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Presenting the Bad Hombre and the Nasty Woman: Cocktails to Get You Through Election Night

by TiffinyHarter Posted on November 4, 2016

Mother Jones

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Bite is Mother Jones‘ new food politics podcast. Listen to all our episodes here, or by subscribing in iTunes or Stitcher or via RSS.

If this year’s presidential race hasn’t made you want to shotgun an IPA at full speed, then you haven’t been paying attention. Even the most reserved of us have probably reached for the bottle more than we’d like to admit. But election night is nearly upon us, and to toast the end of the shit-show as the total counts come in, we’re going to need some drinks. Strong ones. Lots of them.

We commissioned a bartender to mix up some presidential-race-inspired cocktails that turn Donald Trump’s off-color remarks into an excuse to have a stiff drink or two (or seven, we’re not judging). To hear how to make the Bad Hombre and the Nasty Woman, plus an interview with the Obama administration’s chef Sam Kass, listen to our latest episode of Bite below. The cocktail segment begins at 1:00.

Nicky Beyries is the bar manager at Foreign Cinema and Laszlo in San Francisco. When creating these political party favors for us, she cleverly chose spirits made by women and people of color (like Square One vodka and Ilegal mezcal). She also avoided predictable choices, like a cosmo for the Nasty Woman.

“I get really tired as a female bartender who faces a lot of sexism—not only from guests, but from the industry and from liquor companies themselves—of the idea that for it to be womanly it has to be a certain way or a certain color,” Beyries told me. “There’s nothing more feminine about something because it’s dyed pink.”

If you can’t track down the products Beyries recommends, our own Tom Philpott has another take on the Bad Hombre, with ingredients you just might have on hand.

So without further ado, here are the recipes for your election-night imbibing pleasure. Cheers!

Bad Hombre

1 dash chili bitters
2 dashes chocolate bitters
1/4 ounce creme de cacao (Tempus Fugit brand)
3/4 ounce Cocchi di Torino vermouth
2 ounces Ilegal Reposado

Stir well over ice, pour into a cocktail glass, garnish with a small chili de arbol balanced on the rim, and a sprinkling of fresh cinnamon.

Photo courtesy Nicky Beyries

Nasty Woman

3 Thai basil leaves
1/2 ounce simple syrup
3/4 ounce fresh lemon juice
2 ounces Square One Basil Vodka

Shake, double strain into a glass, and top with about 1.5 ounces Fever-Tree bitter lemon soda. Garnish with a spring of Thai Basil.

Don’t have these fancy ingredients at home? Try Tom Philpott’s out-of-the-cabinet Bad Hombre:

4 ounces mezcal
2 ounces dry vermouth
2 splashes Cointreau
2-4 dashes of orange bitters
A pinch of chipotle powder (or smoked hot paprika)
A teaspoon each of salt and chipotle powder (or smoked hot paprika), mixed and laid out on a small plate
Garnish: two quarter orange slices, dusted on both sides with salt and chipotle powder.

Wipe the edges of two coupe glasses with an orange slice to moisten. Dip them into the salt/powder mixture to line the edge.

Combine the mezcal, vermouth, Cointreau, a pinch of chipotle powder, and the bitters in a jar. Add ice cubes, stir vigorously, and strain into the coupes. Garnish with the oranges slices. Serves two.

And just in case you missed the internet frenzy over Trump’s “bad hombre” and “nasty woman” comments, here’s a round up of the best memes.

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Presenting the Bad Hombre and the Nasty Woman: Cocktails to Get You Through Election Night

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Nightly News Takes a Dive on Issues This Year

by IvoryECCpmopww Posted on November 2, 2016

Mother Jones

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Andrew Tyndall notes that the nightly news no longer seems to care about policy debates:

This year’s absence of issues is an accurate portrayal of the turf on which the election is being played out….If the candidates are not talking about the issues, the news media would be misrepresenting the contest to do so.

With just two weeks to go, issues coverage this year has been virtually non-existent…. No trade, no healthcare, no climate change, no drugs, no poverty, no guns, no infrastructure, no deficits. To the extent that these issues have been mentioned, it has been on the candidates’ terms, not on the networks’ initiative.

I disagree with this on two levels. First, Hillary Clinton has talked plenty about issues in the conventional sense that Tyndall means it: speeches that cover specific policy proposals, with detail to back them up. Only Donald Trump has declined to do this.

More broadly, both candidates have talked about issues. Trump talks all the time about trade, immigration, ISIS, and guns. Clinton talks about childcare, ISIS, health care, guns, and so forth. There are lots of character attacks too, but then, that’s usually the case. But just because issues are talked about in broad strokes doesn’t mean they’re not talked about. They are. The network news broadcasts just don’t want to risk losing their audiences by forcing them to pay attention to such boring stuff.

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Nightly News Takes a Dive on Issues This Year

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Hillary Clinton Is an Open Book

by MiaOddo02554 Posted on November 2, 2016

Mother Jones

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With a mere 6 days left in Campaign 2016, Ezra Klein points out that Hillary Clinton is perhaps the most transparent presidential candidate in history:

We have Hillary Clinton’s full tax returns going back to the year 1977…public schedules…her campaign’s donors and her foundation’s donors…tens of thousands of emails from her time at the State Department…thousands of her campaign chair’s emails…investigative reports, congressional testimony, and documentary evidence from the inquiries into Whitewater, Benghazi, and Travelgate….so many independent biographies that I couldn’t come up with an accurate count.

….The story with Trump is quite different. We have the three pages from his 1995 tax return…books Trump has written about himself…financial disclosures to the Federal Election Commission, in which he claims, in all capital letters, to have “10 BILLION DOLLARS,” but no one believes that document…Digging beyond that image is difficult because Trump has forced his former associates, and even his former romantic partners, to sign nondisclosure agreements.

Despite all this, Clinton has a reputation for opacity while Trump has a reputation for being open about everything. The reason is deceptively simple: it’s what both candidates want. Clinton very clearly does her best to reveal as little as possible. Trump, by contrast, will talk about anything, loudly and volubly. It’s true that when he talks, he lies constantly and says next to nothing when he’s not lying, but the impression he gives is of somebody with nothing to hide.

Clinton’s reputation is not unfair. Most of her openness has been forced on her, after all. Trump’s reputation, by contrast, is ridiculous. He hides everything and lies about what he can’t. And since he runs a private company and has never served in government, he can get away with it. He’s not subject to FOIA requests or WikiLeaks dumps or random judges deciding that all his emails should be made public.

This isn’t going to change, and at this point it no longer matters whether it’s fair. It just is. But it’s what produces such bizarre levels of CDS1 among conservatives. They’ve forced so much openness on Clinton in an effort to destroy her, and it drives them crazy that it’s done nothing except paint a portrait of a pretty normal politician. Over 25 years, they’ve managed to uncover only three “scandals” that are even marginally troubling,2 and every dry well does nothing but convince them that Clinton is even more devious than they thought. By this time, we’ve tracked practically every hour of every day of Clinton’s life for the past decade, and there’s almost literally no unexamined time left. But it doesn’t matter. The next one will get her for sure!

The truth is different, of course. Hillary Clinton dislikes the press and has learned to be very careful in her public utterances. She has done a few dumb things in her life, and pushed the envelope further than she should a couple of times. If you dislike her, that’s fine. But basically she’s a fairly ordinary politico—ironically, an unusually honest one. When she makes a deal, her word is good. When she talks about policy, she’s careful not to overpromise. On the honesty front, she is Mother Teresa compared to Donald Trump.

1Clinton Derangement Syndrome, in case you’ve forgotten.

2The cattle futures thing remains intriguingly dodgy. Travelgate didn’t involve anything illegal, but definitely shows Clinton in a bad light. And Emailgate may not have produced any evidence of wrongdoing, but it did uncover a case of poor judgment.

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Hillary Clinton Is an Open Book

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A Billionaire Governor Is Using His Own Money to Reinstate the Death Penalty

by VivianLahey Posted on November 1, 2016

Mother Jones

On May 20, 2015, the Nebraska state Legislature voted to repeal the state’s death penalty. When the Republican governor, Pete Ricketts, vetoed the legislation six days later, the Legislature overrode his veto. It was an extraordinary move, making Nebraska the first solidly conservative state in more than 40 years to end the death penalty.

But the victory for death penalty opponents was short-lived. Having failed in his role as governor to protect the death penalty, Ricketts worked to reinstate it in a different capacity: As a man of deep pockets. Ricketts and his billionaire father, Republican megadonor Joe Ricketts, spent $300,000 on an effort to collect enough signatures to put the death penalty question to voters, in the form of a referendum on November 8. The governor donated another $100,000 this fall to fund a campaign to sway voters to reinstate the death penalty.

“It’s pretty unusual to have a governor who would lose an initiative through the process then try to reverse that process outside of the role of the governor with his own money,” says state Sen. Colby Coash, a conservative Republican and a leader of the anti-death-penalty effort. “Pretty unprecedented.”

Ricketts’ personal funding of the pro-death-penalty campaign has raised questions about the separation of powers in the state, but also about his political motives. The death penalty is an odd issue for Ricketts to stake so much on because, at least in Nebraska, it’s largely symbolic. The state has not carried out an execution in nearly two decades—and critics believe it will not execute anyone in the foreseeable future because the state is unable to obtain the necessary drugs. (Ricketts’ administration even tried, but failed, to obtain execution drugs illegally from India.)

It’s possible that the governor simply feels passionately about the death penalty, which he has long supported. But Ricketts’ critics think he’s using the death penalty to achieve a different objective: consolidating his own power. Ricketts, they say, wanted the death penalty on the ballot in November as a wedge issue to unseat lawmakers who have defied him over the past year. If Ricketts plays his cards right, he could enter the last two years of his first term as a much more powerful governor. From there, he could run for the US Senate—for which he ran unsuccessfully in 2006—or even the White House. “Certainly he sees himself with a future,” says Paul Landow, a professor at the University of Nebraska-Omaha who specializes in state-level politics. “A national future.”

Within a few months of becoming governor in January 2015, Ricketts was clashing with the Legislature—and losing. The first showdown came over a bill to raise the gas tax to pay for repairs to roads and bridges. Ricketts vetoed the 6-cent-per-gallon hike, and the Legislature overrode his veto. Less than two weeks later, the Legislature overrode another veto, this time over the death penalty. The very next day brought a third override, over a bill to allow driver’s licenses for young immigrants who were granted temporary legal status under President Barack Obama’s 2012 executive action to help children of undocumented immigrants. A year later, the Legislature would override Ricketts’ veto of a bill permitting these same immigrants to obtain professional and commercial licenses.

Ricketts has made no secret of his anger at the legislators who voted against him on those measures. At the state Republican Party convention this spring, he read aloud the names of more than a dozen GOP senators who had crossed him and called for electing Republican senators who do not stray from the party’s platform. (The Legislature is unicameral, but its members are known as senators.) This is a faux pas in Nebraska, where the Legislature is ostensibly nonpartisan, although it’s no secret which members are Republicans and which are Democrats. Thirteen senators, including five Republicans, chastised Ricketts in an open letter for attacking “respected conservatives elected by the people to obey their own convictions and principles, not the governor’s.”

But Ricketts was doing more than lecturing the Legislature. By the time he gave that speech, he had already endorsed a challenger to one of the Republicans who had clashed with him on those vetoes. Later in the summer, he gave his support to another challenger of an incumbent Republican. Meanwhile, Americans for Prosperity and Trees of Liberty, two groups affiliated with the Koch brothers, used a direct-mail campaign to target incumbent Republicans who had defied Ricketts on the vetoes. (The groups are not required to disclose their donors.) After a May primary—Nebraska employs a jungle primary system in which the top two vote-earners face off in the general election—three sitting Republicans are confronting GOP challengers on November 8.

With the death penalty question on the ballot, these challengers are making it a central campaign issue as they try to oust sitting Republicans who voted to repeal it. They’re “trying to ride it to election,” says state Sen. Mike Gloor, a Republican who voted to repeal the death penalty. Vincent Powers, the head of the state Democratic Party, puts it more bluntly. “Ricketts just wants to impose his will on the Legislature, and so he’s using this emotional issue as a club,” he says. “It’s very troubling if you are like me and you think democracy is a good thing.”

The fact that the repeal effort succeeded at all was something of a miracle. For decades, state Sen. Ernie Chambers, a liberal independent who has served in the Legislature since the 1970s, has unsuccessfully introduced a bill to abolish the state’s death penalty. But in 2015, with a large freshman class open to arguments against the death penalty, a few conservatives in the Legislature took up the cause as well.

By all accounts, Nebraska’s death penalty is a failure. The last execution in the state took place in 1997, but the state continues to spend $14.6 million a year on costs related to maintaining the death penalty, according to a study commissioned by the state’s anti-death penalty coalition. The legislators who voted to repeal it had come to believe that the death penalty was not just a financial loser but also bad policy that was unfairly applied, used to coerce suspects into pleading guilty, and capable of putting innocent people to death.

As the death penalty fight moved from the Legislature to the ballot initiative, a coalition of conservatives, liberals, and the Catholic Church came together to fight to retain the repeal. The coalition has spent more than $2.5 million on voter education efforts, canvassing, and TV ads—far more than its pro-death-penalty counterpart has spent.

Even with the active backing of the Nebraska Catholic Conference in the heavily Catholic state, the consensus is that a popular referendum on the death penalty in a deep-red state is a heavy lift. But there are a few wild cards that could help the anti-death penalty side in a close contest. The first is the language on the ballot itself, which could confuse some death penalty supporters, who need to vote “repeal” to reverse the existing death penalty ban. When the ballot language was finalized, the coalition opposing the death penalty quickly changed its name to Retain a Just Nebraska so that death penalty opponents would know to vote “retain” to keep the ban.

The second big question is turnout. Nebraska does not have a governor’s race or a US Senate race this year, leaving the presidential race as the main draw for voters to get to the polls. But Nebraska, though deeply conservative, is not exactly Trump territory. Ricketts endorsed Trump after his first choice, Ted Cruz, dropped out of the primary, but he has not donated to Trump’s campaign; his wife, meanwhile, registered as a Democrat and is supporting Hillary Clinton. Both of the state’s Republican US senators have spoken out against Trump: Ben Sasse is perhaps the most prominent Never Trump Republican in the country, while Deb Fischer unendorsed him after the infamous 2005 Access Hollywood video was leaked in early October. (She later re-endorsed him.) “I think there’s a legitimate chance that the Legislature will be held up,” Coash says hopefully. “It all comes down to turnout.”

Most politicians and analysts predict the repeal will be overturned because Nebraska is such a conservative state. “I would be absolutely shocked if the voters basically supported to keep the repeal of the death penalty,” says Aaron Trost, a Republican operative who ran Fischer’s campaign in 2012. In August, the pro-death-penalty group released a poll showing that 2 out of 3 Nebraskans support the death penalty. Dan Parsons, the spokesman for the anti-death-penalty group, has argued that the poll was “flawed.” Unlike the poll, the referendum states that if the death penalty repeal stands, defendants who would otherwise have received a death sentence would instead get life in prison. Previous polling has shown that when life without parole is mentioned as the alternative to the death penalty, some Americans switch from death penalty support to opposition.

“We’ve outworked them and outmaneuvered them for over a year now,” Parsons says. As of early October, according to campaign finance disclosures, the anti-death-penalty group had raised $2.7 million to the pro-death-penalty group’s $1.2 million—and most of the latter funds were spent gathering signatures to put the issue on the ballot.

The anti-death penalty group received big donations from liberal philanthropic organizations. Major contributors to the pro-death penalty group include Pete and Joe Ricketts and billionaire Republican donor Robert Mercer, as well as two national dark-money groups. One of those groups, Citizens for a Sound Government, spent money on Ricketts’ behalf during his 2014 primary. It’s unclear who is behind the groups’ money or why outside groups see fit to invest in the death penalty in Nebraska. One possibility is that they’re investing in something else: Ricketts’ broader conservative agenda and his career, perhaps on the national stage.

“Should the ballot initiative lose, that would be a big blow to him,” says Landow, the political scientist. “So it’s a gamble. And he took it, I think, because he calculated that it was worth it in terms of his future national standing.”

Continued – 

A Billionaire Governor Is Using His Own Money to Reinstate the Death Penalty

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FBI Taking Another Look at Clinton Emails

by ShennaZoxygres Posted on October 28, 2016

Mother Jones

The FBI has come across emails that may be related to the closed Hillary Clinton email server investigation, according to a letter FBI Director James Comey sent several congressional leaders on Friday. The emails appear to have come from devices belonging to disgraced former congressman Anthony Weiner and his wife, Huma Abedin, a longtime Clinton aide.

“In connection with an unrelated case, the FBI has learned of the existence of emails that appear to be pertinent to the investigation,” Comey wrote. “I am writing to inform you that the investigative team briefed me on this yesterday, and I agreed that the FBI should take appropriate investigative steps designed to allow investigators to review these emails to determine whether they contain classified information, as well as to assess their importance to our investigation.” He added, “the FBI cannot yet assess whether or not this material may be significant, and I cannot predict how long it will take us to complete this additional work.”

Immediately on Twitter, Clinton foes started crowing. So did Donald Trump at a rally in Manchester, New Hampshire, minutes after the news broke. “They are reopening the case into her criminal and illegal conduct that threatens the security of the United States of America,” Trump said, as the crowd chanted, “Lock her up!” Trump continued, “Hillary Clinton’s corruption is on a scale we have never seen before. We must not let her take her criminal scheme into the Oval Office. I have great respect for the fact that the FBI and the Department of Justice are now willing to have the courage to right the horrible mistake that they made.”

Trump added that the FBI’s decision not to recommend charges “was a grave miscarriage of justice that the American people fully understood” and that now “perhaps finally justice will be done.”

A little more than an hour after news of the FBI letter broke, the New York Times reported that the new information came to light after the FBI seized devices belonging to Abedin and Weiner.

Shortly after the New York Times report, Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta issued a statement calling Comey’s decision to make the announcement 11 days before the election “extraordinary”:

Upon completing this investigation more than three months ago, FBI Director Comey declared no reasonable prosecutor would move forward with a case like this and added that it was not even a close call. In the months since, Donald Trump and his Republican allies have been baselessly second-guessing the FBI and, in both public and private, browbeating the career officials there to revisit their conclusion in a desperate attempt to harm Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.

FBI Director Comey should immediately provide the American public more information than is contained in the letter he sent to eight Republican committee chairmen. Already, we have seen characterizations that the FBI is ‘reopening’ an investigation but Comey’s words do not match that characterization. Director Comey’s letter refers to emails that have come to light in an unrelated case, but we have no idea what those emails are and the Director himself notes they may not even be significant.

It is extraordinary that we would see something like this just 11 days out from a presidential election.

The Director owes it to the American people to immediately provide the full details of what he is now examining. We are confident this will not produce any conclusions different from the one the FBI reached in July.”

Read Comey’s full letter below:

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This story has been updated with information from the New York Times report and Podesta’s statement.

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FBI Taking Another Look at Clinton Emails

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Self-driving truck uses first shipment to deliver Budweiser. Sigh.

by TerriGoward2812 Posted on October 26, 2016

Turns out, they’re not all true.

The Republican presidential nominee appeared on Herman Cain’s radio show on Tuesday, and he had quite a bit to say about wind and solar power, and birds too. Here’s part of the transcript, courtesy of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, with our fact-checking notes added in brackets:

Trump: Our energy companies are a disaster right now. Coal. The coal business is — you know, there is such a thing as clean coal [False]. Our miners are out of work — now they’re just attacking energy companies like I’ve never seen them attack anything before.

They want everything to be wind and solar. Unfortunately, it’s not working on large-scale [False]. It’s just not working [False]. Solar is very, very expensive [False]. Wind is very, very expensive [False], and it only works when it’s windy [False].

Cain: Right.

Trump: Someone might need a little electricity — a lot of times, it’s the opposite season, actually. When they have it, that’s when you don’t need it. So wind is very problematic [False] and — I’m not saying I’m against those things. I’m for everything. I’m for everything.

Cain: Right.

Trump: But they are destroying our energy companies with regulation [False]. They’re absolutely destroying them [False].

Cain: But their viability has to be demonstrated before you shove it down the throats of the American people. That’s what you’re saying.

Trump: In all fairness, wind is fine [True]. Sometimes you go — I don’t know if you’ve ever been to Palm Springs, California — it looks like a junkyard [False]. They have all these different —

Cain: I have.

Trump: They have all these different companies and each one is made by a different group from, all from China and from Germany, by the way — not from here [False]. And you look at all these windmills. Half of them are broken [False]. They’re rusting and rotting. You know, you’re driving into Palm Springs, California, and it looks like a poor man’s version of Disneyland [False]. It’s the worst thing you’ve ever seen [False].

And it kills all the birds [False]. I don’t know if you know that … Thousands of birds are lying on the ground. And the eagle. You know, certain parts of California — they’ve killed so many eagles [False]. You know, they put you in jail if you kill an eagle. And yet these windmills [kill] them by the hundreds [False].

But solar and wind power are on a meteoric rise, whether Trump likes it or not.

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Self-driving truck uses first shipment to deliver Budweiser. Sigh.

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Even Hillary Clinton’s Victory Rally Is Trolling Donald Trump

by NikiNIPXyt Posted on October 26, 2016

Mother Jones

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Election night is 13 days away, and Politico reports that Hillary Clinton finally has a venue for her victory rally: the Jacob V. Javits Center, overlooking the Hudson River in Manhattan. The venue, with its soaring glass ceiling, comes with obvious symbolic value for a candidate vying to become the first woman president. But the Javits Center also has an added significance for Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump—it’s one of his least favorite buildings in all of New York City.

It wasn’t always that way. Trump acquired the option to develop the site early in his career as a real estate developer, and he spent years trying to get the city to build a convention center at his location on West 34th Street. “There wouldn’t be a new convention center in New York today if it hadn’t been for the Trumps,” he wrote in his first book, The Art of the Deal, Trump even lobbied the city to name the building named after his family, offering to waive his $833,000 fee if they slapped the “Trump” name on the center.

But when the city chose a different developer for the project, Trump turned on it. In his book, he held the ensuing project responsible for “perhaps the most horrendous construction delays and cost overruns in the history of the building business”:

The Art of the Deal

Trump was also upset that the developers had ruined the view of the Hudson by facing the building in the wrong direction.

The Art of the Deal

Trolling Donald Trump may be the least of the Clinton campaign’s concerns when it comes to an election night rally—the election will, after all, be over by then. But it’s certainly a nice touch.

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Even Hillary Clinton’s Victory Rally Is Trolling Donald Trump

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Newt Gingrich Refuses to Discuss His Attack on Megyn Kelly

by ImogeneLeclair Posted on October 26, 2016

Mother Jones

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On Tuesday night, Newt Gingrich, the Republican who was forced to resign as House speaker in the late ’90s and who now is a top Donald Trump surrogate, got into a row with Fox News host Megyn Kelly. Toward the end of a segment on the presidential election, the often combative Gingrich started grousing about the media paying too much attention to all the women who have accused Trump of sexual assault (after a video emerged of Trump bragging about committing sexual assault). Kelly defended the media’s handling of this story: “We have to cover that story, sir.” What about a Hillary Clinton speech in which she referred to open borders? Gingrich retorted. “That is worth covering,” Kelly said.

Gingrich then angrily exploded: “Do you want to go back to the tapes of your shows recently? You are fascinated with sex and you don’t care about public policy. That’s what I get out of watching you tonight.” Kelly shot back: “I am not fascinated by sex. But I am fascinated by the protection of women.” Gingrich became irate and dared Kelly to say “Bill Clinton” and “sexual predator.” She did not take the bait, and shortly after that, Kelly said goodbye to Gingrich and asked him to “spend some time” working on his “anger issues.”

The exchange blew up Twitter and was the talk of the politerati. On Wednesday morning, as Trump was holding an event in Washington, DC, to promote his new hotel, with Gingrich one of the few notable GOPers in attendance, he congratulated Gingrich for tangling with Kelly (with whom Trump once feuded).

Following the ribbon-cutting ceremony in the hotel lobby, Mother Jones asked Gingrich about his emotional face-off with Kelly. “Do you really think that Megyn Kelly was overly fascinated with sex by asking about the sexual-assault accusations regarding Trump?” we inquired. Waving his hand, Gingrich replied, “I’m not going to talk about that.”

We followed up: “But given that you guys impeached a president” about a matter involving sex—Gingrich interrupted, “It speaks for itself. It speaks for itself.” He and his (third) wife then walked away to eat lunch at the hotel restaurant.

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Newt Gingrich Refuses to Discuss His Attack on Megyn Kelly

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Donald Trump Takes Time Off From Campaigning for an Infomercial

by Graciela5532 Posted on October 26, 2016

Mother Jones

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With less than two weeks to go before the presidential election, Donald Trump spent Wednesday morning not worrying about making America great again but about preserving his business empire.

As Trump took the stage for the grand opening of his new hotel in Washington, DC, it wasn’t clear whether he would be talking about the election or just praising this new venture. It was a throwback to the Republican primary, when campaign events and Trump product placement went hand in hand. (At a press conference at his Florida resort, Mar-a-Lago in March, Trump bragged about his business prowess by listing products that have borne his name over the years—Trump steaks, Trump vodka—as the cable networks aired the event live.)

The hotel opening was listed on his campaign website and staffed partly by campaign employees. But with election day around the corner, Trump seemed more interested in basking in the glow of the media cameras to hype this project—and his kids, Ivanka, Donald Jr., and Eric, who were there for the occasion. He had given up a morning of campaigning in a swing state for this. On the same day, Mike Pence, was holding a rally in Utah, a state Republicans should be able to take for granted but where Trump has been slipping in the polls.

“With a notable exception of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, this is the most coveted piece of real estate in Washington, DC,” Trump said to a full room of VIPs in business suits and dresses. The well-attired attendees, who clapped when Trump entered the room, did not look like folks upset with NAFTA and who were eager to see the Washington swamp drained. One VIP was a woman who works for a major consulting firm in Washington who recently booked meeting rooms at the hotel for an event in April. The rates were low, she said, as many companies in the capital shy away from the Trump hotel because of Trump’s campaign. “There are a lot of people who will not want to have anything to do with this place,” she said. She noted that her firm is hoping that by the time of its event, Trump will have “calmed down.”

With more than two hundred journalists in the ballroom covering the odd event, Trump claimed that the hotel showed that he can get things done. He declared, “My theme today is five words: ‘under budget and ahead of schedule.'” (That is actually six words.) Trump then pivoted from hailing his hotel to assailing Obamacare. The health care program “is in free fall,” he said. The “military is depleted,” he added. Finally, he congratulated Newt Gingrich, one of his surrogates, for a combative interview with Fox News host Megyn Kelly on Tuesday night.

Though the ballroom was packed with camera crews and reporters, Trump’s days of getting uninterrupted air time on major cable networks are over. None of the cable networks paid much attention to his event Wednesday. It stood in stark contrast to the last big event he held at the hotel.

That was September 16, and Trump was riding high. The polls showed him neck-and-neck with Hillary Clinton, and he tricked the media into giving him a free 45-minute infomercial for his new Washington hotel. He had invited the press to the hotel, with a soft opening underway, for what was billed as a major statement on birtherism. The word was that Trump would finally declare that he believed Obama was a US citizen, after years of championing the conspiracy theory that the president was born in Kenya. Instead, Trump used about half an hour of the free media coverage to promote the hotel and showcase military veterans supporting his campaign. Eventually, he made about 20 seconds of remarks regarding his supposed abandonment of birtherism (which hardly seemed genuine).

After that event, Trump was pleased with how he had bamboozled the media, and the press fumed. “We got played,” CNN’s John King admitted. Ultimately, this stunt may have backfired on Trump. It became a turning point in his media coverage. Major news outlets called his birther statement—in which he blamed Clinton for starting the birther charge—a lie. And when Trump gave a tour of the hotel that day to the photographers and videographers in his press pool, without any reporters, the pool decided to destroy the footage. Shortly after this episode, Trump’s campaign began tanking, following his poor performance at the first debate and the appearance of a video of him bragging about sexually assaulting women.

After the September birtherism event ended, the stage on which Trump had touted his new hotel literally collapsed as the cameras were still rolling—a perfect metaphor for what happened that day between Trump and the press. On Wednesday morning, the stage did not fall apart. But it seemed as if Trump might have realized that his electoral prospects had. He appeared more fixated on trying to save his brand, which has been harmed by the divisive and insult-driven campaign he has mounted. After the ribbon-cutting ceremony in the hotel lobby, Ivanka was hobnobbing with well-wishers and accepting congratulations. Mother Jones asked her if her father’s presidential bid had damaged the Trump brand. She just smiled and quickly walked away.

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Donald Trump Takes Time Off From Campaigning for an Infomercial

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Trump Meltdown Continues Apace

by kx0bq6uuw Posted on October 23, 2016

Mother Jones

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Only 16 days to go! So what did Hillary Clinton spend the weekend doing?

Hillary Clinton moved to press her advantage in the presidential race on Sunday, urging black voters in North Carolina to vote early as Republicans increasingly conceded that Donald J. Trump is unlikely to recover in the polls….By running up a lead well in advance of the Nov. 8 election in states like North Carolina and Florida, she could make it extraordinarily difficult for Mr. Trump to mount a late comeback.

….Both Mrs. Clinton and key Republican groups have effectively pushed aside Mr. Trump since the final presidential debate on Wednesday, treating him as a defeated candidate and turning their attention to voter turnout and battling for control of Congress. An ABC News tracking poll published on Sunday showed Mr. Trump trailing Mrs. Clinton by 12 percentage points nationally and drawing just 38 percent of the vote.

OK, that sounds like good, sound campaign strategy. How about Donald Trump? Well, he went to Gettysburg, the site of Abraham Lincoln’s famous speech about living up to our highest ideals as a nation. Trump was there, supposedly, to provide a vision of his first hundred days in office:

Instead, the Republican nominee used the first third of what had been promoted as a “closing argument” speech to nurse personal grievances, grumbling about “the rigging of this election” and “the dishonest mainstream media,” and threatening to sue the women who have come forward — an 11th woman did on Saturday — to accuse him of aggressive sexual advances.

“Every woman lied when they came forward to hurt my campaign — total fabrication,” Mr. Trump said. “The events never happened. Never. All of these liars will be sued after the election is over.”

As always with Trump, his timing and his venue are perfect. Next up: Trump goes to Checkpoint Charlie to complain about NATO allies not paying us enough money.

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Trump Meltdown Continues Apace

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