* Josh Marshall speculates.
My real interest is in a different question: where’s the money?
I got onto thinking about this when I saw John McQuaid’s short piece in Forbes. As McQuaid notes, this is the gaping hole, the burning question at the center of Trump’s campaign. Reports suggest that Trump has been unwilling to undergo the ego effacement of calling high dollar Republican donors and asking for money. His campaign has virtually no money in the bank ($2.4m at last count)…
Trump may be stingy. He may be saying that the RNC should take responsibility for fundraising, which is something it’s clearly not capable of doing. (The RNC has massive fundraising capacity but it can’t simply take on singlehanded what the candidate was expected to raise.) But as big a disaster as Trump’s campaign is at the moment he stands a real shot at being the next president of the United States. It is simply not credible that he is standing on principle in not giving his campaign any more money at such a critical moment when his bid is being so deeply damaged.
The only credible answer is that it is difficult or perhaps even impossible for him to produce these comparatively small sums. If that’s true, his claim to be worth billions of dollars must either be a pure sham and a fraud or some artful concoction of extreme leverage and accounting gimmickry, which makes it impossible to come up with actual cash.
* As Martin wrote earlier today, Corey Lewandowski got the “You’re fired” treatment from his boss. Here is how the director of Trump’s New York campaign responded on twitter:
* The folks at Moody’s Analytics took a look at Trump’s economic proposals. Surprise…surprise, it’s not a pretty picture.
Economists reviewed Trump’s proposed tax cuts for individuals and businesses, his calls to deport undocumented immigrants and build a southern border wall, and his threats to impose large tariffs on goods imported from China and Mexico.
The analysis found that if all of Trump’s proposals were implemented, “the economy suffers a lengthy recession and is smaller at the end of his four-year term than when he took office.”
“The upshot of Mr. Trump’s economic policy positions under almost any scenario is that the U.S. economy will be more isolated and diminished,” the report reads.
The economists drew four basic conclusions about the impact of Trump’s plans: a less global economy, larger government debt, a weaker economy with higher unemployment, and benefits mostly for high-income Americans.
* Today the majority on the Supreme Court sided with law enforcement on an illegal stop-and-search case. Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote a dissent that demonstrates precisely why it is important to have people with diverse backgrounds on the court.
By legitimizing the conduct that produces this double consciousness, this case tells everyone, white and black, guilty and innocent, that an officer can verify your legal status at any time. It says that your body is subject to invasion while courts excuse the violation of your rights. It implies that you are not a citizen of a democracy but the subject of a carceral state, just waiting to be cataloged.
We must not pretend that the countless people who are routinely targeted by police are “isolated.” They are the canaries in the coal mine whose deaths, civil and literal, warn us that no one can breathe in this atmosphere. They are the ones who recognize that unlawful police stops corrode all our civil liberties and threaten all our lives. Until their voices matter too, our justice system will continue to be anything but.
I dissent.
* Finally, if someone put me in charge of the universe, I’d make every Trump supporter go through this process.
