Trump and the Alt-Right

Clinton's meeting with the FBI could have been on occasion to focus on ethics issues.  Instead, Trump made his own bigotry the story of the weekend.  David Weigel writes:

It was so close to the message that Republicans say they want from Donald Trump: a tweet describing Hillary Clinton as “crooked” and the “most corrupt candidate ever,” on the morning that the likely Democratic presidential nominee met with the FBI.

But the image that Trump chose to illustrate his point, which portrayed a red Star of David shape slapped onto a bed of $100 bills, had origins in the online white-supremacist movement. For at least the fifth time, Trump’s Twitter account had shared a meme from the racist “alt-right” and offered no explanation why.

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The offending image first appeared in a June 15 tweet by @FishBoneHead1, an account with fewer than 1,000 followers and a penchant for memes that mock Muslims, black Democrats and “cucks” — an alt-right term derived from the word “cuckold,” for people they deem insufficiently conservative. According to Anthony Smith, a reporter for the news site Mic, it was shared June 22 on a racist section of the 8Chan Web forum.

More detail from Anthony Smith:

Though the thread where the meme was featured no longer exists, you can find it by searching the URL in Archive.is, a "time capsule of the internet" that saves unalterable text and graphic of webpages. Doing so allows you to see the thread on /pol/ as it originally existed.

Of note is the file name of the photo, HillHistory.jpg, potentially a nod to the Neo-Nazi code for "HH," or "Heil Hitler," which the alt-right is fond of hiding in plain sight. 

Back to Weigel:

“The evangelicals will listen to his pro-Israel statements, while we will listen to his signals,” Andrew Anglin wrote in the Daily Stormer, a racist site named after Nazi propagandist Julius Streicher’s notorious tabloid.

International Views of Clinton and Trump

Pew reports on a new international poll:

Overall, people in most of the countries surveyed across Europe and Asia have confidence in Hillary Clinton and her ability to handle international affairs.Donald Trump, however, gets negative ratings in nearly every country surveyed.

The most confidence in Clinton comes from many of the same places where Obama and the U.S. are broadly popular, such as Sweden, Germany and the Netherlands. Much smaller shares in Greece, India and China have confidence in her, although in many places where her confidence ratings are low it is because many people do not offer a response.

Trump, on the other hand, is broadly unpopular in every country surveyed. His highest ratings are in China and Italy, yet even there they do not reach a quarter. Furthermore, in Sweden, fully 82% have no confidence at all in Trump. And in the UK, which Trump visited this past week after the momentous Brexit vote, 71% of the public have no confidence in him at all. (The survey was conducted from April to May and includes interviews conducted before Trump and Clinton became their respective parties’ presumptive nominees.)

Negative Partisanship

Pew reports:

Our study of polarization in 2014 found that a major element of partisan polarization “has been the growing contempt that many Republicans and Democrats have for the opposing party.” Since then, levels of mutual contempt have grown, and “many” has become “most,” according to a separate survey of 2,008 adults, conducted on landlines and cellphones from April 12-19, 2016.

Today, 58% of Republicans have a very unfavorable impression of the Democratic Party, up from 46% in 2014 and just 32% during the 2008 election year. Among Democrats, highly negative views of the GOP have followed a similar trajectory – from 37% in 2008 to 43% in 2014 and 55% currently.

To gauge the depth of partisan dislike, the 2014 survey asked those who expressed very unfavorable opinions of the opposing party if they would go so far as to say “the party’s policies are so misguided that they threaten the nation’s well-being.”

Over the past two years, as the numbers of Republicans and Democrats with very unfavorable views of the opposing party have grown, so too have the shares saying the other party threatens the nation’s well-being: 45% of Republicans now view Democratic policies as a threat, up from 37% in 2014. And 41% of Democrats say the same about the Republican Party’s policies, an increase of 10 percentage points from two years ago.

The power of negative feeling toward the opposition is reflected in the reasons people give for identifying with their own party. Majorities in both parties point to the positive impact of their own party’s policies as a major reason for their choice of parties – but nearly as many cite the harm caused by the opposing party’s policies.

Chaos Syndrome

Jonathan Rauch writes at The Atlantic:

Chaos syndrome is a chronic decline in the political system’s capacity for self-organization. It begins with the weakening of the institutions and brokers—political parties, career politicians, and congressional leaders and committees—that have historically held politicians accountable to one another and prevented everyone in the system from pursuing naked self-interest all the time. As these intermediaries’ influence fades, politicians, activists, and voters all become more individualistic and unaccountable. The system atomizes. Chaos becomes the new normal—both in campaigns and in the government itself.

Our intricate, informal system of political intermediation, which took many decades to build, did not commit suicide or die of old age; we reformed it to death. For decades, well-meaning political reformers have attacked intermediaries as corrupt, undemocratic, unnecessary, or (usually) all of the above. Americans have been busy demonizing and disempowering political professionals and parties, which is like spending decades abusing and attacking your own immune system. Eventually, you will get sick.

American Bridge v. Trump

Trump's GOP opponents failed at oppo, but Democrats are not making that mistake. At The New York Times, Maggie Haberman and Ashley Parker report that American Bridge seeks to define Trump as effectively as it defined Todd Akin in 2012.

In 2016, the group is taking every opportunity to do the same thing with Donald J. Trump. It is maintaining an archive of digital video footage, with 6,500 clips of Mr. Trump speaking or being mentioned, going back to the 1980s, and 17,000 hours of footage over all. It has also compiled more than 5,000 pages of research on the presumptive Republican nominee and has 25 trackers monitoring him.

American Bridge is playing a more significant role in 2016 than it did in 2012, when the Obama campaign was leery of the group, which was founded by a close ally of Hillary Clinton’s. This cycle, Democrats have relied on it openly for research.

There are special systems that allow it to search by specific strings of words to identify issue targets. It is trying to expedite their ability to quickly frame a case against Mr. Trump. And it is monitoring roughly 600 candidates up and down the ballot, in addition to Mr. Trump.

In the 25th paragraph of the Times story about the Trump Institute's sleazy business practices and plagiarism, we find where the story cam from:

Asked about the plagiarism, which was discovered by the Democratic “super PAC” American Bridge, the editor of the Trump Institute publication, Susan G. Parker, denied responsibility and suggested that a lawyer for the Milins, who provided her with background material for the book, might have been to blame.

Trump Sleaze

At Bloomberg, Zeke Faux and Max Abelson report on The Trump Building:

“Iconic and wonderful,” Donald J. Trump said at a South Carolina town hall event last year, praising the 86-year-old Art Deco tower as one of his great possessions. The presumptive Republican presidential nominee also told fans in Maine that critics who mock his failed companies should focus instead on the Manhattan skyscraper. “They don’t want to talk about 40 Wall Street,” he said.

But the 72-story building has housed frauds, thieves, boiler rooms and penny-stock schemers since Trump took it over in 1995 in what may be the best deal of his career. No single property in his portfolio is more valuable than 40 Wall St., according to a Bloomberg valuation of his assets last year. And no U.S. address has been home to more of the unregistered brokerages that investors complain about, according to the Securities and Exchange Commission’s current public alert list.

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Trump wrote in his 2008 book “Trump Never Give Up” that tenants at 40 Wall St. are “many of the top-notch businesses in the world.”

That was once the case. Aaron Burr, Alexander Hamilton’s nemesis, took an office at that site after founding the Manhattan Company, a forerunner of JPMorgan Chase & Co., in 1799. Work began on that spot 130 years later for the bank’s new tower, which was supposed to be the world’s tallest. It was bad timing. Not only did it lose the height race to the Chrysler Building, but Wall Street’s 1929 crash made renting out space difficult.

Seema Mehta reports at The Los Angeles Times:

As millions of people were losing their homes in the depth of the recession, instructors at Trump University were urging students to seek out anxious or desperate sellers to reap a financial windfall, according to recently released documents in the federal class-action lawsuit against presumptive GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump.

The now-defunct for-profit real-estate school, founded by Trump and two associates in 2004, offered workshops on how to take advantage of the foreclosure crisis in some of the hardest hit states, including California.

Jonathan Martin reports at The New York Times:

As with Trump University, the Trump Institute promised falsely that its teachers would be handpicked by Mr. Trump. Mr. Trump did little, interviews show, besides appear in an infomercial — one that promised customers access to his vast accumulated knowledge. “I put all of my concepts that have worked so well for me, new and old, into our seminar,” he said in the 2005 video, adding, “I’m teaching what I’ve learned.”

Reality fell far short. In fact, the institute was run by a couple who had run afoul of regulators in dozens of states and been dogged by accusations of deceptive business practices and fraud for decades. Similar complaints soon emerged about the Trump Institute.

Yet there was an even more fundamental deceit to the business, unreported until now: Extensive portions of the materials that students received after forking over their seminar fees, supposedly containing Mr. Trump’s special wisdom, had been plagiarized from an obscure real estate manual published a decade earlier. 

Michael Finnegan reports at The Los Angeles Times:

The Trump Baja fiasco fits a pattern in the Republican presidential candidate’s business record. Over decades of building a business empire in real estate, casino gaming, golf resorts, reality television and the sale of clothing and other merchandise, Trump has left a long trail of angry customers and vendors who accused him in court of cheating them.

Libya and the Wrong Target

Dan Friedman writes at Fortune:

Libya is a mess. No one argues that the decision by the United State and its allies to conduct a bombing campaign that led to Gaddafi’s death left behind a functioningcountry, let alone a liberal democracy. The September 2012 attack on the U.S. consulate that killed four Americans was part of the anarchy that resulted from Gaddafi’s ouster.

Yet the Benghazi Committee spent more than $7 million and wrote 800 pages in a mostly unsuccessful bid to fault Clinton’s actions before and after the attack. The reportdetails mistakes by U.S. officials, and the probe exposed Clinton’s use as Secretary of State of a private server for her email, the biggest drag on her presidential campaign so far.

But Democrats dismissed the inquiry as a partisan witch-hunt that revealed no information beyond what seven prior congressional probes unearthed. It failed to back conservative claims that Clinton or her staff inhibited a military response that could have saved lives, leaving two conservatives on the panel to issue their own addendum attacking Clinton.

For a political party that has famously focused on faulting anything Obama or Clinton touch, the Benghazi report represents a striking failure to coherently express a view most Americans have held since 2011: Clinton screwed up by urging intervention in Libya.