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Donald Trump Tag

This one surprised me. I've grown accustomed to most cultural venues mocking anything Republican or right-leaning (though it could be argued Trump is neither). But a recent 'Saturday Night Live' sketch called "Black Jeopardy" was surprisingly kind in its portrayal of what appears to be a...

In August, the GOP and PACs associated with it, started preparing ads that target Hillary in case Donald Trump couldn't make a comeback. Now that it's almost certain we will end up with Hillary, the GOP knows the importance of holding the Senate and the House has only grown stronger. With two weeks left, the candidates have unleashed these ads across the country, mirroring their opponents as too similar to Hillary and promise to keep her in check in the White House.

Could Donald Trump pull a Brexit, confounding elite opinion by winning the election with votes that the polls didn't pick up? On today's Morning Joe, Joe Scarborough and Chris Cillizza of the Washington Post agreed it could happen. Scarborough said that people are still whispering to him as they leave the room that they're voting for Tump, but are embarrassed to tell pollsters given the coverage of his comments about women, etc. There are limits to the phenomenon: in Cillizza and Scarborough's view, the hidden Trump vote is unlikely to exceed 1.5%. But if Trump can continue to tighten the race in these two final weeks . . . it could be a very interesting election night.

There is a possibility that Texas, a state typically owned by Republicans, could turn blue next month since Donald Trump only leads Hillary Clinton by three points. However, Clinton only leads Trump by three points in Florida. From CBS News:
The poll numbers show voters’ frustration about the dialogue in the race – and what may amount to a wasted opportunity for both. Sixty-nine percent feel Donald Trump is talking about things that he, himself cares about, while fewer, 46 percent say he’s talking about issues they care about. Clinton has much the same gap.

This should surprise no one. These are probably the same people who in college demanded intellectual safe spaces and trigger warnings. We have seen it at Twitter, where conservative accounts seem to be targeted, and also at Facebook, where there were allegations of the same. The Wall Street Journal reports, Facebook Employees Pushed to Remove Trump’s Posts as Hate Speech:

After the third debate, much ado was being made about Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton being seated close to each other at the Alfred E. Smith dinner, separated only by a holy man and a gulf of political differences. It seems that the the seating arrangement may have been a good idea.

On last evening's Hardball, when Trump surrogate Steve Cortes said that voters across America don't care about Donald Trump's refusal to blindly accept the election outcome, Chris Matthews shut him down. After calling Cortes an "elitist," Matthews declared "this isn't going to work," cut Cortes off, and moved to reliable liberal Ruth Marcus of the Washington Post. By coincidence, in this morning's Quick Hits, this Insurrectionist wrote "the liberal echo chamber has contracted a bad case of the vapors over Trump's statement, but hard to believe many actual voters out in America give much of a darn." Guess elitist minds think alike ;-)

Helmut Norpoth, a professor at Stony Brook University on Long Island, has developed a model for predicting elections which, when applied, has correctly predicted every presidential election back to 1912 with one exception - the 1960 election. He has been predicting a Trump win for months and he's standing by his forecast. Syracuse.com reports:
SUNY professor says Trump win at least 87 percent certain; other polls 'bunk' A SUNY professor continues to project Donald Trump as the likely winner of this year's election and he's critiquing polls that predict the opposite in a new opinion piece.

Donald Trump said at the debate that he would consider whether to accept the election results at a later date. The media and Democrats (but I repeat myself) are pretending to be apoplectic, as if Trump had violated a core principle of our democracy that no election result could be contested. The NY Times hyperventilated, Donald Trump’s Contempt for Democracy, while WaPo called it Trump’s breathtaking repudiation of American democracy. In fact, Trump "threatens" to do only what Democrats have done in the past when it comes to disputed elections:

That was ugly! Today's Morning Joe offered a prime example of the notion that the bitterest political fights are the ones between members of the same party. Joe Scarborough and Bill Kristol got into a nasty spat over Kristol's accusation that in the early days of the campaign, Morning Joe had been supportive of Donald Trump, and by extension bears some responsibility for his rise. An angry Scarborough shot back "you lied!" and laid out the case that he had declared early on that he wouldn't vote for Trump, had analogized his call for a Muslim ban to Germany circa 1933, and said that Trump's reluctance to reject David Duke's endorsement was disqualifying.

Every couple of weeks, Joe Scarborough rebuilds lost conservative street cred by going on a good rant against liberals and the MSM. He did so in spades on today's Morning Joe, comprehensively crushing libs for their hypocrisy in "freaking out" over Trump's wait-and-see answer at last night's debate to the question of whether he'd accept the results of the election. Excerpts: "the media got something they can absolutely freak out about and claim that he is an agent of Vladimir Putin and destroying democracy in America and it's just another example of the media having to find a little phrase and freak out when as a Republican I have listened to Democrats talk about the only two times we won the White House in like 800 years that we stole both elections . . . hell, even Bernie Sanders supporters just six months ago were saying that Hillary Clinton was rigging the election."

I don't have a clear "who won" reaction. Trump was more subdued than usual for the first part of the debate, and he seemed to do well. He missed a huge point on the Heller decision -- which Hillary absolutely falsely described as an issue of protecting toddlers. As things heated up, Trump again scored points, particularly on the Clinton foundation and Hillary making a mess of the world. He also did well on immigration. BUT, as usual, Trump gave the media something to talk about that likely hurts him -- declining to say whether or not he would accept the outcome of the election. In a prior debate he said he would, but now no? It's all the media is going to want to talk about.

Welcome to our live coverage of the third and final Hillary v. Trump showdown. Hosted by the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, the debate will begin at 9:00 PM EST. According to The Daily Beast, "Wednesday’s program will include six segments, each 15 minutes long, in which the candidates will be asked about a myriad of topics including debt, immigration, the economy, Supreme Court appointments, and the candidates’ fitness to be president." Fox News' Chris Wallace will moderate tonight's debate.

As we approach the final presidential debate later tonight, the polling looks grim for Donald Trump. In a sense, Trump never really recovered from his post Democratic convention fall, when his public feud with the Khan family wasted what had been a Trump rally after the Republican convention. There was a rebound for a couple of weeks, as Trump maintained uncharacteristic composure and relative silence as Hillary's email and other scandals took a toll. But all of that went down the tubes as Trump took the bait on the "fat shaming" allegation after the first debate. Does ANYONE even remember the woman's name at this point? She was just a Clinton prop used to set up what was to come, the NBC tape of comments about groping women and the rollout of a series of women accusing Trump of groping them in some form or another.

In recent days, a Facebook page appeared called "Liberty United Against Trump" which was meant to reflect the sentiments of students at Liberty University who had turned on their school's president and his endorsement of Donald Trump. Liberal media outlets picked up the story and ran. It was covered at outlets like the Huffington Post and the Washington Post:
Liberty University students protest association with Trump Students at Virginia’s Liberty University have issued a statement against Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump as young conservatives at some colleges across the country reconsider support for his campaign.