Trump Solicits Illegal Foreign Contributions

F Troop marches on. Jonathan Swan and Harper Neidig report at The Hill:

Donald Trump's campaign is still soliciting illegal donations from foreign individuals — including members of foreign governments at their official email addresses — weeks after the campaign was put on notice by watchdog groups.

Foreign members of parliament from the United Kingdom and Australia confirmed to The Hill that they received fundraising solicitations from the Trump campaign as recently as July 12 — two weeks after a widely publicized Federal Election Commission (FEC) complaint issued on June 29 by nonpartisan watchdogs Democracy 21 and the Campaign Legal Center.

These latest campaign finance violations were first reported by the investigative websiteWhoWhatWhy and have been confirmed by The Hill.

The Trump campaign did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

GOP Botches

Jenni Ryall reports at Mashable:

Donald Trump, it seems, was not internet-prepared for the announcement of Indiana governor Mike Pence as his vice presidential running mate.

On Friday, the Republican presidential candidate announced to the world via his medium of choice, Twitter, that he would be bringing Pence along for the ride.

Politico reporter Shane Goldmacher was quick to point out that almost nothing was ready for Pence's moment of glory.

Not only are there a bunch of squatters sitting on important URLs such as Trumppence.com, even Trump's website hasn't been updated for the important announcement.

Perhaps, the worst fears of Trump's team had come true and the billionaire announced his VP pick on social media without warning, despite saying he would wait to do it "the old fashioned way." Either way, missed opportunities have appeared everywhere.

Goldmacher, Alex Isenstadt and Kenneth P. Vogel report at Politico:

The last-minute plea for $6 million from Las Vegas billionaire Sheldon Adelson to rescue the Republican convention has erupted in controversy, as four of the five signatories to the letter from party organizers never saw it before it was sent and major donors flagged serious errors that forced the convention hosts to apologize to one of the GOP’s most influential financiers.

The episode has opened a window into a host committee that is scrambling and still millions shy of its fundraising target, only days before tens of thousands of Republicans arrive in Cleveland, as it acknowledges for the first time that presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump has put a damper on donations.

The letter, obtained by POLITICO on Thursday, outlined two dozen major corporations — Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Duke Energy and Apple, among them — that it claimed had backed out a combined more than $8.1 million in pledged donations in recent months.

But on Friday, Emily Lauer, a spokeswoman for the Cleveland 2016 Host Committee, acknowledged to POLITICO that the list of lost donors in the letter to Adelson was inaccurate — and that the committee has now reached out to Adelson’s aides to apologize.

Trump Does Not Care About the Senate GOP

Like Bernie Sanders, Trump disdains his nominal party.

Robert Draper writes at The New York Times:

For an at-risk Republican senator this fall, to back away from Trump is, by extension, to snub his millions of die-hard loyalists, the one group of party voters that is sure to show up on Nov. 8. But to go all-in for Trump is to take leave of your Republican bona fides and embrace life as a Trump Mini-Me — a gamble that not a single Republican senator up for re-election this fall appears to have the stomach for.

None of this seems to overly concern Trump. When I asked him recently whether the party’s maintaining its majority in the Senate meant anything to him, he replied: “Well, I’d like them to do that. But I don’t mind being a free agent, either.” Trump has shown similarly little interest in helping his party’s committees build the sort of war chests typically required in a campaign year. After winning the presidential nomination on a shoestring budget and with fewer paid staff members than the average candidate for governor, he has been visibly reluctant to help build much in the way of national campaign infrastructure, sending a clear message to his fellow Republicans: This fall, you’re on your own. As Ryan Williams, a strategist with the 2012 Romney presidential campaign, told me: “Traditionally, the nominee has a robust campaign that absorbs the R.N.C. effort and works in tandem with the down-ballot campaigns. We did that with Romney in 2012. This time around, there’s a complete void at the presidential level. Trump’s trying to play a game of baseball and hasn’t put out an infield.”

Newt and Muslims

The attack in Nice has put terror back at the top of the agenda.

Victor Morton reports at The Washington Times:

In an interview Thursday night on Fox News’ Channel’s “Hannity” show, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich called for the monitoring of mosques and said America’s ruling class is too afraid to do this.

“This is the fault of Western elites who lack the guts to do what is right, to do what is necessary,” he said. “We better rethink the rules, or we’re going to lose the war.”

“You have to monitor the mosques,” Mr. Gingrich said. “Where do you think the primary source of recruitment is? We should … test every person here who is of a Muslim background, and if they believe in shariah, they should be deported.”    

On this issue, he has been consistent. In a 2011 presidential debate, he compared Muslims to communists and Nazis.  Of course, he also acknowledged that, under questioning people can simply lie.  ABC reported:

At the New Hampshire debate Monday night, Gingrich responded to questions about loyalty tests for administration officials, saying, "The Pakistani who emigrated to the U.S., became a citizen, built a car bomb which luckily failed to go off in Times Square, was asked by the federal judge, how could he have done that when he signed and when he swore an oath to the United States. And he looked at the judge and said, 'You're my enemy. I lied.'"

"Now, I just want to go out on a limb here. I'm in favor of saying to people, if you're not prepared to be loyal to the United States, you will not serve in my administration, period," Gingrich added to applause.

But Gingrich didn't stop there, despite an attempt by moderators to interject. He compared hiring Muslims to how Americans dealt with Nazis in the 1940s.

"We did this in dealing with the Nazis. We did this in dealing with the Communists. And it was controversial both times and both times we discovered after a while, you know, there are some genuinely bad people who would like to infiltrate our country. And we have got to have the guts to stand up and say, 'No,'" he concluded.

ABC Breaking News | Latest News Videos

The Evangelicals' Faustian Bargain

Evangelicals are flocking to a Biblically illiterate libertine. 

Pew reports:

Evangelical voters are rallying strongly in favor of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump. Indeed, the latest Pew Research Center survey finds that despite the professed wariness toward Trump among many high-profile evangelical Christian leaders, evangelicals as a whole are, if anything, even more strongly supportive of Trump than they were of Mitt Romney at a similar point in the 2012 campaign. At that time, nearly three-quarters of white evangelical Protestant registered voters said they planned to vote for Romney, including one-quarter who “strongly” supported him.1 Now, fully 78% of white evangelical voters say they would vote for Trump if the election were held today, including about a third who “strongly” back his campaign.

Robert P. Jones writes at The New York Times:

Today, white evangelicals are not only experiencing the shrinking of their own ranks, but they are also confronting larger, genuinely new demographic and cultural realities. When Barack Obama was elected president in 2008, white Christians (Catholics and Protestants) constituted a majority (54 percent) of the country; today, that number has slipped to 45 percent. Over this same period, support for gay marriage — a key issue for evangelicals — moved from only four in 10 to solid majority territory, and the Supreme Court cleared the way for gay and lesbian couples to marry in all 50 states. The Supreme Court itself symbolized these changes, losing its last remaining Protestant justice, John Paul Stevens, in 2010.

A recent Public Religion Research Institute-Brookings survey shows the alarm that white evangelical Protestants are feeling in the wake of demographic and cultural changes. Nearly two-thirds are bothered when they encounter immigrants who speak little English. More than two-thirds believe that discrimination against whites has become as big a problem as discrimination against other groups. For discrimination against Christians, that number is nearly eight in 10. And perhaps most telling of all, seven in 10 white evangelical Protestants say the country has changed for the worse since the 1950s.
...
Mr. Trump’s ascendancy has turned the 2016 election into a referendum on the death of white Christian America, with the candidate appealing strongly to those who are most grieving this loss. Mr. Trump instinctively understood this from the beginning of his campaign. Take his speech at an evangelical college before the Iowa caucuses in January: “I’ll tell you one thing: I get elected president, we’re going to be saying ‘Merry Christmas’ again.” He added that Christianity will be resurgent “because if I’m there, you’re going to have plenty of power — you don’t need anybody else.”

Also at The Times, Peter Wehner writes:

The calling of Christians is to be “salt and light” to the world, to model a philosophy that defends human dignity, and to welcome the stranger in our midst. It is to stand for justice, dispense grace and be agents of reconciliation in a broken world. And it is to take seriously the words of the prophet Micah, “And what does the Lord require of you but to do justly, and to love kindness and mercy, and to humble yourself and walk humbly with your God?”

Evangelical Christians who are enthusiastically supporting Donald Trump are signaling, even if unintentionally, that this calling has no place in politics and that Christians bring nothing distinctive to it — that their past moral proclamations were all for show and that power is the name of the game.

The French philosopher and theologian Jacques Ellul wrote: “Politics is the church’s worst problem. It is her constant temptation, the occasion of her greatest disasters, the trap continually set for her by the prince of this world.” In rallying round Mr. Trump, evangelicals have walked into the trap. The rest of the world sees it. Why don’t they?
 

Veep Leaks

Leaks about the vice presidential selection are not always accurate.  From 2004:

Scandalabra Is Weighing on Clinton

The New York Times reports:

Hillary Clinton has emerged from the F.B.I. investigation into her email practices as secretary of state a wounded candidate with a large and growing majority of voters saying she cannot be trusted, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll.

As Mrs. Clinton prepares to accept the Democratic Party’s nomination at the convention in Philadelphia this month, she will confront an electorate in which 67 percent of voters say she is not honest and trustworthy. That number is up five percentage points from a CBS News poll conducted last month, before the F.B.I. released its findings.

Mrs. Clinton’s six-percentage-point lead over the presumptive Republican nominee, Donald J. Trump, in a CBS News poll last month has evaporated. The two candidates are now tied in a general election matchup, the new poll indicates, with each receiving the support of 40 percent of voters.

Any single poll is but a snapshot, and many other polls show Mrs. Clinton with a narrow but consistent lead over Mr. Trump. The Times/CBS News survey was conducted shortly after the release of the F.B.I. report on her email practices that suggested they were imprudent but not illegal. The damage from those revelations may or may not prove lasting.

Mr. Trump is also distrusted by a large number of voters — 62 percent — but that number has stayed constant despite increased scrutiny on his business record and falsehoods in his public statements and Twitter messages.