Trump Cards, Con't

Donald Trump is feeling pretty good these days as his message of "normalized" racism and bigotry continues to resonate with Republican voters, in Ohio yesterday he refused to walk back his long-held birther beliefs.

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump said in an interview here that he remains unwilling to say that President Obama was born in the United States, that he is more bullish than ever on his chances to win and that he is not exploring the launch of a new media company in case he loses the race.

Trump also made a far-from-subtle push — in the interview and in a letter from his doctor released Thursday — to be seen as vigorous and healthy, as his Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton, returned to the campaign trail after being treated for mild pneumonia.

In the interview, conducted late Wednesday aboard his private plane as it idled on the tarmac here, Trump suggested he is not eager to change his pitch or his positions even as he works to reach out to minority voters, many of whom are deeply offended by his long-refuted suggestion that Obama is not a U.S. citizen. Trump refused to say whether he believes Obama was born in Hawaii.

“I’ll answer that question at the right time,” Trump said. “I just don’t want to answer it yet.”

And why would Trump ever answer?  The Basket of Deplorables overwhelmingly believe Barack Obama is secretly Kenyan and never was eligible for the office of President, and there's no public penalty for such outright, overt racism among the voting public.  There are plenty of folks that think being a birther is better than voting for Hillary and they'll gladly vote in November.

Meanwhile, Trump's latest policy nugget is that he'll rid the nation of those awful food safety regulations that keep your kids from munching on broken glass.

In a fact sheet posted online Thursday, the campaign highlighted a number of "specific regulations to be eliminated" under the GOP nominee's economic plan, including what they called the "FDA Food Police." 

“The FDA Food Police, which dictate how the federal government expects farmers to produce fruits and vegetables and even dictates the nutritional content of dog food,” it read.

“The rules govern the soil farmers use, farm and food production hygiene, food packaging, food temperatures and even what animals may roam which fields and when,” the statement continued. "It also greatly increased inspections of food 'facilities,' and levies new taxes to pay for this inspection overkill."

Sure is gonna be fun in a Trump administration.  Just don't plan to eat anything for the next four years.

They're Finally Starting To Get It

It's amazing how many pundits are finally coming around to the true driver of Donald Trump's popularity among Republican dead-enders.  It's depressing that it only took them years to figure out what was obvious to most voters in seconds, but hey, at least folks like Matthew Yglesias are admitting it.

Well, as much as Yglesias can, anyway.

It's taboo in the United States to throw around accusations of racism. And obviously nobody can be sure what's in the heart of Donald Trump or his voters. 

But we do know that the unusual geographic pattern of Trumpism — stronger in the South and Northeast than in the Midwest or West — corresponds to the geography of white racial resentment in the United States. We also know that Trump rose to political prominence based on the allegation that America's first black president wasn't a real American at all, and launched his 2016 campaign with the allegation that Mexican immigrants to the United States are largely rapists and murders. 

We know that this kind of rhetoric does not resonate with nonwhite Americans but has appealed to white voters in the kinds of places — some poor, others affluent — where the level of racism among the white population is unusually high.

Which, if you're familiar with Yglesias, is about as close as he's going to get to saying that racism is helping Trump.

Leaving this racial element out of the story not only paints a false portrait of Trump's rise, it makes it impossible to understand the resistance to Trump in some segments of the GOP elite. It's true that Trump has been less than entirely orthodox on some important policy issues. But that was also true of George W. Bush, John McCain, and Mitt Romney. 

Part of the difference is that Trump simply hasn't kissed the right rings in an effort to have his past deviations expunged. But a big part of the difference is that over the past 15 years the Republican Party has been trying to respond to the shrinking white share of the population by broadening its demographic appeal. There have been plenty of disagreements about exactly how to do that, but building bridges to black and Latino voters has been a common goal. 

Trump represents, in effect, abandonment of that goal in favor of a very different idea of responding to the shrinking white share of the population by politicizing and mobilizing white identity while downplaying free market doctrines. That, in turn, reflects a broader trend in right-of-center politics that is also manifesting itself in different ways everywhere — from the UK and France to Sweden and Finland, a trend that threatens the ideals many American conservative leaders are deeply committed to. 

It's polite to both Trump and his supporters to sweep this all under the rug with hazy talk of "anti-establishment" feeling. But to do so completely misses a huge part of what the conflict between pro- and anti-Trump forces is actually about — is the Republican Party going to be an ideological party or an ethnic one?

With Trump as your candidate for president, the answer to that question is obviously the latter. Republicans have not only abandoned outreach efforts to black and Latino voters, they are now looking to actively punish them, and to promote the idea that the GOP is fully the party of white resentment the way the Dixiecrats were 60 years ago.

Combine that with the same misogyny that we're seen out of the GOP and especially in Trump's virulent strain of Republicanism, and you've got a recipe for a cocktail of White Guy Rage.

It could have won 60 years ago, and even 20 years ago if Ross Perot hasn't managed to screw things up for the GOP with his third party runs, handing the country to Clinton twice.

But the demographics of 2016 are markedly different.  The numbers would require Trump getting upwards of 75% of the white male vote, something that's simply not going to happen, and he's alienating everyone else to the point where there simply won't be enough voters for him to win.

But years after Donald Trump started all this by becoming the highest profile "birther", it amazes me that people are still pretending like his campaign isn't based solely on racism and hatred.

And the GOP is now 100% on board.

Trolled By Turd Blossom

Even I have to admit that this is some pretty epic trolling by Karl Rove.

Rove, former deputy chief of staff to President George W. Bush who is working on a book about President McKinley, told Time that he'd expect Obama to be "more gracious" to the man "who made it possible for him to be President." 

"In a serious vein, I would hope that he would find a gracious way to honor McKinley, who is an important figure in American history. And I’m not certain he has the authority to have done what he did; the designation was granted by law of Congress in 1917," Rove told the magazine. "In a more jocular way, the guy ought to be more gracious to the guy who made it possible for him to be President." 

Obama was born in 1961 in Hawaii, which was annexed in 1898 during McKinley's presidency.

A swipe at the President and the Birther idiots in his own party?  Yeah, you get a point for that, Karl.

And several million negative points for, you know, being Karl Rove.

Re-Birther Of The Fool

So what do you get when you combine rabid GOP nationalism with "I'm not a racist but..." mentality and throw in a healthy dollop of paranoia heading into 2016?  The revenge of the Birther movement as it finds some Republican candidates unacceptable.

In a column published last week on the conspiracy theory website WND, author Jack Cashill noted that questions had been raised about whether four of the 17 candidates in the GOP field were really "natural born citizens" and therefore eligible to run for President. 

Ted Cruz has already dealt with those questions publicly -- the Canadian-born senator from Texas renounced his citizenship with that country last summer in anticipation of a 2016 bid -- but Cashill also listed Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal (R) and former Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA) among those who were suspect. 

He even mentioned that Jindal's preferring to go by the name Bobby -- inspired by "The Brady Bunch" -- instead of his given name, Piyush, would make for interesting evidence in a court case focused on his eligibility to run for commander-in-chief. 

But who, exactly, was suspicious of these candidates? On what grounds could these four politicians' eligibility to be President be challenged? And why was Santorum, whose background as an Italian-American doesn't get mentioned nearly as frequently as Rubio's Cuban heritage or Jindal's Indian heritage, suspect? 

TPM called up Cashill to find out. Cashill notably co-wrote the 2012 book "Officer's Oath" with former Lt. Col. Terry Lakin, who was dismissed from the U.S. Army in 2010 and sentenced to six months in prison for refusing to deploy to Afghanistan amid his questions about President Barack Obama's eligibility to serve as commander-in-chief.

And the interview is a goddman classic.

When the challenge was made against Barack Obama, people said “how dare you question he’s a natural born citizen because he was born in Hawaii." Even if he was born in Hawaii, that does not make him a natural born citizen. It’s a very strict term. I won’t say very strict -- there’s a real meaning to the term, it’s not that it’s perfectly defined but the understanding is well understood. The understanding is that you be born of American parents with unquestioned loyalty to the United States. So for instance, had Obama been born [somewhere] other than Hawaii he would not have been eligible to run for President. Even though his mother was an American, just like Ted Cruz’s mother was American, the difference is that according to the law you’d have to be an American citizen for five years after the age of 14. She simply wasn’t old enough to confer that status on Obama. If his mother had been a non-American citizen and his father had been a Kenyan, and neither had any allegiance to the United States, which in fact neither of them really did, he would not have been eligible no matter where he was born.

So the question comes up about Bobby Jindal’s parents. Both of them were in the United States on student visas. To me the real question is does the candidate have any divided allegiance. So if Jindal’s parents remained steadfastly identifying as Indians and he steadfastly identified as an Indian, even though he was born in the United States and was a citizen, he would not be eligible. Legitimately, he would not be eligible to be President. But given the fact that he changed his name after a character in “The Brady Bunch" -- as American as it gets -- I don’t think there’s any question in any of those candidates that there’s any dual allegiance. That’s what the law was designed to prevent, was people with dual allegiance. Especially in the early Republic when you had people who were from England or from France and who really reported back to the motherland first. Even if they were born here they might be children of a diplomat or something like that. The fact that you are a citizen doesn’t make you a natural born citizen.

These people are completely, certifiably bonkers. and now they are turning on each other.  It would be funny other than the fact that their votes count too, and they are much more likely to vote than your average Democratic voter.

Last Call For Voting Irregularities

Two very different stories about the 2012 election, both from the indispensable Taegan Goddard's Political Wire.  First, a majority of Republicans don't believe the 2012 elections were fair in any way because after all, Democrats won:

Going into the 2012 election, both Democrats and Republicans expressed concerns about the fairness of the election. Only 15 percent of Republicans and 19 percent of Democrats were very confident that the election would be decided fairly.

After the election, fears about voter fraud abated among Democrats but skyrocketed among Republicans, with 58 percent of Republicans not confident at all about the fairness of the election.

Republicans are particularly concerned about voter fraud and intimidation in big urban areas, with 32 percent of them believing that it had a big impact on the election, 49 percent believing it had some impact, and only 19 percent believing it had no impact.

The only reason Democrats won?  OBAMA'S THUG LYFE X ARMY.  Oh, and the birther thing:

Despite releasing his long-form birth certificate in 2011, these rumors have persisted.  In particular, between 40 and 70 percent of Republicans still believe that President Obama may have been born outside of the U.S.

Furthermore, most of those who question President Obama’s place of birth are not just expressing negative views toward him without considering the implications.  When asked in a follow-up question about whether they thought being born outside of the U.S. would make Barack Obama “ineligible under the U.S. Constitution to be president,” 72 percent of those who thought the President might have been born outside of the U.S. believed that he would be ineligible to be president.

So you're looking at anywhere from 29% to 50% of Republicans who think President Obama is not even legally the President.   Split the difference and call it 40%, and that's still tens of millions of people who do not recognize Barack Obama as President.  No wonder the GOP is talking impeachment.

And speaking of actual voting unfairness...

A new Harvard study contacted over 7,000 election administrators in 28 states and found they provide different information about voter ID requirements to voters of different ethnicities.

And those differences are pretty stark and brutal.  Latino-sounding names got far fewer responses from election officials in the experiment.

The finding holds up when you drop certain regions, when you drop small towns, and when you control for whether officials are elected or appointed. What’s more, they find that there are actually statistically significant differences in the quality of response from officials, depending on what kind of name is used. Responses to Latino voters were likelier to be non-informative, less likely to be “absolutely accurate” (that is, giving complete and accurate information about the relevant topic), and even less likely to take a friendly tone.

It's depressing stuff all the way around.  Don't expect Republicans to lift a finger to try to improve either of these two situations, too.