I worry about Trump dropping out not because somehow that might cause Clinton to lose, but because Trump at the top of the ticket will do the most damage to the Republican party.

Stay strong, Little Gloves.

It’s really crazy to think that Trump is no worst than former republican candidates , though significantly , he isn’t unique in being a danger to the country from the GOP given the clown car in the recent GOP primary. If we avoid the “Trump as President” bullet this time we are going to be facing , in all probability , more and more genuinely dangerous candidates. This is very upsetting to the official left wing narrative that there is no real difference between the two political parties. We may rightfully lament the corporatist nature of the democrats, but sanity suggest the battle to be fought is the one that is related to the most immediate danger.

What Bradley (in life) and Robards (film) said was To it the words “her tit”. They ran the rest of the quote.

If we had a ‘like’ button I’d have pressed it for Tabasco’s first para. And I hope the final phrase is true. The local coverage of the Wisconsin event which Trump didn’t come to made it look like a Wake.

Actually…. Trump was always going to lose. This enables him to create a narrative that enables him to blame the Republican leadership for his defeat (they lost their nerve and turned against and destroyed him).

I haven’t noticed anyone panicking about Trump stepping down. I’m inclined to agree with Corey that his doing so would create complete shambles, which is one reason I suspect that so few Republicans are actually calling for him to do it (another reason being that they may be craven but they’re not idiots, and they know he won’t).

I’m curious whether the never-Trumpers will get any credit at all ever, from anyone, for being on the right side of this? Probably not.

If the Republican Party is destroyed, the people who make it up will not be destroyed, and their ideas and feelings and energies and resources will not be destroyed either. Instead, they will be freed up to cohere in new and different ways. ‘The repressed returns, in monstrous form.’

As the Ryan rally in Wisconsin demonstrated today Trump’s core supporters are undeterred by the tapes and what will likely follow. If he is somehow forced out the Republicans risk all those folks staying home or worse, coming to the polls to vote against the RINOs that drove him out.
Trump’s ego won’t allow him to quit. More likely he will see this as an opportunity to solidify the anger of his supporters that will allow him to garner months of attention after the election.
What the Democrats have to do is drive home the point that Trump is not some aberration that slipped through the primary process. Trump is the direct result of forty or more years of Republican cynicism and the party’s willingness to cater to people’s worst fears and instincts in pursuit of a reactionary agenda. Trump is the paranoid style come home to roost much the same as Goldwater was the natural result of preying on people’s fears.
Does anyone seriously doubt that if the election was close that Republicans would be falling all over themselves to excuse, downplay, or otherwise sweep Trump’s behavior and comments under the rug?
Politics is, at least to some degree, about winning elections. But winning for its own sake without the slightest shred of support for the idea of governing is cynical demagoguery. Gingrich particularly raised winning to the exclusion of purpose or principle as an end in itself. Trump’s elevation to the head of the ticket exposes that hypocrisy, especially for the Christian Right, and no amount of rats jumping ship as the deck chairs slide under water excuses or ameliorates the fact that the Republican Party set the table and created the conditions which now exist.
Trump, for all his piggishness, misogyny, racism, and general sociopathy is not the problem. The Republican Party in its entirety owns every bit of this.

No matter how this ends, it will all be the fault of the left somehow. Tabasco’s shot at Bernie supporters at #5 makes fun of them for saying that only Bernie can beat Trump, but on the other hand if anyone here said that HRC was almost sure to win, they were told that they didn’t appreciate the fascist threat that everyone had to pitch in to stop at all costs.

Signing on to all of Nick @11.

My apologies, I didn’t mean to misconstrue your argument, and it’s only #6 that I disagree with. I still don’t think it makes sense. Firstly, the Democrats can’t destroy the Republican party — that’s not how party politics work. If they did, they would become more conservative, and less acceptable to their left wing.

Trump has destroyed the Republican party — it had nothing to do with the Democrats at all, except to the extent that we nominated a woman to stand against him which he did not take with grace or delicacy. There is a core of 35-40% of Republican voters (my estimate, could be different) who are going to support him through thick and thin. What are their leaders going to do to save this election? Throw Trump under the bus and piss off this 35% who will vote for him and screw the downballot races? Or will they stick with their core voters and lose every single person who finds ‘grab them by the pussy’ revolting?

This next month is scoundrel time, as Lilian Hellman put it. Trump was nominated because of deep divisions in the Republican party, and those divisions are going to play out now, as people start voting. Democrats don’t have anything to do with it.

Point 2

“With this apology, Trump will be thought of as a wimp, a weakling who caved into the forces of feminized political correctness.” Maybe.

But this seems completely wrong to me, and I am a Trump supporter. There’s no point in going into the PC controversy other than to note that for many in the Trump base forcing Donald to debase himself (again, after already debasing himself on tape) will only remind Trump voters (and many independents) that Bill Clinton has yet to apologize for anything he and Hillary did to Juanita Broderick, or Ms. Flowers.

The general response among Trump supporters (the little I’ve seen) has seen the tape as part of a coordinated effort by the media and the HRC campaign to deflect from Hillary’s disastrous record in advance of the upcoming debate and to prep viewers for some gutter politics from the ‘neutral’ moderators.

More informed viewers will be familiar with Jesse Jackson’s infidelities, Gingrich’s, and a host of others and see the media frenzy as another example of temporary and selective prudery. The NYT tried extremely hard to find women Trump has ‘abused’ and the entire exercise blew up in their faces.

If the exercise is now checking for skid marks, I suggest we’re all living in glass houses of one kind, or another. There will, of course, be some here who have never speculated aloud about the size, shape and efficacy of the body parts of others, or divulged descriptive details of personal, or second-hand experiences.

You’ve never said: ‘he fucked me, he grabbed my boobs, or she would/wouldn’t —….”

You never visit Radar, TMZ, or the Daily Mail to check up on the news. You think Chelsea Handler is a yuppy store and the degradation of women in rap music a ‘cultural difference.’

And if we’re talking about taking the private public, you’ve never said, or written, that you’d like to torture, or kill anyone you know, or a stranger – such as a major political figure. You’ve never privately, or publicly, wished anyone dead. You find Donal Trump contemptible, but find a way to forgive Bill Clinton’s serial exploitation of young women ‘understandable.’

In short, you got nothing.

And the Trump base see you for the hypocrite you are.

@ 18

Yes, politics is full of double standards. Also winners and losers; on which subject, do you still think Trump will win?

Trump’s base isn’t going anywhere. But the base is not going to deliver him 270 electoral votes. Electoral college arithnatic is so sterile, so unpassionate, so boring. But that is how elections are won and lost. Tell us where he gets his 270 EVs.

21@ No. Any other commands?

I’ll point out that the polls also predicted the Leave campaign would win right up until Remain lost. You add a lot to most conversations. Less so when you argue that the outcome of an election held in November is determined by polling numbers in October.

My view, and this has not changed, is that if Trump is within 5 on election night there’s a good chance he’ll win. If he’s ahead, or even, he wins.

Your job, of course, and that of the other those planning to lick the glove, is to convince Trump voters that all is lost.

And that’s the problem with your strategy. You’re talking to the wrong people and saying the wrong things. See if you can figure the rest out for yourself.

You’re no fool.

I think this really will destroy the evangelical right.

Weirdly, I’d make a bet that the _evangelical right_ comes out unscathed. Which is, yes, bizarre. But no one’s going to call them on this.

@26 Thank you so much for this!

I used to correspond with Andrew Sullivan begging him to come to his senses.

After the Iraq invasion, he emailed me this wonderful one liner:

“I revel in your humiliation.”

Your @26 is so him!

Good times!!

Next time they will back someone who is actually one of them, rather than someone who has just walked out of Gomorrah Central.

How? They couldn’t put forward anyone convincing this time, and another four years out of power will just strip the talent larder even more bare.

@29

It only has to be someone convincing to them. There has to be a tele-evangelist from South Carolina who will do. Pat Robertson ran in 1988, came second in the Iowa caucuses and declared on the night that he would be the nominee. That turned out to be optimistic but he might just have been ahead of his time.

“You aren’t even a US citizen.”

Put him on a list!

@33 JQ actually puts this best, we’ll butt out of your elections when you stop managing ours.

Democrats never organize coups, or corrupt the political process in ‘friendly’ nations. It’s not in the ‘liberal’ dna!

What is this Monroe Doctrine of which you speak?

I’m not so much a ‘Trump supporter’ as someone opposed to putting a practitioner and fan of violent regime change in teh WH, again. That’s too complicated for some folks, so I just shorten it to ‘I’m a Trump supporter.’

Yes, we write letters.

I’m claiming something stronger. I think that actual believers in evangelical Christianity will turn away from conservative politics,. The leaders who’ve followed Trump will be discredited, while the minority who’ve repudiated him will be justified.

The cultural penumbra of self-described evangelical Christians who don’t attend church all that regularly will continue to form part of the Republican base, but they won’t pay any attention to the Falwells and Robertsons.

John, I’d have to be more awake than I am right now, but I think I want to say that there is no movement of actual conservative believers in Christianity to destroy. There are individuals like Fred “Slacktivist” Clark and small communities, but all we’re seeing now is the revelation to anyone looking of what’s been the case for most of my adult life: evangelicalism talks Christ but lives Reagan and Rand (and Bryant and the Klan). This is who they are, this is who they’ve been. They became a fundamentally post-Christian movement no later than the ’80s. By and large, to claim to be an evangelical or conservative Christian is to claim to be no Christian at all in any meaningful sense.

It isn’t Democratic pressure that has led the Green Party to spend decade after decade developing essentially zero infrastructure or candidates for anything but president. They made themselves incapable of offering an alternative that could ever conceivably go anywhere. When they have a hundred members serving at the same time in county and state positions, then they’ll have the beginnings of an alternative.

I remember this being discussed on Usenet and FidoNet. It’s not news. But it’s still true that a party that only runs a candidate for president is a party that can’t ever make a difference except, possibly, as a presidential spoiler. It’s not a party that will ever produce someone who could govern and get any of their agenda accomplished.

Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock for the last twenty-five years, you’ll have noticed that in most western societies regressive economic policies have created a class of the super-rich, and so super-powerful. Such people, protected by their wealth, can basically say and do what they like, not just in public but in private. There are any number of gut-wrenching accounts of how such people treat the hired help, hotel staff, waiters and of course the general public they come across. I have no idea who will win your election, but given the public anger in most countries against the super-rich, it would be paradoxical, after this sordid episode, if Americans decide to change their mind and vote for a wealthy, powerful woman who will make the world even safer for the wealthy and powerful, and even more dangerous for everyone else.
A vote for Trump, as with similar candidates elsewhere, is a vote against the status quo, not a vote for an individual as such.

Kidneystones @ 42

There’s only four weeks left. The media hasn’t paid any attention to your list of worthy issues to date. Why are they going to start now? Who is going to make it clear that Hillary is a destroyer of young women? Trump? Or the media who you say are in Hillary’s pocket?

The whole “Trump is bad, but Hillary is worse” thing is getting a bit stale, though.

Donald Trump just retweeted Juanita Broaddrick calling Bill Clinton a rapist.

Tell me again how this is in the bag for the Democrats.

(And, yes, of course he was going to go there. He’s Trump.)

Re: John Q, @ 22 and 37: I wish this were true, but having lived in the US for almost 60 years (and having had many of these individuals as students in my classes), I doubt Trump’s beliefs and behavior will have little long-term effect on the evangelical right (however, there is, and has been for some time now, a growing tendency among very young evangelicals to abandon ‘organized’ religion altogether, as well as any clear-cut political affiliation as logically linked to their faith). The “sin and forgiveness” narrative, so to speak (which does not appear to require genuine remorse or sufficient evidence for true individuation or self-realization) trumps all, thus Christians will conveniently plug this story into their (some of the avowed Christian pundits on cable TV have already done so) redemption “theology” (with strong roots in substitutionary atonement doctrine that goes back to Anselm). Evangelical Christians are well known in some quarters for their remarkable capacity for tolerating and sustaining cognitive dissonance, self-deception, and states of denial, hence a public confession and mere expression of regret on the part of the sinner (provided one proclaims a belief in Jesus’s salvific power) will suffice by way of ongoing support for Trump.

@45 The Great Right-wing Konspiracy.

Actually, I expect parts of the media will break ranks simply for branding purposes, especially if interest and ratings start to drop. Ratings demand a race to the end/cliffhanger and that’s if the bottom drops out of Trump’s support mid-low 30s post debate. If Trump survives the weekend and gets to 40 or above in seven days, ‘in the bag’ is going to look a lot more like neck and neck, which is after all what this reality show is all about.

The sink has been thrown. If this crap fest doesn’t knock Trump down he’s going to look a lot more like Teflon Ronnie than many here want to imagine. What a challenge that was to grapple with. TV cowboy and light bulb salesman versus Carter.

Light bulb salesman wins. It’s all white noise from this point forward. At least until the next OMG Trump has to quit now moment.

LFC, Eric Kauffman is a political scientist, the reference is a book, and the claims about Muslims are from

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/are-muslims-distinctive-9780199769209?cc=ie&lang=en&

Raven Onthill: “But if Trump spends a month claiming that Hillary Clinton is accessory to rape, and dragging out all the attacks on William Clinton and claiming that Hillary Clinton was participant, who knows how matters will go?”

During the primary, Sanders supporters said this might happen. They were told that they were foolish and that everyone was familiar with these allegations against the Clintons already: that HRC was immunized against them. Sanders on the other hand was supposed to be not immunized against nebulous attacks on him because he hadn’t been through the grinder already. So they were foolish for thinking that only HRC could win as Tabasco says above, but they were also foolish for thinking that HRC might lose, and foolish both for thinking that these attacks on the Clintons might be factor and also for thinking that if anyone was bound to win against Trump then why not run the leftward candidate.

That’s what everyone will agree on after this election.

“But if Trump spends a month claiming that Hillary Clinton is accessory to rape, and dragging out all the attacks on William Clinton and claiming that Hillary Clinton was participant, who knows how matters will go?”

I expect that this is exactly what he’ll do, but he’ll still lose, because the signal has been sent to the Republican establishment that he’s a loser and that good Republicans can and should abandon him. He can’t get past 40%. Where are the voters who will be swayed by trying to blame Hillary for Bill’s sins, real or imagined? Doesn’t he already have those voters?

Re: The gratuitous Bernie Bashing(tm)

For about a week or two, not so long ago when Trump and Clinton were close in the polls and Trump was leading in some states, I read a raft of articles laying the groundwork for the dolchstosslegende with Sanders and his Millennial supporters being the scapegoat. There was a slowly mounting panic and someone other than Clinton needed to be blamed.

eg.
http://theweek.com/articles/650246/bernie-sanders-undo-damage-hes-done-hillary-clinton
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/09/donald-trump-is-winning-september.html

Now, riding high, it’s like “my dog could have beat Trump”. Where were you all 3 weeks ago?

The reference to Democrats playing their cards right was in regards to whether Clinton would try tying Trump to the GOP as a direct outgrowth of the party’s underlying nature and decades worth of policies vs. the strategy she chose which was to pain Trump as an aberration that has nothing to do with “real” Republicans.

I think most Republican officials and office holders have played the cards they were dealt in the best way possible. Be the good soldier, but also be clear it is as a loyal Republican who respects the party’s ultimate choice and the GOP primary votes which led to the choice.

Now Trump has given them a chance to distance themselves further and they are going to take it. I don’t think this election will lead to any weakening of the GOP as a party and I don’t think they will loose the Senate, or if they do it will be by one or two seats. The Trump fiasco has given them a coherent message which is don’t worry about Trump, worry about denying Clinton a Democratic Senate.

In 2020 they will be back with a professional candidate who has 99% of the pre-Trump policy positions with but some rhetorical bones will be tossed to the populist right Trump has been able to activate. Mostly I think in the “law and order”, anti-BLM/no inherent bias/anti-the concept of white privilege kind of way. It’s a potentially a scarily effective combo. I don’t know if it will work in the US like similar styles of right wing populism have worked in Europe because the US is too diverse, i.e. there are too many counter votes where in the EU there are enough non-whites/non-Christians to be scary for a voter but not enough to provide an effective political counter force.

@Ronan. The situation you posit may already be happening in certain countries. It’s a question of the relative weight of social ideas vs economic conditions in the way people vote. In France, which is the example I know best, wealthier members of the immigrant community (not all Muslim) regularly vote for the Right, and indeed there are many elected right-wing politicians from those communities. However, the less well-educated and poorer parts of immigrant communities from the Maghreb and West Africa, who used to vote solidly for the Socialists, are also increasingly voting for the Right, largely for social policy reasons. Gay marriage cost the Socialists an awful lot of votes among the more socially conservative elements of such communities, amplified by a string of other concerns mainly related to educational issues. Several areas to the north of Paris that used to be run by the Communists, and later the Socialists, have now fallen into the hands of the Republicans (ex-UMP). They all have significant populations of recent immigrants from conservative social backgrounds.
What this suggests, to me at least, is that whilst people *generally* vote according to their economic interests where other things are equal, social factors can be decisive under some circumstances. This is why it’s very dangerous for parties that consider themselves to be of the “Left” to think that immigrant communities will vote for them forever, just because they are immigrant communities. By contrast purely ideological factors such as religion (in my experience anyway) seldom seem to translate directly into votes. Which is why I was interested in your reference. It’s not a book I know and there aren’t many details: can you tell us more about it?

David 10.09.16 at 2:52 pm @ 62:
‘This is why it’s very dangerous for parties that consider themselves to be of the “Left” to think that immigrant communities will vote for them forever, just because they are immigrant communities.’

It’s actually a sort of racial position, especially when, in the United States, non-immigrant Black and Latin persons are also assumed to belong to the Democratic Party and the pseudo-Left forever because of their ‘race’, as if one’s political and social positions were determined by one’s ancestry.

That the hard-profanity made this episode different is an interesting and useful observation.

There was a story popular in the Omaha World-Herald newsroom that when its then-publisher Harold Andersen was on a flight home from DC and reading transcripts of Nixon in which the president was using expletives and other coarse language throughout, that this use of language was unacceptable to Andersen and was what pushed the paper to become the first in the nation to call for the president’s resignation. The OWH has always been a conservative paper.

@63

Fee fee purity purity pony Pragmatic Serious fee fee

Why do you even bother discussing anything since everything you don’t agree with or displeases you can only come from deeply irrational feelings. Like, seriously, what is someone supposed to say to that? I know you are but what am I? Its apparently all about your self righteous Very Super Serious fee fees that are always correct no matter the situation.

Ok, dude, you are always right. I think you are great and I will defer to your fee fees in any and all situations. Is that better?

Omega Centauri @ 61: median income rose five percent last year

I looked into that. Median income did rise over last year (maybe not quite so much this year, apparently), but by a more modest 2% or so, driven by increases in real wage income, which is not nothing — actually pretty good. The record-setting number appears to be a statistical anomaly attributable to a change in the way the surveyors coded non-wage income, when the information they were given in interviews was an ambiguous or imprecise asset value.

I’ve made the point several times in comments that the Trump voters’ “vote for the bomb thrower” as you put it, only makes political sense in an economic context in which the economy is doing OK: employment is high and things appear stable. That impulse to break the system can only take the form of a middle-finger vote for a ridiculous figure like Trump when the voter is not actually experiencing or even fearing an immediate economic crisis. The economic anxieties and resentments may be real enough, but they are more a matter of the long-festering kind, and the person feeling that “radical” impulse does not appreciate the severe and personally adverse consequences that would follow from the system actually breaking.

The survey research is pretty clear that the core Trump voter is a bit above median in income and perhaps a bit below median in educational attainment, and some of that “just break it” impulse is an expression of being dissatisfied with a political system one doesn’t understand or usually pay much attention to. The economic dissatisfactions blend easily with the usual mix of pre-epistemic political bad attitudes that characterize the authoritarian follower: conventional morality, aggression against out-groups, impatience with due process and moral complexity generally, and so on.

Authoritarian followers are prone to being fooled by personalities like Trump’s. His personality’s orientation to social dominance and his lack of ethical constraints means that he can just keep talking randomly until he says something that they respond to, without experiencing any dissonance. It is why there is a correlation between Trump’s kind of demagogic right-wing politics and the preaching of hypocritical evangelical preachers: they are plugging into the same set of vulnerabilities latent in large groups of people, particularly people who are relatively low status and low in educational attainment: basically people who are dependent and afraid.

Most evangelicals are not invested in a morality of conscience that might be disturbed by evidence of Trump’s hypocrisies. I agree with the earlier comment that the obscenities may be a factor, because that disturbs the morality of convention. Trump, himself, driven by his idiosyncratic form of the narcissistic morality of honor and reputation, may respond in ways shaped more by his own psychological needs than the needs of his base of political supporters. We’ll see just how flexible he is, how willing he is to shape his performance to the needs of his audience instead of himself.

@ efcdons, if you write a comment the gist of which is “I’m irritated by what some people said 3 weeks ago compared to what they’re saying now,” what sort of response do you expect? Once I read that, I confess I didn’t care much about the rest of it.

Evangelicals haven’t always voted as a bloc, after all, and their becoming one wasn’t even a purely organic development—it was pretty deliberate. Will this election push them back in an apolitical direction, re electoral politics? It’s certainly possible.

Quite true. Their “natural” inclination seems to be to not vote at all because they are not much interested in politics or political issues of the economic sort. Historically, their rates of voter participation have been relatively low, in the absence of some particular issue on which they focus, like abortion. Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell attempted to bring them into Republican politics on a broader reactionary social agenda married to an economic agenda their followers probably didn’t appreciate. Karl Rove was very good at pushing buttons. Anti-gay referendums raised their voter participation rates.

Eric (eric) Kauffman (different bloke)

All-righty, then! My bad.*

*Not for the first time, and surely not the last.

The Republicans have no good options at this point.
But then, they don’t deserve any.

(Actually, literally sent to him. Not even email backscatter. Yeah, sure, the guy is responsible for every piece of racist spam he ever received…)

LFC, that’s my recollection as well. Some of us found the story about the newspaper publisher’s reaction bizarre given all the other bad things Nixon had done, but in line with his personality and therefore not all that surprising. My parents made me watch Nixon’s resignation speech because history. I was 12.

One poll confirms overwhelming majority of GOP voters stand with Trump, can’t stand GOP establishment, don’t want Trump to quit for being vulgar a decade ago.

Who could have imagined that? Certainly not the media. As many non-Democrats are pointing out, Trump’s ‘unforgivable’ remarks didn’t prevent NBC from paying Trump a fortune per episode over a decade.

I won’t be watching the debate, or reading the after action reports by the spin spewers. The furor is already beginning to recede, faster than I’d expected. Support among evangelicals will drop, at least temporarily. How much and for how long is another question. A better question, asked by Byron York, is will it matter if some ‘traditional’ GOP voters dump Trump?

This election, like Brexit, will be determined by cross-over voting, independents, and motivation. Democrats, like the Remain campaign face the immense challenge of convincing a deeply unhappy percentage of the populace (possibly the majority) that HRC is not another years of more of the same only much worse.

That’s the discussion that nobody on the Hillary side wants to have, here or elsewhere, because Crooked Hillary has changed her positions publicly on TPPP and other issues and is the embodiment of the worst aspects of a political process many have grown to hate.

@85 Hi Pat. The attribution should go to JQ. Congrats on the relocation and on your chance to participate in the election!

This is a bit reminiscent of the fall of Nixon. What caused most of Nixon’s hardcore supporters in Congress to abandon him was not Watergate, the Cambodian bombings, or any of his other flagrant illegalities, deceptions and abuses of power but those “expletive deleted”s in that transcript of the White House recordings. It’s kinda like shooting Stalin for swearing.

derrida d
What caused most of Nixon’s hardcore supporters in Congress to abandon him was not Watergate, the Cambodian bombings, or any of his other flagrant illegalities, deceptions and abuses of power but those “expletive deleted”s in that transcript of the White House recordings.

Not my recollection or PJW’s — see above.
I was 17 when Nixon resigned. Some of his hardcore congressional supporters stuck w him to the end, and for those who didn’t I don’t think the ‘expletive deleteds’ were anything more than one factor, and not the major one. Anyone in Congress who knew anything must have been aware that Nixon was hardly a Boy Scout in his presentation of self, esp. when he thought he was talking in private (never thought he’d have to turn the tapes over). [That said, I will stand open to correction if someone cites reputable evidence to the contrary — meaning e.g. first-hand interviews showing that the ‘expletive deleteds’ were a really big deal.]

He was guilty of obstruction of justice, after all. Sam Ervin, conservative Dem. who chaired the Watergate hearings, might have been a courtly old gent, but I’m sure he didn’t give a shit how many times Nixon said “shit” on the tapes, and prob. ditto for Republican Howard Baker and for a lot of them.

Ok, one addendum.
I haven’t brought myself to watch the videotape, but is it possible that something more than profanity is what makes this the last straw for some people among his supporters?
Isn’t there a difference betw, e.g., calling someone “a fat pig” (which is what his past quotes are mostly like, afaict) and bragging about how he can kiss/grope [sexually assault] someone whenever he wants b/c he’s a star?

@94 Voting is weeks away. This isn’t the last last straw. It’s only the most recent last straw. There’s still ample time for tens, or hundreds of last, last straws.

Once in the booth, the decision becomes: 4-8 years of being screwed by Clintons? Yes/No.

I just watched a Sky News presenter try repeatedly to shame Farage into denouncing Trump as ‘unfit’ to be president on the basis of this tape. Bullying the public into a de facto vote for one candidate will be seen as just that. The media created this mess, in concert with the HRC campaign, to push Hillary’s dishonesty revealed in the leaks and emails out of the public view.

Trump will use the media bias to pivot onto lying Hillary, lying for Bill, lying in the leaks about ‘public’ and ‘private’ policy positions in paid speeches to the hated banksters, and lying to American voters about jobs, education, health care, infrastructure, foreign policy etc, etc.

His base hasn’t budged. The politico morning after poll has him down 5, which is fine.

Hillary’s base is much less committed. He may he yet screw it up, but has survived every single ‘last straw’ to date. I’m beginning to think that this ‘last straw’ meme is just another media creation.

@Raven O.

Trump said if elected he wd get the AG to appoint a prosecutor to look into HRC’s conduct w/r/t the emails (a journalist pointed out correctly afterward that that in itself wd overstep the bounds of presidential authority, as Pres. can’t order the AG to do that).

Then HRC in response said it’s good that someone w Trump’s temperament is not in charge of the justice system. At which pt Trump interrupted w “b/c you would be in jail.” I took that more as a dumb riposte than an actual threat — though Trump did seem to be serious about the prosecutor thing, even though it’s something the pres. can’t lawfully do.

@94: Very much so. It’s one thing to “know” it and another to see and hear it. (Particularly from a sexagenarian father of several children whose young wife was pregnant with his fourth at the time.)

Trump did hand over a hostage to fortune tonight when he flatly denied that he had ever done what he told Billy Bush he did. We already have Jill Harth to the contrary, although I don’t know anything about her story beyond the Kristof column.

On the plus side for Trump, it looks as if he has brought low yet another member of the Bush family, for which he deserves the thanks of a grateful nation. Billy Bush has been suspended from the Today show.

“Trump’s Great Escape: Hillary Fails to Nail Donald.”

New Daily Mail Headline.

“Clinton established herself as a superior bureaucrat Sunday night with more mature knowledge of foreign policy minutiae and a more intelligible way of communicating details about how laws are made.

But Trump won on points in what has become the Year of the Outsider, playing to a national television audience that polls show are weary of Washington’s same-old same-old and eager for new blood.”

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3830041/Second-debate-Hillary-Clinton-Donald-Trump-gets-underway.html

Just googled “Jesse Lehrich go fuck yourself.”

Of course, nobody in the entire world is now talking about the Jesse Lehrich Clinton campaign tweet, or the apology from Brian Fallon, Clinton’s national press secretary.

Not the Independent, Wapo, CNN….nobody

Talk about shooting yourself in the face.

http://www.cnn.com/2016/10/09/politics/clinton-wins-debate-but-trump-exceeds-expectations/
“CNN)Donald Trump exceeded expectations, but Hillary Clinton won the second presidential debate, according to a CNN / ORC poll of debate watchers. The results showed a clear victory for Clinton, with 57% saying Clinton won, as opposed to 34% for Trump. ”

Numerous reality-based commentators predicted before the debate that the line from the traditional media would be that Trump “exceeded expectations”, with no reference to the absolute level of performance. Have to pump up the ratings for the 3rd debate doncha know.

“Quite true. Their “natural” inclination seems to be to not vote at all because they are not much interested in politics or political issues of the economic sort. Historically, their rates of voter participation have been relatively low, in the absence of some particular issue on which they focus, like abortion. Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell attempted to bring them into Republican politics on a broader reactionary social agenda married to an economic agenda their followers probably didn’t appreciate.”

I would have to say this is, on balance, not true. American evangelicalism has always been very closely tied to what they call some variation of “true blue Americanism”. These type of terms come up frequently throughout their history. One example: the evangelical community gradually grew stronger and stronger in opposition to FDR as his time in office progressed. The evangelical community phrased their complex of criticism of FDR as that FDR was not a true American, or was anti-American or a similar formulation.

Or, more foundationally, American evangelicalism from its foundation was inherently and deeply political. The movement’s founding documents are The Fundamentals, a series of books funded by a right-wing oil tycoon, and which are highly politically combative. The Fundamentals contained large sections denouncing socialism, recent immigrants (in the guise of criticizing the Catholic Church) and so on.

The evidence that Trump raped a 13 year old girl 20 years ago is far stronger than the Juanita Brodderick allegation.
http://lawnewz.com/high-profile/high-profile-casey-anthony-attorney-now-representing-jane-doe-in-trump-rape-lawsuit/
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/donald-trump-rape-accusation-underage-girl-claim-what-happened-sexual-assault-allegation-a7354111.html
Here is the complaint and sworn affidavits
https://www.scribd.com/doc/316341058/Donald-Trump-Jeffrey-Epstein-Rape-Lawsuit-and-Affidavits

trump has changed the GOP. In the recent past, the GOP took their utopian blueprint from Atlas Shrugged. Now they take it from Handmaid’s Tale, from a sort of non-Atwood p.o.v. Lockeroomery for all the girls. Trump’s remarks explain, as well, the sexual charge of de-funding Planned Parenthood. If your old lady isn’t pregnant, how can you get a real charge on cheating on her? This explains a lot.
You know who is never going to get any credit? Valerie Solanas. I can’t help but think of her SCUM manifesto when I hear the defenses of Trump, or the outraged GOP cries that this is something that they don’t want happening to wife, daughter or sister – cause of course, women are defined by their relationship to men – I think, Solanas, you crazy prophet you. .

@113 Actually, I expect parts of the media will break ranks simply for branding purposes, especially if interest and ratings start to drop. Ratings demand a race to the end/cliffhanger and that’s if the bottom drops out of Trump’s support mid-low 30s post debate. If Trump survives the weekend and gets to 40 or above in seven days, ‘in the bag’ is going to look a lot more like neck and neck, which is after all what this reality show is all about. My @54 takes into account a drop to 32-33.

If this looks like anything other than a concerted attempt by the press and the Hillary campaign to drive down poll numbers, let me know.

I stand by my original. If Trump is within 5 by election day, he can win. If he’s even or slightly ahead it’s his. He was outspent 40-1 in key battleground states to keep it even, or Hillary ahead by single digits. He got his issues out in the debate, when you suggested he couldn’t.

The pundits had Trump quitting after the tape and before the debate.

The poll you cite, if I recall, has her at 50 and him at 38, or so. Very few folks are going to defend Trump on camera, or even privately, when any approval questions make any mention of the tape, or any other misdemeanor.

All indicators say he should lose, and perhaps in the kind of landslide you hope for/predict. With any other set of candidates, and in almost any other election I’d probably agree. But 38 isn’t 32. 50 isn’t 55. She’s not well-liked and, as Corey notes, in his most recent piece, Hillary allies are amping up the outrage to ‘unprecedented levels – something we’ve never seen before.” Pant, pant, pant.

Should be an interesting few weeks. Some conservative pundits believe the real avalanche of mud is yet to come.

@ 115 “How many…are…?” Probably better to ask how many aren’t.

I’m delighted, of course, to see so many purportedly sensible people shrieking over what a popular vulgarian reality-TV star said both privately and publicly over his decades-long career.

Hillary and her ilk are counting on the panty-sniffers to carry her over the finish line.

Good times!

117 Always delighted to learn how I can brighten a day.

Please feel free to imagine I didn’t laugh out loud reading your comment and that I’m now cursing your very existence.

Panty-sniffers for freedom!

Don’t forget to lick the glove this November.

119 Not a bit. You’re quite right and that’s why I think he’ll win. The prudes only profess to be shocked when asked questions like ‘would you want your daughter blah, blah, blah?’

Who’s going to admit on camera they’re not shocked, or appalled? Who’s going to choose clean language over jobs in November? That’s a different, but altogether very real question.

Had Hillary actually adopted job-creating policies and avoided wars, rather than siding with the globalists and the neo-cons, she’d win in walk. She’s not trusted on these issues and for very good reasons.

Which is why the entire world is ‘discovering’ for the very first time that Donald Trump is a vulgarian, but is now ‘horrified’ by his behavior instead of clapping as they used to during the decades he provided so much of the kind of tasteful entertainment Americans love and tuned into nightly.

You’re missing the point. This is not yet another example of Trump’s misogynistic attitude. This is Trump’s confession that he regularly commits sexual assault.

” but that the pragmatic argument for Hillary was misguided because Trump would beat her, whereas Bernie would beat him.”

Gosh I hate Hillary supporters. The pragmatic argument for Hillary was: you need to vote Hillary because Hillary was more electable. And now, against the worst major candidate in history – well, okay, maybe only the past decade or so – Hillary was running neck-and-neck until the establishment media got so scared that it went all in for her candidacy. And she might still flub it.

BTW the pragmatic argument turns on a counterfactual, so I’m afraid Hillary winning (or losing) doesn’t show whether it is true or not.