love it

Yeah, he doesn't want to win. I think he realizes now that the next 4 years are going to be hell and he doesn't want the burden.

Trump refuses to support Paul Ryan, John McCain in upcoming Republican primaries - The Washington Post

Whenever Trump doubles and triples back on the same statement over and over again to make it seem longer, it reminds me of the 1988 SNL sketch where Carvey's Bush kept desperately trying to fill his speaking time at the debate.

He's just daring McCain to withdraw his support, isn't he? I mean there is plenty of time after the AZ primary on Aug 30 for McCain to do it and make it sting for Trump.

I'm open to the theory Trump doesn't really want to win, but, why doesn't he just quit? He doesn't seem like a guy who's willing to tough it out just out of loyalty to the Republican party. He could make up some bullshit about how he know he could win but his family is being hurt by all the bad media. That would sound fake, but so does this whole campaign.

Maybe he thinks he´s going to be Emperor ... Our last one in Germany basically spent 3/4 of his time either on hunting trips or travelling around the world in his private ocean liner (not for meeting other leaders, for pleasure ;) ). Then this silly First World War business happened and alas, no more emperors ...


This whole primary thing seems like an utterly insane process anyway, no offense. (as does, to some extent, the whole campaign process before the real election).

In light of Obama basically saying what most can acknowledge (even people who´d vote him often seem to hope he will be a mere figure head, no ? ) today i was wondering: Wouldn´t the republican party at some point not also profit from cutting their losses, earning some goodwill and then regroup for the next time around ?


He can´t technically be pulled from the race by the party anymore, can he ? And why would he quit instead of just loose (and claim he was swindled out of the job somehow) ? I mean, this now is the fun part for a guy like him i´d wager.

Yes, and on the day Obama said that Republicans should stop backing Trump. It's absolutely perfect.

I'm starting to wonder if he got the nomination and realized being president is a lot of fucking work and he'd rather not deal with it. Regardless of what happens from here he's going to have more media attention and higher television ratings for anything he does.

Trump can't be this stupid, can he? This is Trump. There has to be an end game that benefits him somehow.

I still have the urge to check that these aren't links to The Onion when they're posted. I think that's a bad sign. :D


I am too, sorta, but I think Occam's Razor tells us that all Trump is doing is continuing the behavior that won him the nomination. All he's gotten from his behavior so far is positive reinforcement (in the form of winning the nomination) and stuff we would normally see as negative response either can't penetrate his ego or echo chamber.

I don't think he changes until it becomes obvious (like a sustained double-digit deficit to Clinton) that he's going to lose, and even then he might just "try harder" and double down.

We can't be too far away from skewed polls talk.

Yeah, when I saw that this morning, the first thing I thought was why would any Democrat comment on Trump unless absolutely necessary? Just let Trump be Trump and he'll tear apart the Republican vote on his own.

I've been waiting for this. In the 2008 and 2012 threads, we had endless talk of bad weightings and Nate Silver bias. Have people finally given up that nonsense?

I still feel bad for Romney because his people fed him this crap and made him sincerely think he was going to win.

I had a coworker who just KNEW Romney was going to win. She could barely contain her gloating all day long about how the pollsters were wrong, and that people on the ground were reporting good things for Romney. And then he lost. It was priceless to watch her. (She's one of those insufferable types who can never stop talking about her political views to anyone within earshot.)

Apparently Roger Stone is laying the groundwork, saying that since Trump led in a poll in FL, if he loses that means the election was stolen.

If anything, this actually makes sense to attract those who have issues with Trump's lack of consistent conservatism.

Why would ANYONE that hoped to have legitimate conservative credentials back either of those worse-than-useless pseudocon frauds?

longtime ally of Paul Manafort, Trump's campaign manager: "Manafort not challenging Trump anymore. Mailing it in. Staff suicidal."

— John Harwood (@JohnJHarwood) August 3, 2016

A Trump campaign source, in reax to this, tells me "it's all true" and "way worse than people realize." https://t.co/nvioNcjMCJ

— Ali Vitali (@alivitali) August 3, 2016

Top republican: @Reince is 'apoplectic' over Trump's refusal to back Ryan. He called several Trump staffers to express his displeasure.

— Katy Tur (@KatyTurNBC) August 3, 2016

More from same source: The next 24 to 72 hours are crucial. There is serious talk about key Republicans coming out hard against Trump.

— Katy Tur (@KatyTurNBC) August 3, 2016

How does attacking a "pseudocon" make oneself any less of a "pseudocon"? Trump's past is more liberal than McCain and Ryan put together.

If you're accused of being a communist, it doesn't seem like a great idea to get all gung-ho backing another commie does it?

If you're, I dunno, accused of being a pedophile, do you immediately rush out to offer your support for a couple of pedophiles?

So then why on Earth would he endorse either of those guys?

If he wins, then their days are surely numbered.
If he loses, then neither of them are his problem.

There's no need for him to lose credibility by backing them.

The current state of the GOP is no better illustrated than calling Paul Ryan, the guy that wrote and is still trying to pass the most conservative budget post WW2, a pseudo-con fraud.

Think that ship already sailed.

That an eager to capitulate fraud like Ryan is still IN the GOP is illustrative of the current state of a party that has done little in recent memory. He's a poster child for why it's time to turn them out, turn them over, or if need be start over entirely.

Conservative voters spoke clearly about the need for change at the top during a long primary season. The uselessness of Ryan's ilk is a major reason Trump was able to win, at least with him there was some reason for hope instead of hopelessness.

Sounds like one of the most obstructionist members of the Tea Party has been primaried from the center, and lost.

Huelskamp loses GOP primary after ideological battle - POLITICO

Ideally, the nomination (and hopefully massive defeat) of Trump was the breaking point for the Tea Party wave.

(and oh, just to counteract the idea above:

Marshall backers hoped their victory in Kansas would send a message to frequent “no” voters among House Republicans: that obstructionism has its limits.

“Every member should remember this the next time they see a Club for Growth or Heritage Action vote alert,” said a national Republican strategist. “Never put their interests before your district or the country, or there will be a price to pay.”

Oh, and a Ryan spokesman fired back

""Neither Speaker Ryan nor anyone on his team has ever asked for Donald Trump's endorsement," campaign spokesman Zack Roday said in an email to reporters Tuesday. "And we are confident in a victory next week regardless."

This is a reporter from the Washington Post who is tasked with covering the Clinton campaign. This is something you'd see from someone working for the campaign, not as a supposed neutral journalist.

What the hell kind of conclusion is that? Those pictures are clearly taken at different times. You proved nothing.

Check out the beginning of this Youtube video. Clearly more people than in that second picture.

Oh and uh......

I am wrong. This is why I should not trust things I see on Twitter. It looks like from the other pictures she filled most of the gymnasium up.

Meg Whitman came out yesterday against him. Says she'll vote for Hillary. I'm sure Trump will have some insult about her looks or something. McCain bashed him for his Khan statements.

At some point you have to imagine things will break. How long are people like Ryan going to allow themselves to be dragged through the mud by him? Rubio and Christie are already laughing stocks. The heads of the party have to realize it's a longshot that Trump wins the Presidency. At some point they have to cut bait and try to save the House and Senate. It feels like if a couple high profile members of the GOP come out strongly against Trump, the rest of the dominos will fall.

Then again maybe they'll just hold their nose and pretend nothing is wrong. Then after the election hope the voting public forgets about this race by the next election.

We also have Trump's spokesperson Katrina Pierson blaming Obama for Khan's death in 2004 when Obama was just a State Senator. And former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski going birther on CNN during a segment.

Trump is going down too fast. Maybe I'm just a worried liberal, but I can see GOP somehow getting Pence on top of ballot and changing the game. Lots of folks I know itching to vote against Hillary.

:popcorn: pass the popcorn please

Maybe his ego won't let him do it. He'd be a quitter in his mind and deserving of ridicule. So he has to become so outrageous as to force people to vote for HRC.

I don't know how his mind works....but doesn't seem to need much more than that to me.

I think he wanted to lose in the primary and claim the GOP screwed him over.

I'll start. We've already had indications (from both primaries, really) that some percentage of people are telling pollsters one thing and voting another as well as instances where the polls were wrong (usually with Sanders) because they missed demographics that came out strongly to vote.

I would not be surprised if there's a meaningful percentage of Trump voters who won't admit to a pollster they're going to vote for him. Maybe worth 1-2%?

To be clear, I'm not going crazy and getting on the unskewed polls bus. I'm just saying there's some potential for models to show Trump slightly under where he should be.

Also, there's still 100 days to go. Who the fuck knows what's going to happen.


I remember a time when Paul Ryan was one of the guys on the outer fringe of the GOP, tossing economic ideas into the mix that made GOP leadership cringe.


At this point, it's probably too late to make this happen, functionally. The following two scenarios are more likely (not that they're very likely, just more likely):

1. Trump ends up signaling that he'll resign immediately after inauguration, and basically starts campaigning for Pence. It would be weird, yes, and they'd probably lose as a result, but what about this campaign season hasn't been weird?

2. By Labor Day a critical mass of polls show Clinton with a solid double-digit lead and a base that's been energized by watching (in horror) the Trump Show all summer. Key Republicans (elected, pundits, etc...) who can't bring themselves to vote Clinton decide to give Johnson a look and throw their weight behind him. You end up with something that looks like the 1992 result.

I'm not sure what will happen in November, but it's likely that Trump will underperform his polling because he has literally no infrastructure at this point. We've never seen a modern campaign without so much as field staff in every state. He isn't working on GOTV efforts at all.

Meanwhile Hillary has Obama's great data and GOTV operation and has been building on that foundation.

And to Jon's point, the majority of GOP voters may think the party isn't pure enough, but the majority of the country thinks they have gone too far. There are no national election wins to the right of Paul Ryan.

So speaking of weird shit, how about a conspiracy of epic proportions? What if we find out that Hillary and Trump were in cahoots the whole time, then what?

We've never seen a campaign, post-convention, in actual danger of imploding: Mass Defections Expected as Donald Trump’s Campaign Implodes | Vanity Fair

Usually by this point there's sufficient momentum that that kind of existential crisis has passed.

This has always seemed too far-fetched to be true. To be true, they'd have had to make these plans last summer, when Trump's victory was a pipe dream at best. Would Clinton risk the fallout from people finding out about this on a very, very small change that Trump would win the nomination? Clinton may be a lot of things, but she's plenty calculating when it comes to winning.

There is no way that is possible. I think a much more likely situation is that Trump is in the early stages of dementia. My mother turned into a combative person as dementia started taking hold of her. She started regularly picking fights with her friends and my father. I wouldn't be surprised to find out a few years from now that Trump is suffering from dementia too. I'm not being flippant at all. Trump's behavior really reminds me of what happened to her.

I know, but since we're all just spit-ballin', I figured I'd chime in with my own what-if's. :)

Not only will be she vote for Clinton, but she plans on campaigning for her among her GOP friends and raising money for her. That, especially the latter two thing is pretty big. Trump already is losing the money raising race; this is only going to make it harder.

Jonathan Swan on Twitter: "Just got off the phone with a top Trump donor and fundraiser. At wit's end. Expletive after expletive. Can't fathom what Trump is doing."


"I would break his f---ing thumbs if I could" - top Trump donor/fundraiser to me just now.

why let facts get in the way of a good Obama jab? I really really hope that for the next general election they get rid of these useless spokesmen/women on both sides-and just let someone official from the campaign like a campaign manager or press secretary talk to the press if the candidate/VP is not available.

It's getting harder by the day to tell which headlines are real.

Katrina Pierson: Obama likely caused Khan's death (before he was elected)
For Trump, a new ‘rigged’ system: The election itself
Report: Trump Kept Asking During Foreign Policy Briefing Why He Can’t Just Use Nukes
Trump Campaign Ponders Going Negative
Trump blasts New York Times: ‘They don’t write good’
Trump Pauses Washington Post Interview Five Times to Watch TV
Donald Trump isn't crazy