Trump decides to let Trump be Trump

 Trump decides to let Trump be Trump 

 

Trump be Trump

When Donald Trump was elected president, there was modest comfort in knowing the executive branch is made up of some 4,000 presidential appointees, 1,200 of whom must be confirmed by the Senate and 630 of whom fill top-tier agency positions. The hope was that Trump would get himself some honest, competent help.

With some exceptions, that has not proved to be the case. Hundreds of jobs went unfilled for a year or more, including 240 top-three agency officials. Regulatory jobs went to alumni of regulated industries. Key West Wing jobs turned over as the White House turned into a human resources merry-go-round.

Now Trump is into a new phase of personnel changes, purging people who have said “no” to him once too often or people who have embarrassed him with bad headlines about ethical problems. The irony of that speaks for itself.

White House sources have told the New York Times and the Washington Post that the president has decided that after 14 months in office, he can get by on his trusted gut. He makes decisions, he once said, “with very little knowledge other than the knowledge I [already] had, plus the words ‘common sense,’ because I have a lot of common sense and I have a lot of business ability.”

So last week he replaced his top economic adviser, Gary Cohn, with former CNBC talking head Larry Kudlow. Cohn told Trump “no” too many times on trade issues. Kudlow is a true believer in trickle-down economics, which on TV gave him an almost unblemished record of being wrong on big economic stories. But he was on TV, which is a key credential for Trump.

Trump last week also replaced Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, who told him “no” a lot, with CIA director Mike Pompeo, the former congressman from Koch Industries in Wichita, Kan.

To replace Pompeo at the CIA, Trump’s gut led him to agency veteran Gina Haspel, who played a big role in the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation” of terrorist detainees. Trump’s gut has told him “waterboarding works,” though studies say otherwise.

Next on the hit list could be Housing Secretary Ben Carson, not because of his deep lack of understanding of housing issues but because his wife’s insistence on $31,000 worth of office furniture caused embarrassing headlines. The same kind of headlines could cost high-flying Veterans Affairs Secretary David Shulkin his job.

After that could come a third national security adviser. Trump has had it with the intellect and restraint of Gen. H.R. McMaster, who replaced Gen. Michael Flynn, who was caught lying about what he told the Russian ambassador.

Even with competent people around him, however briefly, Trump’s first 14 months have been chaotic. Now he’s staffing up with sycophants. Trump Unleashed is a profoundly disturbing thought.

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Trump Won't Rule Out Effort to Remove Ryan as Convention Chairman

Donald J. Trump will not rule out an effort to remove Paul D. Ryan as chairman of the Republican National Convention if he does not endorse Mr. Trump’s candidacy.

Mr. Trump stopped short of calling for Mr. Ryan, the speaker of the House, to step down from his convention role. But in an interview that aired Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Mr. Trump said there could be consequences in the event that Mr. Ryan continues withholding his support.
“I will give you a very solid answer, if that happens, about one minute after that happens, okay?” Mr. Trump said. “There’s no reason to give it right now, but I’ll be very quick with the answer.”

Mr. Trump has shown little interest over the last few days in placating his critics inside the party, including Mr. Ryan. The Wisconsin lawmaker said on Thursday that he was not ready to endorse Mr. Trump, citing reservations about his political style and policy agenda. The two men are scheduled to meet privately in Washington next week.

But on “Meet the Press,” Mr. Trump struck a dismissive pose toward Mr. Ryan – and responded with outright hostility to other Republican critics who have refused to back his campaign.

Jeb Bush, he said, was “not honorable” for breaking his promise to endorse the party’s nominee. Mitt Romney, he said, was “ungrateful” for the help Mr. Trump gave him in the 2012 election. Mr. Trump referred to Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina senator who said Friday he would never vote for Mr. Trump, as “this lightweight.”

Of Mr. Ryan, he said, “I’d like to have his support. But if he doesn’t want to support me, that’s fine, and we have to go about it.”

Asked about Mr. Trump’s remarks on the convention, Brendan Buck, a spokesman for Mr. Ryan, replied, “The speaker looks forward to meeting with Mr. Trump on Thursday.”

Other allies of Mr. Trump have gone further in criticizing Mr. Ryan for declining to issue an immediate endorsement.

Sarah Palin, the former Alaska governor, predicted in an interview on CNN’s “State of the Union” that Mr. Ryan would be “Cantored,” a reference to former Representative Eric Cantor of Virginia, who was in line to be speaker of the House before losing re-election in a Republican primary in 2014.








Source: msn

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Hillary Clinton Targets Republicans Turned Off by Donald Trump

After a year of staking out liberal positions and focusing largely on minority voters, Hillary Clinton’s campaign is re-positioning itself to appeal to independent and Republican-leaning white voters turned off by the Republican Party’s presumptive nominee, Donald J. Trump.

With the Democratic nomination in sight, Mrs. Clinton has broadened her economic message, devoted days to apologizing for a comment she previously made that angered working-class whites, and has pledged that her husband, former President Bill Clinton, who remains widely popular among the blue-collar voters drawn to Mr. Trump, would “come out of retirement and be in charge” of creating jobs in places that have been particularly hard hit.

he move comes at a time when the Republican Party is publicly grappling with whether to embrace its unconventional nominee. The House speaker, Paul D. Ryan, on Thursday said he was “just not ready” to back Mr. Trump.

As Mrs. Clinton talks to voters, her campaign is trying to gain endorsements from influential Republican leaders, including former elected officials and retired generals, who can help convince voters that she is their best alternative to Mr. Trump — a striking turn after Mrs. Clinton spent the past year trying to mobilize the liberal wing and labor leaders in the Democratic Party.

But her campaign, confident that the young people and liberals backing Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont will come around to support Mrs. Clinton in November, is focusing its efforts on white working-class women and suburban women who tend to vote for Republican presidential candidates, but who polls show hold negative views of Mr. Trump.

“I’m here because I want you to know whether people vote for me or not, whether they yell at me or not, it’s not going to affect what I will do to help,” Mrs. Clinton told residents at a health clinic here on Monday, as protesters’ chants outside of “Hillary, go home!” could be heard.

Mrs. Clinton’s two-day swing across Appalachia this week served as the beginning of the campaign’s full-court press to convince persuadable white voters that she would run a more inclusive campaign than Mr. Trump — and to signal that she would cede no demographic group to him.

“I invite a lot of Republicans and independents who I’ve been seeing on the campaign trail, who’ve been reaching out to me, I invite them to join with Democrats,” Mrs. Clinton told CNN on Wednesday. “Let’s get off the red or the blue team. Let’s get on the American team.”

In the Democratic primary, Mrs. Clinton has struggled with non-college-educated white voters and self-identified independents, often losing those groups by wide margins to Mr. Sanders. But faced with the choice between Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Trump, 51 percent of independents and 59 percent of moderates favor the former secretary of state, compared with 41 percent and 39 percent for Mr. Trump, according to the most recent CNN/ORC poll.

“If the primary happened to be over already, we feel the coalition we’ve built has the makings of a winning coalition as it is in a general election,” said Brian Fallon, a Clinton spokesman. “But,” he added, “we’re not satisfied with that. We want to make inroads even with populations that aren’t supporting her in great numbers.”

Senator Sherrod Brown, Democrat of Ohio, who is supporting Mrs. Clinton, said while campaigning with her at a diner in Athens, Ohio, on Tuesday that the suburban women in Cleveland, Columbus and Cincinnati could ultimately decide the November election. “I think educated suburban white women, to be sure, are going to be turned off en masse and there will be more of that,” he said.

But if Mrs. Clinton’s “Breaking Down Barriers Tour” in Kentucky, Ohio and West Virginia this week provided a road map for her campaign’s strategy in the weeks ahead, the antagonistic reception she received also highlighted her own vulnerabilities and tendency to divide and incite people — weaknesses Mr. Trump plans to exploit.

At Mrs. Clinton’s event in Athens, a protester, Peter Schmidt, 34 and a miller, held a handmade sign that read “I’d Rather Be Home Reading Your Goldman Sachs Transcripts,” a reference to the paid speeches she delivered to the Wall Street bank. Mr. Schmidt said her tour of Appalachia felt like pandering. “I don’t trust her,” he said. “That’s why I’m holding this sign.”

Mr. Trump, who has proved adept in connecting with white working-class men, also plans to hit Mrs. Clinton on her previous support for global trade deals that many Americans blame for jobs moving overseas. He has giddily seized on a comment she made to CNN in March that “we’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business.”

The backlash over that remark — made in the context of replacing coal with clean energy jobs — turned Mrs. Clinton’s campaign events into an Appalachian apology tour, as she was repeatedly, and pointedly, forced to explain what she called a “misstatement.”

“I can’t take it back,” Mrs. Clinton told one out-of-work coal industry worker, Bo Copley, 39, a father of three and a registered Republican, when he emotionally confronted her about the comment. “What I want you to know is I’m going to do everything I can to help no matter what happens politically,” she added. “That is just how I am made.”

The Clinton campaign is also moving to exploit the public criticism of Mr. Trump by prominent Republicans.

On Wednesday, the campaign released an online ad that quotes Mr. Trump’s former primary opponents describing him as a “know-nothing candidate,” “a narcissist” and “the most vulgar person ever to aspire to the presidency,” among other epithets.

Priorities USA Action, a “super PAC” supporting Mrs. Clinton, intends to reach out to Republican mega donors disillusioned by their party’s presumptive nominee.

Mrs. Clinton has portrayed Mr. Trump as a “loose canon” on foreign policy and often points to her husband’s record as evidence that she would help blue-collar voters. “The brilliance of Bill Clinton gives her a particular edge,” said Gaston Caperton, a Democratic former governor of West Virginia who supports Mrs. Clinton.

Even with Mr. Clinton in its corner, the Clinton campaign does not expect to win voters like Mr. Copley, who said he is undecided but who generally fits Mr. Trump’s core demographic of supporters. But Mrs. Clinton hopes to make inroads with women like Mr. Copley’s wife, Lauren — voters whom Clinton aides call “megachurch moms” and describe as religious, Republican-leaning women who reject Mr. Trump.

Christine Matthews, a researcher who advises Republicans on how to win female voters, said that portraying Mr. Trump as dangerous on foreign policy could help Mrs. Clinton draw some Republican women whose most important issues are national security and terrorism. “Can she drive moms who have kids who think, ‘Oh my gosh, this is too scary a prospect and our country won’t be safe if he’s elected president?’ ” Ms. Matthews said. “You can imagine that attack ad in your head.”

Democrats acknowledge that the prospect of terrifying skeptical voters into supporting their candidate would not be the most inspirational campaign message.

It is a far bleaker appeal than Ronald Reagan’s message of American exceptionalism and Mr. Clinton’s promise to restore “the forgotten middle class,” both of which inspired white working-class voters to cross party lines.

But Mrs. Clinton’s pitch to Republicans reflects the grim political realities of 2016: More than half of the registered voters who said they would vote for Mrs. Clinton planned to do so in opposition to Mr. Trump, rather than in support of her candidacy, according to the CNN/ORC poll.

“Her bumper sticker for Republicans should be ‘Unified Against Trump’ or ‘Vote for the enemy. It’s important,’ ” said Ben Howe, a Republican and a contributing editor at the conservative online publication Red State, who posted the Clinton campaign’s #I'mWith Her slogan on Twitter after Mr. Trump’s decisive victory in Indiana.

Or, as Jan Franck, 65, a retiree in Charleston, W.Va., put it after hearing Mrs. Clinton speak on Tuesday: “She could be a sock puppet running against Donald Trump, and I’d vote for her.”

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Obama scolds media about ‘reality show’ Trump coverage

President Obama warns the media against covering the Trump campaign like a reality show. (Photo: Carlos Barria/Reuters)

Pres. Barack Obama scolded the media on Friday over its coverage of Donald Trump’s unorthodox campaign, entreating reporters to skip “the spectacle and the circus” of the 2016 race.

He urged reporters to instead dig into the candidates’ positions on the economy and the military. As if on cue, he was then asked about the bombastic entrepreneur’s tweet about a taco bowl.

“We are in serious times and this is a really serious job. This is not entertainment, this is not a reality show,” Obama admonished in the White House briefing room. “This is a contest for the presidency of the United States.”

The president went on to take a number of indirect shots at Trump. He said reporters need to apply “genuine scrutiny” about whether candidates offer up “completely implausible” policies or “take a position on international issues that could threaten war or has the potential of upending our critical relationships with other countries or would potentially break the financial system.”
“What I’m concerned about is the degree to which reporting and information starts emphasizing the spectacle and the circus. Because that’s not something we can afford,” he said.

Obama highlighted a debate inside the Republican Party about what it represents, reflecting unease in some parts of the GOP that “their standard bearer at the moment is Donald Trump.” He suggested that Republican women and fiscal hawks should be uncomfortable voting for the wealthy reality show star.

Another reporter later asked if Obama had seen Trump’s Cinco de Mayo tweet of himself eating a taco bowl. The tweet sparked a social media firestorm Thursday afternoon.

Obama sidestepped with evident annoyance.

“I have no thoughts on Mr. Trump’s tweets. As a general rule, I don’t pay attention to Mr. Trump’s tweets,” he replied. “And I think that will be true for, I think, for the next six months. So, if you could just file that one.”

The president also declined to weigh in substantively on whether Sen. Bernie Sanders should concede the Democratic nomination to Hillary Clinton, who holds a wide lead. “Just let the process play out,” he said.

Obama said “everybody starts getting a little chippy” at this point in the primaries, but Democrats have “a pretty strong consensus” on core issues and only “disagreements about tactics.”

“In terms of the Democratic votes coming up, I’m going to let the voters cast their ballots, and not, you know, not try to meddle in the few primaries that are remaining,” he said. “We will know soon enough. It’s not going to be that much longer.”


Source: Yahoo News

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Donald Trump, Losing Ground, Tries to Blame the System

Donald J. Trump and his allies are engaged in an aggressive effort to undermine the Republican nominating process by framing it as rigged and corrupt, hoping to compensate for organizational deficiencies that have left Mr. Trump with an increasingly precarious path to the nomination.
Their message: The election is being stolen from him.
On Tuesday, Mr. Trump berated the politicians he said were trying to stop his nomination and denounced the Republican Party, which he cast as complicit in the theft.
“Our Republican system is absolutely rigged. It’s a phony deal,” he said, accusing party leaders of maneuvering to cut his supporters out of the process. “They wanted to keep people out. This is a dirty trick.”
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His charges built on comments over the last several days by associates, senior advisers and Mr. Trump himself, seeking to cast a shadow of illegitimacy over the local and state contests to select delegates to the Republican National Convention in Cleveland in July.
By blaming the process rather than his own inadequacies as a manager, Mr. Trump is trying to shift focus after Senator Ted Cruz of Texas outmaneuvered him in delegate contests in states like Colorado, North Dakota and Iowa, losses that could end up denying Mr. Trump the nomination.
The new approach is a tacit admission that Mr. Trump’s campaign, which has been so reliant on national news coverage and mass communication via Twitter, has not been able to compete in the often intimate and personal game that is delegate courtship.
His effort to sow doubt about the system plays into the suspicions and anxieties that many of his most ardent backers have about a political process they believe has intentionally disenfranchised them. And it allows Mr. Trump to divert attention from his recent losses in delegate races that are occurring all over the country.
Mr. Trump has a pattern of claiming fraud when an election does not go his way. And his critics say this kind of misdirection is his specialty.
“If Trump can’t win something, he’ll always say it’s someone else’s fault,” said Stuart Stevens, a Republican strategist who has advised several presidential candidates, most recently Mitt Romney in 2012. “Donald Trump is a place you go to settle scores,” he added, noting Mr. Trump’s tendency to play on grievances, whether political, economic or racial.
And that’s what he’s selling. ‘You’ve been cheated here, you’ve been cheated there,’ ” Mr. Stevens said. “ ‘I’ll get yours.’ ”
In an interview on Tuesday, Mr. Trump appeared to acknowledge as much. “Don’t forget, I only complain about the ones where we have difficulty,” he said.
After losing the Iowa caucuses, Mr. Trump insisted that Mr. Cruz had prevailed by duping Ben Carson supporters into voting for him after spreading a false rumor that Mr. Carson was dropping out of the race. “Ted Cruz didn’t win Iowa, he stole it!” Mr. Trump wrote on Twitter at the time.
Mr. Trump’s complaints also reflect the difficult math he seems likely to face at the convention. Each delegate denied pushes him further away from winning the nomination on the first ballot, after which most delegates would be free to vote for someone else. And after the most recent rounds of voting, Mr. Cruz is poised to have many loyal supporters who would stand with him on a second ballot or beyond.
By its own admission, the Trump campaign has fallen perilously behind in the delegate effort, narrowing Mr. Trump’s road to the nomination with each contest.
The outlook in the coming weeks is not much more favorable. Even if Mr. Trump prevails in high-profile battles like next week’s New York primary, there are growing signs that he is not well equipped to succeed in the lower-profile skirmishes for delegates.
There, Mr. Cruz has an advantage. His campaign recently hired Ken Cuccinelli, a conservative former attorney general of Virginia and a veteran of the state’s internecine Republican battles, to oversee its effort to send pro-Cruz delegates to Cleveland.
The process for choosing delegates can be convoluted and arcane. Even if one candidate wins a state, the delegates who are supposed to vote for him at the convention might privately support one of his opponents, and could do so formally if the nomination goes beyond a first ballot. In some states, like Colorado, delegates selected at a district caucus then vote for separate delegates to the national convention. Because the approach varies by state, campaigns must be well versed in each set of rules.
In an interview, Mr. Cuccinelli noted that 28 states or districts will select delegates this weekend. “We’ll have them all covered,” he said by phone from the Cruz campaign’s Houston headquarters, where he now spends much of his time.
Mr. Cuccinelli said he had only recently detected evidence that Mr. Trump’s staff was engaged in the shadow campaign to elect favorable delegates at state and local conventions.
“We are very blessed that our opponent had no idea what he was doing on this until about a month ago,” Mr. Cuccinelli said. “A media-only campaign has its advantages, but it also has its very severe disadvantages.” Mr. Trump’s newly hired chief delegate strategist, Paul J. Manafort, did not respond to an interview request.
By taking the battle for delegate selection seriously only at this relatively late date, Mr. Trump may have crippled his hopes to win a multiballot convention. That is because in many states, the deadline for individuals to run for delegate has already come and gone.
In 10 of Virginia’s 11 congressional districts, for example, the deadline has passed to run for one of the three delegate slots available to each district. And as the elections in which those 33 delegates will be chosen unfold in the coming weeks, the Cruz campaign plans to have a presence.
Arkansas is another case in point. The deadline to apply to be a candidate for delegate was in February. And since the list of applicants became available early last month, Cruz volunteers in each of the state’s 75 counties have been vetting it for people they believe will be most loyal to him at the convention. Arkansas delegates are required to vote for the candidate they are pledged to based on primary results for only one ballot. After that, it is their choice.
“If Senator Cruz is going to be president, then we need to make sure we have people who are loyal to Ted Cruz who are going to Cleveland as delegates,” said Bob Ballinger, a Republican state representative and the Cruz campaign’s Arkansas chairman. The goal, Mr. Ballinger added, is to find people “who are willing to go down and will stick with him through a second or third vote if it comes down to that.”

This effort has already dealt Mr. Trump serious setbacks. In Colorado on Saturday, Mr. Cruz’s organizational muscle helped him capture all 34 delegates at stake.
And in Iowa, which also chose delegates over the weekend, Mr. Cruz’s success could go a long way in helping him if the convention gets to a second ballot. Though Iowa binds its delegates on the first ballot for candidates based on the proportion of the vote they received in the statewide caucuses Feb. 2, they are free to vote as they please after that.
Cruz supporters in Iowa were elected to 11 of the 12 delegate slots that were filled over the weekend and secured five of eight spots on a commission that will nominate another delegate slate.
Jeff Kaufmann, the chairman of the Iowa Republican Party, said it was clear that the Cruz campaign was outworking its rivals. “Organization still matters,” he said.
Find out what you need to know about the 2016 presidential race today, and get politics news updates via Facebook, Twitter and the First Draft newsletter.



SOURCE: The New York Times

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