Thursday Reads: The End of the Primaries and The Hard Road Ahead

Good Morning!!

So this is the new normal. Donald Trump is the nominee of the Republican Party. The candidate is wholeheartedly supported by white supremacists and KKK leaders. Serious politicians and journalists are referring to him as a tyrant in the making.

We’re being told this is unprecedented. I would argue that Ronald Reagan was close, but at least he had been Governor of California and had been involved in party politics for years. Trump is not a serious person by any stretch of the imagination, and he clearly knows nothing about politics or how the U.S. government works. His knowledge of foreign policy is limited to his own experiences as a businessman.

It’s well past time for the mainstream media to state bluntly what Trump’s campaign is about, but I don’t know if they will ever do it. The reason people are supporting Trump is because he represents and enables their racism, xenophobia, and misogyny. Period. Yet NBC News, a once venerable journalistic organization, chose to anchor its entire evening news broadcast from Trump HQ last night!

The “short-fingered vulgarian”

Mediaite: NBC Makes Curious Decision to Let Lester Holt Anchor Nightly News from Trump Tower.

Lester Holt interviewed Donald Trump in Trump Tower tonight, which is fine, but it came with the rather curious decision to anchor the entire NBC Nightly News broadcast from Trump Tower.

It’s not clear why this happened, but whatever the case, Trump Tower was visible in the background during Holt’s live reports on the news of the day, as well as the interior of Trump’s office during the interview….

Fun experiment: imagine how people would react if, say, a nightly network newscast anchored live from, say, Chappaqua.

You can read sample reactions from Twitter at the link. Many people wondered why Trump could not have walked the short distance to NBC headquarters at 30 Rock for the interview. It appears that the powers that be at NBC and MSNBC will continue to treat Trump as if he were on the verge of becoming king instead of running for president of a supposed democratic republic.

Also from Mediaite, Tommy Christopher explains what Trump is all about: Donald Trump’s Win Isn’t Some ‘Anti-Establishment’ Wave, It’s the Racism Stupid.

It’s all over but the crying, which will also be fun to watch, but even after all these many months of Donald Trump vanquishing foe after foe, the media still doesn’t get it. They still bang on about this anger at “the establishment,” and as a result, they are giving Hillary Clinton bad advice already. During CNN’s coverage of the Indiana primary Tuesday night, liberal commentator and Bernie Sanders supporter Van Jones became just the latest pundit to misdiagnose the Trump phenomenon, and connect it to Bernie Sanders. There is a similarity, but not the one Jones identifies.

The same rebellion is happening in the country in both parties. The reason Hillary is still fighting is the reason that Trump won. There is a big, big discontent in this country and tonight for Bernie Sanders and we can say the same thing about Bernie, he shouldn’t be here either. I just don’t think that people get it yet. You got people sitting on a white hot stove in their houses right now and they are mad… I do think (Hillary) has got to, tonight, show that she’s got the message from both parties, the message from the Republicans, they’re mad and hurting, the message from the Democrats, they’re mad and hurting.

Jones is so close to being right, he even calls the anger “white hot,” but he just misses the absolutely crucial key to Hillary Clinton’s eventual defeat of Trump.

And even Van Jones can’t see it and say it. It’s all about racism and white male resentment. Read the rest and watch video at the link. The reason why Jones can’t point out the obvious truth is that his candidate–Bernie Sanders–is also appealing to white male resentment. The only difference is that Sanders is focused on hatred of Wall Street instead of hatred of people of color. But Sanders has been attacking our African American POTUS over the years and in this campaign.

As for “giving Hillary Clinton bad advice,” she doesn’t take advice from the media and she is already calling out Trump’s racism and xenophobia as well as his misogyny and ignorance of world affairs.

Now that it’s too late, “reasonable” Republicans and conservatives are saying they won’t vote for Trump no matter what. Massachusetts’ {Gag} {Choke} Republican Governor Charlie Baker is one of them. The Boston Globe:

Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker said he will not vote for his party’s nominee Donald Trump and won’t support likely Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.

“The things he said about women and Muslims and religious freedom, I just can’t support,” Baker said. “At the same time, I do believe Secretary Clinton has a huge believability problem.”

Is that so. Maybe you should just focus on your own party’s nominee, asshole.

And while endorsing New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie back in February, Baker specifically called out Trump.

“I think there’s a certain temperament and a certain collaborative nature that’s fundamental to somebody’s ability to succeed in government, and I question whether he has the temperament and the sense of purpose that’s associated with delivering on that,” Baker said.

Despite those questions, Baker acknowledged on Wednesday that Trump would be the nominee.

“I give him credit for it,” Baker said. “He earned it fair and square, and congratulations to him.”

F**k you, Charlie. If that’s all you have to say about this nightmare for the country, you’re nothing but a coward. And besides you endorsed Chris Christie, who could very well be the VP nominee! Trump even said he’s “open to Cruz” as VP!

Former Oklahoma GOP Rep. MIckey Edwards was on Chris Hayes’ show last night, and he looked like he was going to a funeral. I can’t find the video right now, but he told Hayes that he wouldn’t vote for Trump even if he were the only one on the ballot. Other serious conservatives are saying they’ll be too busy to attend the Republican Convention in July, including candidates running downticket. We heard yesterday that George W. Bush and George H.W. Bush have no plans to endorse Trump. It’s likely Jeb won’t be supporting him either.

Here’s Michael Cohen at The Boston Globe: RIP GOP.

Indeed, the biggest near-term question for Republicans is: How bad will the damage be? How badly will Trump lose? How many seats will the GOP lose in the House and Senate and farther down the ballot in state legislature races?

But the bigger question — and it’s one that we may not know the answer to for months or years to come — is how will the Republican Party survive what’s happened to it over the past year?

At one point, the Republican Party nominally stood on a platform of economic and social conservatism. At least that was the public face of the party. Today, with Trump at its helm, it’s a party of nativism, xenophobia, crudeness, and misogyny. Those elements were of course always present in the party — and are at the root of its modern political success. But they were generally hidden below the surface or utilized with dog whistles. With Trump, there is no mistaking the fact that what drives GOP voters is not conservative dogma, but rather resentment, anxiety, and fear, particularly of minorities, Muslims, and immigrants.

That post-2012 Republican Party autopsy that said the GOP must reach out to Hispanic voters if it wanted to win a national election again is dead and buried. Quite simply, the Republican Party cannot win national elections if it doesn’t find a way to broaden the party’s appeal. With Trump as the presidential nominee, that effort will be set back, perhaps a generation or more.

Even more searing than the electoral challenges, Trump has delivered a savage blow to the GOP’s conception of itself. Armed with a mere handful of endorsements from elected GOP officials, Trump has run a campaign aimed directly against the Republican establishment. And he beat the stuffing out of it. And by taking positions on everything from taxes and trade to transgender Americans and terrorism that run directly against decades of conservative orthodoxy, he’s left the Republican establishment with no clear ideological mooring. Is the GOP a party of small government conservatism or a party of nativism and white male resentment? For decades, Republicans tried to be both, and Trump has, with a single presidential campaign, exposed the fallacy that lay at the heart of the party — namely that its voters were only interested in conservative dogma insofar as it was married to those aforementioned feelings of resentment, anxiety, and fear. But when given a choice between dogma and dog whistle, they’ve chosen this year – overwhelmingly – to go with the latter.

We’ll just have to wait and see. It will likely be both interesting and horrifying.

I don’t want to spend much more time on Bernie Sanders, because he’s irrelevant now. Nevertheless, he’ll be with us at least until the end of the primaries, and that’s a good thing as long as he stops damaging the Democratic Party and its putative nominee. If he continues, it will keep Hillary in the news, and his supporters deserve the opportunity to vote for him.

It appears that at least some efforts have begun to get Sanders to calm down and stop trying to elect Donald Trump. Yesterday Greg Sargent wrote about what some Democratic leaders have been telling him.

Top Democrats to Sanders: Don’t drop out. But tone it down.

…top Democrats I spoke with today don’t feel any particular sense of urgency about Sanders getting out of the race. However, they are gently urging Sanders to take into account just how much higher the stakes are, now that Trump is the nominee, as the Vermont Senator calibrates his approach to the final stretch of the Dem campaign.

Those closely following the delicate dance underway among the key players — the Clinton and Sanders campaigns; the White House; major progressive figures such as Elizabeth Warren — say there are several factors about Sanders that are worth keeping in mind. One is that Sanders is not the type of guy who responds to pressure. He has long been a bit of a loner figure in Congress and the Senate, they say, and does not mind being at odds with the Democratic establishment — indeed, he relishes that position, as we’ve seen by his year-long campaign against it.

At the same time, however, top Dems also believe Sanders has an unappreciated pragmatic streak that tends to surface after he has pushed the envelope as far as possible and gotten all he could in the process. For instance, Sanders pushed very aggressively to make the Affordable Care Act as much to his liking as possible, frustrating some involved in the bill’s progress, but in the end, he backed the ACA and advocated for it.

Sanders might do something similar again now. Having spent a year building a national constituency behind his unabashed economic progressivism and calls for reform to our rigged political system, which very well could have an impact beyond the Dem primaries, he could continue to engage in a spirited contest of ideas with Clinton, but without suggesting she lacks integrity, and without forcing a contested convention in the end.

I suppose anything is possible, but IMHO Hillary is doing the right thing by simply ignoring Bernie and focusing on defeating Trump in the Fall. I think we should follow her lead and just let him do whatever he’s going to do. His donations are dropping and even the media isn’t following him as much as before.

U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton waves after leading a discussion on gun violence prevention at the Wilson-Gray YMCA in Hartford, Connecticut, U.S., April 21, 2016. REUTERS/Adrees Latif

Meanwhile, Hillary is focusing on the general election.

Politico: Clinton plots swing-state ambush for Trump.

In recent days, the Clinton campaign has finalized a series of senior hires around the country, expanded the size of her central swing-state planning team in New York, and hundreds of thousands of dollars have been transferred to strategically important state parties from the Democratic National Committee. She’s also scheduled a series of public speeches and private meetings in states that will be crucial to her general election campaign.

Many of the moves had been in the works since early spring, when campaign officials began the process of hiring swing state operatives and more closely coordinating with state parties — the building blocks of the fall campaign’s field organizing infrastructure.

According to operatives and elected officials in eight battleground states, the switch flipped after Clinton’s 16-point win in New York last month — and Trump’s own romp there. In the days after that April 19 victory, some of Clinton’s state directors — who had previously operated only informally and without the campaign’s imprimatur — started meeting with local political leaders and planning the fall fight.

It’s all over but the grieving process for Bernie and his most fervent fans. Quite a few have already seen the writing on the wall and joined the Hillary bandwagon.

What stories are you following today?