nearly as interesting to watch, and wouldn't be leading the polls in the Republican primaries.

But imagine if someone you actually knew acted like the Donald Trump we see on television. Let's say you and your spouse invited someone over for dinner, and after the meal he said, "Well that food was crap, and not only that, your outfits are ugly, your taste in decor is abominable, and your kids strike me as uncommonly stupid." You probably wouldn't say, "Wow, how refreshingly honest — he really tells it like it is!" You'd say that guy was a jerk, and never invite him over again.

Trump's success so far is proof that we have more than our share of jerks here in America, and they're coming out for him in force. But do jerks make up more than half of the electorate? It's hard to imagine.

Donald Trump's "Yuuge" Problem. Is America's Problem!

The truth about Donald Trump’s ability to lie is that he has identified a flaw in our political system.

Donald Trump has a yuuge problem with the truth. During a recent one-hour town hall on CNN, he told more than a lie a minute, according to Huffington Post. Trump spouts bs about his opponents, about his staff, about his record, about his opponents’ records. We’ve reached a moment in his campaign where it might be surprising if the truth accidentally came out of his mouth.

But how does he get away with it? There have been reams of commentary blaming the media for failing to correct his factual inaccuracies. However many in the press of called him out repeatedly on his lack of truth—not just the ideological and nonpartisan fact-checking organizations, but numerous members of the media, even Fox News.

The truth about Donald Trump’s ability to lie is that he has identified a flaw in our political system, one used for years by those with an interest in hacking our republic for ideological gain. If you can create a world of two coexisting and contradictory truths, then there is no way to tell a lie.

Since 2012, I began researching a book about how lies, such as “death panels” infect our political and media culture. Quickly it became apparent that there were people who invented these lies, primarily for financial or political gain.

This form of ideological warfare dates back to the tobacco companies’ fight to prevent a public acknowledgment that their product causes cancer. Their methodology has been used over and over again. Aided by a bifurcated media structure that allows Republicans and Democrats to seek information from completely different sources, we have reached a point in our society where there are two competing truths when asked about critical issues.

To confirm this theory I commissioned Public Policy Polling to conduct a poll of 1,083 registered voters asking about their beliefs on three vital public policy issues: health care, guns, and abortion.

Specifically we asked respondents if they believed death panels exist (they don’t), if they believe in the “more guns, less crime” theory (it’s wrong), and whether abortion causes breast cancer and mental health issues (it doesn’t).

While the results were not at all surprising, they do explain some of the underlying problems with our political ecosystem.

It is not simply that we are a country that is divided by political philosophy; we disagree on what should be stipulated facts. This is often cited as the problem behind debates about climate change, but it actually extends across nearly every issue with a partisan divide.

Seventy-four percent of Republicans either believe the Affordable Care Act established death panels or are unsure, compared with 51 percent of Democrats.

Sixty-nine percent of Republicans believe the “more guns, less crime” theory to be true, compared with thirty-three percent of Democrats.

Finally 61 percent of Republicans believe or are unsure if asked whether abortion causes breast cancer and mental health issues, compared with 46 percent of Democrats.

It is not simply that we are a country that is divided by political philosophy; we disagree on what should be stipulated facts. This is often cited as the problem behind debates about climate change, but it actually extends across nearly every issue with a partisan divide.

These divisions are part of an intentional effort to sow division and create a political universe where progress on any number of issues is impossible. As Richard B. Berman, an infamous corporate lobbyist and public relations huckster who establishes respectable-sounding but shill organizations such as the anti-labor Center for Union Facts, pointed out in a surreptitiously recorded speech to energy industry executives his goal was not to win but instead to “tie” because a “tie basically ensures the status quo.”

A culture where liberals and conservatives each seek out information from media sources that confirm, rather than challenge, their ideological preconceptions only magnifies this problem. If your trusted source of information claims that objective lies are true, no amount of scientific debunking is going to undo that damage.

This problem has become far more acute among conservatives than liberals because of a decades-long campaign to convince them that all media has a built-in liberal bias. Hence why Fox News chief Roger Ailes exclaimed to then Daily Beast reporter Howard Kurtz, “Every other network has given all their shows to liberals.(They Haven’t)” He concluded, “We are the balance.”

That is the environment in which we enter the 2016 campaign. Enter into this already toxic environment where liberals and conservatives are operating off a different set of facts, Donald Trump is a candidate perfectly equipped to take advantage of the same hacks of democracy that Lies, Incorporated exploit. His large-scale, attention-grabbing lies have not only deceived the public, they have sucked oxygen away from his opponents as the media provides ample coverage of the fallout over whatever his most recent gaff is. Thus far this has distracted from any real debate in the Republican primary, instead forcing candidates to discuss the relative size of their hands and other body parts.

This is exactly the goal of modern political tactics. Bog down debate on already settled or tangential issues to avoid the real questions that need to be dealt with. In the case of issues like global warming, this allows broad swaths of the public to ignore a crisis at hand and in the case of Donald Trump, it distracts voters from recognizing his ignorance on a host of issues.

Ari Rabn-Havt is author of Lies Incorporated: The World of Post-Truth Politics. 

Editor's comment:

the writer adroitly avoids accusing other politicians of also telling lies like donald trump, chief among them #lyinghillaryclinton.. i recon the writer is a democRAT.

Why Donald Trump's Ham-fisted Incompetence Is Such A Winning Combo For The Republican Party.

Why Donald Trump's ham-fisted incompetence is such a winning combo for the Republican Party
by Ryan Cooper

Despite his brand as a ruthless businessman whose greed borders on the sociopathic, it's becoming clear that Donald Trump couldn't organize his way out of a wet paper sack.

After a deluge of truly abysmal headlines, he has tripped himself up yet again on the way to the Republican nomination, as poor logistics lost him multiple delegates in five states over the weekend. His own kids didn't even realize they had to change their New York party registration last October in order to be able to vote Trump in the primary on April 19. Sad!

Ted Cruz, with his carefully organized army of staring ideologues, is the natural beneficiary of Trump missteps, and has gathered most of the lost delegates. Of course, if Trump had even a modicum of political competence, he would have long since locked up the nomination. Just look at this tidbit from the weekend caucuses: "The frontrunner’s advisers repeatedly instructed supporters to vote for the wrong candidates — distributing the incorrect delegate numbers to supporters," Time reports.

Still, it's hard to imagine a politically competent Trump who would also have run the same campaign that launched him to the front of the pack, where he still remains, despite the recent flailing. It's a good demonstration of why nobody can lock up this primary.

Trump soared to frontrunner status by exploiting the fact that the GOP base has, for years, been running on the political equivalent of solvent abuse. Angry, resentful, and paranoid, the conservative movement has responded to inconvenient politics or facts with sheer denial or an enraged doubling-down. Climate change going to drown half of America's coastal cities? It must be a conspiracy cooked up by all those scientists out to get that grant money. Got creamed among Latinos in the presidential election of 2012? To Hades with elite attempts to pass immigration reform as an unavoidable compromise, and primary some major supporters for good measure.

Trump first got into major national politics on the back of the conspiracy theory that President Obama wasn't really born in the United States. (Obama himself completely humiliated Trump for this at the 2011 White House Correspondents Dinner, which reportedly was the spark for Trump to run for president.) During the primary, he has taken every Republican bad habit — every plausibly-deniable racist dogwhistle, every game of footsie with rancid demagogues, every piece of crank economics or pseudoscience — and made them overt slogans painted in 20-foot-tall letters.

As a strategy to win the Republican primary, such tactics combine extremely well with Trump's spider sense for his audience's worst instincts and his absolute genius at manipulating TV media to get himself free coverage.

The rest of the primary field has been unable to mount a serious challenge despite being implicated in exactly the same stuff, just to a lesser degree. If Trump's tax plan is total garbage (which it is), Rubio's and Cruz's were no less so. His signature immigration policy of "huge wall plus deport the brown people" is bonkers, but rooted in decades of conservative anti-immigrant hysteria. And you can draw a straight line to Trump's "ban Muslims" idea from many previous episodes of whipped-up anti-Muslim bigotry.

But it turns out that such a strategy means absolutely obliterating one's standing among the broader population. If nominated, Trump would very likely be the least popular major party nominee since the advent of modern polling. Virtually any Democratic nominee would be the heavy favorite against him.

And that illustrates why traditional national Republican candidates wanting to leverage white racism for electoral advantage have used the dogwhistle instead of an actual whistle. Without plausible deniability, you're going to turn out like Strom Thurmond in 1948. Only Trump, with his unmerited arrogance and manifest ignorance of basic political mechanisms, is dumb enough to try it.

But as a primary strategy, it's successful enough that the only actual politician to pose a serious challenge to Trump, Ted Cruz, is having to scramble to pick up all the scraps he can find — and Cruz is similar enough to Trump that the party is still fantasizing about nominating someone else. Who knows, it might even work. But it'd be simpler to prevent the party from being eaten by galloping nonsense in the first place.

Donald Trump.

The GOP Has A Big Problem. Millions Of Its Voters Are A Civically Incompetent Mob. Yep. But So Are Democratic Voters!

The GOP Has A Big Problem. Millions Of Its Voters Are A Civically Incompetent Mob. Yep. But So Are Democratic Voters!
by Damon Linker

There is one thing you will never hear an American politician say, at least in public, after losing an election: "I would have prevailed if the voters weren't so foolish, short-sighted, and stupid."

The reticence makes sense. For one thing, when your career depends on winning votes, it's wise not to insult those who cast them. But on a deeper level, such an outburst clashes with bedrock American convictions about democracy.

In the U.S. the people rule, and we tend to assume the legitimacy of their decisions. You might disagree with the outcome of an election, but you accept it. Of course it was justified. The people have spoken, and they have rendered judgment. If the opposing candidate or campaign had been better, more sensible, more reasonable, it would have prevailed.

Who's to say the people were wrong?

And yet here we are, facing the prospect of Donald Trump winning the Republican presidential nomination.

I know we've entered a new bearish phase of Trump coverage. The Heidi Cruz tweet! The pending Lewandowski arraignment! The abortion meltdown! The 10-point polling gap in Wisconsin!

All true. It's been a bad week or so for Trump. Yet he's still beating Cruz by nearly 300 delegates. He's still on track to win big in New York and other delegate-rich states on the East Coast in the coming weeks. And his national poll numbers continue to track slowly upwards. Whereas the party's appointed Trumpslayer (Ted Cruz) sits at 31 percent in the latest Reuters tracking poll, Trump himself has seen his number modestly rising over the past week to 44.6 percent.

Which means that millions of Republican voters — not a majority, but a solid plurality — continue to want Donald Trump to be their party's nominee for president. How could that possibly be — after the mess of the past week, but also after endless months of insults; racial, ethnic, and religious taunts and threats; blatantly ignorant statements about policy (foreign and domestic); and a continual flood of transparent lies?

Explanations abound:

It's the media's fault, for giving Trump so much free publicity.
It's the GOP establishment's fault, for whipping up irrational hostility to Barack Obama for seven long years.

It's the right-wing media's fault, for doing something similar to liberals in general for even longer.
It's neoliberalism's fault, because 30+ years of tax cuts and free-market policies have decimated the white working class.

It's George W. Bush's fault.

It's Barack Obama's fault.

Those are just the most pervasive theories. Each of them gets at a part of the truth.

But so does this: Roughly 40 percent of the GOP base is voting out of a poisonous mixture of ignorance and spite. They are behaving like a mob. And thus their political choice deserves no deference or respect whatsoever.

This judgment has nothing to do with ideology. I disagree with the mainstream Republican agenda, but it represents a legitimate position on our politics. The same holds for the mainstream Democratic agenda, as well as for Bernie Sanders' left-wing insurgency against the Democratic establishment and its preferred nominee for president (Hillary Clinton).

This isn't even about the cluster of ideas that Trump is running on: immigration restrictions, protectionism, and so forth. A responsible, informed candidate could run for president on an agenda like that without it posing a threat to the country in the way that Trump's candidacy clearly does.

The problem is that Donald Trump, as an individual, is manifestly, indisputably unqualified to be president. Yes, as nearly everyone recognizes, he's a demagogue, which should be bad enough. But he's also wildly inconsistent, petulant, and vindictive, and he obviously delights in encouraging (and in the case of his campaign manager's alleged behavior, rewarding) violence.

Then there's his inexcusable ignorance about policy. In just the past two weeks, Trump has staked out as many as four positions on abortion, and threatened to scrap the mainstay of the postwar liberal order (NATO), as well as efforts to stop the proliferation of nuclear weapons in a world where terrorists are actively seeking to procure them, without so much as a coherent or compelling explanation as to why.

Apparently millions of Republican voters don't care that Trump would make a disastrously bad president. And that is an expression of rank civic irresponsibility.

What can we do about it? Other than work within the political system to ensure his defeat at the polls, nothing. But that doesn't mean we should deny sobering implications of this whole sorry episode: Democracy lets the people decide who rules, but there is no guarantee that they won't occasionally use the power to make catastrophically bad decisions.

Why Karl Rove is rooting for a brokered convention

This is something Aristotle understood very well, which is why his arguments in favor of a modified form of democracy differ so dramatically from modern, egalitarian versions. The latter nearly always involve some praise of The People's innate wisdom and make a profoundly moral case for deferring to its preferences. Aristotle, by contrast, simply points out that if you don't give the people a voice, they'll make trouble. And because they are so numerous — the people, in Aristotle's terms, are "the many" — they can potentially make an awful lot of trouble. Which may necessitate giving them an awful lot of power.

There are a lot of Trump supporters in the GOP. The party may have no alternative but to defer to their choice of presidential nominee. But please, let's not pretend that a Trump victory in the primaries would carry even an ounce of moral legitimacy.

It would be colossally foolish choice, made by colossally foolish voters.

Editor's comment: sAnd o would it be for democrats voting for hillary and bernie!

GOP's Donald Trump.

What Donald Trump has wrought

As Wisconsinites head for the polls, our Beltway elites are almost giddy. For they foresee a Badger State bashing for Donald Trump, breaking his momentum toward the Republican nomination.

Should the Donald fall short of the delegates needed to win on the first ballot, 1,237, there is growing certitude that he will be stopped. First by Ted Cruz; then, perhaps, by someone acceptable to the establishment, which always likes to have two of its own in the race.

But this city of self-delusion should realize there is no going back for America. For, whatever his stumbles of the last two weeks, Trump has helped to unleash the mightiest force of the 21st century: nationalism.

Transnationalism and globalism are moribund.

First among the issues on which Trump has triumphed — “We will build the wall — and Mexico will pay for it!” — is border security.

Republican candidates who failed to parrot Trump on illegal immigration were among the first casualties.

For that is where America is, and that is where the West is.

Consider Europe. Four months ago, Angela Merkel was Time’s Person of the Year for throwing open the gates to the “huddled masses” of the Middle and Near East.

Merkel’s Germany is now leading the EU in amassing a huge bribe to the Turks to please take them back, and keep them away from the Greek islands that are now Islam’s Ellis Island into Europe.

Africa’s population will double to 2.5 billion by 2050. With 60 percent of Africans now under 25 years of age, millions will find their way to the Med to cross to the Old Continent where Europeans are aging, shrinking and dying. Look for gunboats in the Med.

If immigration is the first issue where Trump connected with the people, the second is trade.

Republicans are at last learning that trade deficits do matter, that free trade is not free. The cost comes in dead factories, lost jobs, dying towns and the rising rage of an abandoned Middle America whose country this is and whose wages have stagnated for decades.

Economists who swoon over figures on consumption forget what America’s 19th-century meteoric rise to self-sufficiency teaches, and what all four presidents on Mount Rushmore understood.

Production comes before consumption. Who owns the orchard is more essential than who eats the apples. We have exported the economic independence that Hamilton taught was indispensable to our political independence. We have forgotten what made us great.

China, Japan, Germany — the second, third and fourth largest economies on earth — all owe their prosperity to trade surpluses run for decades at the expense of the Americans.

A third casualty of Trumpism is the post-Cold War foreign policy consensus among liberal interventionists and neoconservatives.

Trump subjects U.S. commitments to a cost-benefit analysis, as seen from the standpoint of cold national interest.

What we do we get from continuing to carry the largest load of the defense of a rich Europe, against a Russia with one-fourth of Europe’s population?

How does Vladimir Putin, leader of a nation that in the last century lost its European and world empires and a third of its landmass, threaten us?

Why must we take the lead in confronting and containing Putin in Ukraine, Crimea and Georgia? No vital U.S. interest is imperiled there, and Russia’s ties there are older and deeper than ours to Puerto Rico.

Why is it the responsibility of the U.S. Pacific Fleet to defend the claims of Hanoi, Manila, Kuala Lumpur and Brunei, to rocks, reefs and islets in the South China Sea — against the claims of China?

American hawks talk of facing down Beijing in the South and East China Seas while U.S. companies import so much in Chinese-made goods they are fully subsidizing Beijing’s military budget.

Does this make sense?

Patriotism, preserving and protecting the unique character of our nation and people, economic nationalism, America First, staying out of other nation’s wars — these are as much the propellants of Trumpism as is the decline of the American working and middle class.

Trump’s presence in the race has produced the largest turnout ever in the primaries of either party. He has won the most votes, most delegates, most states. Wisconsin aside, he will likely come to Cleveland in that position.

If, through rules changes, subterfuge and faithless delegates, party elites swindle him out of the nomination, do they think that the millions who came out to vote for Trump will go home and say: We lost it fair and square?

Do they think they can then go back to open borders, amnesty, a path to citizenship, the Trans-Pacific Partnership and nation building?

Whatever happens to Trump, the country has spoken. And if the establishment refuses to heed its voice, and returns to the policies the people have repudiated, it should take heed of John F. Kennedy’s warning:

“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible, make violent revolution inevitable.”

Editor's comment: great points made, pat, but donald trump appears to be the wrong person to play the piper to the tunes, 

GOP Pollster: Here’s How We Know [Donald] Trump Has No Chance In November.

GOP pollster: Here’s how we know Trump has no chance in November

Some Republicans are in denial about what he would do to the ticket

He’s an electoral disaster waiting to happen

Here are the numbers that prove it
 Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks at a campaign stop Wednesday in Appleton, Wis.
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks at a campaign stop Wednesday in Appleton,

Some Republicans have been trying to talk themselves into believing that Donald Trump would not be so bad as the Republican nominee for president. Maybe he really would scramble the political deck sufficiently, they think, to allow the party to retake the White House.

Those Republicans are whistling past the graveyard. A Trump nomination has as much chance of success in the general election as Trump University, or Trump Mortgage, or Trump Shuttle, or Trump Vodka, or Trump Casinos. Trump is an electoral disaster waiting to happen.

Demographic trends make clear that a Republican nominee who hopes to win a majority of the popular vote in 2016 must gain either 30 percent of the nonwhite vote or 65 percent of the white vote, a level not seen since President Ronald Reagan’s 49-state landslide sweep in 1984. Trump doesn’t stand a chance of doing either one.

Gain 30 percent of the nonwhite vote? Trump’s favorable to unfavorable ratings in the latest Post-ABC News national poll among nonwhites are 16 percent to 81 percent (72 percent strongly unfavorable); among Hispanics alone - the largest and fastest-growing minority group - they are 14 percent to 85 percent (74 percent strongly unfavorable). A Trump nomination could lock Hispanics into the Democratic column for a generation or more, threatening Republican presidential victories as far as the eye can see.

Gain 65 percent of the white vote? Trump’s favorable to unfavorable ratings among white women are 29 percent to 68 percent. His strongly unfavorable rating of 55 percent among white women is more than four times his strongly favorable rating among that group of 13 percent. How in the world could Trump reach 65 percent among whites overall if more than two-thirds of white women give him an unfavorable rating today, and if most of that unfavorable rating is intensely negative?

And that’s not all. Millennials have now passed baby boomers to become the largest generation. Trump’s ratings among millennials are now 18 percent favorable to 80 percent unfavorable, with 70 percent strongly unfavorable. Partisan identifications that are formed when voters come of political age tend to stick with them the rest of their lives, and a Trump nomination could push an entire generation into the Democratic column.

Negative ratings at these levels are historic for a major party nominee, creating hurricane-force head winds. And just imagine what Trump’s unfavorable ratings would be once the Democrats’ ads finish running.

But what about “the missing white voters” whom Trump supposedly would energize and bring into the electorate? Weren’t there more than 4 million whites who voted in 2008 but not 2012? Yes, and Mitt Romney lost by 5 million votes. Had every one of the missing white voters turned out and voted for Romney, he still would have lost.

Those whites who did not vote were concentrated in the deepest red states - Arkansas, Oklahoma, West Virginia - where President Obama never had a chance and lack of competition drove down turnout. No evidence exists of a dramatic falloff among white voters in the swing states that decide the outcome of a presidential contest.

Conservatives are fond of calling for dynamic scoring of the financial impact of changes in tax policy, where individuals’ behavior is incorporated into the estimate. For example, doubling the tax on yachts does not generate twice the revenue, because people in turn do not buy as many yachts.

We should apply the same concept to voter turnout. Would a Trump nomination bring more white voters to the polls? Undoubtedly, based on the high viewership of Republican debates and the high turnout in Republican primaries so far. Higher white turnout could conceivably put some of the Democratic- leaning but overwhelmingly white states of the Great Lakes region into play.

But the other side gets to play this game, too. There may have been 4 million fewer whites who voted in 2012, but there were also 12 million eligible Hispanic voters who stayed home. We know it is easier to drive voters to the polls to vote against rather than for a candidate - witness the tea party’s success in 2010 and 2014 in trying to stop the Obama agenda.

How difficult would it be to increase Hispanic turnout, given Trump’s ratings and his threat to deport 11 million immigrants? The easiest job in U.S. politics in 2016 goes to the Democratic operative charged with doubling Hispanic turnout to stop Trump. And that could put some Republican-leaning states with higher nonwhite populations, such as Georgia, into play.

Trump has a serious Republican problem as well. Since 1984, no victorious Republican presidential candidate has received less than 91 percent support from Republicans. Trump’s favorable to unfavorable ratings among Republicans are 52 percent to 47 percent, with 34 percent strongly unfavorable. A candidate beginning a general election campaign with almost half of his party holding unfavorable views is a non-starter. Contrast that with Hillary Clinton’s favorable to unfavorable ratings among Democrats of 78 percent to 20 percent.

A Trump nomination would put a Democrat in the White House, seriously threaten Republican majorities in Congress and leave the Republican Party in shambles. Let’s hope Republicans wake up before it’s too late.

Whit Ayres is president of North Star Opinion Research, a GOP polling firm, and was the pollster for Marco Rubio’s presidential campaign.

The Republican Party Can Recover From Donald Trump Faster Than You Think

The Republican Party can recover from Donald Trump faster than you think

by Michael Brendan Dougherty

What if the Republican Party isn't doomed?

The consensus tells us Donald Trump is about to destroy the GOP. He has backed away from his pledge to support the eventual nominee of the party if it's not him, saying he has been treated unfairly. Everyone is asking why Republicans haven't done more to avert the coming disaster.

And pundits tell us that the Republican Party of the Bush years is dying no matter what. Writing in The Atlantic, David Frum warns that rallying to Trump would change the direction of the GOP. And running a conservative third-party challenger to compete with Trump may have a similar effect: Splitting a party means abandoning it to your factional enemies.

After Paul Ryan gave a speech that was critical of Trump without ever naming him or making the case against him, New York Times columnist Ross Douthat criticized Ryan for his paralysis. For Douthat, Paul Ryan and the party he leads are proving themselves unable to absorb the most compelling parts of Trumpism, namely its solicitousness of working-class voters. And yet that same party is also unable to forcefully reject Trump the candidate.

But perhaps fretful paralysis is good enough for now. Whatever becomes of Donald Trump's moment in politics, there are reasons to believe this moment is unsustainable and the basic status quo of the Republican Party will eventually emerge triumphant.

Let's posit that, on or off the ticket, Donald Trump will cause an electoral disaster for Republicans.

If he is the nominee, Trump depresses the turnout and activism of churchy Republicans and other social conservatives. He repulses suburban women, and further alienates younger upwardly mobile Republicans. If he is not the nominee, but is the leading vote-getter, the Republican machinations to deny him the nomination alienate a large number of Trumpistas from the party and the effect is just about the same: Republicans lose Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Virginia, and other states by larger than normal margins. Perhaps it is so bad that Republicans not only lose the Senate, including a few talents like Rob Portman, but the House as well.

What happens then? Hillary Clinton wins. Justice Scalia's seat is filled by a justice who is much more liberal than he was. Clinton is given a two-year mandate to do something big on the progressive wish list. Having defeated the most anti-immigrant candidate in modern history, she may go for comprehensive immigration reform. As a bonus, what she does isn't something that threatens to immediately raise taxes on the millions of affluent and moderate voters that supported Clinton over Trump.

These are all defeats for the Republican Party. And they will naturally bring about some expectations for an enduring Democratic majority. But at the same time that Clinton has a unified government, or close to one, the media will question whether she really has a mandate, since the other major party found itself, by virtue of some flukes and quirks, unable to field an impressive candidate. The flukiness of the Republican nominating process ends up infecting the Democratic victor too.

By 2018, the strength of the Republican Party will be ready to reassert itself, perhaps without a major rethink. Matthew Yglesias has made the case that Republicans possess unprecedented strength and numerical superiority at the foundational level of American politics: state legislatures. This means a larger bench from which to select candidates for federal offices or higher offices at the state level. It also helps attract ambitious talent into the party for the foreseeable future. Dying parties don't have this kind of strength. Clinton's presidency, still fresh, will do the work Republican candidates have so far been unable to do: unify the party.

After Super Tuesday, I predicted that the GOP would rally to Trump in the hopes that by accepting the unhappy marriage with a smile, they could change the suitor over time. I was wrong; the party hasn't resolved itself to Trumpism. After the initial wave of endorsements from Paul LePage and Chris Christie, and flirtatious gestures by Rudy Giuliani and Newt Gingrich, the flood of support never materialized. Mitt Romney's unprecedented attack on his party's frontrunner stopped the momentum. And it has become harder to regain, particularly as the Trump campaign seems to be losing steam at the exact moment when a frontrunner is normally romping to the end zone.

The party has been unable to co-opt Trump, unable to endorse him, unable to oppose him effectively. But Trump is not going to bequeath to Republicans a squadron of Trumpistas in Congress. He is not going to build the kind of institutions that ideologues use to pressure a major political party. He's just going to make a spectacle of himself. Barring a black swan event, he will fade away.

The GOP will still have all the problems that pre-dated Trump and that only he exposed. A plurality of its voters will still be unsatisfied with the party's agenda, especially on the economy. It will still have problems with young voters, and still have a long-term demographic problem. Its philosophy will still be outdated.

But by 2018, all the talk of bloodbaths and schisms and fracturing will go away. The party will have powers to exercise, sinecures to offer, and orthodoxies to protect again. The party will get out of its hospital ward and move on. It will shock you how much it never happened.

Some See Alabama's Segregationist, George Wallace, In Donald Trump. Do You?

ATLANTA (AP) — One presidential candidate pledged to "Stand up for America." Two generations later, another promises to "Make America Great Again." Their common denominator: convincing certain Americans that their version of the United States is under threat.

Donald Trump, leader for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination, has never said he's following the playbook of Alabama Gov. George Wallace, who achieved national stature on his promise of "segregation now, segregation tomorrow and segregation forever," then made four failed bids for the White House from 1964 to 1976.

Instead, Trump invokes the anger of "the silent majority," a phrase he's resurrected from the era of Wallace and President Richard Nixon, who won in 1968 and 1972 in part by co-opting Wallace's racially charged populism.

Trump detractors hear more than a faint echo of Wallace in Trump's anti-establishment mix of economic protectionism and blunt nativism, and they note that the brash billionaire, like Wallace, has drawn similar results in the campaign: tense rallies that often involve violent clashes among protesters, police and the candidate's supporters.

"Trump is taking his campaign straight to the haters, and he's gotten the roots of that old Wallace crowd," says Joe Reed, a black Democratic Party broker in Alabama who came to know the four-term governor toward the end of his life, when he had abandoned his segregationist positions, long after a would-be assassin left him paralyzed.

The comparison offends Trump backers.

"George Wallace was a racist," said Debbie Dooley, a national tea party leader. "It's totally ridiculous for anybody to think the same about Donald Trump." She argues Trump's independence from "the money that controls Washington, D.C." outweigh his caustic rhetoric on immigration, Muslims and the protesters — many of them young and black — who interrupt his rallies.

"Donald Trump is not preaching hate," Dooley said. "He's standing up for the American workers and the American people."

Trump offers his outsized personality as an all-purpose antidote to a country that is "falling apart" and "never wins anymore."

The overwhelmingly white throngs at Trump rallies roar at his mention of a border wall and heartily approve his call to stop all non-citizen Muslims from entering the United States. Supporters cheer his promises to protect gun rights and share his lament that Christianity is under attack. They applaud his threats of punitive tariffs on imports from countries "killing us on trade."

Wallace, meanwhile, fueled his strongest campaigns in 1968 and 1972 with a wide-ranging critique of a society in decline. He modified the overtly racist language he used in his Alabama campaigns, fashioning himself instead as a "states' rights" conservative. He complained of rising crime and a "sick Supreme Court" that outlawed compulsory school prayer and allowed pornography.

Wallace, political historian Dan T. Carter said, "had all these ways of getting across what he meant" without explicitly mentioning race or class. "He said 'inner-city thugs,' and everybody knew he was talking about young black men in the cities."

Tom Turnipseed, who managed Wallace's 1968 campaign and became a civil rights activist, assigned the same motivation to Trump and Wallace. "Fear," he told The Associated Press.

"You can scare folks with that line that the Mexicans are coming because everyday working people ... see Mexicans in the labor market and it hurts their wages — they think of it that way, at least," Turnipseed said. "Governor Wallace, you know, did the same with African-Americans."

In his book "The Politics of Rage," Carter identifies Wallace and his play for working-class white votes as the model for the "Southern strategy" that Nixon and Ronald Reagan would use in four winning elections.

Nixon wrote in his memoirs of having to navigate Wallace so he would not "draw a large number of conservative votes from me." Nixon protected his right flank by criticizing court-ordered busing of schoolchildren to accomplish integration, vowing to impose "law and order" and declaring the "War on Drugs," which an aide later described as a targeting of "hippies" and blacks.

Trump is the latest heir of all this, Carter said.

"When you hear Trump supporters say he 'tells like it is' or 'he's not politically correct,'" Carter said, "what they're really saying, many of them, is ... 'I love it, because it's what I believe, too.'"

Protesters, meanwhile, become evidence of the national decay that only the candidate's tough leadership can reverse.

When activists interrupted his rally at Madison Square Garden in 1968, Wallace asked why Democratic and Republican leaders "kowtow to these anarchists." He added, "We don't have riots in Alabama. They start a riot down there, first one of 'em to pick up a brick gets a bullet in the brain, that's all."

Trump has pined for "the old days" when such "animals" would be "carried out on a stretcher, folks." He orders security to "get 'em the hell outta here" and said of one protester, "I'd like to punch him in the face."

Reed acknowledged there are "working white folks who are mad" but says Trump, like Wallace, has them "turning their arrows at the wrong folks."

Trump denies he is playing to racism or xenophobia. His supporters "aren't angry people," he says, just frustrated "about the way the country is being run."

"What are we looking for, OK, all of us?" Trump asked after declaring that families, jobs, homes and health care face existential threats. "We're looking for security. We're looking for safety. We're looking for family, and taking care of our family, right?"

Editor's note: article is here.