Tag Archives: mexican

Donald Trump Doesn’t Want a Muslim Judge Either

by GeorginaDownie2 Posted on June 5, 2016

Mother Jones

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We already know that Donald Trump thinks Judge Gonzalo Curiel is biased against him because he’s “Mexican.” But what about other judges with non-white backgrounds? John Dickerson asked him about this on Face the Nation today:

Later, when asked if he believed a Muslim judge would treat him unfairly because of another controversial proposal to temporarily bar Muslims from entering the U.S., Trump replied: “It’s possible, yes. Yeah. That would be possible, absolutely.”

“Isn’t there sort of a tradition though in America that we don’t judge people by who their parents were and where they came from?” Dickerson asked. “I’m not talking about tradition,” Trump replied. “I’m talking about common sense, okay? He’s somebody, he’s proud of his heritage.”

OK then. No Hispanics and no Muslims. I wonder which non-white ethnicities are allowed to pass judgment on Trump? He’s been pretty rough on China and Japan, after all. And Trump was king of the birthers a few years ago, so blacks probably don’t think much of him. This brings up an obvious question:

When questioned on whether he would instruct his lawyers to ask that Judge Curiel get thrown out of the Trump University case, Trump said: “Well, I may do that now—We’re finding things out now that we didn’t know before.”

“Because of his Mexican heritage though?” Dickerson pressed. “No, but because of other things,” Trump responded. “I mean because of other things.”

Hmmm. He wants Curiel tossed off the case, but not because of his Mexican heritage. Why is that? A reader points me toward a piece by Garrett Epps in the Atlantic this morning about a 1998 case overseen by federal judge Denny Chin:

Eventually, Chin dismissed Klayman’s client’s case….Not long after, the judge got a letter from Klayman and his co-counsel, Paul Orfanedes, asking a few “questions” about the judge’s Asian American background….In a written response, Chin…lowered the boom. Klayman and Orfanedes were required to withdraw as counsel from the case and would not be permitted to appear in Chin’s court on any matter ever again. They would be required to show his opinion to any other judge in the district in any future case. The court clerk would also report the sanctions to every court where they held bar membership.

….The Second Circuit briskly affirmed Chin’s order. “Courts have repeatedly held that matters such as race or ethnicity are improper bases for challenging a judge’s impartiality,” wrote the chief judge, Ralph Winter, a Reagan appointee.

In public, Trump can rant about anything he wants. But in court, if his lawyers so much as mention Curiel’s Mexican heritage in a recusal motion they risk nuclear sanctions. Even for Trump, they aren’t willing to do that.

Still, there are always those “other things.” My own guess is that this is a blustery Trumpian fiction, just like all the evidence of Barack Obama’s Kenyan birth that Trump insisted his private investigators had been digging up back in 2011. We’ll see.

Bottom line: Donald Trump apparently believes that the only judge qualified to try his case is a white Christian. I guess this is the new, more presidential Trump that his backers keep insisting will show up any day now for the general election.

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Donald Trump Doesn’t Want a Muslim Judge Either

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Donald Trump Supporters Violently Attacked in San Jose

by MaribelSJG Posted on June 3, 2016

Mother Jones

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Chaos erupted outside a Donald Trump rally in San Jose, California, on Thursday, as a crowd of protesters violently attacked supporters of the presumptive GOP nominee as they left the event. Some of the protesters were seen waving Mexican flags and burning the real estate magnate’s trademark “Make America Great Again” hat.

At one point, a protester hurled a heavy bag at a supporters’ head, leaving him with blood trailing down his face and onto his shirt. The incident was recorded on video:

The Los Angeles Times reports at least a dozen people, including one police officer, were attacked at the scene. Several people were taken into custody, but the police declined to say how many were arrested. It’s unclear who exactly was responsible for the violence. The ugly scene comes just days before the California primaries on Tuesday.

Throughout the Republican primary season, Trump rallies have included hostile confrontations between his supporters and protesters. The real estate magnate has been repeatedly criticized for failing to condemn—and perhaps even encouraging—his supporters to act violently. He even promised at one point to pay for his supporters’ legal fees should they tussle with protesters and have trouble with law enforcement officials. But on Thursday, it appears demonstrators flipped the script on the continued brawls—a move that likely plays squarely into Trump’s hands.

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Donald Trump Supporters Violently Attacked in San Jose

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The Real Story of the Syrian Family Who Donald Trump Said Might Be Terrorists

by GeorginaTindal Posted on May 31, 2016

Mother Jones

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Matt Chase

The couple who had panicked the nation’s right-wing politicians and pundits sits on a couch in a spartan ground-level apartment on the outskirts of San Bernardino, California. Thirty-two-year-old Samer is in a blue sweatshirt and jeans, lounging next to his wife, Sara. He has a round face and relaxed eyes; she is more angular, her eyes more direct. They’re both wearing ankle monitors. Ever since they were released from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention two months earlier, they’ve kept a low profile. It took me weeks to contact them, and now they’ve agreed to tell their story. But they have some caveats: no real names, not too many details. They don’t want to stir up any more trouble than they’ve already been through.

Eight months before I met them, they were in Syria, on the phone with a smuggler. ISIS fighters were on the fringes of their small Christian village, firing mortars into it. Samer and Sara knew if the village fell there was a good chance they’d be abused or executed. There was no power, no work, and the price of food was punishing. Part of their home was blown up. Their little boys, two and five years old, were “afraid all the time,” Sara recalls. They almost never ventured outdoors. Of Syria, Samer says, “It is not a life.” So they decided to seek a new one—in America, where they hoped to join Samer’s parents and sister, who live in California.

The smuggler told them he could help, in exchange for everything they had—a valuable tract of land, the remains of their home, and all its contents. The smuggler’s network stretched across the globe, and he arranged to get them to Lebanon, then Turkey, where they waited three months before being supplied with expertly forged European passports—they won’t say which nationality—and plane tickets to Brazil. From there, they traveled north. The smuggler told them where to go, whom to meet, when to take a car, and when to fly. The passports worked at every checkpoint, border, and airport.

On November 17, Samer, Sara, and their two little boys walked across the Mexican border at Laredo, Texas, and turned themselves in to American immigration officials. Samer remembers, “I was so happy. I finally arrived here to have a safe life, a good life for my children.”

They didn’t realize they were stepping into a firestorm of anti-refugee hysteria. Four days before their arrival, ISIS-backed terrorists had attacked in Paris. After Samer and Sara entered the United States, the conservative website Breitbart proclaimed—falsely—that they and another Syrian family who had crossed with them were “illegal aliens” who had been “caught” sneaking into the country. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott tweeted a link to the story. Ben Carson said their arrival could be a sign that “our worst nightmare may be unfolding before our eyes.” Trump tweeted that they might be terrorists: “ISIS maybe? I told you so. we need a big & beautiful wall!” In the days that followed, more than 30 governors said they did not want Syrian refugees settling in their states.

Almost immediately after requesting asylum, Sara and the boys were put in one ICE detention center, Samer in another. They went through the extensive asylum interview process and were determined to have “credible fears of persecution or torture” in Syria. Within two weeks they were approved for release. ICE officials told Samer’s family in California to buy airline tickets for them. But the day before they were set to depart, Tashfeen Malik and Syed Farook slaughtered 14 people in San Bernardino. ICE told Samer’s family to cancel the flights to California, and Samer and Sara were denied parole. The only explanation was a vague declaration of “law enforcement interests.”

During their weeks of detention, Samer was allowed to speak to Sara only once on the phone. The boys cried every night, asking Sara where their father was. As Christmas approached, the children had been held for nearly 40 days, despite a mandate that most migrant kids should be released after three to five days. “The look on their face is a look of terror,” their lawyer, Jonathan Ryan, the executive director of the Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services, told me after visiting Sara at the time. “The look and the panic of a person pinned down on a hospital gurney.”

“I definitely thought America would accept me,” Samer told the Guardian. “If I had known that it was so terrible here I wouldn’t have brought my family.” On Christmas Eve, the family was finally released, reunited, and put on a flight to California.

That’s where I meet them two months later, in the warm and tidy apartment where Samer’s parents live. A cross hangs above the kitchen doorway. We drink tea in the living room as Samer and Sara lay out the terms for sharing their story. They’re wary: They don’t want to be back in the headlines, and they worry more press could endanger Sara’s mother and sister, still trapped in Syria. “They didn’t have a chance to leave,” she says. ISIS is still on the outskirts of their village.

They talk about life before the war, of their town—a small community speckled with trees and fields of crops. Sara doesn’t want to dwell on how the war has changed it. “The way the village looks is not important,” she says. “It is like all of Syria,” a landscape of broken concrete and twisted rebar.

Their troubles aren’t over. The asylum process, as Ryan puts it, is “designed so that people fall into the cracks, lose their cases on a technicality that would drive any sports fan nuts.”

But for now, Samer and Sara are piecing together a normal life. “My son started school,” she says, beaming. “Preschool. Just five years old, but he is a big boy. He is starting to learn English.” The boys, who have been playing in the living room, disappear into the kitchen and return proudly carrying potted flowers. “They bought this flower for their grandma,” Sara explains. Next they walk out holding a bag of peanut M&Ms with pleading eyes, grinning and squirming. They can play outside now. But not today. “It’s too windy!” Sara says with a laugh.

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The Real Story of the Syrian Family Who Donald Trump Said Might Be Terrorists

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Quote of the Day: Donald Trump Doesn’t Need No Stinkin’ Policy Experts

by DeclanHutchins Posted on May 9, 2016

Mother Jones

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Politico interviewed “nearly five dozen Republicans” recently and heard a consistent message: nobody with even a trace of policy cred wants to work in a Donald Trump administration. “The A-level people, and there are not that many of them to begin with, mostly don’t want to work for Trump,” said a former Bush official. “He will cut the A-level bench of available policy talent at least in half, if not more.”

But not to worry. This is all part of the plan:

A source familiar with Trump’s thinking explained that the billionaire businessman was reluctant to add new layers of policy experts now, feeling it would only muddy his populist message that has been hyperfocused on illegal immigration, trade and fighting Islamic extremists.

“He doesn’t want to waste time on policy and thinks it would make him less effective on the stump,” the Trump source said. “It won’t be until after he is elected but before he’s inaugurated that he will figure out exactly what he is going to do and who he is going to try to hire.”

That’s a confidence booster, isn’t it? We’ll all have to wait until after the election for Trump to tell us what he actually plans to do. In the meantime, he’s just going to keep tossing out anti-Muslim, anti-Mexican, and anti-Chinese bombs because that seems to appeal to his fans. But once he wins, he’ll be the most presidential president in the history of presidenting.

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Quote of the Day: Donald Trump Doesn’t Need No Stinkin’ Policy Experts

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Everyone Is Getting Today’s Trump Tweet Totally Wrong

by TeodoroCoulombe Posted on May 5, 2016

Mother Jones

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I think everyone is badly misinterpreting this tweet from Donald Trump:

This is not an awkward and embarrassing outreach to Hispanics. It’s not aimed at Hispanics at all. It’s aimed at white people. This is the kind of thing that Trump’s base—the white working class—views as a perfectly sincere appreciation of Mexican culture. It says, “Yes, I want a wall, and yes, I want to deport all the illegal immigrants in the country. But that doesn’t mean I hate Mexicans.” It’s basically an affirmation to Trump’s voters that they aren’t racists.

Plus it gets a ton of attention, and it also induces loads of mockery from overeducated PC liberals who don’t understand a compliment when they see one. It’s really a genius tweet.

Does everyone understand now? Trump is playing this game at a higher level than most of his critics.

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Everyone Is Getting Today’s Trump Tweet Totally Wrong

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Why Donald Trump and Ted Cruz Could Spell Doom for the California GOP

by EdgarC47982183 Posted on May 2, 2016

Mother Jones

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In 1994, California Gov. Pete Wilson ran a television ad showing Mexican immigrants dashing across the border as a voice declared: “They keep coming: Two million illegal immigrants in California.” Wilson’s short term gain—he won both reelection and a ballot measure denying state services to undocumented immigrants—was soon overcome by a Latino backlash that transformed California into an overwhelmingly Democratic state.

So it was more than a little bit rich to see Wilson use a surprise visit at California’s Republican convention on Saturday to endorse Sen. Ted Cruz, warning that the nomination of Donald Trump could spell ruin for the state GOP. Senator Cruz “is not anti-immigrant,” Wilson said, an implicit jab at Trump. “He, as I am, is for legal immigration of the kind that made this country great. And I might point out that he is hardly anti-Latino.”

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Why Donald Trump and Ted Cruz Could Spell Doom for the California GOP

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Trump’s Foreign Policy Doesn’t Improve When Read From a Teleprompter

by CalebB87yltepl Posted on April 27, 2016

Mother Jones

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I kinda sorta listened to Donald Trump’s foreign policy speech this morning. You know, the one we were all looking forward to because it was written by an actual speechwriter and would be delivered via teleprompter. That’s Trump being presidential, I guess.

So how did Trump do? That depends on your expectations. For a guy who never uses a teleprompter, not bad. By normal standards, though, he sounded about like a sixth grader reciting a speech from note cards. On content, it was the same deal. Compared with normal Trump, it wasn’t bad. By any real-world standard, it was ridiculous.

Fact-checking his speech is sort of pointless, basically a category error. Trump is a zeitgeisty kind of guy, and that’s the only real way to evaluate anything he says. In this case, the zeitgeist was “America First”—and everyone’s first question was, does he know? Does he know that this is a phrase made famous by isolationists prior to World War II? My own guess is that he didn’t know this the first time he used it, but he does now. Certainly his speechwriter does. But he doesn’t care. It fits his favorite themes well, and the only people who care about its history are a bunch of overeducated pedants. His base doesn’t know where it came from and couldn’t care less.

So: America First. And that’s about it. Trump will do only things that are in America’s interest. He will destroy ISIS, crush Iran, wipe out the trade deficit with China, eradicate North Korea’s bomb program, and give Russia five minutes to cut a deal with us or face the consequences. Aside from that, Trump’s main theme seemed to be contradicting himself at every turn. We will crush our enemies and protect our friends—but only if our friends display suitable gratitude for everything we do for them. We will rebuild our military and our enemies will fear us—but “war and aggression will not be my first instinct.” We will be unpredictable—but also consistent so everyone knows they can trust us. He won’t tell ISIS how or when he’s going to wipe them out—but it will be very soon and with overwhelming force. He will support our friends—but he doesn’t really think much of international agreements like NATO.

Then there was the big mystery: his out-of-the-blue enthusiasm for 3-D printing, artificial intelligence, and cyberwar. Where did that come from? In any case, the Pentagon is obviously already working on all three of these things, so it’s not clear just what Trump has in mind. (Actually, it is clear: nothing. Somebody put these buzzwords in his speech and he read them. He doesn’t have the slightest idea what any of them mean.)

So what would Trump do about actual conflicts that are actually happening right now? Would he send troops to Ukraine? To Syria? To Libya? To Yemen? To Iraq? Naturally, he didn’t say. Gotta be unpredictable, after all.

But whatever else you take away, America will be strong under Donald Trump. We will be respected and feared. Our military will be ginormous. No one will laugh at us anymore. We will proudly defend the values of Western civilization. This all serves pretty much the same purpose in foreign policy that political correctness, Mexican walls, and Muslim bans serve in Trump’s domestic policy.

And there you have it. Did he really need a teleprompter for that?

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Trump’s Foreign Policy Doesn’t Improve When Read From a Teleprompter

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Former Mexican President Slams Trump’s Plan to Pay for the Wall as "Absolutely Crazy"

by CedricBoyland Posted on April 19, 2016

Mother Jones

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In an interview with Mother Jones on Tuesday, former Mexican president Vicente Fox intensified his war on Donald Trump and the GOP front-runner’s proposed wall between the United States and Mexico. In February, Fox declared, “I’m not going to pay for that fucking wall.” At that time, Trump had not detailed how he would make good on his plan to force Mexico to pay for the border wall. Since then, Trump has released a plan to compel Mexico to pick up the tab. He would demand from Mexico a one-time payment of $5 billion to $10 billion, and if Mexico failed to comply, he would freeze all wire transfers between undocumented workers and their home countries. He would also impose stiff trade tariffs on Mexican products and cancel visas for Mexicans traveling to the United States, and Mexican travelers would have to higher fees for visas and for border crossing cards.

Asked about Trump’s plan, Fox exclaimed it was “crazy” and demonstrated Trump’s “ignorance about the economy.” Fox added, “We cannot take him seriously.”

A wall along the southern border of the United States has become Trump’s most popular campaign promise. At his rallies, he routinely asks his throngs of supporters, “Who’s going to pay for the wall?” They scream in response, “Mexico!” In early April, when he released his plan for the wall, he estimated its construction would cost $8 billion he estimated. A more realistic estimate put the total closer to $25 billion, if he could even build it at all. His proposal asserted, “We have the moral high ground here, and all the leverage.”

Fox, the president of Mexico from 2000 to 2006, doesn’t think so. He told Mother Jones Tuesday that Trump’s plan makes no sense and would never happen. “It’s an absolutely crazy idea, it’s totally arbitrary, and it goes against established practices on transferences,” he said. “It’s impeding against the free transfer system that works throughout the world. He cannot do that. It’s impossible.”

Fox noted that Trump’s plan would backfire and harm the US economy, perhaps even Trump’s own businesses. Mexico and other countries, he said, would likely retaliate against the United States by imposing their own fees or restrictions on US money transfers, which would hurt American business. “It’s absolutely crazy,” Fox repeated. “It’s ignorant.” (Fox has trolled Trump on Twitter several times regarding the wall.)

Increasing tariffs on Mexican goods—and perhaps getting into a trade war with China, as Trump has suggested—would hurt US corporations doing business overseas, Fox insisted, and “kill the United States economy as we know it today.”

Trump campaign spokeswoman Hope Hicks did not respond to a request for comment.

“Okay, what about the retaliation of Mexico, which will say I will not give visas to Americans to come to work in Mexico, or to come to Cancun?” Fox said. “It’s absolutely stupid. He’s going against all the operating procedures that we have developed worldwide through 200 years of history and open markets.”

Fox maintained that Trump shouldn’t be taken seriously, but he added, “The problem is that he’s causing severe damage to relationships that we hold in the world, diplomatic relationships, with all the free world. It’s just stupid.”

Trump has said that Mexico “has taken advantage” of the United States by allowing “gangs, drug traffickers, and cartels” to infiltrated the country and commit crimes here. Fox countered that the American drug market is the biggest in the world. “How can he have the moral ground if all of those drugs are consumed by his own citizens?” Fox remarked. “The huge drug consumption, the largest in the world, is right there in the United States.” Fox said the United States needed to do a better job of getting its own citizens to stop using drugs. He favors legalization as a means of reducing cartel violence. He also pointed out that most of the illegal drugs in the United States come from Central and South America (though the Mexican cartels do play a significant role).

Trump, Fox commented, is “showing his total ignorance about the way things work in this world.”

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Former Mexican President Slams Trump’s Plan to Pay for the Wall as "Absolutely Crazy"

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Everyone Knows Why Hillary Clinton Won’t Release Her Goldman Sachs Speeches

by SPHLoretta Posted on April 16, 2016

Mother Jones

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John Judis says he’s worried about Hillary Clinton again:

I don’t understand why she can’t put the Goldman, Sachs question behind her. I initially assumed that she either didn’t have transcripts or that what she said was the usual milquetoast stuff politicians offer up. But her continued refusal to provide transcripts (which I now assume must exist) suggests that there must be something damning in them.

If she gets the nomination, she’ll face these questions again in the fall, and if Trump or Cruz is her opponent, these questions will detract from the attention that their past utterances about Mexican rapists or masturbation or whathaveyou.

For what it’s worth, I think we all know what’s in those transcripts: a bit of routine praise for the yeoman work that investment bankers do to keep the gears of the economy well oiled. Maybe something like this:

These are tough times for investment bankers. I think Goldman Sachs is the only organization with a lower approval rating than Congress audience laughs politely between bites of prime rib. But seriously, folks, Main Street and Wall Street need each other. Bankers aren’t villains. I support higher leverage requirements and regulation of derivatives audience stares moodily at their forks, but I’ve always said that we need to do it in a practical way. Some of the financial engineering that’s come under such attack from the Bernie Sanders of the world audience brightens is just what our country needs. It helps states build roads and cities build schools. You’re the villains when things go bad—and maybe sometimes you deserve to be. But other times you’re the heroes America can’t do without.

This is the kind of thing that people say when they give a speech. But in the hands of a political opponent, it will come out like this:

Bankers aren’t villains….The financial engineering that’s come under such attack from the Bernie Sanders of the world is just what our country needs. It helps states build roads and cities build schools….You’re the heroes America can’t do without.

Something like that, anyway. My own guess is that it’s vanishingly unlikely Hillary said anything in these speeches that’s truly a bombshell. Her entire life suggests the kind of caution and experience with leaks that almost certainly made these speeches dull and predictable. But the Goldman folks knew all that up front. They just wanted the cachet of having a Clinton address their dinner.

Still, when you give speeches to any industry group, you offer up some praise for the vital work they do. It’s just part of the spiel. And Hillary knows perfectly well without even looking that some of that stuff is in these speeches—and it can be taken out of context and made into yet another endless and idiotic Republican meme. Remember “You didn’t build that”? Sure you do.

On another note, if Hillary does release the transcripts, she’s sure not going to do it now. She’ll wait until she has the nomination wrapped up and then release them during the dog days of May or June. If possible, she’ll do it the same day Donald Trump blows up the news cycle again. By that time, Democrats will all be circling the wagons to defend her and the entire foofarah will be dead by the time the real campaign starts in September.

As for the odds of a genuine bombshell, I’d put it at about 1 percent. I guess you never know about these things, but literally everything in Hillary’s 40-year political career suggests a woman who simply doesn’t traffic in bombshells. It’s not in her personality, and in any case, long experience has taught her better. It’s only barely conceivable that something genuinely damning is anywhere in any of those speeches.

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Everyone Knows Why Hillary Clinton Won’t Release Her Goldman Sachs Speeches

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Donald Trump Wins South Carolina Primary

by ClydeBrigstocke Posted on February 21, 2016

Mother Jones

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Like it or not, Donald Trump is in the driver’s seat for the Republican presidential nomination.

The networks called the South Carolina primary for Trump shortly after polls closed on Saturday, with Sens. Ted Cruz of Texas and Marco Rubio of Florida locked in a battle for second place. Over the last week of the campaign, Trump’s opponents worked hard to spin anything less than an overwhelming victory as a disappointing showing for the billionaire real estate mogul, but make no mistake about it: Trump’s win is a big deal. He has now finished second, first, and first in Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina, three states that have very little in common. He has won the latter two by overwhelming pluralities. And he has history on his side: Only one candidate has ever lost South Carolina and won the nomination, and that candidate, Mitt Romney, finished in second in 2012. If his name were anything other than “Donald Trump,” the party’s leaders would be penciling him in for the final speaking spot at their convention in Cleveland.

Trump used South Carolina as a backdrop for some of his most overheated pronouncements. He promoted his proposal to ban Muslims from entering the United States while speaking aboard a decommissioned aircraft carrier in Charleston Harbor. He called Pope Francis “disgraceful” for questioning his proposal to build a wall on the Mexican border. And in his final event of the primary campaign on Friday night, he told the audience an apocryphal story about General John Pershing executing 49 Muslims with bullets coated in pig blood. His biggest argument against Cruz’s candidacy was that the senator was unnecessarily squeamish about torture. Shortly after polls opened on Saturday, Trump tweeted that President Barack Obama would likely have attended Antonin Scalia’s funeral if it had been held at a mosque. Opponents, notably former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, sought to cast Trump as boorish and unpresidential. They misunderstood the race.

Trump didn’t win in spite of being a boor, a bigot, and an analog internet troll; he won because he was proudly all those things. For all the diversions (who picks a fight with the pope, anyway?), he articulated a remarkably clear theory of politics: Other people are screwing you over, and I’m going to stop it. “He’s got balls,” Julia Coates, a longtime Trump fan, told me as we waited for the real estate magnate to take the stage in North Charleston. “He’s got big ones. And that’s what we need. I’m tired of all this shit going on.” It’s the kind of approach that plays poorly among the genteel Southerners who crowd into Low Country town halls in boat shoes and Nantucket red. But he recognized the electorate as something greater—and angrier. If you hadn’t voted in decades, Trump was your guy. If you felt betrayed by the people you had voted for, Trump was also your guy.

If Trump was a winner, then everyone else is (to use his term of choice) a loser—including Rubio, who finished third in Iowa and a disappointing fifth in New Hampshire. Now you can add the South to the list of regions that have been less than receptive to his pitch. It’s not because he didn’t make his message clear. Over the last week, he cast himself as the anti-Trump, a fresh-faced Cuban American who could lead the party into the future. He toured the state with rising star Rep. Trey Gowdy; the state’s African America senator, Tim Scott; and its Indian American governor, Nikki Haley, who joked that the quartet looked like a “Benetton commercial.” Rubio bet the house on the idea that South Carolina was ready for the future and mentioned the Republican front-runner only in passing during his speeches, and never by name. Trump stuck with the past; he went all-in on white identity politics and, like Newt Gingrich and George W. Bush before him, came through unscathed—two divorces be damned.

In actual terms, the biggest loser was Bush, whose campaign is on life support after finishing far behind in a state that helped make his brother president 16 years ago. In a last-gasp effort at upping his numbers in South Carolina, he brought George W.—who was kept at arm’s length for most of the campaign—to North Charleston for a megarally where they chest-bumped backstage. And he blanketed the radio airwaves with an endorsement from the ex-president. Jeb pushed hard to position himself as a commander in chief in a state with one of the highest percentages of military families in the nation.

But even his supporters seemed to recognize the end was near. At a town hall in Summerville, in an open-air pavilion overlooking a golf course (Bush never tried too hard to shake the “country club” label), one questioner after another all but called him a wimp. As the event wrapped up, a voter told the younger Bush that he was a big fan of Dubya but questioned whether Jeb had the toughness for the job. “Can you be a sonofabitch?” he asked. Jeb didn’t say yes.

From here, the Republican field moves on to Nevada and then Super Tuesday, on March 1. Thanks to the efforts of a Southern bloc, that historic bellwether will be loaded up with states that look about as friendly to Trump as South Carolina did. (Not that he needs to drop his g’s to win votes—he cleaned up in New Hampshire, too.) There’s also a lot of time for him to screw it up, although short of lighting an American flag on fire in Times Square, it’s not clear what that would even look like. The more likely scenario is that his opponents and their backers might finally spend real money attacking him on the airways—just $9 million of the $215 million spent by conservative super-PACs this cycle has been on anti-Trump ads. But don’t let Trump’s army of Republican critics say South Carolina doesn’t matter. They’ve been saying for years and years that it does. And they’re absolutely right.

Link:

Donald Trump Wins South Carolina Primary

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