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Trump’s foreign policy advisers are hard to find

https://www.yahoo.com/politics/trump-s-foreign-policy-advisers-1385742359511094.html

Donald Trump’s thundering vows to wage a trade war with China or make Mexico pay to build a thousand-mile wall along the U.S. border seem all the less likely to become reality when you consider how mightily he has struggled with a much more easily achievable campaign promise: to announce an unprecedented A-team of foreign policy advisers.

Under normal circumstances, Republican experts on world affairs would be lining up behind the frontrunner for their party’s presidential nomination, eagerly claiming the mantle of “official adviser” and jockeying with rivals for top jobs should the candidate triumph in November.

The 2016 race for the White House is many things, but “normal circumstances” it is not.

Trump’s surprise jump to the head of the GOP pack has confounded the party’s foreign policy community, a large number of whom have signed up to oppose, not support, his unorthodox campaign. Behind the scenes, influential national security figures are watching their friends and colleagues, ready to use what one former senior defense official described to Yahoo News as “peer pressure” to treat any “symptoms of creeping Trumpism.”

The brash former reality-TV star, who took some heat last August after saying he got his military advice from the Sunday talking-head TV shows, promised on February 9 that he would release a list of formal foreign policy advisers “in about two weeks.” On February 17, he said it was coming “in about a week.” He modified that to “very shortly” in a March 3 interview.

On March 8, Trump told MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” program that while “there’s no team” yet, he’s been meeting “with far more than three people” who were “tremendous,” and that he would name names in a “fairly short period of time.”

So far, Trump has only showcased one formal foreign policy adviser: Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., who has served on the Senate Armed Services Committee since taking office in 1997. A senior Sessions communications aide, Stephen Miller, now working for the campaign, has also shouldered parts of the job, sources say. (Trump spokeswoman Hope Hicks told Yahoo News that Miller is “a policy adviser to Mr. Trump,” and said his role was “not specific to foreign policy.”)

Sessions is known as an anti-immigration hawk, not a foreign policy luminary. But the aide who handles his Armed Services Committee portfolio, Sandy Luff, is very well regarded by Capitol Hill colleagues in both parties. Luff did not return an email asking whether she was advising the campaign. Neither did Hicks. Sessions’ Senate office was also silent.

Trump has been relying on Sam Clovis, whose biography describes him as a retired Air Force colonel and whose title with the campaign is “senior policy advisor.” Clovis has been a gatekeeper, and sometimes a spokesman, for Trump’s foreign policy.

While the media and rival campaigns press the maverick marketeer to keep his promise to disclose where he’s getting advice on world affairs, it’s not clear that any voters care that he hasn’t made that list public, or that he feels any particular urgency to do so, despite his promises.

“He keeps his own counsel,” Roger Stone, a longtime Trump friend and former consultant to his campaign, recently told Yahoo News. “He has succeeded so far by being his own man, so it’s very tough to convince him not to continue on the course that has brought him this far.”

Trump’s foreign policy outlook combines economic nationalism — tariffs on Chinese goods, and building a wall on the Mexican border to keep out immigrants he blames for U.S. job losses — with pressure on traditional allies like Japan and Germany to shoulder more of the financial burden of U.S. military deployments. He has praised Russian President Vladimir Putin. He has famously called for a halt to Muslim immigration to the United States, but hasn’t laid out detailed plans for how he would battle the Islamic State or handle Afghanistan, where the next president will inherit a U.S. troop presence of about 10,000. At a Republican debate last week, Trump did not oppose the idea of sending 20,000 to 30,000 more U.S. troops to battle the Islamic State. “We really have no choice,” he said. “We have to knock the hell out of them.”

Trump’s critiques of intervention abroad can be confusing. On the one hand, he has suggested that Gen. George Patton and Gen. Douglas MacArthur — each of whom led massive, years-long ground campaigns — would have quickly done away with the Islamic State. On the other hand, he has warned quite sharply about the cost of military interventionism.

“When I see the policy of some of these people in our government, we’ll be in the Middle East for another 15 years — if we don’t end up losing by that time, because our country is disintegrating,” Trump recently told MSNBC. “We are spending trillions of dollars in the Middle East, and the infrastructure of our country is disintegrating.”

Beyond Clovis, Sessions and Miller, the Trump campaign won’t say who is helping to sherpa their candidate over the treacherous terrain of world affairs.

The only foreign policy item on the “positions” section of his campaign’s official web site is confronting China on trade, while one of his “issues” is a barebones Middle East message in which he declares “I love Israel, I’m very pro-Israel,” while saying that forging a peace deal with the Palestinians would require him to be “somewhat neutral.” Trump is slated to address the upcoming American Israel Political Affairs Committee (AIPAC) conference in Washington.

Some senior figures in Republican foreign policy circles acknowledge having spoken to Trump, but insist they are not technically “advising” him.

Trump has repeatedly named Richard Haass as someone whose views on world affairs he respects. Haass, who served as senior diplomat under George W. Bush and his father, George H. W. Bush, cannot technically endorse or advise any candidate, because of his position as president of the nonpartisan Council on Foreign Relations. But two Republican foreign policy experts who have talked with Haass say he has described Trump’s outlook as “pragmatic.”

Haass, through a spokeswoman, declined to confirm or deny those accounts.

Trump is known to have spoken with former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who has said nice things about him on Twitter. Aides to Gingrich, upon being told that Yahoo News wanted to talk to the former lawmaker about whether he was advising Trump on foreign policy, said he was not available because of a packed schedule.

The former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, Lieutenant Gen. Mike Flynn, has said he has discussed national security with Trump. In an interview with CNN, Flynn played down the relationship. “I am advising any candidate that has asked me for advice on a range of issues, national security, foreign policy,” Flynn said, calling Trump just “one of the candidates that I have advised.” His son, Michael G. Flynn, told Yahoo News via Twitter that his father “has no official role” in the Trump campaign.

Rudy Giuliani, who was mayor of New York City on Sept. 11, 2001, recently said that he has discussed foreign policy with Trump . But it’s “nothing formal,” Giuliani told the Washington Post.

Trump insiders says the wealthy investor draws his inspiration from one of Ronald Reagan’s top advisers on policy towards the Soviet Union, John Lenczowski, whose articles he sometimes forwards covered in his own notes.

A spokeswoman for Lenczowski, who is now the founder and president of the Institute of World Politics, said the former Cold Warrior has had “no direct contact” with Trump.

“You should know he is not an adviser to Mr. Trump,” Kathy Carroll said by email. “John has never spoken with or met him. However, John’s books and articles are available to the public, and Mr. Trump may have read them.”

These are the kinds of responses that hint at an uphill battle for Trump to find — and name — marquee foreign policy advisers, and so keep his frequently repeated promise and burnish his credentials.

It’s not clear whether the Republicans who have been warily keeping their distance from Trump will rethink their position if he ends up squaring off with the Democratic frontrunner, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Some of his supporters say it doesn’t really matter, contending that Trump’s message of shaking things up, bucking the establishment and the party’s interventionist wing at the same time, will serve him well.

“I think he would start from scratch,” said Stone

_____________

where they at, though?

I think his foreign policy advisors are currently running the WWE and won't be available until early next year.

Politico Analysis: Trump Averages 'One Misstatement Every 5 Minutes'

Donald Trump averaged one misstatement every 5 minutes on the stump last week, Politico reports.

In a fact-check analysis of the GOP presidential front-runner's statements from a rally in Concord, N.C., last Monday to a rally in St. Louis on Friday, there were more than five dozen statements that were either mischaracterizations, exaggerations or false, Politico reports.

The outright-wrong claims included that the United States has a "$500 billion a year trade deficit with China," which Politico reports has been debunked by Politifact, and Trump's assertion he never settles lawsuits.

According to the Los Angeles Times, Trump did so in 2013, with more than 100 prospective condo buyers in California.

A sampling of Politico's collection of a week's worth of misstatements include:

Trade with Japan: In Jupiter, Fla., on March 8, Trump claimed a trade deficit with Japan was "over $100 billion a year." it was about $69 billion, Politico reports.

Exports to Japan: Trump on March 7 in Concord, N.C., claimed the United States sends to Japan "like nothing, by comparison, nothing." The United States exported $62 billion in goods to Japan in 2015, Politico reports.
Job Losses: Also in Concord, Trump stated: "We're losing our jobs and the politicians don't tell you that." The White House put out a fact sheet including outsourcing issues in 2012.

Foreign trade: On March 11 in St. Louis, Trump stated: "We don't win at trade. We lose to everybody at trade." In 2015, the United States had trade surpluses with a number of countries including Hong Kong, the Netherlands, the UAE and Australia.

Manufacturing: In Concord, N.C., Trump asked: "Remember we used to have Made in the USA, right? When was the last time you've seen it? You don't see that anymore." The U.S. Economics and Statistics Administration issued a report in 2014 that found U.S. manufacturers sold $4.4 trillion of goods that classify as "Made in the U.S.A," Politico reports. The National Association of Manufacturers issued a fact sheet noting that manufacturing contributes $2.17 trillion to the U.S. economy and employs 12.3 million Americans.

Health care: In Concord, N.C., Trump claimed health care is "going up 35, 45, 55 percent." Premiums rose by an average of 5.8 percent a year since President Barack Obama took office, compared with 13.2 percent in the nine years prior, Politifact notes.

Campaign Finance: In Concord, N.C., Trump stated: "I've spent the least money and I'm by far number 1. So I've spent the least." Politico reports Trump's campaign has spent $23.9 million as of Jan 31, more than Ohio Gov. John Kasich's campaign, which has spent $7.2 million, or $19.5 million including money from outside groups supporting him.

Self-funding: In Concord, Trump said he's self-funding his campaign, and in Madison, Miss., said he was "not taking money . . . I spent a lot of money. I don't take." In Palm Beach on March 11, he also stated: "Right now, I'm into, you would know better than me, maybe $30 million, maybe more."

Trump solicits donations on his campaign website, and according to Politico, as of Jan. 31, accepted $7.5 million in donations. Trump has given his campaign $250,318, and lent another $17.5 million, Politico reports.

Anti-Trump ads: In Madison, Miss., Trump claimed "$50 million of negative ads against me in Florida." Outside groups had spent $15 million in Florida as of last week, Politico reports. In Jupiter, Fla., he said, "So many horrible, horrible things said about me in one week. $38 million worth of horrible lies." Politico reports every GOP dollar not spent by Trump on TV and radio from March 1 through 7 comes to $10.57 million, according to The Tracking Firm, a service that monitors media buys. And not all of that money was negative against Trump.

Polling: In Concord, N.C., he referred to "one of the polls just came out, and a number of them have just come out. I'm beating Hillary Clinton quite easily, thank you." Politico reports a USA Today/Suffolk University poll from mid-February, showed him 2 points ahead of Clinton; others show she'd beat him.

http://www.newsmax.com/Headline/politico-fact-checking-trump-statements/2016/03/14/id/718973/

Bernie's billionaires: Some wealthy donors have backed Sanders for years

While Bernie Sanders has pitched himself as the presidential candidate for the little guy -- tapping into the wallets of voters angry over Wall Street’s influence in politics -- a deeper dive shows Sanders has enlisted an arsenal of millionaire and billionaire backers who have backed his political career since his early Senate runs a decade ago.

That big-money support stands in sharp contrast to Sanders' calls for corporate fat-cats and the uber-wealthy to pay their “fair share” in taxes by closing loopholes and removing breaks that benefit the mega-rich.

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2016/03/...ml?intcmp=hpbt2

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/...a7b7_story.html

Trump has profited from foreign labor he says is killing U.S. jobs


Donald Trump’s line of clothing and accessories is made in Bangladesh, China, Honduras and other low-wage countries. (Marvin Joseph/The Washington Post)

By Rosalind S. Helderman and Tom Hamburger March 13 


Donald Trump wanted to market a line of men’s clothing that would bear his name.

He told people working with him to help find a company known for producing quality merchandise on a mass scale. In the end, Trump signed on with Phillips-Van Heusen, a manufacturer of affordable shirts produced in factories in 85 countries.

The 2004 deal — one of the first of many merchandise-licensing arrangements in which Trump attached his name to products made by foreign workers and sold in the United States — is relevant today as the billionaire businessman wages a populist presidential campaign in which he accuses companies of killing U.S. jobs by moving manufacturing overseas to take advantage of cheap labor and lax workplace regulations.


Documents and interviews reveal the personal role Trump played in negotiating the deal. Participants said they could not recall him expressing a preference that products be made in the United States.

“Finding the biggest company with the best practices is what was important to him,” said Jeff Danzer, who was vice president of the company hired by Trump to broker the deal. “Finding a company that made in America was never something that was specified.”


Today, Donald J. Trump Collection shirts — as well as eye­glasses, perfume, cuff links and suits — are made in Bangladesh, China, Honduras and other low-wage countries.

Trump’s daughter Ivanka, a vice president at his company and frequent campaign surrogate, markets hundreds of additional products under her own line of jewelry and clothing. Many are made in China.

The contradiction between Trump’s business decisions and his political agenda illustrates the sometimes-awkward transformation of an aggressive, ­profit-oriented marketer and real estate mogul into a firebrand champion of the struggling working class.

When Trump began cutting licensing deals more than a decade ago, many business executives and politicians in both parties argued that free trade and overseas production were beneficial to everyone — a needed boost for poor, developing economies abroad and a path to cheap goods for middle-class consumers in the United States.


Trump, though, has emerged as the Republican presidential front-runner largely by tapping into growing anger among voters who think free-trade policies — such as the ones that have added to Trump’s fortune — have devastated U.S. communities that have lost manufacturing jobs to Mexico, China and elsewhere.

Trump’s rivals and critics say he is a hypocrite, enriching himself with overseas labor while blasting the practice for political gain.

Representatives for the Trump Organization did not respond to requests for comment, and a spokesman for Ivanka Trump’s product line declined to comment.





Trump: 'We need somebody that can take our jobs back from China'
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Play Video1:42


Speaking at the Family Leadership Summit in Ames, Iowa, July 18, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump said "our country's going to hell." (Reuters)

On the campaign trail, Trump has blasted Ford Motor Co. for opening factories in Mexico, criticized a U.S. drug company that moved its headquarters offshore and said he will eat no more Oreo cookies because its maker, Nabisco, moved part of its production to Mexico.

When news broke three weeks ago that the air-conditioner maker Carrier was moving 1,400 jobs from a plant in Indianapolis to Monterrey, Mexico, Trump wrote on Facebook: “We cannot allow this to keep happening. It will NOT happen under my watch.”

Moreover, Trump has mentioned labor conditions overseas in support of his position that goods should be made in the United States, telling CNN last year that Chinese laborers are “paid a lot less and the standards are worse when it comes to the environment and health care and worker safety.”

During Thursday night’s Republican candidates’ debate, Trump said he knows how to fix the policies that encourage outsourcing because he spent so many years taking advantage of them.

“Nobody knows it better than me,” he said. “I’m a businessman. These are laws. These are regulations. These are rules. We’re allowed to do it. . . . But I’m the one that knows how to change it.”

Trump’s rivals for the Republican presidential nomination have tried — so far to no avail — to undercut his popularity among working-class voters by portraying him as someone who rampantly outsources jobs. A similar line of attack proved effective four years ago against then-GOP nominee Mitt Romney.


Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) called on Trump during a March 3 debate to announce that “all the Donald Trump clothing will no longer be made in China and in Mexico but will be made here in the United States.” Trump dismissed the notion, arguing that China’s currency policies “make it impossible for clothing makers in this country to do clothing in this country.”

Critics say Trump is being disingenuous.

Robert Lawrence, a professor of trade and investment at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, has reviewed Trump-brand products for sale online and found that a large percentage are imported.

For example, the website selling Ivanka Trump’s merchandise line links to 838 products — 628 of them imported. Of those, 354 are from China, a country that Donald Trump often says takes advantage of the large U.S. trade deficit.

Ivanka Trump’s products also were marketed alongside her father’s on the Trump Organization website. But amid criticism last week of the family’s outsourcing practices, his daughter’s page was removed.

“I don’t decry what he and his daughter do,” said Lawrence, who served on the Council of Economic Advisers under President Bill Clinton. “But at the same time, for him to claim that this is somehow immoral and go after companies that have relocated manufacturing when he has done the same puts him in conflict with his own rhetoric.”

Lawrence said that some of Trump’s proposals could hurt his own businesses. His proposed 15 percent tax on companies that outsource jobs, or a proposed 20 percent tax for importing goods, could result in higher prices for consumers buying Trump-brand products. Recently, he has discussed placing a 45 percent tariff on Chinese imports.

Lawrence estimated that Trump’s $250 suits made in China would suddenly be priced in the United States at $350 or more. “The impact would be staggering and widespread,” he said.

Michael Strain, deputy director of economic policy studies at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, said that Trump’s trade rhetoric is “deeply irresponsible” because isolating the U.S. economy could devastate businesses and hurt consumers.


Trump struck the 2004 deal with Phillips-Van Heusen, which owns Tommy Hilfiger and Calvin Klein, at a critical moment for his brand — the same year his hit show “The Apprentice” premiered.

Several people engaged in the negotiations said that Trump was personally involved. None could remember him specifically mentioning the U.S.-worker issue.

“If he’s concerned about jobs in the United States, it should have been a question he asked,” said one person involved in the deal, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid offending Trump. “And I can tell you that in none of the meetings did it come up.”

The shirtmaker used factories in some countries, including Bangladesh, China and Honduras, where labor violations such as forced overtime are common, according to Scott Nova, executive director of the Worker Rights Consortium, a group that monitors factory conditions.

The agreement signed by Trump and Phillips-Van Heusen placed no restrictions on where Trump dress shirts, tuxedo shirts and neckwear could be manufactured.

Phillips-Van Heusen agreed that any products “manufactured by it or for it anywhere in the world” would not be made using child labor “as defined in the relevant jurisdiction of production,” according to the contract, which was filed in a later lawsuit in New York between the broker company and Trump.

Mark Weber, who was chief executive of Phillips-Van Heusen at the time, said the company employed a “global sourcing network” to produce clothes for Trump’s line and other brands.

Weber described Trump as a master negotiator who correctly predicted the brand would be a smashing success and persuaded a wary Phillips-Van Heusen to sign on.

In a deposition filed in the New York lawsuit, Trump recalled that the massive clothier had been eager for the deal. “They were very hot to make a deal with us,” Trump said, according to a deposition transcript provided to The Washington Post by Jay Itkowitz, an attorney for the broker company that unsuccessfully sued Trump.

Weber, who is supporting Trump for president, said he concluded at the time that Trump was a patriot.


“He had a clear preference to support American values and what was good for America,” Weber said.

Asked whether Trump ever specifically expressed a preference for items bearing his name to be made in America, Weber said, “You’re asking me for specifics that are very hard to recollect.”

Weber said that at the time, the industry’s widely shared goals — promoted through overseas production — were to improve standards of living for workers in the Third World and to offer U.S. consumers lower prices.

“That was a time when America was very much in favor of building a better life for the people of our hemisphere,” he said, referring to factories in Central America.

“While we care about Americans, we care about people all over the world, too,” Weber said.

He also said that Trump never attempted to require that products be made in the United States as part of the contract between the two companies.

“No one can tell us where to make our products,” said Weber, who left the company in 2006. “I have never signed a contract in my 40 years of experience where someone could tell me where to make my goods.”

After Trump drew scrutiny over the summer for disparaging comments about Mexican immigrants, Macy’s, which sold his clothing line, announced it was ending its relationship with him. Phillips-Van Heusen, now called PVH Corp., quickly followed suit, saying that its licensing deal with Trump would be unwound.

Dana Perlman, a spokeswoman for the company, said last week that it no longer manufactures Trump clothing. She declined to comment further.

the kind of stuff is concerning, for sure.

however, i have to look at a broad view of things, and then into detail.

Bernie standing up for the little guys can't even be debated.

show me pictures of any republican candidate who marched for civil rights in the 60's, who was protesting for blacks to be treated equal.

his record can't even be questioned, for the most part.

as far as the donors go: didn't you said a few days ago that the majority of the richest people in this country are liberals?

so if the rich people are supporting bernie's policy to tax them more......well whats the problem?

i've heard this argument before already, because you'll be the first to say "trump funds himself"

well it's easy to fund yourself when you're worth a billion dollars. everybody else has to play the game to get money for campaigning, but that doesn't take away the overall message.

especially since the fat cats are SUPPORTING sanders to tax them more.

this article is basically complaining that rich liberals have morals.

The "rich" people support whomever they want.

Rich people supporting Sanders ..........no different than Wall Street supporting Clinton - and all the candidates.

Here's how it works: Hey, we'll give you money, but in return, you're going to exempt us.

why is rich people in quotations?

is that suppose to be a code or something?

am i "swish" as well?

this doesn't mean anything, but i thought it was an interesting read


Donald Trump’s butler reveals 9 of his quirks

https://www.yahoo.com/politics/trump-butler-mar-a-lago-quirks-161720903.html


Ever wonder what Donald Trump is like? No, really like? Say, at home?

Anthony Senecal, Trump’s longtime butler at the Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Fla., knows better than almost anyone else.

“You can always tell when the king is here,” Senecal told the New York Times for a profile (“A King in His Castle: How Donald Trump Lives”) that was published Tuesday.

image
White hat: Good mood. Red hat: Watch out! (Photos: Getty)

The 74-year-old Senecal, who’s worked at the 118-room estate for nearly 60 years, revealed some little-known quirks about the Republican frontrunner. Among them:

• Trump likes his steak well done — cooked through so thoroughly it “rock[s] on the plate.”

• “Mr. Trump insists — despite the hair salon on the premises — on doing his own hair.”

• Senecal once hired a bugler to play “Hail to the Chief” as Trump stepped out of his limousine after receiving “an urgent warning from Mr. Trump’s soon-to-land plane that the mogul was in a sour mood.”

• Mar-a-Lago staffers have figured out how to tell if Trump is in one of those sour moods — by observing the color of his hat: “If the cap was white, the staff noticed, the boss was in a good mood. If it was red, it was best to stay away.”

• When he is in a good mood, Trump sometimes peels “$100 bills from a wad in his pocket to give to the groundskeepers.”

• “Mr. Trump rarely appears in bathing trunks, for example, and does not like to swim.”


• After the real estate mogul bought the estate in 1985, he turned the library into a bar and hung a painting of himself, in tennis whites, on the wall.

“I’ve been in other homes in Palm Beach — same exact painting,” Senecal said. “Just a different head.”

• Senecal tried to retire in 2009, but Trump wouldn’t have it, elevating him to “a kind of unofficial historian” at Mar-a-Lago instead:
“Tony, to retire is to expire,” Mr. Trump told him. “I’ll see you next season.”

• And while Trump is “abundantly proud of his ability to drive a golf ball,” Senecal would sometimes lie to his boss when asked how far his ball went:
“Tony, how far is that?” Mr. Trump would ask. “It’s like 275 yards,” Mr. Senecal would respond, though he said the actual distance was 225 yards.

I don't have a problem with candidates taking "Rich" peoples money
but it is the lying about being for the common man and the misleading of our Nations youth,
pretending he actually cares about them more than the money that bothers me.

The only other "Rich" Socialist I can think of was Stalin.

why is rich in quotations?

is there a new MLA format i wasn't aware of?

anyway, he does care, his record says he cares, his actions throughout his life shows.

once again, can you post some pics of any of these GOP candidates marching for civil rights, protesting for equal rights?

The problem with rich liberals "supporting" policies that tax them more is that they will be the ones paying for the "loop holes" that will assuredly be written in to the law.

Ever notice how one of the standard party platforms for the Dems is "reigning" in Big Business via more laws and regulations right?

EVery year Dems get what they want and literally thousands of new regulations are enacted.

And every year Dems keep telling us that Big Business keeps getting away with it all through loop holes.

And every year literally thousands of new regulations are enacted...

and ever year the Dems tell us...

how is that any better or worse than the rich republicans asking for lower taxes, even though through those same loop holes, they end up paying less than suppose to anyway?

every year republicans tell us to believe in the private market.

please, enlighten the board on how the private industry and the government hasn't screwed us over?

pleas enlighten me on why i should choose one over the other?

we keep coming to the same useless agreements on the board.

yet even still, we will come here everyday to argue who's side is better.

and that's the entire point, choosing which side you agree with more than the other.

i just happen to be left leaning.

i've seen the good and bad of both, just like everybody else on this board has.

but, IMO, the government screws us over at a slightly less rate than the private industry.

It's worse because Bernie pimps himself as above the system. He is lying to the American people. When, in fact, he's just as guilty of taking bribes for favors as the rest of them.

Show the receipts as to the bribes and favors, please.

You can scroll up and read 40's article.

'Trump Is Gaslighting America'

This is an intervention. America, you have a Trump problem.

http://www.usnews.com/opinion/blogs/nico...a-with-his-lies

By Nicole Hemmer March 15, 2016, at 12:00 p.m.

Dear America,

This is an intervention.

You have a problem.

Donald Trump.

He’s gaslighting you.

It’s a technique abusers use: Through manipulation and outright lies, they so disorient their target that the person (or in this case, the country) is left defenseless.

Trump is a toxic blend of Barnum and bully. If you’re a good mark, he’s your best friend. But if you catch on to the con, then he starts to gaslight. Ask him a question and he’ll lie without batting an eye. Call him a liar and he’ll declare himself “truthful to a fault.” Confront him with contradictory evidence and he’ll shrug and repeat the fib. Maybe he’ll change the subject. But he’ll never change the lie.

Evidence? He says he never settles lawsuits. He says he’s polling better than Clinton in New York. He says he never encourages violence at his rallies. He says he’s winning Latinos. He says he’s the first candidate to mention immigration. He says, he says, he says.

But forget all that, because evidence is for losers.

Political journalists have been repeatedly criticized for not confronting Trump on his lies. But of course they have. For political journalists, a politician caught in a lie is chum in the water. But when they confront Trump with his lies, he doesn’t behave like most people. He doesn’t blush or equivocate or argue. He steamrolls. He bullies. He lies some more. And the journalists don’t know what to do. They brought facts to an ego fight, and found them to be worthless weapons.

If it’s hard to wrap your mind around the gaslighting of a nation, just watch the dynamics at work on a single person: Michelle Fields. While covering a Trump rally last Tuesday, Fields was grabbed and pulled toward the ground. Ben Terris of the Washington Post reports seeing Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski do it. Fields has bruises on her forearm and there was audio of the event. Lewandowski himself reportedly told a Breitbart editor he grabbed Fields.

So what happened next?

Lewandowski said Fields was crazy. “Totally delusional,” he tweeted. Trump suggested she made the whole thing up. As my colleague Robert Schlesinger put it, “the Trump campaign pulled straight from the attack-the-victim playbook typically deployed against those who raise accusations of sexual assault – she's delusional, she's making things up, why didn't she tell the police, she has a history of this kind of behavior.”

In other words: gaslighting.

And what does this look like as he does it to an entire nation? Let’s go to Chicago, where Trump cancelled a planned appearance, resulting in a series of scuffles between outraged Trump supporters and cheering protestors.

Appearing on Sean Hannity’s show that night, Trump said law enforcement had advised him to cancel the rally out of safety concerns.

The Chicago Police Department says it never advised Trump to cancel.

Trump said, “I don't want anybody to be hurt. We want this to be a nonviolent situation.”

For more than a month Trump has been encouraging his supporters to get violent, not only spurring them to rough up protestors but offering to pay their legal fees if they are arrested for assault.

Trump said his supporters only fight back in self-defense – just three days after a Trump supporter was caught on tape sucker-punching a protester who was being led out of a rally.

Hannity – who has been gaslighting America a lot longer than Trump, but less effectively – said, “When did we start blaming victims of violence instead of the perpetrators of violence?”

Ask Corey Lewandowski.

The best way to end gaslighting is to sever ties with the abuser. Some Republicans are trying to do this, but it seems like the GOP is stuck with Trump, at least through July, probably until November.

But America, you can still resist. Trump will keep saying he loves you, but that’s the con. Like any abusive relationship, love is the misdirect. Power is the goal. The big test facing you now is preventing Donald Trump from getting any.

You know, I think we can get a wedge put into the outside of your left shoe that should straighten you out.

Bernie was supposed to be above all that. Remember?

They are all wide eyed as Bernie serves the Koolaid.

Polls closing left and right. It's kind of exciting for once.

the koolaid comment is rich coming from you.

Bernie losing to Hillary everywhere!
Trump winning in Florida, NC

Well this does mean something.. in fact I think it's one of the most accurate and enlightening articles I've read since the whole Donald Trump saga began.. and it came from the Guardian.. I have a ton I would like to comment on it, but I'll let folks read it first... Trump supporters will find stuff to hate about it, Trump haters will find stuff to hate about it... maybe that's why I really like it.

Millions of ordinary Americans support Donald Trump. Here's why
Thomas Frank

When he isn’t spewing insults, the Republican frontrunner is hammering home a powerful message about free trade and its victims


Monday 7 March 2016 23.12 EST Last modified on Thursday 10 March 2016 12.29 EST

Let us now address the greatest American mystery at the moment: what motivates the supporters of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump?

I call it a “mystery” because the working-class white people who make up the bulk of Trump’s fan base show up in amazing numbers for the candidate, filling stadiums and airport hangars, but their views, by and large, do not appear in our prestige newspapers. On their opinion pages, these publications take care to represent demographic categories of nearly every kind, but “blue-collar” is one they persistently overlook. The views of working-class people are so foreign to that universe that when New York Times columnist Nick Kristof wanted to “engage” a Trump supporter last week, he made one up, along with this imaginary person’s responses to his questions.

When members of the professional class wish to understand the working-class Other, they traditionally consult experts on the subject. And when these authorities are asked to explain the Trump movement, they always seem to zero in on one main accusation: bigotry. Only racism, they tell us, is capable of powering a movement like Trump’s, which is blowing through the inherited structure of the Republican party like a tornado through a cluster of McMansions.

Trump himself provides rather excellent evidence for this finding. The man is an insult clown who has systematically gone down the list of American ethnic groups and offended them each in turn. He wants to deport millions upon millions of undocumented immigrants. He wants to bar Muslims from visiting the United States. He admires various foreign strongmen and dictators, and has even retweeted a quote from Mussolini. This gold-plated buffoon has in turn drawn the enthusiastic endorsement of leading racists from across the spectrum of intolerance, a gorgeous mosaic of haters, each of them quivering excitedly at the prospect of getting a real, honest-to-god bigot in the White House.

All this stuff is so insane, so wildly outrageous, that the commentariat has deemed it to be the entirety of the Trump campaign. Trump appears to be a racist, so racism must be what motivates his armies of followers. And so, on Saturday, New York Times columnist Timothy Egan blamed none other than “the people” for Trump’s racism: “Donald Trump’s supporters know exactly what he stands for: hatred of immigrants, racial superiority, a sneering disregard of the basic civility that binds a society.”

Stories marveling at the stupidity of Trump voters are published nearly every day. Articles that accuse Trump’s followers of being bigots have appeared by the hundreds, if not the thousands. Conservatives have written them; liberals have written them; impartial professionals have written them. The headline of a recent Huffington Post column announced, bluntly, that “Trump Won Super Tuesday Because America is Racist.” A New York Times reporter proved that Trump’s followers were bigots by coordinating a map of Trump support with a map of racist Google searches. Everyone knows it: Trump’s followers’ passions are nothing more than the ignorant blurtings of the white American id, driven to madness by the presence of a black man in the White House. The Trump movement is a one-note phenomenon, a vast surge of race-hate. Its partisans are not only incomprehensible, they are not really worth comprehending.

* * *
Or so we’re told. Last week, I decided to watch several hours of Trump speeches for myself. I saw the man ramble and boast and threaten and even seem to gloat when protesters were ejected from the arenas in which he spoke. I was disgusted by these things, as I have been disgusted by Trump for 20 years. But I also noticed something surprising. In each of the speeches I watched, Trump spent a good part of his time talking about an entirely legitimate issue, one that could even be called leftwing.

Yes, Donald Trump talked about trade. In fact, to judge by how much time he spent talking about it, trade may be his single biggest concern – not white supremacy. Not even his plan to build a wall along the Mexican border, the issue that first won him political fame. He did it again during the debate on 3 March: asked about his political excommunication by Mitt Romney, he chose to pivot and talk about … trade.

It seems to obsess him: the destructive free-trade deals our leaders have made, the many companies that have moved their production facilities to other lands, the phone calls he will make to those companies’ CEOs in order to threaten them with steep tariffs unless they move back to the US.

Trump embellished this vision with another favorite leftwing idea: under his leadership, the government would “start competitive bidding in the drug industry”. (“We don’t competitively bid!” he marveled – another true fact, a legendary boondoggle brought to you by the George W Bush administration.) Trump extended the critique to the military-industrial complex, describing how the government is forced to buy lousy but expensive airplanes thanks to the power of industry lobbyists.

Thus did he hint at his curious selling proposition: because he is personally so wealthy, a fact about which he loves to boast, Trump himself is unaffected by business lobbyists and donations. And because he is free from the corrupting power of modern campaign finance, famous deal-maker Trump can make deals on our behalf that are “good” instead of “bad”. The chance that he will actually do so, of course, is small. He appears to be a hypocrite on this issue as well as so many other things. But at least Trump is saying this stuff.

All this surprised me because, for all the articles about Trump I had read in recent months, I didn’t recall trade coming up very often. Trump is supposed to be on a one-note crusade for whiteness. Could it be that all this trade stuff is a key to understanding the Trump phenomenon?

* * *

Trade is an issue that polarizes Americans by socio-economic status. To the professional class, which encompasses the vast majority of our media figures, economists, Washington officials and Democratic powerbrokers, what they call “free trade” is something so obviously good and noble it doesn’t require explanation or inquiry or even thought. Republican and Democratic leaders alike agree on this, and no amount of facts can move them from their Econ 101 dream.

To the remaining 80 or 90% of America, trade means something very different. There’s a video going around on the internet these days that shows a room full of workers at a Carrier air conditioning plant in Indiana being told by an officer of the company that the factory is being moved to Monterrey, Mexico, and that they’re all going to lose their jobs.

As I watched it, I thought of all the arguments over trade that we’ve had in this country since the early 1990s, all the sweet words from our economists about the scientifically proven benevolence of free trade, all the ways in which our newspapers mock people who say that treaties like the North American Free Trade Agreement allow companies to move jobs to Mexico.

Well, here is a video of a company moving its jobs to Mexico, courtesy of Nafta. This is what it looks like. The Carrier executive talks in that familiar and highly professional HR language about the need to “stay competitive” and “the extremely price-sensitive marketplace”. A worker shouts “F*** you!” at the executive. The executive asks people to please be quiet so he can “share” his “information”. His information about all of them losing their jobs.

* * *
Now, I have no special reason to doubt the suspicion that Donald Trump is a racist. Either he is one, or (as the comedian John Oliver puts it) he is pretending to be one, which amounts to the same thing.

But there is another way to interpret the Trump phenomenon. A map of his support may coordinate with racist Google searches, but it coordinates even better with deindustrialization and despair, with the zones of economic misery that 30 years of Washington’s free-market consensus have brought the rest of America.

It is worth noting that Trump is making a point of assailing that Indiana air conditioning company from the video in his speeches. What this suggests is that he’s telling a tale as much about economic outrage as it is tale of racism on the march. Many of Trump’s followers are bigots, no doubt, but many more are probably excited by the prospect of a president who seems to mean it when he denounces our trade agreements and promises to bring the hammer down on the CEO that fired you and wrecked your town, unlike Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

Here is the most salient supporting fact: when people talk to white, working-class Trump supporters, instead of simply imagining what they might say, they find that what most concerns these people is the economy and their place in it. I am referring to a study just published by Working America, a political-action auxiliary of the AFL-CIO, which interviewed some 1,600 white working-class voters in the suburbs of Cleveland and Pittsburgh in December and January.

Support for Donald Trump, the group found, ran strong among these people, even among self-identified Democrats, but not because they are all pining for a racist in the White House. Their favorite aspect of Trump was his “attitude”, the blunt and forthright way he talks. As far as issues are concerned, “immigration” placed third among the matters such voters care about, far behind their number one concern: “good jobs / the economy”.

“People are much more frightened than they are bigoted,” is how the findings were described to me by Karen Nussbaum, the executive director of Working America. The survey “confirmed what we heard all the time: people are fed up, people are hurting, they are very distressed about the fact that their kids don’t have a future” and that “there still hasn’t been a recovery from the recession, that every family still suffers from it in one way or another.”

Tom Lewandowski, the president of the Northeast Indiana Central Labor Council in Fort Wayne, puts it even more bluntly when I asked him about working-class Trump fans. “These people aren’t racist, not any more than anybody else is,” he says of Trump supporters he knows. “When Trump talks about trade, we think about the Clinton administration, first with Nafta and then with [Permanent Normal Trade Relations] China, and here in Northeast Indiana, we hemorrhaged jobs.”

“They look at that, and here’s Trump talking about trade, in a ham-handed way, but at least he’s representing emotionally. We’ve had all the political establishment standing behind every trade deal, and we endorsed some of these people, and then we’ve had to fight them to get them to represent us.”

Now, let us stop and smell the perversity. Left parties the world over were founded to advance the fortunes of working people. But our left party in America – one of our two monopoly parties – chose long ago to turn its back on these people’s concerns, making itself instead into the tribune of the enlightened professional class, a “creative class” that makes innovative things like derivative securities and smartphone apps. The working people that the party used to care about, Democrats figured, had nowhere else to go, in the famous Clinton-era expression. The party just didn’t need to listen to them any longer.

What Lewandowski and Nussbaum are saying, then, should be obvious to anyone who’s dipped a toe outside the prosperous enclaves on the two coasts. Ill-considered trade deals and generous bank bailouts and guaranteed profits for insurance companies but no recovery for average people, ever – these policies have taken their toll. As Trump says, “we have rebuilt China and yet our country is falling apart. Our infrastructure is falling apart … Our airports are, like, Third World.”

Trump’s words articulate the populist backlash against liberalism that has been building slowly for decades and may very well occupy the White House itself, whereupon the entire world will be required to take seriously its demented ideas.

Yet still we cannot bring ourselves to look the thing in the eyes. We cannot admit that we liberals bear some of the blame for its emergence, for the frustration of the working-class millions, for their blighted cities and their downward spiraling lives. So much easier to scold them for their twisted racist souls, to close our eyes to the obvious reality of which Trumpism is just a crude and ugly expression: that neoliberalism has well and truly failed.

Thomas Frank is the author of Listen, Liberal or Whatever Happened to the Party of the People, published 15 March by Metropolitan Books

The Guardian

bye bye, Rubio. you just got mud stomped in your own state.

So did Kasich.

Now it changed. Oh the drama!

where you getting the live updates at

I'm watching cnn

Many of the initial votes on the Dem side come from early voting. Exit polls showed Bernie up in IL, MO, and OH. He got slaughtered in Florida, though.

I guess exit polls don't mean much. He got slaughtered in Ohio. Also in NC.

The current results only show early voting. Bernie's base really doesn't use early voting.

Wrong.

Slaughtered in Florida
Slaughtered in Ohio
Getting Slaughtered in Missouri
Slaughtered in North Carolina

so much slaughtering, the vegans are gonna riot.

Less than 1% precincts reporting in Ohio, 40. That means early voting and absentee ballots.

I understand he's still a longshot, but I'm hopeful.

I think Rocket got into some of swish's stash.

Well he is only down by 10 points in Illinois.

CNN shows 10% of pricincts reporting. I don't know what you are watching, but it's way behind.

Rubio suspends his campaign.

There goes all of Soros' cash.