Tag Archives: trump

Donald Trump Can’t Stop Lying About His Birther Past

Mother Jones

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When Donald Trump tried to pin the birther movement on Hillary Clinton during his Friday announcement, the media jumped in to factcheck, pointing out that he was rewriting history. Late Friday afternoon, the Trump campaign sent a press release to reporters in an attempt to back up its claims—but instead it only contradicted the GOP candidate’s entire argument.

Trump’s “evidence” was laughably lackluster. The campaign pointed to a Friday CNN interview with Clinton’s 2008 campaign manager, Patti Solis Doyle, in which she said when a low-level volunteer coordinator with the campaign sent an email advancing the birther conspiracy, the Clinton campaign immediately fired the person. Solis Doyle couldn’t even recall if the person, a volunteer-coordinator, was a paid staffer or a volunteer.

So basically, Clinton fired someone who spread the birther conspiracy, therefore, in Trump’s mind, it’s all Hillary’s fault. Meanwhile, Trump himself spent years claiming the first African-American president was illegitimate and Obama was lying about his place of birth. And once Obama did release his longform birth certificate in 2011, it still didn’t satisfy Trump. He spent the subsequent years calling it a fake—making vague suggestions that Obama might have even killed elected officials to hide a cover up. “A lot of people don’t agree with that birth certificate,” Trump said in 2012. “A lot of people do not think it’s authentic.”

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Donald Trump Can’t Stop Lying About His Birther Past

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Millennials are starting to realize that Clinton is not the same as Trump

Ready. Same. Fire.

Millennials are starting to realize that Clinton is not the same as Trump

By on Sep 15, 2016Share

Hillary Clinton got one piece of good news this week: An increasing number of  young voters can tell her policies apart from Donald Trump’s.

For Clinton, that’s no small feat.

In July, Tom Steyer’s group NextGen Climate released the first battleground poll of millennial voters this election cycle. The takeaway was a startling number: roughly four out of 10 voters age 34 and younger saw no difference between the two candidates on the issues most important to them.

Now a new follow-up poll by NextGen Climate/Project New America in 11 swing states has found some improvement in Clinton’s numbers in just the month since the last poll was done. More see a difference between the two candidates:

NextGen Climate/Project New America Battleground Millennial Survey

Clinton also gained five points since July among likely millennial voters who say they intend to vote for her: 48 percent now back Clinton compared to 23 percent for Trump in a four-way race.

Her gains among Sanders’ most die-hard voters are worth looking at. Around the time of the Democratic National Convention in July, one in five millennials were still devoted Sanders supporters, and most of them didn’t see a difference between Clinton and Trump. Now, the Sanders holdouts have shrunk from 21 to 16 percent, and slightly fewer Sanders supporters still claim there’s no difference between the two major-party candidates.

While Clinton’s numbers have improved, Trump’s have stayed about the same, despite his repeated attempts to reboot his campaign.

“Millennials’ views of Donald Trump haven’t changed — but their awareness of the differences between Trump and Hillary Clinton on the issues has,” Jamison Foser, a strategic advisor to NextGen Climate, said in a statement. “Clinton’s lead has grown and favorability has increased as young voters learn more about the candidates’ policy positions, suggesting that as bad as things are for Trump, they can still get worse.”

The polling firm Global Strategy Group asked voters which candidate represents their views on issues like equal pay and debt-free college. Clinton pulls ahead on these issues and also has stronger favorability on climate-related questions — like moving away from fossil fuels to clean energy and protecting families’ health with clean air and water.

NextGen Climate/Project New America Battleground Millennial Survey

Still, 28 percent of likely voters see no difference between Clinton and Trump on protecting air and water and 30 percent don’t think there’s a difference on moving away from fossil fuels. That’s still a lot of voters who don’t see the point in choosing between the two.

Clinton at least has a few more millennial-whisperers working in her corner from now until Election Day. This weekend, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren will campaign in Ohio to convince this historically unreliable voter demographic that she’s their best bet.

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Millennials are starting to realize that Clinton is not the same as Trump

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Donald Trump Announces Something, Press Goes Wild

Mother Jones

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A couple of weeks ago Hillary Clinton announced a plan to rein in excessive price increases by pharmaceutical companies. It was a hot topic at the time thanks to outrage over the 6x price increase of the EpiPen. However, if my sleuthing is accurate, Clinton’s plan wasn’t covered at all in the print editions of the New York Times and Washington Post, and got only a short blurb in the Wall Street Journal.

Today Donald Trump announced a modest child-care and maternity leave plan that was almost comically underfunded. The New York Times produced a long front-page story. The Washington Post ran a long story in the A section and added a second analysis piece online. The Wall Street Journal provided Ivanka Trump with prime op-ed real estate to tout her father’s plan. That’s some great coverage! And all of these pieces barely mentioned that Trump offered no remotely plausible way to pay for his proposal.

I suppose you can argue that Trump’s child-care plan is more important than Clinton’s drug pricing plan. Or that an actual policy proposal from Trump is so rare that it’s big news no matter what. Or that Republicans don’t normally propose spending money on people in need.

Sure, I guess. I mean, I realize that the marvel of the dancing bear is not that the bear dances well, but that the bear dances at all. Even so, it sure seems like the press really doesn’t care about Hillary Clinton’s policy proposals—oh God, another boring white paper from Hillz—but swoons every time Donald Trump blurps out one of his laughably ill-thought-out ideas—he’s using Ivanka to appeal to suburban women, we gotta get on this! But that’s editorial judgment for you. I’m sure the pros know what they’re doing.

POSTSCRIPT: Can I gripe about something else as long as we’re on the subject? Thanks. Here’s the New York Times:

But in selling his case, Mr. Trump stretched the truth, saying that his Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton, has no such plan of her own and “never will.”

The Washington Post doesn’t even mention this, and needless to say, neither does Ivanka Trump’s bit of puffery in the Journal. So props to the Times. But seriously: stretched the truth? As Trump knows perfectly well, Hillary Clinton has been pressing for better child-care and family leave policies for decades, and her current proposal has been on her website for months. It’s far more extensive, more generous, and better thought out than Trump’s.

This is why Trump feels like he can simply say anything he wants, no matter how ridiculous. The obvious way to describe Trump’s statement is to call it a lie. That’s what it is. Instead, it either goes unmentioned or, at best, gets tiptoed around inaccurately. In what way, after all, did Trump “stretch the truth”? That implies there’s some kernel of truth to what Trump said, but he exaggerated it. But that’s not what he did. He just lied.

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Donald Trump Announces Something, Press Goes Wild

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Latest Email Hack Too Dull to Get Outraged About

Mother Jones

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Another email hack from Guccifer 2.0! So what did we learn?

Let’s see. Colin Powell thinks that Donald Trump is a racist idiot who has no shame. That seems fair. Also, Powell thinks that Hillary Clinton could have handled her email affair better. Hard to argue with that. And Powell really, really didn’t want her email woes to be connected to him. That may or may not be fair, but it’s certainly understandable.

In addition, there’s apparently some unremarkable stuff about “tech initiatives from Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Kaine’s time as governor of Virginia, and some years-old missives on redistricting efforts and DNC donor outreach strategy.” Exciting! Plus a bunch of spreadsheets listing DNC donors. That’s a bummer for the DNC, but otherwise pretty dull.

I don’t know who Guccifer is, or whether he’s a front for the Russian government, but he needs to step up his game. If there’s any more like this, he’s going to give email hacking a bad name.

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Latest Email Hack Too Dull to Get Outraged About

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New York’s Attorney General Has Opened An Inquiry into Donald Trump’s Charity

Mother Jones

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New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman has opened an inquiry into Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s charity following questions over whether the foundation has complied with state law.

The scrutiny comes in light of recent investigations by the Washington Post and Associated Press that shed light into the inner workings of the Donald J. Trump Foundation. The Washington Post reported on Saturday that Trump, who founded the charity in 1987 and has claimed to have donated millions from his own pocket, had not contributed to his foundation since 2008. Instead, the Post found, Trump’s foundation received millions of dollars from donors, which it doled out under its own name.

In 2009, Trump reportedly spent $20,000 meant for charitable purposes on a six-foot-tall painting of himself. In 2013, the Trump Foundation gave $25,000 to a political group associated with Florida Attorney General Pamela Bondi. That gift, which was illegal, resulted in a $2,500 penalty payment to the Internal Revenue Service. House Democrats have called for a federal criminal investigation into the transaction.

Schneiderman told CNN’s Jake Tapper on Tuesday that his office was looking into Trump’s charity out of concern it had “engaged in some impropriety” in its operations. “We’ve inquired into it, and we’ve had correspondence with them,” he said. “I didn’t make a big deal out of it or hold a press conference. We have been looking into the Trump Foundation to make sure it’s complying with the laws governing charities in New York.”

Schneiderman is also challenging Trump in a lawsuit alleging that Trump University, the mogul’s defunct real-estate seminar, engaged in “persistent fraudulent, illegal and deceptive conduct.”

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New York’s Attorney General Has Opened An Inquiry into Donald Trump’s Charity

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A Silicon Valley Billionaire Just Challenged Donald Trump in the Best Way Possible

Mother Jones

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LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman just made Donald Trump an offer that should entice the GOP nominee who claims to have donated millions to veterans: If Trump releases his tax returns by October 19, the date of the last presidential debate, Hoffman will donate up to $5 million to veteran groups.

The original idea came from a crowd-funding campaign started by Peter Kiernan, a veteran of the Marines who was once deployed to Afghanistan. Kiernan said he would donate to 10 veteran’s groups should Trump release his taxes and began raising money to do so on Crowdpac.com.

In a Medium post published on Monday afternoon, LinkedIn co-founder Hoffman expressed his support for Kiernan’s campaign, and upped the ante by promising to quintuple the final total raised by Kiernan, up to $5 million.

Kiernan explained his reasoning on the campaign’s site. “Any servicemember who has ever held a security clearance has been subjected to a rigorous background check, including personal finances, affiliations, and drug activity…To be the Commander-in-Chief of this group, you should be held to the same standards.”

In his post, Hoffman also noted both the tactic and the actual dollar amount should have special significance to the GOP nominee: In 2012, Trump offered Barack Obama $5 million to release his college transcripts, his passport applications, and other documents.

As BuzzFeed points out, Hoffman’s intentions might not just be about the 2016 election. He was an early investor in Crowdpac, the site hosting Kiernan’s crowd-funding campaign, so he potentially stands to benefit financially from raising the site’s profile.

In January, Trump skipped a Republican primary debate in Iowa and instead held a fundraiser for veterans during the same time slot. (He initially claimed to have donated $6 million from the event to veteran charities, but his campaign has significantly decreased that estimate following reports suggesting the initial figure was inflated.) But the nominee has also been adamant about keeping his tax returns from the public eye: Though he promised to release them in May, he has since reversed his position, saying he would withhold the records because he was being audited by the IRS. (The agency has said that’s not necessary.)

As Hoffman explains, the proposal “gives Trump a strong incentive to act but doesn’t reward him directly for something he should have already done. Instead, men and women to whom all Americans owe a great debt of gratitude will benefit from any positive action he takes.”

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A Silicon Valley Billionaire Just Challenged Donald Trump in the Best Way Possible

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New York Times Public Editor Shrugs Off Charges of False Equivalency

Mother Jones

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Liz Spayd, the New York Times public editor, writes today about charges of “false equivalence.” She basically blows it off:

As we enter the final sprint of an extraordinary presidential campaign, the use of this term is accelerating, and it typically is used to attack news outlets accused of unfairly equating a minor failing of Hillary Clinton’s to a major failing of Donald Trump’s.

….The problem with false balance doctrine is that it masquerades as rational thinking. What the critics really want is for journalists to apply their own moral and ideological judgments to the candidates….I can’t help wondering about the ideological motives of those crying false balance, given that they are using the argument mostly in support of liberal causes and candidates.

Spayd is getting plenty of flak for this on social media, and I think it’s partially deserved. There’s no question that charges of false equivalence are often partisan, but her job should be to figure out if they’re correct anyway. She doesn’t even really try to do that.

At the same time, Spayd also makes a valuable point that gets too little attention. Some of the Times’ reporting on the Clinton Foundation has been important, she says:

On the other hand, some foundation stories revealed relatively little bad behavior, yet were written as if they did. That’s not good journalism. But I suspect the explanation lies less with making matchy-matchy comparisons of the two candidates’ records than with journalists losing perspective on a line of reporting they’re heavily invested in.

Yep. I frequently read stories that should have been spiked because they don’t really say much of anything. The problem is that after spending days or weeks reporting something, no reporter wants to leave empty-handed. So they write something, even if it’s little more than narrative or innuendo. Editors should be more aggressive about killing stuff like this.

There’s an additional point that Spayd doesn’t make: some stories naturally lend themselves to continual coverage, while others don’t. The Clinton email story is an obvious example of the former. Donald Trump’s tax returns are an example of the latter. These are probably equally important stories, but the email story gets dozens of front-page hits simply because new information drips out steadily. Trump’s tax returns get only one or two because there’s nothing new to report once Trump has made it clear he has no plans to release them.

So editors need to ask themselves if a story is getting overcovered solely because of the nature of the information drip, rather than because of its intrinsic importance. I may be partisan, as Spayd says, but I’d say that both the email story and the Clinton Foundation story have been overcovered for this reason. I don’t quite know what the answer is—the whole point of news is to report stuff that’s new, after all—but at the very least political editors should probably retain more perspective about how much attention to give to individual drips in long-running stories.

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New York Times Public Editor Shrugs Off Charges of False Equivalency

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In New Poll, Clinton Leads Trump In Every Single Category

Mother Jones

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The latest WaPo/ABC News poll shows Hillary Clinton leading Donald Trump 51-43 percent in a two-way race. That’s good news for Clinton, but the rest of the poll is even better news. Asked who they believe will win, Clinton leads by a whopping 58-29 percent. Historically, this is a pretty predictive indicator. President Obama’s approval rating is up to 58 percent, which is good news for the candidate of the same party. Clinton also leads on all four questions about character and all five questions about issues.

But here’s my favorite result. Although 43 percent of respondents say they support Trump, only 36 percent say he’s qualified to serve. This means that 7 percent of the population plans to vote for him even though they think he’s unqualified to be president. Boo yah!

Anyway, margin of error, question wording, blah blah blah. This probably doesn’t really mean much. But it’s amusing nonetheless.

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In New Poll, Clinton Leads Trump In Every Single Category

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Gary Johnson’s Supporters Aren’t Worried About His Aleppo Gaffe

Mother Jones

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Gary Johnson, the Libertarian Party’s quirky nominee for president, opened his speech at a New York City rally Saturday with an unusual statement for a politician: an apology. During a disastrous appearance two days earlier on MSNBC, the former New Mexico governor had replied to a question about Aleppo, Syria—a besieged city that has been devastated by the country’s five-year civil war—by asking, “What is Aleppo?” Johnson later claimed that he had simply “blanked,” but the comment went viral, making the candidate appear uninformed.

I wanna start off with an apology to all of you, this whole Aleppo gaffe,” he said to the crowd at the beginning of his speech. “Really, all of us work so hard. We care so much about these issues, and I want you to know that I really, really care about these issues.”

Many who attended today’s rally, however, said Johnson’s misstep did not affect their willingness to vote for him in a contest that has been defined by, among other things, Donald’s Trump’s controversial comments about Muslims, women, and Mexican immigrants.

“If you’re gonna judge a whole candidate based on that then you can’t really vote for Clinton or Trump…both of them have said way worse things,” said Morgan Spicer, a 26-year-old illustrator who is also considering voting for Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate. The fact that Johnson admitted he messed up made a difference for her. “He was a gentleman about it,” she said.

Others at the event, including Kyra Chamberlain, 47—who said she and her husband Chris are volunteer coordinators for Johnson in Maine—expressed similar sentiments.

“The fact that he responded right away with an honest and open answer…we needed to get over that stuff and just get back to the issues,” Chamberlain said.

Many of Johnson’s supporters at the New York rally, including several who said they had backed Bernie Sanders during the Democratic primaries, are attracted to Johnson’s non-interventionist foreign policy, his support for the legalization of marijuana, and his support for marriage equality and abortion rights. But for some, Johnson’s demeanor is also a selling point.

“I like his positivity,” said Eric Antisell, 24, who said that he also voted for Johnson in 2012. “He’s not running on fear,” Antisell added.

Of the half dozen supporters interviewed by Mother Jones at the event, the majority said they would not consider voting for Trump or Hillary Clinton.

“The two candidates from the major parties are just two sides of the same coin,” Chamberlain said.

That is an argument that Johnson and his running mate, former Massachusetts Gov. William Weld, both made in their speeches Saturday. “The two parties in Washington really seem to live with no other thought than to destroy each other rather than getting the people’s business done,” said Weld. Though they now tout the appeal of a third-party option, both Johnson and Weld were Republicans when they served as governors.

While Johnson may have tried to put his Aleppo blunder behind him, not everything at the rally went quite according to plan. When an American flag hoisted on the stage behind him dropped to the floor, Johnson attributed it to something larger.

“Sometimes I think there is a conspiracy,” he said.

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Gary Johnson’s Supporters Aren’t Worried About His Aleppo Gaffe

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Larry King Dupes Donald Trump Into Interview on Russian TV

Mother Jones

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Today we learn just how easy it is to trick Donald Trump. Yesterday he was interviewed by Larry King on RT, a TV network funded by the Russian government. That’s probably not a good look, especially for a candidate already viewed as alarmingly cozy with Vladimir Putin. So what happened?

Poor Donald. He used to be so sharp. Probably suffering from dysphasia or something.

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Larry King Dupes Donald Trump Into Interview on Russian TV

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