Trump Isn't Just Losing Because Of His Policies-- His Corrupt Nature And Personal Essence Make Women Want To Puke

The Pam Bondi/Trumpanzee case isn't going away. It's classic Trump. As Paul Waldman put it in yesterday's Washington Post, "Bondi’s office had received multiple complaints from Floridians who said they were cheated by Trump University; while they were looking into it and considering whether to join a lawsuit over Trump University filed by the attorney general of New York State, Bondi called Trump and asked him for a $25,000 donation; shortly after getting the check, Bondi’s office dropped the inquiry." Clearly, Bondi should not be Attorney General, not even of Florida, and should certainly be in prison. What about Trump? He insists she's "upstanding" but Trump himself certainly isn't; he has a pattern of behavior that this episode typifies, a pattern going all the way back to when he was a crooked young real estate developer, emulating his crooked, racist father and bulldozing the rules and getting away with everything from racial discrimination to Mafia funny business. But Waldman's point yesterday was that we don't know anything much about the Bondi scandal because the media has just let it die.

[T]here was only one mention of this story on any of the five Sunday shows, when John Dickerson asked Chris Christie about it on Face the Nation (Christie took great umbrage: “I can’t believe, John, that anyone would insult Pam Bondi that way”). And the comparison with stories about Hillary Clinton’s emails or the Clinton Foundation is extremely instructive. Whenever we get some new development in any of those Clinton stories, you see blanket coverage-- every cable network, every network news program, every newspaper investigates it at length. And even when the new information serves to exonerate Clinton rather than implicate her in wrongdoing, the coverage still emphasizes that the whole thing just “raises questions” about her integrity.

...[T]he truth is that you’d have to work incredibly hard to find a politician who has the kind of history of corruption, double-dealing, and fraud that Donald Trump has. The number of stories which could potentially deserve hundreds and hundreds of articles is absolutely staggering. Here’s a partial list:

• Trump’s casino bankruptcies, which left investors holding the bag while he skedaddled with their money

• Trump’s habit of refusing to pay contractors who had done work for him, many of whom are struggling small businesses

• Trump University, which includes not only the people who got scammed and the Florida investigation, but also a similar story from Texas where the investigation into Trump U was quashed.

• The Trump Institute, another get-rich-quick scheme in which Trump allowed a couple of grifters to use his name to bilk people out of their money

• The Trump Network, a multi-level marketing venture (a.k.a. pyramid scheme) that involved customers mailing in a urine sample which would be analyzed to produce for them a specially formulated package of multivitamins

• Trump Model Management, which reportedly had foreign models lie to customs officials and work in the U.S. illegally, and kept them in squalid conditions while they earned almost nothing for the work they did

• Trump’s employment of foreign guest workers at his resorts, which involves a claim that he can’t find Americans to do the work

• Trump’s use of hundreds of undocumented workers from Poland in the 1980s, who were paid a pittance for their illegal work

• Trump’s history of being charged with housing discrimination

• Trump’s connections to mafia figures involved in New York construction

• The time Trump paid the Federal Trade Commission $750,000 over charges that he violated anti-trust laws when trying to take over a rival casino company

• The fact that Trump is now being advised by Roger Ailes, who was forced out as Fox News chief when dozens of women came forward to charge him with sexual harassment. According to the allegations, Ailes’s behavior was positively monstrous; as just one indicator, his abusive and predatory actions toward women were so well-known and so loathsome that in 1968 the morally upstanding folks in the Nixon administration refused to allow him to work there despite his key role in getting Nixon elected.

And that last one is happening right now. To repeat, the point is not that these stories have never been covered, because they have. The point is that they get covered briefly, then everyone in the media moves on. If any of these kinds of stories involved Clinton, news organizations would rush to assign multiple reporters to them, those reporters would start asking questions, and we’d learn more about all of them.

That’s important, because we may have reached a point where the frames around the candidates are locked in: Trump is supposedly the crazy/bigoted one, and Clinton is supposedly the corrupt one. Once we decide that those are the appropriate lenses through which the two candidates are to be viewed, it shapes the decisions the media make every day about which stories are important to pursue.

And it means that to a great extent, for all the controversy he has caused and all the unflattering stories in the press about him, Trump is still being let off the hook.

When Kellyanne saw the recent polls of Trump losing Pennsylvania decisively, she immediately said Trump can win the presidency without Pennsylvania. But he can't. He's looking more and more like a candidate who's going to win big among racist males, which is enough for victories in the more backward southern states, and not much else. Ginning up deranged Clinton-hatred might bring in a few more low-info voters that could help in a handful of non-Confederate states. But educated suburban voters-- especially women-- they're not even listening to his message any longer. They've written off the messenger. To the Toronto Star it looks like "simple math... is leading Donald Trump toward a devastating Pennsylvania defeat," primarily because he's "getting trounced in the prosperous suburban communities."

Polls show that educated white women, in particular, appear to be rejecting Trump in favour of the educated white woman running against him.

For all the talk of Trump’s toxicity with racial minorities, it is easy to forget that he is poisonous to much of the white population, too. In fact, because he has alienated white women and white people with college degrees, he is actually doing worse with whites than Mitt Romney did in 2012.

His issues are most acute in manicured oases like Montgomery County’s affluent Blue Bell, 40 minutes north of Philadelphia. A summer day spent talking to 37 women at McCaffrey’s Food Market, a store offering artisan pizza and custom cakes, corroborated the basic finding of data from Pennsylvania to Virginia to Colorado: Trump is staring at a suburban whupping.

...Trump is badly lagging every previous Republican nominee with educated white women. Among white women with a college degree, Romney earned 52 per cent to Obama’s 46 per cent in 2012. Democrat Hillary Clinton, the first female nominee of a major party, is trouncing Trump 58 per cent to 38 per cent, ABC/Washington Post polling suggests.

No Republican has won Pennsylvania since 1988. Trump, behind in more diverse states, needs it desperately. He is trailing by seven percentage points. The four “collar counties” around Philadelphia-- Montgomery, Bucks, Chester and Delaware-- are a large part of the reason why.

...The counties have been trending toward the Democrats for 25 years. Republican voters there, [director of the Center for Politics and Public Affairs at Franklin and Marshall College Terry] Madonna said, tend to mix fiscal conservatism with liberal positions on issues like gun control, abortion rights and climate change. Trump has staked out right-wing stances on all three.

Educated women overwhelmingly-- including Republican women and even ones who agree with him on issues-- "find his personality intolerable... Their chief concern about Trump was not policy. They objected most strongly to his behaviour, to his attitudes toward women, and to his disparagement of Muslims, Hispanics and African-Americans. "I think Trump is disgusting and awful and everything about him makes me sick,” said Stefani Bohm, 43, a psychotherapist... Miranda Sarwer, 44, who works in the pharmaceutical industry: “He’s a bigot, he’s a racist.”

...“He’s very arrogant, he doesn’t understand foreign policy, and he doesn’t understand this country,” said Maria Maman, 51, an undecided self-employed independent who usually votes Republican. “He’s a horrible guy. He’s just like a bigot, and so nasty,” said a 63-year-old retired school principal, Joanne, a Republican supporting Clinton who declined to give her last name. “No experience, no empathy, no policies.”

Amazing that this isn't a contest between people who identify as Democrats versus people who identify as Republicans as much as it is between people with two-digit IQs and people with three-digit IQs. Does that mean I'm saying only a moron can be backing Trump? Certain overlays notwithstanding, pretty much.