US Election: 2016

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But don't forget, if this comes down to a contested convention, Kasich may be the establishment candidate that they rally around. Polls are saying he is the only one who could put up a decent showing against Clinton (not that he has a winning chance, but he has better poll numbers against the anointed one).

But like the rest of the primary wannabe's he's delusional if he thinks he can win.

 

[Fishbone Jones]

But don't forget, if this comes down to a contested convention, Kasich may be the establishment candidate that they rally around. Polls are saying he is the only one who could put up a decent showing against Clinton (not that he has a winning chance, but he has better poll numbers against the anointed one).

But like the rest of the primary wannabe's he's delusional if he thinks he can win.

If the GOP wants trouble and wants their party to die, all they need to do is subvert the democratic process, shut out Trump and deny the will of the people.

He has accomplished what politicians haven't been able to do for decades. No matter which party. He has energized voters, has unheard of amounts of people backing him and is showing the Emperor(s) (GOP & Dems) have no clothes. Exposing them as the elitist parasites that they are.

Shut him out. They'll only confirm what he has been saying. At their peril.

 

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Trump had a very busy day here in DC.

Showing off his Yuge development hotel project at the Old Post Office building.

Meeting with GOP members.

And an interview with the Editorial Board of the Washington Post.

Below is a copy of the transcript released by the Post. What strikes me most about the discussion is how woefully unprepared he was and grossly inarticulate the man is. Setting the rhetoric aside, his speaking style and his interview style fails to reach the level of what one would consider presidential.

A transcript of Donald Trump’s meeting with The Washington Post editorial board

https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-partisan/wp/2016/03/21/a-transcript-of-donald-trumps-meeting-with-the-washington-post-editorial-board/?hpid=hp_rhp-top-table-main_trump-foreign-1pm%3Ahomepage%2Fstory

Part 1

FREDERICK RYAN JR., WASHINGTON POST PUBLISHER: Mr. Trump, welcome to the Washington Post. Thank you for making time to meet with our editorial board.

DONALD TRUMP: New building. Yes this is very nice. Good luck with it.

RYAN: Thank you… We’ve heard you’re going to be announcing your foreign policy team shortly… Any you can share with us?

TRUMP: Well, I hadn’t thought of doing it, but if you want I can give you some of the names… Walid Phares, who you probably know, PhD, adviser to the House of Representatives caucus, and counter-terrorism expert; Carter Page, PhD; George Papadopoulos, he’s an energy and oil consultant, excellent guy; the Honorable Joe Schmitz, [former] inspector general at the Department of Defense; [retired] Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg; and I have quite a few more. But that’s a group of some of the people that we are dealing with. We have many other people in different aspects of what we do, but that’s a representative group.

FRED HIATT, WASHINGTON POST EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR: Do you want to start out?

TRUMP: No, other than to say, we’re working hard, I think we’re all in the same business of trying to make our country better, a better place, so we have something in common. I’ve been treated very, very badly by The Washington Post, but, you know, I guess — and I’m your neighbor, I’m your neighbor right down the road, in fact we’re actually giving a press conference there in a little while, I think your people are going to be there. And by the way, Bob Costa is an excellent reporter, I’ve found him to be just an excellent reporter. I should tell you, because I have to give you the good and the bad. Not that he does me any favors, because he doesn’t, but he’s a real professional.

So we’re having a news conference today in the new building that’s going up, and the building is very much ahead of schedule, because it was supposed to open two years from September, and we’re going to open it in September. We could open it actually sooner but we’re going to break it in a little bit, so we’re going to open it in September, and it’s under budget, even though we’ve increased the quality of the finishes substantially, marble finishes, very high quality of marble, so we’re under budget and ahead of schedule. And I’m, you know, I am that way when I build, I know how to build, I know how to get things done.
The GSA [General Services Administration], I will say, GSA has been very professional, they’ve been very, very professional. They chose us over—I think they had more than 100 people who bid, you can imagine, because of the location, but they had over 100 people that bid, and it was broken down into ten finalists, and I got it. We got it because of the strength of my financial statement and also because of the strength of what we were proposing. So we’re having a news conference there today. What time is that, Hope?

HOPE HICKS, TRUMP CAMPAIGN SPOKESPERSON: It’s at 2:15.

TRUMP: 2:15. I hear a lot of the press is going to be there, we’re going to give them a tour of the building. It’s still a little bit rough — as an example, a lot of the marble surfaces all have sheetrock covering, and plywood covering on them, so a lot of people won’t see as much as they think. It’ll be like a miracle, you take it off and it explodes, like it’s finished, right? But that’ll be a fun news conference.

HIATT: If I could, I’d start by asking is there a secretary of state and a secretary of defense in the modern era who you think have done a good job? Who do you think were the best?

TRUMP: Well, because I know so many of them, and because in many cases I like them, I hate to get totally involved. I think George Shultz was very good, I thought he was excellent. I can tell you, I think your last secretary of state and your current secretary of state have not done much. I think John Kerry’s deal with Iran is one of the worst things that I’ve ever seen negotiated of any kind. It’s just a horrible giveaway.

HIATT: What in particular?

TRUMP: Well, I think, number one, we shouldn’t have given the money back. I think, number two, we should have had our prisoners before the negotiations started. We should have doubled up the sanctions. We should have gone in and said, ‘release our prisoners,’ they would have said ‘no,’ and we would have said, ‘double up the sanctions,’ and within a short period of time we would have had our prisoners back. And I think that was a terrible mistake. I think giving the money back was a terrible mistake. And by the way they are not using the money on us, they are not buying anything from us, they’re buying, you noticed, they didn’t buy Boeing, they bought Airbus, 118 planes from what I understand, but they bought them all from Airbus, they go out of their way not to spend any money in our country. So I wouldn’t have done that. And I think it’s going to just lead, actually, to nuclear problems. I also think it’s going to be bad for Israel. It’s a very bad deal for Israel.

HIATT: George Shultz, it’s interesting, was associated with a foreign policy of Reagan that was very much devoted to promoting democracy and freedom overseas. Is that something you think in today’s world the United States should be doing?
TRUMP: I do think it’s a different world today and I don’t think we should be nation building anymore. I think it’s proven not to work. And we have a different country than we did then. You know we have 19 trillion dollars in debt. We’re sitting probably on a bubble and, you know, it’s a bubble that if it breaks is going to be very nasty. And I just think we have to rebuild our country. If you look at the infrastructure — I just landed at an airport where, not in good shape, not in good shape. If you go to Qatar and if you go to (inaudible) you see airports the likes of which you have never seen before. Dubai, different places in China. You see infrastructure, you see airports, other things, the likes of which you have never seen here.

HIATT: Short of nation building, is there any role in promoting values or democracy? Or that’s not something…

TRUMP: Well, there is, I just think that we have values in our country that we have to promote. We have a country that is in bad shape, it’s in bad condition. You look at our inner cities, our inner cities are a horrible mess. I watched Baltimore, I have many, many friends in Baltimore, we watched what happened. St. Louis, Ferguson, Oakland, it could have been much worse over the summer. And it will probably be worse this summer. But you look at some of our inner cities. And yet you know I watched as we built schools in Iraq and they’d be blown up. And we’d build another one and it would get blown up. And we would rebuild it three times. And yet we can’t build a school in Brooklyn. We have no money for education, because we can’t build in our own country. And at what point do you say hey, we have to take care of ourselves. So, you know, I know the outer world exists and I’ll be very cognizant of that but at the same time, our country is disintegrating, large sections of it, especially in the inner cities.

HIATT: So what would you do for Baltimore, let’s say.

TRUMP: Well, number one, I’d create economic zones. I’d create incentives for companies to move in. I’d work on spirit because the spirit is so low, it’s incredible, the unemployment, you look at unemployment for black youth in this country, African American youth, is 58-59 percent. It’s unthinkable. Unemployment for African Americans – not youth, but African Americans – is very high. And I would create in the inner cities, which is what I really do best, that’s why when I open a building and I show you it’s way ahead of schedule, under budget and everything else—I think it was the Rite Aid store, the store in Baltimore it took them 20 years to get it built, one store, and then it burned down in one night—we have to create incentives for people to love what they are doing, and to make money. And to create, you know, to really create a better life for themselves. And you can’t – it doesn’t seem right that you will have a situation like Baltimore, and many other places, let’s use Baltimore as an example, there are many Baltimores in this country. Detroit is maybe even a better example than Baltimore. But that you’ll have a situation like that, and then we’re over nation building with other, with countries that in many cases don’t want us there. They want our money, but they don’t want us.

HIATT: The root of many people’s unhappiness in Baltimore was the perception that blacks are treated differently by law enforcement. And the disproportionate – do you think it’s a problem that the percentage of blacks in prison is higher than whites, and what do you think is the root of that situation?

TRUMP: Well I’ve never really see anything that – you know, I feel very strongly about law enforcement. And, you know, if you look at the riot that took place over the summer, if that were stopped – it all, it mostly took place on the first evening, and if that were stopped on the first evening, you know, you’d have a much nicer city right now, because much of that damage and much of the destruction was done on Evening One. So I feel that law enforcement, it’s got to play a big role. It’s got to play a big role. But that’s a pretty good example, because tremendous amounts of damage was done that first evening – first two evenings, but the first evening in particular. And so I’m a very strong believer in law enforcement, but I’m also a very strong believer that the inner cities can come back.

HIATT: Do you see any racial disparities in law enforcement – I mean, what set it off was the Freddie Gray killing, as you know. Is that an issue that concerns you?

TRUMP: Well, look, I mean, I have to see what happens with the trial. I—

HIATT: Well, forget Freddie Gray, but in general, do you believe there are disparities in law enforcement?

TRUMP: I’ve read where there are and I’ve read where there aren’t. I mean, I’ve read both. And, you know, I have no opinion on that. Because frankly, what I’m saying is you know we have to create incentives for people to go back and to reinvigorate the areas and to put people to work.  And you know we have lost million and millions of jobs to China and other countries. And they’ve been taken out of this country, and when I say millions, you know it’s, it’s tremendous. I’ve seen 5 million jobs, I’ve seen numbers that range from 6 million to, to smaller numbers. But it’s many millions of jobs, and it’s to countries all over. Mexico is really becoming the new China. And I have great issue with that. Because you know I use in speeches sometimes Ford or sometimes I use Carrier – it’s all the same: Ford, Carrier, Nabisco, so many of the companies — they’re moving to Mexico now. And you know we shouldn’t be allowing that to happen. And tremendous unemployment, tremendous. They’re allowing tremendous people that have worked for the companies for a long time, they’re allowing, if they want to move around and they want to work on incentives within the United States, that’s one thing, but when they take these companies out of the United States. Other countries are outsmarting us by giving them advantages, you know, like in the case of Mexico. In the case of many other countries. Like Ireland is, you’re losing Pfizer to Ireland, a great pharmaceutical company that with many, many jobs and it’s going to move to Ireland.

RUTH MARCUS, COLUMNIST: But Mr. Trump, if I could just follow up on Fred’s question. I think that what he was trying to get at was the anger in the African American community that held some of the riots and disturbances this summer about disparate treatment and about … clearly you say you’ve read where there is disparate treatment. But it is pretty undeniable that there is disproportionate incarceration of African Americans vs. whites. What would you – is that something that concerns you?

TRUMP: That would concern me, Ruth. It would concern me. But at the same time it can be solved to a large extant with jobs. You know, if we can rebuild those communities and create incentives for companies to move in and create jobs. Jobs are so important. There are no jobs. There are none. You go to those communities and you can’t – there is nothing there. There is no incentive for people. It is a very sad situation. And what makes it even sadder is that we are spending so much money in other countries and our own country has vast pockets of poverty and a lot of this is caused by the fact that there are no jobs. So we can create jobs in places like Baltimore and Detroit. You know, Detroit made a move, but I don’t know but it just seems to be fizzling. I don’t know what is going on. I watched Detroit four, five years ago and it looked like they were really putting a full-court press on and it doesn’t seem to be, from what I’ve been told, friends of mine that are very much involved in that whole process that it doesn’t seem to be, doesn’t seem to be something that is being pursued like it should be pursued. But if we can create jobs, it will solve so many problems.

CHARLES LANE, EDITORIAL WRITER/COLUMNIST: Can I follow up on that? I mean, to take the case of Baltimore, I mean one of the things that’s so remarkable about Baltimore and Detroit is that both of these cities, like many others have been – it’s not as if no one has ever said before we should have economic zones, it’s not as if no one has ever said before we need incentives and taxes etc., etc. And Baltimore received a lot of federal aid over the years. So I guess the question, then, is what’s different specifically about your approach to these issues from what’s been tried in the past, because a lot of effort has been put in just the direction you just described.

TRUMP: I think what’s different is we have a very divided country. And whether we like it or not, it’s divided as bad as I’ve ever seen it. I‘ve been, you know, I’ve been doing things for a long time. I see it all the time. I mean I see it so often. I see it when we go out and we have 21,000 people in Phoenix, Arizona, the other day, the division – not so much Phoenix, because that was actually very smooth, there wasn’t even a minor, they did block a road, but after that, that was Sheriff Joe Arpaio, when the road was unblocked everyone left and it was fine. But in Tucson, you can see the division. You can see the division. There’s a racial division that’s incredible actually in the country. I think it’s as bad, I mean you have to say it’s as bad or almost as bad as it’s ever been. And there’s a lack of spirit. And one thing I thought that would happen, and it hasn’t happened, unfortunately, I thought that President Obama would be a great cheerleader for the country. And it just hasn’t happened. I mean we can say it has. But it hasn’t happened. When you look at the Ferguson problems and the Baltimore problems and the Detroit problems. And you know there’s a lack of spirit. I actually think I’d be a great cheerleader – beyond other things, the other things that I’d do – I actually think I’d be a great cheerleader for the country. Because a lot of people feel it’s a hopeless situation. A lot of people in the inner cities they feel that way. And you have to start by giving them hope and giving them spirit and that has not taken place. Just has not taken place.

 

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Part 2

RYAN: Mr. Trump, you’ve mentioned many times during the campaign, in fact including this morning, instances you feel where the press has been biased or unfair or outright false in their reporting, and you’ve mentioned that you want to “open up” the libel laws. You’ve said that several times.

TRUMP: I might not have to, based on Gawker. Right?
[CROSSTALK]

TRUMP: That was an amazing—

RYAN: My question is not so much why you feel they should be open but how. What presidential powers and executive actions would you take to open up the libel laws?

TRUMP: Okay, look, I’ve had stories written about me – by your newspaper and by others – that are so false, that are written with such hatred – I’m not a bad person. I’m just doing my thing – I’m, you know, running, I want to do something that’s good. It’s not an easy thing to do. I had a nice life until I did this, you know. This is a very difficult thing to do. In fact I’ve always heard that if you’re a very successful person you can’t run for office. And I can understand that. You’ll do a hundred deals, and you’ll do one bad one or two bad ones — that’s all they read about are the bad ones. They don’t read about the one hundred and fifty great ones that you had. And even some of the ones they write that are good, they make them sound bad. You know, so I’ve always heard that. I’ve heard that if you’re successful – very successful – you just can’t run for—

RYAN: But how would you fix that? You’ve said that you would open up the libel laws.

TRUMP: What I would do, what I would do is I’d – well right now the libel laws, I mean I must tell you that the Hulk Hogan thing was a tremendous shock to me because – not only the amount and the fact that he had the victory — because for the most part I think libel laws almost don’t exist in this country, you know, based on, based on everything I’ve seen and watched and everything else, and I just think that if a paper writes something wrong — media, when I say paper I’m talking about media. I think that they can do a retraction if they’re wrong. They should at least try to get it right. And if they don’t do a retraction, they should, they should you know have a form of a trial. I don’t want to impede free press, by the way. The last thing I would want to do is that. But I mean I can only speak for – I probably get more – do I, I mean, you would know, do I get more publicity than any human being on the earth? Okay? I mean, [Editor’s note: Trump points at Ruth Marcus] she kills me, this one – that’s okay, nice woman.

RYAN: Would you expand, for example, prior restraints against publications?

TRUMP: No, I would just say this. All I want is fairness. So unfair. I have stories and you have no recourse, you have no recourse whatsoever because the laws are really impotent.

MARCUS: So in a better world would you be able to sue me?

TRUMP: In a better world — no — in a better world I would be able to get a retraction or a correction. Not even a retraction, a correction.

RYAN: Well, now, you’ve been a plaintiff in libel suits so you know a little bit of the elements …

TRUMP: I had one basic big libel suit, it was a very bad system, it was New Jersey. I had a great judge, the first one, and I was going to win it. And then I had another good judge, the second one, and then they kept switching judges. And the third one was a bad judge. That’s what happened. But, uh…

RYAN: But there’s standards like malice is required. Would you weaken that? Would you require less than malice for news organizations?

TRUMP: I would make it so that when someone writes incorrectly, yeah, I think I would get a little bit away from malice without having to get too totally away. Look, I think many of the stories about me are written badly. I don’t know if it’s malice because the people don’t know me. When Charles writes about me or when Ruth writes about me, you know, we’ve never really met. And I get these stories and they’re so angry and I actually say, I actually say, “How could they write?” – and many stories I must tell you, many stories are written that with a brief phone call could be corrected before they’re written. Nobody calls me.

STEPHEN STROMBERG, EDITORIAL WRITER: How are you defining “incorrect?” It seems like you’re defining it as fairness or your view of fairness rather than accuracy.

TRUMP: Fairness, fairness is, you know, part of the word. But you know, I’ve had stories that are written that are absolutely incorrect. I’ll tell you now and the word “intent”, as you know, is an important word, as you know, in libel. I’ll give you an example. Some of the media, not all of it, but some of it, is very, very strong on – you know I get these massive crowds of people, and we’ll get protesters. And these protesters are honestly, they’re very bad people. In many cases, they’re professionals. Highly trained professionals. And I will rent an arena for 20,000 seats and they will come in – because there’s really no way – how you going to be able to tell – somebody said “oh you shouldn’t let ‘em in” – how you gonna know, you know? They walk in. [Inaudible] So we had an incident this weekend, which was amazing in Tucson, Arizona where a man, a protestor, wearing a Ku Klux Klan outfit, another one dragging an American flag, was walking out of the arena, and an African American man who was a supporter was sitting there listening to the speech and we had to stop because they were so loud – they’re so loud, these people, I don’t know what they do, they’re trained voices or something. And they’re walking up and you saw it, because it was all over television, and the African American man became incensed I think the guy said something to him like you know what, like “screw you,” okay? Or worse. I think, because he looked over to him and said something to him and the guy just had it. Now, they were together, these two. The one wearing a Ku Klux Klan, the other dragging a flag or something, but the African American man, who I think was an Air Force person, I just read he had a pretty stellar life so far. And he just became incensed. So when I saw the television yesterday early in the morning I saw the Ku Klux Klan, I saw exactly what happened. By the time it got on to the national shows that was for the most part taken out. They just had this African American smacking, you know, fighting. And it didn’t make sense, you know, why, why. But if you saw it in the morning it made a lot more sense. We don’t condone violence at all but it’s very, very unfair reporting and we, you know…

HIATT: Sorry, when you say we don’t condone violence —

TRUMP: I say that.

HIATT: You say that. But you’ve also said, “In the good old days, he would have been ripped out of his seat so fast, you wouldn’t believe it.” Isn’t that condoning violence?

TRUMP: No, because what I am referring to is, we’ve had some very bad people come in. We had one guy — and I said it — he had the voice — and this was what I was referring to — and I said, “Boy, I’d like to smash him.” You know, I said that. I’d like to punch him. This guy was unbelievably loud. He had a voice like Pavarotti. I said if I was his manager I would have made a lot of money for him, because he had the best voice. I mean, the guy was unbelievable, how loud he was. And he was a swinger. He was hitting people. He was punching and swinging and screaming — you couldn’t make — so you have to stop. You know, there is also something about the First Amendment, but you had to stop. And, so, this one man was very violent and very loud. And when he was being taken out, he walked out like this, with his finger way up, like, “screw everybody.” And that’s when I made that statement. He was absolutely out — I mean, he hit people and he screamed and then he was walking out and he’s giving everybody the finger. And they don’t talk about that. See, they don’t talk about that. They say, “Donald, wait a second, Donald, don’t” —

HIATT: But your answer is you condone violence when the guy is really egregious and terrible?

TRUMP: No, I condone strong law and order. I’ll tell you what they —

HIATT: Rip him out of his seat, punch him in the face, isn’t that violent?

TRUMP: Well he punched other people.

HIATT: No, I understand that.

TRUMP: Fred, he punched other people. He was punching people. He was — one guy was, you know, I’d like to say —

JO-ANN ARMAO, ASSOCIATE EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR: The Fayetteville protester who was sucker punched — he didn’t punch anyone —

TRUMP: No.

ARMAO: He was being escorted from police, and he was sucker punched.

TRUMP: No. When are you talking about? When?

ARMAO: In Fayetteville.

COREY LEWANDOWSKI, TRUMP 2016 CAMPAIGN MANAGER [to Trump]: North Carolina.

TRUMP: I don’t know. I don’t know which one.

ARMAO: Yes you do.

TRUMP: I don’t know. Because we’ve had so many —

ARMAO: That’s the gentleman you said you were going to look into to see whether or not to pay his legal fees.

TRUMP: Oh well that’s a different — that’s different from the one I’m talking about. This one was about a month ago. This one was before Fayetteville.

ARMAO: Well, okay, Fayetteville, do you condone violence in that case —

TRUMP: No I don’t, no I don’t, that’s different —

ARMAO: Where the protester is being walked out —

TRUMP: By the way, that’s different —

ARMAO: But, yet, you explained it that he was giving the finger and so he provoked it, so he got sucker punched. And you are going to possibly pay for his legal expenses.

TRUMP: He did give the finger, and —

ARMAO: So that’s okay?

TRUMP: Well, a lot of people don’t — you know, the finger means, “F you.” A lot of people think — and you have children there, you have a lot of children that go, you know, they go with their parents — a lot of people think that’s very inappropriate. I mean, you know —

ARMAO: It’s certainly inappropriate.

TRUMP: Well, I think it is.

ARMAO: But does it — is it — does it qualify to —

TRUMP: So do you let him —

ARMAO: — to punch him in the face?

TRUMP: Again I don’t condone it. So do you let him walk out, he’s holding up his finger, telling everybody. Same thing happened, you know, the last one in —

HIATT: I guess the question is, when you then offer to pay the guy’s legal fees, isn’t that —

TRUMP: I didn’t offer —

HIATT: Isn’t that condoning?

TRUMP: No, I didn’t offer, Fred —

HIATT: You said you would consider it —

TRUMP: I said I want to look into it. I said I want to look into it. I didn’t say that.

HIATT: Isn’t that condoning?

TRUMP: No, I don’t think so.

HIATT: Doesn’t that convey a message of approval?

TRUMP: Don’t think so.

LEWANDOWSKI: To be fair, before every event, there is a public service announcement made about —

TRUMP: It’s true.

LEWANDOWSKI: — any potential protesters. That is made to everybody that says —

TRUMP: Strong.

LEWANDOWSKI: — please do not engage these protesters. You know, they may cause a disturbance. Please do your best, let local law enforcement handle this or security at that venue. The problem becomes, with a massive crowd of twenty or thirty or forty thousand people, the resources that are there don’t have the ability to get to all these people in a manner before the crowd reacts, because the agitators are inciting those people. So we are very clear at the onset, that there is a loud public notice that says, “please do not engage these people, please let them do their job, and let the local law enforcement deal with that.” That’s said at the very front end at every event.

TRUMP: Very loud, and it’s repeated over and over. Actually, I guess it’s on tape, but they repeat it over and over. One thing that was interesting this weekend. We had in Phoenix, Arizona, we had an interesting incident. We had people, we had a major highway coming into the arena. It’s not an arena, it’s a huge open space, 60 acres, and it was packed. And we had a major highway coming in, and people — protesters — stopped their car in the middle of the highway, chained themselves to their cars, and the cars — blocked. They were there for a while. A car was not able to move. They were backed up for 20 — I mean, like, just forever. And, it was terrible. And they were very abusive, screaming, you know, “screw you, screw you, pigs, pigs” — meaning to the cops. Sheriff Joe Arpaio — now that was his territory. Okay, he’s a tough cookie. Sheriff Joe saw this, he gave them a couple of minutes to move their car — they didn’t move them — cut the chains, arrested the people and just moved the cars over. I don’t know how they did it — just, they were gone in minutes after he came there. Minutes. It was amazing how quick. They actually had chains around their necks. They didn’t even know why they were there. People – somebody was interviewed, “Why are you here?” “Well, I don’t know, I’m not sure.” They didn’t even know.

Nobody ever talks about these people. They say, “Oh, Trump had a bad rally,” or something. You know there are two sides to it, and honestly, there is really one side of it – because you see how bad this was. So what happened is they arrested three people. There were probably a hundred or a hundred-fifty protesters, there were 21,000 people there, there were 150 protesters that were creating havoc. As soon as the three people were arrested, everybody else ran. That was the last we heard, and I made a speech for, you know, a half hour, 45 minutes – not one person stood up and started screaming at this speech. It was sort of an amazing thing.

Now Tucson was different. Different police force, different level of, you know, whatever, and we had numerous interruptions during the speech. You know, I’ll be speaking, I’ll be ready to make a point, and a guy will stand up and start, just screaming. Out of — from nowhere, for, like, no reason. Not even screaming things that make sense, and often screaming tremendous obscenities.
I know [Lewandowski] went in – he took a lot of heat a couple of days ago in that same rally because he went in to get – to quiet people down, and they had a couple of signs “F-you” – it just said “F-you,” meaning the word spelled out, and you have cameras there, you know, it’s on live television, and you have guys holding signs saying “F-you Trump” or just “F-you,” and they had numerous of those – there were, you know, probably ten of those signs throughout the arena.
And he went in to say, please would you move the sign, and the woman in front – and I saw it – this guy grabbed the woman in front, okay, he [Lewandowski] hardly touched him – he took him – If he touched him at all it was just grabbing the shirt a little bit. But the guy was a real wiseguy. And he was screaming obscenities. He did grab the woman in front and ultimately he was led out by the security guy, who was right behind him.
But the reason is that the police were slow to get there. And the point is this: You’re making a speech and you have guys getting up saying, [Editor’s note: Trump says the next few words in a hushed voice] “fuck you,” and the whole place goes, “Whoa,” and it incites the place. They incite the place, because then everyone goes, “USA, USA.” That’s why they’re all screaming “USA, USA,” or “Trump, Trump, Trump.”

You can have 20,000 people and you can have like two people. Usually – it’s amazing – usually it’s one person. I mean, it’s like they stage it. It’s very professional. They have like one person here, one person here, one person.
Okay, we’re talking about the media. So, I’ve never seen the media cover it from that angle. It’s always, “Trump had a” — and here’s the big thing, I mean, honestly, essentially nobody has heard

 

[cupper]

Part 3

HIATT: But just – given the Supreme Court rulings on libel — Sullivan v. New York Times — how would you change the law?

TRUMP: I would just loosen them up.

RUTH MARCUS: What does that mean?
[Crosstalk]

TRUMP: I’d have to get my lawyers in to tell you, but I would loosen them up. I would loosen them up. If The Washington Post writes badly about me – and they do, they don’t write good – I mean, I don’t think I get – I read some of the stories coming up here, and I said to my staff, I said, “Why are we even wasting our time? The hatred is so enormous.” I don’t know why. I mean, I do a good job. I have thousands of employees. I work hard.
I’m not looking for bad for our country. I’m a very rational person, I’m a very sane person. I’m not looking for bad. But I read articles by you, and others. And, you know, we’ve never – we don’t know each other, and the level of hatred is so incredible, I actually said, “Why am I – why am I doing this? Why am I even here?” And I don’t expect anything to happen–

RYAN: Would that be the standard then? If there is an article that you feel has hatred, or is bad, would that be the basis for libel?

TRUMP: No, if it’s wrong. If it’s wrong.

RYAN: Wrong whether there’s malice or not?

TRUMP: I mean, The Washington Post never calls me. I never had a call, “Why – why did you do this?” or “Why did you do that?” It’s just, you know, like I’m this horrible human being. And I’m not. You know, the one thing we have in common I think we all love the country. Now, maybe we come at it from different sides, but nobody ever calls me. I mean, Bob Costa calls about a political story – he called because we’re meeting senators in a little while and congressmen, supporters – but nobody ever calls.

RYAN: The reason I keep asking this is because you’ve  said three times you’ve said we are going to open up the libel laws and when you ask you what you mean you say hatred, or bad–

TRUMP: I want to make it more fair from the side where I am, because things are said that are libelous, things are said about me that are so egregious and so wrong, and right now according to the libel laws I can do almost nothing about it because I’m a well-known person you know, etc., etc.

JACKSON DIEHL, DEPUTY EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR: Back to foreign policy a little bit, can you talk a little bit about what you see as the future of NATO? Should it expand in any way?

TRUMP: Look, I see NATO as a good thing to have – I look at the Ukraine situation and I say, so Ukraine is a country that affects us far less than it affects other countries in NATO, and yet we are doing all of the lifting, they’re not doing anything. And I say, why is it that Germany is not dealing with NATO on Ukraine? Why is it that other countries that are in the vicinity of the Ukraine not dealing with — why are we always the one that’s leading, potentially the third world war, okay, with Russia? Why are we always the ones that are doing it? And I think the concept of NATO is good, but I do think the United States has to have some help. We are not helped. I’ll give you a better example than that. I mean, we pay billions– hundreds of billions of dollars to supporting other countries that are in theory wealthier than we are.

DIEHL: Hundreds of billions?

TRUMP: Billions. Well if you look at Germany, if you look at Saudi Arabia, if you look at Japan, if you look at South Korea  — I mean we spend billions of dollars on Saudi Arabia, and they have nothing but money. And I say, why? Now I would go in and I would structure a much different deal with them, and it would be a much better deal. When you look at the kind of money that our country is losing, we can’t afford to do this. Certainly we can’t afford to do it anymore.

DIEHL: About Ukraine, was it right for the United States to impose sanctions on Russia when they invaded Crimea and would you keep those sanctions on them?

TRUMP: I think the answer is yes, it was, but I don’t see other people doing much about it. I see us doing things about it, but I don’t see other people doing much about it.

DIEHL: And could I ask you about ISIS, speaking of making commitments, because you talked recently about possibly sending 20 or 30,000 troops and—

TRUMP: No I didn’t, oh no no no, okay, I know what you’re saying. There was a question asked to me. I said that the military, the generals have said that 20- to 30,000. They said, would you send troops? I didn’t say send 20,000. I said, well the generals are saying you’d need because they , what would it take to wipe out ISIS, I said pretty much exactly this, I said the generals, the military is saying you would need 20- to 30,000 troops, but I didn’t say that I would send them.

DIEHL: If they said that, would you go along with that and send the troops?

TRUMP: I find it hard to go along with—I mention that as an example because it’s so much. That’s why I brought that up. But a couple of people have said the same thing as you, where they said did I say that and I said that that’s a number that I heard would be needed. I would find it very, very hard to send that many troops to take care of it. I would say this, I would put tremendous pressure on other countries that are over there to use their troops and I’d give them tremendous air supporters and support , because we have to get rid of ISIS, okay, just so — we have to get rid of ISIS. I would get other countries to become very much involved.

DIEHL: What about China and the South China Sea. What do you think they’re up to and—

TRUMP: I think it’s a terrible situation, I think it’s terrible they have no respect for–

DIEHL: –and what should we do about it?

TRUMP: Well look, we have power over China and people don’t realize it. We have trade power over China. I don’t think we are going to start World War III over what they did, it affects other countries certainly a lot more than it affects us. But—and honestly, you know part of—I always say we have to be unpredictable. We’re totally predictable.  And predictable is bad. Sitting at a meeting like this and explaining my views and if I do become president, I have these views that are down for the other side to look at, you know. I hate being so open. I hate when they say — like I said get rid of the oil, keep the oil, different things over the years, when people are saying what would you do with regard to the Middle East, when we left — We should have never been in Iraq. It was a horr- it was one of the worst decisions ever made in the history of our country. We then got out badly, then after we got out, I said, “Keep the oil. If we don’t keep it Iran’s going to get it.” And it turns out Iran and ISIS basically—

HIATT: How do you keep it without troops, how do you defend the oil?

TRUMP: You would… You would, well for that– for that, I would circle it. I would defend those areas.

HIATT: With U.S. troops?

TRUMP: Yeah, I would defend the areas with the oil.  And I would have taken out a lot of oil. And, uh, I would have kept it. I mean, I would have kept it, because, look: Iran has the oil, and they’re going to have the oil, well, the stuff they don’t have, because Iran is taking over Iraq as sure as you’re sitting there. And I’ve been very good on this stuff. My prognostications, my predictions have become, have been very accurate, if you look.

HIATT: So what do you think China’s aims are in the South China Sea?

TRUMP: Well I know China very well, because I deal with China all the time. I’ve done very well. China’s unbelievably ambitious. China is, uh… I mean, when I deal with China, you know, I have the Bank of America building, I’ve done some great deals with China. I do deals with them all the time on, you know, selling apartments, and, you know, people say ‘oh that’s not the same thing.’ The level of… uh, the largest bank in the world, 400 million customers, is a tenant of mine in New York, in Manhattan. The biggest bank in China. The biggest bank in the world.

China has got unbelievable ambitions. China feels very invincible. We have rebuilt China. They have drained so much money out of our country that they’ve rebuilt China. Without us, you wouldn’t see the airports and the roadways and the bridges; I mean, the George Washington Bridge is like, that’s like a trinket compared to the bridges that they’ve built in China. We don’t build anymore, and it, you know, we had our day. But China, if you look at what’s going on in China, you know, they go down to seven percent or eight percent and it’s like a national catastrophe. Our GDP is right now zero. Essentially zero.

DIEHL: Could you use trade to cause them to retreat in the South China Sea?

TRUMP: I think so, yeah. I think so

DIEHL: What would you do?

TRUMP: We, well, you start making it tougher. They’re selling their products to us for… you know, with no tax, no nothing. By the way, we can’t deal with them, but they can deal with us. See, we are free trade. The story is, and I have so many people that deal with China –they can easily sell their product here. No tax, no nothing, just ‘come on, bring it all in, you know, bring in your apples, bring in everything you make’ and no taxes whatsoever, right? If you want to deal with China, it’s just the opposite. You can’t do that. In other words, if you want to, if you’re a manufacturer, you want to go into China? It’s very hard to get your product in, and if you get it in you have to pay a very big tax.

HIATT: So, if they occupied what the Japanese call the Senkaku Islands, is that something the United States…

TRUMP: Well, I, you know, again, I don’t like to tell you what I’d do, because I don’t want to… You understand what I’m saying, Fred? If I… Okay, if I say ‘Well, we should go in and do this or that or that,’ I don’t want to, I don’t want to sort of… red flag all over it. I do think this: It’s an unbelievable thing that they’ve done, it’s unbelievable aggression, it’s unbelievable lack of respect for this country.

HIATT: This theory of unpredictability, I want to push a little bit, I mean – there are many people who think that North Korea invaded South Korea precisely because Acheson wasn’t clear that we would defend South Korea. So I’m curious, does ambiguity sometimes have dangers?

TRUMP: Well I’ll give you, I’ll give you an example. President Obama, when he left Iraq, gave a specific date – we’re going to be out. I thought that was a terrible thing to do.  And the enemy pulled back, because they don’t want die.  Despite what you read, you know, they don’t want to die — and they just pulled back, and after we left, all hell broke out, right? And I’ll give you another example that I think was terrible: when they sent, a few months ago, they sent fifty troops in. You know, fifty elite troops. Now, why do we have to have a news conference to announce that we’re sending fifty troops? So those troops now have targets on their back. And…you shouldn’t do it.  We’re so predictable: “Ladies and gentlemen, we’re sending fifty troops into Iraq or Syria. And these are our elite troops. And they’re going to do this and that and that and this.” And those troops now are being hunted. If you didn’t send them, they wouldn’t – if you didn’t say that, they wouldn’t know. I mean, there are times when you just can’t be… You talk too much. We talk too much. I guess they thought that was good politically, to say we’re sending fifty troops? I don’t think it was good.

LANE: Can I ask you…Just going back to NATO, because…

TRUMP: Yes.

LANE: As you know, the whole theory of NATO from the beginning  was to keep the United States involved in the long term in Europe to balance, to promote a balance of power in that region so we wouldn’t have a repeat of World War I and World War 2. And it seems to be like what you’re saying is very similar to what President Obama said to Jeffrey Goldberg, in that we have allies that become free riders. So it seems like there’s some convergence with the president there. What concerns me about both is that to some extent it was always thought to be in our interest that we, yes, we would take some of the burden on, yes, even if the net-net was not 100 percent, even steven, with the Germans. So I’d like to hear you say very specifically, you know, with respect to NATO, what is your ask of these other countries? Right, you’ve painted it in very broad terms, but do you have a percent of GDP that they should be spending on defense? Tell me more. Because it’s not that you want to pull the U.S. out.

TRUMP: No, I don’t want to pull it out. NATO was set up at a different time. NATO was set up when we were a richer country. We’re not a rich country. We’re borrowing, we’re borrowing all of this money. We’re borrowing money from China, which is a sort of an amazing situation. But things are a much different thing. NATO is costing us a fortune and yes, we’re protecting Europe but we’re spending a lot of money. Number 1, I think the distribution of costs has to be changed. I think NATO as a concept is good, but it is not as good as it was when it first evolved. And I think we bear the, you know, not only financially, we bear the biggest brunt of it. Obama has been stronger on the Ukraine than all the other countries put together, and those other countries right next door to the Ukraine. And I just say we have, I’m not even knocking it, I’m just saying I don’t think it’s fair, we’re not treated fair. I don’t think we’re treated fair, Charles, anywhere. If you look everything we have. You know, South Korea is very rich. Great industrial country. And yet we’re not reimbursed fairly for what we do. We’re constantly, you know, sending our ships, sending our planes, doing our war games, doing other. We’re reimbursed a fraction of what this is all costing.

LANE:  You know, well, they say and I think this is on public record, it’s basically 50 percent of the non-personnel cost is paid by South Korea and Japan.

TRUMP: 50 percent?

LANE: Yeah.

TRUMP: Why isn’t it 100 percent?

HIATT: Well I guess the question is, does the United States gain anything by having bases?

TRUMP: Personally I don’t think so. I personally don’t think so. Look. I have great relationships with South Korea. I have buildings in South Korea. But that’s a wealthy country. They make the ships, they make the televisions, they make the air conditioning. They make tremendous amounts of products. It’s a huge, it’s a massive industrial complex country. And —

HIATT: So you don’t think the US gains from being the force that sort of that helps keep the peace in the Pacific?

TRUMP: I think that we are not in the position that we used to be. I think we were a very powerful, very wealthy country. And we’re a poor country now. We’re a debtor nation. How you going to get rid – let me ask you – how are you going get rid of $21 trillion in debt? You’re going to be at 21 trillion in a matter of minutes because of that new omnibus budget. So they passed that ridiculous omnibus budget. How you going to get rid of that debt. We’re spending that to protect other countries. We’re not spending it on ourselves. Because we have, we have armor-plated vehicles that are obsolete. The best ones are given to the enemy. We give them to our allies over in the Middle East. A bullet shot in the air and they immediately run and the enemy takes over. I have a friend whose son is in his third, his third tour over in Iraq. He’s over in, I mean he’s a very special kid, he’s a great kid. But he’s over in the Middle East, and, uh, Afghanistan, different parts of the Middle East, actually. And he said to me, I said to him what do you think. And he said, it’s so sad. He said the enemy has our equipment – the new version — and we have all the old version, and the enemy has our equipment, because they get into a fight with the so-called people like the Freedom Fighters, you know the whole Syrian deal, where we’re sending billions and billions of dollars worth, and they capture the equipment. In most cases the shots are fired and everybody leaves. And these are the people we’re backing. And we don’t know if it’s going to be another Saddam Hussein deal, in other words, let’s get rid of Assad with these people and these people end up being worse. Okay? But he said, they have better equipment. It’s our equipment. They have, I guess we send 2,300 Humvees over, all armor-plated. So we have wounded warriors, with no legs, with no arms, because they were driving in stuff without the armor. And the enemy has most of the new ones we sent over that they captured. And he said, it’s so discouraging when they see that the enemy has better equipment than we have – and it’s our equipment.

 

[cupper]

And finally Part 4

HIATT: I’d like to come back to the campaign. You said a few weeks ago after a family in Chicago gave some money to a PAC opposing you, you said, “They better watch out. They have a lot to hide.” What should they watch out for?

TRUMP: Look, they are spending vicious … I don’t even know these people. Those Ricketts. I actually said they ought to focus on the Chicago Cubs and, you know, stop playing around. They spent millions of dollars fighting me in Florida. And out of 68 counties, I won 66. I won by 20 points, almost 20 points. Against, everybody thought he was a popular sitting senator. I had $38 million dollars spent on me in Florida over a short period of time. $38 million. And, you know, the Ricketts, I don’t even know these people.

HIATT: So, what does it mean, “They better watch out”?

TRUMP: Well, it means that I’ll start spending on them. I’ll start taking ads telling them all what a rotten job they’re doing with the Chicago Cubs. I mean, they are spending on me. I mean, so am I allowed to say that? I’ll start doing ads about their baseball team. That it’s not properly run or that they haven’t done a good job in the brokerage business lately.

RYAN: Would you do that while you are president?

TRUMP: No, not while I am president. No, not while I’m president. That is two phases. Right now, look, you know, I went to a great school, I was a good student and all. I am an intelligent person. My uncle, I would say my uncle was one of the brilliant people. He was at MIT for 35 years. As a great scientist and engineer, actually more than anything else. Dr. John Trump, a great guy. I’m an intelligent person. I understand what is going on. Right now, I had 17 people who started out. They are almost all gone. If I were going to do that in a different fashion I think I probably wouldn’t be sitting here. You would be interviewing somebody else. But it is hard to act presidential when you are being … I mean, actually I think it is presidential because it is winning. And winning is a pretty good thing for this country because we don’t win any more. And I say it all the time. We do not win any more. This country doesn’t win. We don’t win with trade. We don’t win with … We can’t even beat ISIS. And by the way, just to answer the rest of that question, I would knock the hell out of ISIS in some form. I would rather not do it with our troops, you understand that. Very important. Because I think saying that is very important because I was against the war in Iraq, although they found a clip talking to Howard Stern, I said, “Well…” It was very unenthusiastic. Before they want in, I was totally against the war. I was against it for years. I actually had a delegation sent from the White House to talk to me because I guess I get a disproportionate amount of publicity. I was just against the war. I thought it would destabilize the Middle East, and it did. But we have to knock out ISIS. We are living like in medieval times. Who ever heard of the heads chopped off?

HIATT: Just back to the campaign. You are smart and you went to a good school. Yet you are up there and talking about your hands and the size of private …

TRUMP: No …

HIATT: … your private parts.

TRUMP: No, no. No, no. I am not doing that.

HIATT: Do you regret having engaged in that?

TRUMP: No, I had to do it. Look, this guy. Here’s my hands. Now I have my hands, I hear, on the New Yorker, a picture of my hands.

MARCUS: You’re on the cover.

TRUMP: A hand with little fingers coming out of a stem. Like, little. Look at my hands. They’re fine. Nobody other than Graydon Carter years ago used to use that. My hands are normal hands. During a debate, he was losing, and he said, “Oh, he has small hands and therefore, you know what that means.” This was not me. This was Rubio that said, “He has small hands and you know what that means.” Okay? So, he started it. So, what I said a couple of days later … and what happened is I was on line shaking hands with supporters, and one of supporters got up and he said, “Mr. Trump, you have strong hands. You have good-sized hands.” And then another one would say, “You have great hands, Mr. Trump, I had no idea.” I said, “What do you mean?” He said, “I thought you were like deformed, and I thought you had small hands.” I had fifty people … Is that a correct statement? I mean people were writing, “How are Mr. Trump’s hands?” My hands are fine. You know, my hands are normal. Slightly large, actually. In fact, I buy a slightly smaller than large glove, okay? No, but I did this because everybody was saying to me, “Oh, your hands are very nice. They are normal.” So Rubio, in a debate, said, because he had nothing else to say … now I was hitting him pretty hard. He wanted to do his Don Rickles stuff and it didn’t work out. Obviously, it didn’t work too well. But one of the things he said was “He has small hands and therefore, you know what that means, he has small something else.” You can look it up. I didn’t say it.

MARCUS: You chose to raise it …

TRUMP: No, I chose to respond.

MARUS: You chose to respond.

TRUMP: I had no choice.

MARCUS: You chose to raise it during a debate. Can you explain why you had no choice?

TRUMP: I don’t want people to go around thinking that I have a problem. I’m telling you, Ruth, I had so many people. I would say 25, 30 people would tell me … every time I’d shake people’s hand, “Oh, you have nice hands.” Why shouldn’t I? And, by the way, by saying that I solved the problem. Nobody questions … I even held up my hands, and said, “Look, take a look at that hand.”

MARCUS: You told us in the debate ….

TRUMP: And by saying that, I solved the problem. Nobody questions. Everyone held my hand. I said look. Take a look at that hand.

MARCUS: You told us in the debate that you guaranteed there was not another problem. Was that presidential? And why did you decide to do that?

TRUMP: I don’t know if it was presidential, honestly, whether it is or not. He said, ‘Donald Trump has small hands and therefore he has small something else.’ I didn’t say that. And all I did is when he failed, when he was failing, when he was, when Christie made him look bad, I gave him the– a little recap and I said,  and I said, and I had this big strong powerful hand ready to grab him, because I thought he was going to faint. And everybody took it fine. Whether it was presidential or not I can’t tell you. I can just say that what he said was a lie. And everybody, they wanted to do stories on my hands; after I said that, they never did. And then I held up the hand, I showed people the hand. You know, when I’ve got a big audience. So yeah, I think it’s not a question of presidential …

MARCUS: He said he regrets …

HIATT: Okay, let’s move on here. Let’s move on.

TRUMP: I did feel I should respond. Maybe I’m wrong. I don’t know. But I felt I should respond because everybody was talking about it.

RYAN: You [MUFFLED] mentioned a few minutes earlier here that you would knock ISIS. You’ve mentioned it many times. You’ve also mentioned the risk of putting American troop in a danger area. If you could substantially reduce the risk of harm to ground troops, would you use a battlefield nuclear weapon to take out ISIS?

TRUMP: I don’t want to use, I don’t want to start the process of nuclear. Remember the one thing that everybody has said, I’m a counterpuncher. Rubio hit me. Bush hit me. When I said low energy, he’s a low-energy individual, he hit me first. I spent, by the way he spent 18 million dollars’ worth of negative ads on me. That’s putting [MUFFLED]…

RYAN: This is about ISIS. You would not use a tactical nuclear weapon against ISIS?
[CROSSTALK]

TRUMP: I’ll tell you one thing, this is a very good looking group of people here.  Could I just go around so I know who the hell I’m talking to?

HIATT: Sure, then I’d like to let a couple of them get in questions.

LEWANDOWSKI: We have got five minutes, hard out.

HIATT: Okay.

TRUMP: Oh is it?

CORY: Yeah. You have a meeting you have to get to.

TRUMP: Okay we do.

ARMAO: I’m Jo-Ann Armao. I cover D.C. events. I  want to ask you a question about what you think about D.C. voting rights or statehood.

TRUMP: Okay. I’ll talk about that.

TOM TOLES, EDITORIAL CARTOONIST: Tom Toles.

TRUMP: Hi, Tom.

LANE: I’m Charles …

TRUMP: Yes, I know Charles.

STROMBERG: Steve Stromberg, editorial writer.

TRUMP: Right.

MARCUS: Ruth Marcus.

TRUMP: Right.

RYAN:  Fred Ryan.

TRUMP: Right, right.

DIEHL: Jackson Diehl.

TRUMP:  Good.

JAMES DOWNIE: James Downie, digital opinions editor.

TRUMP: Hi, James.

MICHAEL LARABEE: Mike Larabee, I’m the op-ed editor.

TRUMP: Yes.

CHRISTINE EMBA: Christine Emba.

TRUMP: Hi, Christine.

JAMIE RILEY: Jamie Riley, letters and local opinions.

TRUMP: Good, yes, yes.

KAREN ATTIAH: Karen Attiah, deputy digital editor.

HIATT: Karen, you want to get a question in?

ATTIAH: Uh, yeah, I mean speaking again of the system of what a lot of people would say are some of the uglier components of your campaign; a lot of people have said you’ve been running a very divisive campaign as far as racial divides, you’ve noted you know your comments about Muslims, about Mexicans, immigrants and such. You have information that the country is becoming browner, is becoming younger, is becoming blacker. What in your vision of president, in your presidency, how would you bridge these divides and how will you address a– how are you going to run on a message of inclusion of all Americans?

TRUMP: Well, first of all, if you look at some polls that have come out, I’m doing very well with African Americans. I’m doing, actually if you look at the polls, a lot of the polls that came out, in the, um, what do they call it? Exit polls, like from Nevada and other places, I’m doing very well with Hispanics.

ATTIAH: I think some of the polls are saying you’re doing [in the] negatives.

TRUMP: We do, if it’s illegals, in other words, if it’s everybody, but people that are legally living here, I’m doing very well. In other words, people that are here, like Hispanics that are in the country, I’m doing very well. People that vote. Like people leaving voting booths and all, I’m doing very well with them. I want to be inclusive, but at the same time, people should come here legally. They should be here legally. And I think the reason I’m doing, that I will do well, especially once I get started, don’t forget I haven’t even focused on Hillary yet. And, and as you know, you know I’ve had polls that are against me, but I’ve had many polls that say I’d beat Hillary, but they’re not that, that, they don’t mean  anything now because it’s too early. Because I haven’t hit her. I’ve only hit her once, and that was eight weeks ago, but, I haven’t started on Hillary yet, and when I do I think I’ll be able to make my  points. I mean, you know, but, but I think that just to try and answer your question: Uh, I am the least racist person that you will ever meet. Okay. That I can tell you.

ATTIAH: But do you feel that your messages, your rhetoric, are dangerous and divisive for this country? How do you feel they’re ….

TRUMP: I don’t think so. No, I don’t think so. With the Muslim thing I think it’s a serious problem. I’ve had Muslims call and tell me you’re right with the Muslim thing, I think it’s a serious problem.  And it’s a problem that has to be addressed. I mean, there’s tremendous hatred. Even the, even the guy they caught in Paris. He was being hid out by other Muslims, and everybody is after him, and he’s living right next to where he grew up.  There’s a serious, serious problem with the Muslims and it’s got to be addressed. It’s temporary, and it’s got to be addressed. And you know you may think of it as negative. Many people think it’s very positive.

HIATT: How would you identify people to keep them out of this country?

TRUMP: Well look, there’s many exceptions. There’s many – everything, you’re going to go through a process. But we have to be very careful. And I was really referring in particular, you know, to migrations – Syrians, the whole migration, where we’re going to take in thousands. And I heard in the Democrat debate, I heard 55,000, okay. 55,000. Now they say it’s really ten [thousand], but it’s already 10, and I just don’t think we can take people into this country. You saw what two people did – the woman and the man, whether she radicalized him or [inaudible] – but you saw what two people did, and I just don’t think we can take people in when we have no idea who they are, where they come from. There’s no documents, there’s no paper, and we have ISIS looming over our head, and we have tremendous destruction. We lost the World Trade Center, we lost the Pentag – you know, we had a plane go into the Pentagon, etc.

ARMAO: D.C.: You told Chuck Todd last year on “Meet the Press” that you love D.C., you love the people, that you want to do what’s best for them. They think what’s best for them is statehood or at the very least voting rights. What is your position on those two things?

TRUMP: I think statehood is a tough thing for D.C. I think it’s a tough thing. I don’t have a position on it yet. I would form a position. But I think statehood is a tough thing for D.C.

ARMAO: Tough politically?

TRUMP: I think it’s just something that I don’t think I’d be inclined to do. I’d like to study it. It’s not a question really – maybe Chuck didn’t ask me like you’re asking me – I don’t see statehood for D.C.

ARMAO: What about having a vote in the House of Representatives?

TRUMP: I think that’s something that would be okay. Having representation would be okay.

HIATT: Last one: You think climate change is a real thing? Is there human-caused climate change?

TRUMP: I think there’s a change in weather. I am not a great believer in man-made climate change. I’m not a great believer. There is certainly a change in weather that goes – if you look, they had global cooling in the 1920s and now they have global warming, although now they don’t know if they have global warming. They call it all sorts of different things; now they’re using “extreme weather” I guess more than any other phrase. I am not – I know it hurts me with this room, and I know it’s probably a killer with this room – but I am not a believer. Perhaps there’s a minor effect, but I’m not a big believer in man-made climate change.

STROMBERG: Don’t good businessmen hedge against risks, not ignore them?

TRUMP: Well I just think we have much bigger risks. I mean I think we have militarily tremendous risks. I think we’re in tremendous peril. I think our biggest form of climate change we should worry about is nuclear weapons. The biggest risk to the world, to me – I know President Obama thought it was climate change – to me the biggest risk is nuclear weapons. That’s – that is climate change. That is a disaster, and we don’t even know where the nuclear weapons are right now. We don’t know who has them. We don’t know who’s trying to get them. The biggest risk for this world and this country is nuclear weapons, the power of nuclear weapons.

RYAN: Thank you for joining us.

 

[Fishbone Jones]

Have you got a Cole's notes version? I'm 62 and don't think I have enough time left to read all that.

 

[cupper]

Have you got a Cole's notes version? I'm 62 and don't think I have enough time left to read all that.

Blah Blah Blah I'm great

Blah Blah Blah Everyone loves me

Blah Blah Blah I'm Yuge with [your favorite minority here]

Blah Blah Blah Better negotiator

Blah Blah Blah Build the wall

Blah Blah Blah etc.

 

[cavalryman]

Blah Blah Blah I'm great

Blah Blah Blah Everyone loves me

Blah Blah Blah I'm Yuge with [your favorite minority here]

Blah Blah Blah Better negotiator

Blah Blah Blah Build the wall

Blah Blah Blah etc.

So pretty much boilerplate politico  rancing:  Thanks for the translation

 

[a_majoor]

Read the "Blue on Blue" article with Bill Clinton decrying the "disastrous" Obama legacy, and one of the comments in Instapundit  was interesting:

http://pjmedia.com/instapundit/229702/

The Clintons must have enough dirt to sink Obama many times over, hence the blatant public insult. This is a "you can't touch us" slap in the face.

Who knows, maybe they have photos. This just hasn't been a good year for Lightbringers.

 

[CougarKing]

Enough already with Trump's obsession with the Chicago Cubs!  :facepalm:

Big League Stew/Yahoo Sports

Donald Trump threatens to run attack ads against Cubs owners
Chris Cwik By Chris Cwik
2 hours ago

Donald Trump may be willing to take his burgeoning feud with the Chicago Cubs to the next level. The presidential hopeful now says he's considering running attack ads against the Ricketts family, telling them they are doing a "rotten job" running the franchise.

Trump is upset with the family after learning that they contributed $3 million to an anti-Trump PAC. The Ricketts stood by their contribution, saying "we stand up for what we believe in."

Trump's threats here are a bit less scandalous than his initial statements on the matter, though. When he first accused the Ricketts of spending against him, he said they "better be careful, they have a lot to hide." Based on his latest comments, Trump won't be revealing any deep, dark secrets if he decides to take the next step.

(.,..SNIPPED)

 

[cupper]

It's a good thing he hasn't seen this site then.  ;D

 

[a_majoor]

The observation that JFK would not be welcome in today's Democrat party seems mirrored in the observation that many Trump supporters could be considered "traditional" Democrat supporters (i.e. espouse values which would have been traditionally supported by the Democrat party). It would be rather ironic that the traditional Democrat voters are the ones to push Trump over the top:
(part 1)
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-donald-trump/

Why Donald Trump?
A quest to figure out what’s happening in America.
By Clare Malone

The night before Super Tuesday I was on a plane from Oklahoma City to Cleveland, my hometown, when a thought struck me: I truly had no idea what was going on in America.

I’d been traveling a fair bit during the rush of primary season, and you start to feel unstuck when you do that. The moments of my days I would have otherwise spent doing soothingly banal things — grocery shopping, hand-washing delicates, pouring Drano into various plumbing orifices — I now spent alone in hotel rooms, contemplating the Donald Trump phenomenon.

I’d seen glints and glimmers of his wide swath of support — the man in New Hampshire who was following Trump around the country, hawking merchandise; the friendly middle-aged women in Iowa who just liked his style; the Oklahoma couple at a Bernie Sanders rally who, after a few minutes of pleasant chitchat about Sanders, started talking to me about their deep admiration for and likely support of Trump. But the thesis was still missing for me: Why him? Why these people?

Mulling over these questions has pretty much become the primary occupation of politicos. Jamelle Bouie of Slate wrote that it was a consequence of President Obama’s upending the country’s racial hierarchy. Scott Winship at National Review chalked it up to a more generalized national anxiety disorder. Samantha Bee did her own twist on a focus group with young Trump voters.

“I don’t like the way they’re stabbing each other in the back.” So she wouldn’t be voting for Trump, then? “No, I didn’t say that.”

There were other theories too, based on more empirical thinking. The Upshot found that areas of Trump support overlapped with places that had high concentrations of people who ethnically identified as “American.” A doctoral student theorized that Trump supporters had a bent toward authoritarianism. Recent political science fieldwork seemed to suggest something different: that his supporters are more raging populists than autocrats. They weren’t rallying around a figure who consolidated power in a chaotic vacuum, they were thrilling to the words of an instigator.

What I kept returning to, though, was the surprise of it all.

Polling’s long arm, we were promised, could reach farther than any reporter into the brambles of American politics and retrieve what was difficult to see from the outside: the hidden proclivities and preoccupations of demographic groups. Political science, in turn, was meant to act as a killjoy, a gulp of dusty academic air amid the breathlessness of campaign news cycles.

But for months political obsessives doubted poll numbers with the strength of a thousand Thomases. The numbers said one thing, but common sense indicated otherwise. Political scientists had no perfect historical precedent to call upon. Reporters, meanwhile, had only the piecemeal musings of the voters they happened to accost at rallies and coffee shops, nothing to suggest that a new paradigm was being formed.

Now Trump is the likely Republican nominee for president.

Given the limitations of statistical analysis, political science and traditional reporting, I reasoned that a hybrid approach using all three could help answer the prevailing question in American politics: Why Donald Trump?

On March 1 there was a Trump rally in Columbus, in a billboard-strewn no man’s land by the city’s airport. When I arrived that morning it was spotted with campaign yard signs and volunteers directing cars to a vast overflow lot about a mile away. In the Middle West, such parking crises are often engendered by county fairs and football games, but rarely by political speeches.

I ended up in a scofflaw’s spot in front of an industrial stone company and walked down the road’s shoulder to where Bill and Alysha Johnson stood pointing cars toward the lot. Bill, 42, a DirecTV installer, and Alysha, 37, who stays at home with the couple’s kids, had driven from their small town of 600 outside Cincinnati while it was still dark to volunteer for the campaign. Alysha’s affection for Trump was simple, she said: “He’s for the working class and seems to be revealing a lot of things about the government we haven’t known.”

Outsiders claiming to reveal what’s really happening on the inside of the marble halls of power — that’s what this election has become all about.
 
“The country is fed up with what’s going on,” Trump said in July. “You know, in the old days they used the term ‘silent majority’; we have the silent majority back, folks.”

Outsiderism means not just skepticism about big banks and Washington politicians but wariness of other institutional pillars of American life — like the media. Alysha was spending a lot of time fact-checking the news, trying to make sure that what she read and heard about the campaign was trustworthy. “If there’s rumors that are going around, I watch them,” she said.

Alysha is not alone in her mistrust of mainstream news organizations — in 2015, only 40 percent of Americans said they trusted mass media, and that number tends to dip in election years, according to Gallup. Trump is never short of disdain for the press, particularly at his rallies; he likes to stop in the middle and direct crowds to jeer at the members of the media in their midst.

When I met Joseph Youde, 24, at a Trump rally in Cedar Falls, Iowa, in January, he answered my questions — “I like Donald Trump because we’re weak,” he said. “I think we need a tough leader” — then turned the questioning on me. Youde managed to be genuinely friendly while asking something along the lines of “How does it feel to be a member of the media?” Trump had just dispensed a few choice words for journalists during his speech: “The press, they’re the most dishonest people I’ve ever seen in my life. They’re disgusting.”

In Columbus, I asked Alysha Johnson what she thought about what was then Trump’s most recent dust-up, his refusal to disavow an endorsement from David Duke, former head of the Ku Klux Klan. She replied, “From what I know, that’s all a lie and Hillary Clinton is actually cozy with KKK members — there’s several pictures of her with them.” If I went online and searched for “Clinton; image; KKK member” it would show up, she assured me.

When I tried that, a picture of former West Virginia Senator Robert Byrd pecking Clinton on the cheek popped up. Byrd was indeed once a member of the KKK and had mentored Clinton in the Senate. So Alysha’s claim wasn’t strictly wrong, though Byrd, who died in 2010, had long ago renounced his membership in the organization.

Something inspirational seems to be happening among the assembled — a sense of collective identity being discovered.

One could forgive them that very human reaction. Anyone who has ever been chastened or embarrassed might understand the tendency toward anger or defensiveness when cornered in an argument — backing down doesn’t seem viable, and that can produce unfortunate sound bites, if not glimpses into deeply held beliefs. Political science has shown that Alysha isn’t alone in her doubt. A 2000 study by political scientists found that Americans who have incorrect information about public discourse can be divided into two different groups — the misinformed and the uninformed. The uninformed simply don’t know about a given topic; the misinformed are interested in what’s going on, but their sources of information are flawed. Another study, in 2010, found that when the misinformed were told about their inaccuracies, they held onto their beliefs with all the more conviction.

But why the alternate news sources to begin with?

“I think on the right we’ve been ignoring the mainstream media for years,” Matt Mayer, who runs a conservative think tank out of Dublin, Ohio, told me. “I think the real break was Rathergate. The view was that Dan Rather truly tried to alter the election by hitting Bush with that National Guard stuff, and I think that’s when the right finally said, ‘That’s it.’” And that, he continued, led to the rise of sites like Free Republic and Glenn Beck’s TheBlaze, with their communities of active commenters. Unfounded claims often take root and flourish. “In some ways it’s an echo chamber — some of the stuff I see I’m like, ‘Oh my God, really?’” Mayer said.

If the rumor-filled parts of the Internet were the lens through which Alysha viewed the world, then it was like looking through rose-colored stunner shades: There was an unmistakable red tinge and some bars that blocked her from seeing the full picture.

Every time I go to Cleveland’s art museum, I like to visit a painting called “Stag at Sharkey’s,” by George Bellows. It’s from the early 20th century, during boxing’s heyday, a time when Irish and Italian prizefighters were the fierce poster boys for ethnic whiteness. Bellows’s fighters are going at each other — snapping sinews and all that — but it’s the crowd that always gets me. They’re a mass of dark figures at the foot of the ring, and some have slashing grins, a reminder of the exhilaration of having a champion who can do what you yourself cannot.

As I rounded the corner in Columbus, I found myself in an industrial alley with dozens of late arrivals streaming into an airplane hangar. I’d been denied press credentials for the event — no explanation, although I’d been approved for others — so I queued up in the general admission line and entered the massive space just as the national anthem was starting. The assembled crowd of about 5,000 was reverently quiet — a massive flag billowed, police officers and firefighters stood at attention, and the sickly gray sky seemed more like swirling marble than the dull harbinger of rain it had been only moments ago. Something stirred deep beneath my layers of reportorial cynicism; I got chills.

This part of the appeal of Trump rallies is not talked about much. Most reports on the events detail incidents of violence, and that is because they are numerous: In North Carolina, a 78-year-old man recently punched a black protester in the face and said he wanted to kill him; a rally in Chicago was canceled outright because of scuffles between Trump supporters and protesters; a man was punched and kicked repeatedly during an Arizona rally last weekend. Trump leverages the power of this violence — he recently said that if he isn’t nominated at the Republican Convention in July, “I think you’d have riots.”

Along with the fighting, though, something inspirational seems to be happening among the assembled — a sense of collective identity being discovered. In this millionaire cosmopolitan who has married two immigrants, the threatened silent American majority has found its champion.

Trump supporters feel America’s national identity is threatened in 2016; a RAND survey of likely Republican voters found that those who strongly agreed with the statement “Immigrants threaten American customs and values” favored Trump at a rate of 60.1 percent. Ruth Albert, a 65-year-old retired postal worker whom I met outside a Trump event in Exeter, N.H., in February, told me that Trump’s immigration policy was a big reason she was attracted to him. “Why should people sneak in?” she said. Albert herself is a descendant of Josiah Bartlett, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, and lives in the family’s ancestral home.

David Merritt, managing director at Luntz Global, a political consulting firm known for its focus groups of Republican voters, says many Trump supporters reject the notion that their views are racist. “These people were actually surprised,” he told me. “They said, ‘Why would you think we’re racist because we want to protect America? When Muslim terrorists want to come into America and blow up our buildings and kill us, why is keeping them out racist?’”

The Upshot’s look at the geography of Trumpism showed a number of variables linked to areas of deep Trump support — counties where a high proportion of the population is white with no high school diploma, where there are large numbers of mobile homes, and where there is a poor labor-force participation rate. Political scientists Michael Tesler and John Sides recently pointed to new research that shows “both white racial identity and beliefs that whites are treated unfairly are powerful predictors of support for Donald Trump in the Republican primaries.”

 

[a_majoor]

(Part 2)

This is in no small part because of Trump’s virtuoso dog-whistling — it’s a thing to behold, almost as if he’d grabbed the slender wrists of the crowd with those big hands of his, felt for the pulse of their darkest hearts and then whispered the words they so long to hear. While containing no overt racial slurs, Trump’s stump speech is cleverly coded.

Trump has offered people something more potent than party allegiance: empowerment.

“Do we love our police?” Trump asked in Columbus to big cheers. The line is simple but cuts to something much deeper: Republicans, the majority of whom are white, have consistently reacted quite differently from Democrats to the recent spate of racially charged police killings. On March 15, when Ohio voters cast their ballots, I went to a polling place at Our Lady of Angels in the West Park neighborhood of Cleveland, where many of the city’s police officers live and just a mile and a half from the park where 12-year-old Tamir Rice was shot and killed by a police officer in November 2014. There, Katy Gallagher, 55, told me that while she had voted for Hillary Clinton, many cops and firefighters she knew in the neighborhood were switching their allegiances. “A lot of them are voting Trump because of immigrants getting jobs — which is surprising because they’ve always voted Democrat,” she said.

A 58-year-old West Park voter named Eileen who declined to give me her last name said she was supporting Trump because of the energy he’d injected into the race. “I found it to be very exciting,” she said. “I paid more attention to this than any other year before. I watched all the debates.” She had voted for President Obama in the previous election.

This is something he has in common with a lot of Americans. Sides and Tesler cite the work of political scientists James Stimson and Christopher Ellis, who have found that those who identify as conservatives often take liberal positions on things like the size of government. These voters are “symbolically conservative” but “operationally” liberal. According to Stimson and Ellis, that group made up nearly 25 percent of the electorate in 2008. Trump’s views on trade, which National Review called “silly and illiterate” are old-school-Democrat ones — globalization is really screwing over the little guy, huh?The idea that Trump could pick up white support that might typically go to Democrats in states like Ohio has become a truism of the 2016 race, though he lost the state to its governor, John Kasich, in the March 15 primary. “I am a commonsense conservative — Is that OK?” he asked the Super Tuesday crowd in Columbus. Trump has taken on the patina of conservatism, despite lacking a conservative orthodoxy.

Trump has offered people something more potent than party allegiance: empowerment. Bernie Sanders is presenting something similar, though his message is more catholic in its demographics; John Kasich speaks about empathy as a balm for the scathed electorate; but Trump’s silent majority, a mostly white, working-class cohort, wants to talk about their problems for once.

The morning after Super Tuesday I headed west on I-90, hugging the curves of Lake Erie. John Kasich, consummate moderate and the zip-up sweater’s greatest proponent since Mr. Rogers, was speaking in Grand Blanc, a suburb of Flint. I had met Trump supporters, but wanted to see how Republicans outside his base were thinking about him. While Trump seems to have something of a ceiling of support — his best showing was 49.3 percent of the vote in Massachusetts, but he has received an average of 34 percent — most Republicans seem to agree that Trump will be the GOP nominee. In a new poll, only 10 percent still thought he was “not very or not at all likely” to get the nomination.
 
This swift adjustment to the magical thinking of the Trump candidacy is perhaps the most astounding thing about the 2016 election. America’s political sensibility has adjusted to his rhetoric as part of the new, bilious normal. What that means for the future of the Republican Party isn’t quite clear, but it may be that many of its voters, even the moderate ones, are looking for a bit of a crack-up, a revolution they never knew they wanted until Trump walked into their lives.

“I’m looking for a candidate that’s kind of a moderate,” Bonnie Guith, a retired nurse practitioner who was sitting in the back of a Grand Blanc meeting room, told me as she waited for Kasich to arrive. “I don’t like the way they’re stabbing each other in the back.” So she wouldn’t be voting for Trump, then?

“No, I didn’t say that,” Guith said. She offered that Kasich might make a decent vice presidential candidate for Trump.

Ostensibly, these voters were from the moderate wing of the party, yet here they were, allowing that Trump had some good points. They were the personification of America’s collective brain adjusting to his reality.

“Winning begets winning,” David Merritt had pointed out to me. “Lots of people like being on the winning team; there are more Patriots fans than there are Cleveland Browns fans.”

Trump’s eventual win in Michigan was sizable, with 36.5 percent of the vote; Kasich narrowly finished third, behind Ted Cruz. But contained in Michigan’s exit polls were the same conflicted feelings that had been on display in Grand Blanc: just 20 percent of Kasich voters in the state would be happy with Trump as the nominee, while three-quarters would be dissatisfied. Last week, a group of party elites met to discuss strategies to stop Trump, including a third-party bid for president. The Washington Post reported that “the mood of the room was muted and downbeat.”

When I talked to Matt Mayer, lanky and wry and able to cite Reagan’s birthday off the top of his head, he just wasn’t sure what was going to happen to the GOP. We were sitting in a Starbucks in Dublin, Ohio; arranged before him was a venti coffee and a creased copy of the Financial Times. “Are we starting to see a split? Is the Freedom caucus — could it turn into the Freedom Party?” he wondered.

Mayer understood the Trump appeal, especially after having driven around Ohio in 2012 on a book tour; he’d felt the changes coming, perhaps. “I’ve talked to everyone you can imagine that’s the base of the Republican Party,” he said. “My God, you could see the frustration and the anger at the political actors, and he is not that. I get it.”

Mayer leaned back into his chair as an old O’Jays song played over the Starbucks speakers. “People all over the world, join hands.”

That evening I drove south from Grand Blanc to my hotel in downtown Detroit, where the streets were quiet and slushy. I lay on the bed, flipping through the channels — nothing but political coverage, nothing for me to think about but the Donald Trump phenomenon.

So, why Trump after all? Even after all my time on the road, no one explanation for Trumpism seems more illuminating than the other. Voters’ distrust in institutions meant news and basic facts were worthy of questioning and only the most outrageous statements had the ring of truth; working-class whites’ racial anger had reconstituted their sense of identity; and their desire for the center to no longer hold meant drastic upheaval in the Grand Old Party and America. But there is no one unified theory of Trumpism. The reasons for his rise are numerous, and perhaps, in some cases, unknowable. Trump’s candidacy has shown that Americans are more radical than anyone realized.

My sister texted late — she was watching “Mitt,” the documentary about Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign. The next morning, Romney was due to make a speech denouncing Trump and all he stood for. I decided to watch too. How quaint it all seemed, we marveled; four years ago, the 47 percent video had been a scandal, and now the fact that Trump had bad-mouthed the pope only days before was but a passing thing. The thought I’d had in the Grand Blanc meeting room came rushing back: How powerful our minds are that we adapt to such strange circumstances so quickly.

 

[Kilo_302]

The Republican façade is coming down. Years of austerity and tax cuts in Louisiana have left that state bankrupt, and even some Republicans are starting to realize their own policies make little sense. The mantra "no compromise at all costs" has led to deeply irrational policies and has also contributed to Donald Trump's success. Republican voters have, alongside the Party, been conditioned to reject anyone who will talk to Democrats. This is clearly a problem.

http://www.truthdig.com/avbooth/item/gop_sheriff_shreds_gov_jindal_and_his_20160323

n late February, conservative Louisiana sheriff Newell Normand publicly criticized “that idiot,” former Gov. Bobby Jindal, for leading his state off a fiscal cliff, and admonished his fellow Republicans for following obstructionist leaders and resisting proposed tax increases aimed at covering the budget problems Jindal left behind.

According to the New Orleans Times-Picayune, Louisiana suffers a $943 million budget shortfall between now and the end of the fiscal year on June 30. “The state is also estimated to face a $2 billion shortfall in the 2016-17 budget year,” the paper states.

Normand, who serves as sheriff of Jefferson Parish, accused Jindal, whom he once endorsed, of “trying to rewrite history” since leaving office earlier this year.

“What a mess,” Normand said at the Metropolitan Crime Commission’s annual awards luncheon. “Bobby Jindal was a better cult leader than Jim Jones. We drank the elixir for eight years. We remained in a conscious state; we walked to the edge of the cliff, and he watched. And guess what? Unlike Jim Jones, he did not swallow the poison. What a shame.”

Normand assaulted his party’s support of austerity economics and its obedience to Grover Norquist, president of the lobbying group Americans for Tax Reform and one austerity’s chief proponents. Before the 2012 elections, Norquist got 95 percent of Congressional Republicans to sign a pledge refusing to increase income taxes on businesses and individuals.

Advertisement

 


“We cannot cut our way to a balanced budget, because some of the programs that are on the chopping block are the ones that are going to affect everyone of us up here,” Normand continued. “And we do not have the assets or the resources necessary to make up for it. We’re facing enough challenges today. We do not need to face the stupidity of our leadership as it relates to how we’re going to balance this budget and talking about these silly issues because we’re worried about what Grover Norquist thinks. To hell with Grover Norquist!”

Bracingly, Normand urged his listeners to abandon obstructionist leaders and pursue compromise with their political colleagues.

“We have some systemic, fundamental issues that need to be addressed, and it can’t be handled by parties. It’s got to be handled by intellectual individuals, void of a party, void of an overarching philosophy, working together. And what’s really incredible to me? Compromise is now a dirty word.”

Here’s a transcript of Normand remarks provided by the site CenLamar.com:

What a mess. Bobby Jindal was a better cult leader than Jim Jones. We drank the elixir for eight years. We remained in a conscious state; we walked to the edge of the cliff, and he watched. And guess what? Unlike Jim Jones, he did not swallow the poison. What a shame.

The fact of the matter is that he’s now out there on Twitter and on public spaces trying to rewrite history, and we hadn’t even figured out what history is. We know we face a $2 billion to $2.2 billion budget shortfall next year, somewhere between $700 million and $900 million between now and June 30. And he’s trying to get everybody to believe that he did a phenomenal job.

We have to just say no.

I’m a Republican, but I’m not a hypocrite. We have to look at ourselves critically as a party and figure out where we are, what we’re going to be about.

The fact of the matter that the Republican leadership in this state is now saying and trying to blame Gov. John Bel Edwards, whose only been in office a little bit over forty days, is absolutely incredulous to me.

This guy’s a friggin genius. In less than 45 days, he has screwed this state up so bad- in the history of the state, the largest budget deficit. That’s what they’re trying to get us to believe.

Come on folks; we have to wake up. Let us be honest about what we’re doing.

We did this to ourselves, myself included, because I endorsed that idiot (Jindal).

And now, we’re going to try and play partisan politics as it relates to this. And as Leon pointed out: Mental health, going to get cut. Bigger problem for criminal justice, right?  We’re talking about shutting down five state prisons that house 8,000 inmates. I think it’s just under a third that come from our region.

You think they’re going home to Bunkie?

We better get concerned. We better wake up. We better be honest. We better talk about the issues because we are going to pay the price, and we’re going to pay dearly. And we’re going to pay more than any other region in the state of Louisiana.

So I asked you last year, I made the same call, a call for action. We better get all over this thing. We better be honest about our approach.

We cannot cut our way to a balanced budget, because some of the programs that are on the chopping block are the ones that are going to affect everyone of us up here. And we do not have the assets or the resources necessary to make up for it.

We’re facing enough challenges today. We do not need to face the stupidity of our leadership as it relates to how we’re going to balance this budget and talking about these silly issues because we’re worried about what Grover Norquist thinks.

To hell with Grover Norquist! I don’t care about Grover Norquist! We’re worrying about the ATR report card? Give me a break.

We are the folks that are seeing the degredating (sic) situations out on the streets of this state, each and every day. Seven officers shot and killed last year. Officers getting hurt every day. And the few and little resources we have and the services that try to deal with the illnesses of drug addition and others, they are going to be cut, is absolutely incredulous to me.

Medicaid expansion, for example, provides significant sustenance for us to deal with some of those issues within the walls of the prison and our local jails.

And I have to sit there and listen to my Republican counterparts talk about gobbledygook- blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah- and I’m so sick and tired of hearing “Obama, Obama, Obama, Obama.” You know how much intellect it takes to blame something on somebody else? This much (motions a zero with his hand).

Propose a solution. Let’s work together and collaboratively and toward an outcome that’s going to make sense for us as a society. That is what we need to do, and that needs to be the call of action in this state. Because Leon’s right.

We are at not only a crossroads maybe in the city of New Orleans; we’re at a crossroads in the state of Louisiana, as to who we’re going to be, what we’re going to be, and how we’re going to be.

We have some systemic, fundamental issues that need to be addressed, and it can’t be handled by parties. It’s got to be handled by intellectual individuals, void of a party, void of an overarching philosophy, working together. And what’s really incredible to me? Compromise is now a dirty word.

How many people in this room are married?

How many people in their marriage don’t compromise? Raise your hand.

 

[CougarKing]

Aside from this update below, there's some bad press rising about Cruz making attack ads against Trump's current wife Melania and why she isn't 1st lady material. (I won't be posting any news articles on that bit of news since a lot of these articles on it show suggestive photos of her, and that violates site guidelines here.      )

More delegates for Cruz:

Canadian Press

The Latest: Ted Cruz takes all of Utah's 40 GOP delegates
[The Canadian Press]
The Associated Press

March 23, 2016


WASHINGTON - The Latest on the U.S. presidential race (all times Eastern Daylight Time):

3:16 a.m.

Texas Sen. Ted Cruz's big win in Utah means he will get all 40 of the state's delegates to the Republican National Convention.

Cruz has a very limited path to clinch the nomination before the party's convention this summer.

(...SNIPPED)

 

[a_majoor]

Cruz taking that state hardly slows Trump down at all. Here is a blog post which sums up the math pretty concisely:

http://voxday.blogspot.ca/2016/03/trump-math-updated.html

Trump: the math updated

So, Arizona, which matters, went for Trump, and did so by a 23-percent margin that exceeded the +13 polls by 10 points. Utah, which doesn't matter much (I had Trump getting 17 delegates there, but he won't get any), went unanimously to Cruz. So, let's update the previous delegate math.

You may recall I originally stated this: If Trump wins Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and California, plus one state from the following list (Arizona, Missouri, Indiana, Wisconsin), he wins the nomination. Period. Nothing else matters.

Since then, he has won Florida, Missouri and Arizona, but lost Ohio. So, all he needs now, in practical terms, is Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and California. Those are the three vital states, which the latest, but mostly outdated, polls currently show:

Pennsylvania: Trump +17
New Jersey: Trump +27
California: Trump +16

According to Fox News, after Arizona, Trump has 739 delegates. There are 238 proportional votes to be distributed; due to his strength in New York we can safely expect Trump to win at least 126 of them. That brings him to 865, which means he will need 372 out of the remaining 539 winner-takes-all delegates, or 69 percent of them.

That is three points fewer than he needed before this week; Cruz's outperformance in Utah didn't accomplish anything because Trump's strength in New York outweighs Cruz's in Utah.

As far as states go, to mathematically close out the nomination, he'll need, at a minimum, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, California, Indiana, and one smaller state. If Cruz or Kasich can't win at least one of those four states, (and two if one of them isn't California), Trump will hit the required 1,237 delegates.

Of course, none of this takes into account the potential game-changing endorsement of Ted Cruz by Jeb Bush. You may want to consider the possibility that Cruz will withdraw from the race and join a monastery in Borneo. And, of course, the endorsement demonstrates the intrinsic falseness of the contention that the GOPe hates and fears Ted Cruz over all.

 

[a_majoor]

Another non-issue which should be front and centre:

http://pjmedia.com/instapundit/229847

SIXTH-ANNIVERSARY THOUGHTS: Obamacare Was Going to Lower Health Care Costs. What Actually Happened.

Hawking the Affordable Care Act (ACA) six years ago, President Barack Obama said, “Every single good idea to bend the cost curve and start actually reducing health care costs [is] in this bill.”

Team Obama projected that their version of health care reform—replete with the bells and whistles of “investments” in health information technology, health care delivery and payment reforms—would translate into big cost reductions for individuals, families and businesses. In his iconic health care “talking points”, the president said that the “typical” family would see a yearly $2500 savings in their health costs.

Those family cost savings, of course, have not materialized.

In year six, even with lower than anticipated enrollment in the health insurance exchanges and the refusal of 21 states to participate in the law’s Medicaid expansion, the health care cost curve is still on an upwardly mobile trajectory.

It is fueled by sharp increases in both public and private health care spending.

Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services data show that total per capita health insurance spending will rise from $7,786 in 2016 to $11,681 in 2024. Looking at the future of employer-based health insurance costs, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projects that job-based premiums are poised to increase by almost 60 percent between now and 2025.

Obamacare’s cheerleaders have allowed their exuberance to outrun their supply lines. Medicare trustee Charles Blahous best summarized the problem:

“Given how the ACA’s advocates touted the law as ‘bending the cost curve down and reducing the deficit’ while occasionally in the same sentence crediting it with expanding coverage to ‘more than 94 percent of Americans’, many Americans could be forgiven for not understanding that those two goals were in conflict.”

Obamacare cannot deliver the impossible (even if it were good public policy­— and it isn’t).

It’s like the whole thing was just a gigantic fraud, sold with a pack of lies.

 

[Kilo_302]

This is hilarious

http://gawker.com/open-carry-at-the-republican-convention-yes-please-1766879873

 

[ueo]

Hmmm altho hilarious, might it not be an indicator of what's to come...