Friday, August 19, 2016
Full Replay/Transcript: Donald Trump Gives First Campaign Speech Since Hiring Bannon & Conway
Tuesday, July 19, 2016
***2016 GOP Convention LiveWire*** Trump Officially Clinches GOP Nomination
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by BREITBART NEWS19 Jul 20161,914
Welcome to Breitbart News’s live updates of Tuesday’s evening session of the 2016 Republican National Convention. Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) will place Donald Trump’s name into nomination. Ted Cruz’s allies may try to disrupt the convention–and get their fair share of publicity–once again.
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***LISTEN TO/WATCH BREITBART NEWS’S LIVE COVERAGE OF THE REPUBLICAN NATIONAL CONVENTION HERE.*** Call in: 713-955-0782.
VIDEO: TRUMP TAKES ON GOP OVER 'RIGGED' SYSTEM
Tonight’s theme is “Make America Work Again,” and featured speakers will include UFC President Dana White, former Attorney General Michael Mukasey, Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI), the NRA’s Chris Cox, LPGA golfer Natalie Gulbis, Dr. Ben Carson, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, actress Kimberlin Brown, Donald Trump Jr., and Tiffany Trump. House Majority Leader Paul Ryan (R-WI), Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) will also speak. View the full convention schedule here.
All times eastern.
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7:45: Trump will address the convention via satellite later tonight:
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7:35:
7:32: Never Trump agitators not trying to pull shenanigans on the floor to get attention.
7:25:
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It’s official. Donald J. Trump Wins GOP Presidential Nomination.
7:11: Donald Trump Jr. vows that his dad will put New York in play in the general election. He says his it is his honor to put Trump over the top with 89 of the state’s delegates. He says his dad gave average Americans a voice this election cycle.
“Congratulations Dad! We love you,” he says.
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7:02: New York passes so the Empire State can put Trump over the top.
6:59: Lo and behold, Gov. Susana Martinez helps New Mexico cast its 24 votes for Donald Trump.
6:47: Michigan passes so that New York can put Trump over the top.
6:45: Trump getting close to the 1,237 delegates need to clinch nomination. He’s over 800 after Maryland.
6:28: Florida delegate booed when he says Florida is the state that gave LeBron James his first two champions. All 99 of the state’s votes to Trump.
6:25: Crowd Boos Colorado delegation/attention-seekers:
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6:22: Ecstatic California Delegation (172 delegates for Trump!):
6:12: Roll call of the states has begun.
6:05: Outside the convention halls:
From Andy Badolato:
Iraq war diplomatic security style tail gunners, AKA Trunk Monkeys with M4 battle rifle variants. They look like Federal or local law enforcement CAT (counter assault team) teams.
6:03: Henry McMaster of South Carolina says he was the first elected official in the country to endorse Trump. He says it was lonely for a bit but “no more.” He says the “sleeping giant of the American spirit has been awakened.” He says Trump is a remarkable man of “uncommon strength, uncommon determination, accomplishment, and vision.” McMaster says “there’s something happening here. What it is precisely here. We are going to make America great again with Donald Trump. Thank you and God bless you.”
5:59: Rep. Chris Collins (R-NY) thanks Sessions for standing with him in support of Trump. He says Western New York has been devastated by “unfair trade deals” that have allowed Mexico and China to “steal our jobs.” He says we have been losing under Barack Obama. Collins says the federal government is trampling on our rights while our country has no borders. “Enough is enough,” he says. “It’s time to take back our country. The great United States of America.” He says Trump is not just a candidate but a “movement.”
5:58: Sessions says it is his distinct honor and great pleasure to nominate Donald Trump for the office of the presidency of the United States of America.
5:53: Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) says Americans love our country “like no other people on earth. But we have gotten off course. And the American people know it. Our political system is not working.” He says good Americans want the political games to end. Sessions slams Obama for blaming the police while crime is rising. He blasts the political, corporate, and media establishments for being politically correct. He says Trump was not intimidated and “he would not be silenced. He spoke the truth. He gave voice to the people’s concerns.” He mentions Trump’s opposition to bad trade deals and support for law and order and police officers. Sessions says voters reward Trump’s courage. He says Trump is positive by nature and has “tremendous energy and strength.” He calls trump a “warrior” and “winner” who loves his country and is determined to see it become a “winner” again. He says he believes Trump is the singular leader who can get the country back on track.
5:50: House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) says it’s an honor to be at the convention. He is going over procedural rules.
5:45: Disgusting scene outside the convention:
5:43: RNC Chair Reince Priebus calls the convention back to order.
5:35: Big Ratings for First Night of GOP convention:
5:30: When the GOP convention resumes, Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) will put Donald Trump’s name into nomination. Rep. Chris Collins (R-NY) and South Carolina Lieutenant Governor Henry McMaster will give seconding speeches.
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Tuesday, June 7, 2016
Daily Mail: ‘Clinton Cash’ a ‘Blistering Indictment’ of How the Clintons Got Rich from Corruption
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'Follow the money': Movie exposing secrets of how Clintons became rich after quitting the White House to be shown on eve of Hillary getting her party's nomination
By Nikki Schwab, U.s. Political Reporter For Dailymail.com17:32 20 May 2016, updated 17:45 20 May 2016
Clinton Cash' documentary is being screened at CannesProducers plan to air the blistering indictment on the eve of the Democratic National Convention - when she will be installed as candidateBased on the book by the same name, the film links money given to Bill Clinton for paid speeches to decisions Hillary Clinton made at StateIt also suggests all those contributions to the Clinton Foundation weren't pure altruism They and were meant to get the Clintons to overlook human rights violations by unsavory world leaders, movie suggests
Audiences in Cannes are getting a taste of the searing new documentary 'Clinton Cash,' which offers a harsh indictment of the paid speeches, personal favors, and personal enrichment that have accompanied Bill and Hillary Clinton through their decades in politics.
And if the movie-maker's wishes come true, so will Americans - the night before Clinton is formally named her party's White House candidate
The hour-long movie attempts to follow the money that has flowed toward Bill and Hillary Clinton since the former president left the White House, and suggests that much of it came from a cast of companies and countries seeking favorable treatment from the powerful pair.
Among the more damaging revelations in the film: out of 13 speeches ex-president Bill Clinton gave that earned more than $500,000 on the speaking circuit, 11 of them were during his wife's reign as secretary of state.
The film also probes the $1.4 million Bill Clinton got from a Nigerian newspaper to deliver two speeches in 2011 and 212, notwithstanding Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan's human rights record.
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'Clinton Cash' author Peter Schweizer narrates the new hour-long documentary of the same name, which explores foreign influence on Hillary Clinton at the State Department through donations
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The New York Times called 'Clinton Cash' 'the most anticipated and feared book' of the presidential election cycle - and the movie will only make it bigger
It also also lays out unsavory dealings in South Sudan, the Democratic of the Congo, and Haiti, as it constructs at thesis that regimes and companies ingratiated themselves with the Clintons through charitable contributions to the Clinton Foundation and by offering hefty speaking fees to the Clintons.
Then it looks at who among the Clintons' employers had something to gain, like TD Bank, a company that backed the Keystone XL pipeline and payed $2 million for Bill Clinton speeches.
The film doesn't present hard evidence of an illegal quid pro quo, but it lays out a torrent of information for viewers to consider, and throws in images of blood-stained cash to drive the point home.
As if on cue, Hillary Clinton released a personal financial disclosure form this week that reveals she got $5 million in royalties from her 2014 book and $1.5 million in speaking fees in 2015 as she was gearing up to run for president.
Based on the book by Hoover Institution fellow Peter Schweizer, the film connects the dots between donations to the Clinton Foundation or given to the ex-president for paid speeches and decisions Hillary Clinton made while being secretary of state.
'Cronyism and self-enrichment are a bipartisan affair, and Hillary and Bill Clinton have perfected them on a global scale,' Schweizer says in the film.
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Peter Schweizer's book and documentary links donations coming into the Clinton Foundation, along with money given to Bill Clinton for paid speeches, into policy moves Hillary Clinton made at the State Department
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The film is being shopped around at Cannes for a distributor, while the creators are looking toward a television deal too.
The plan is to air the documentary the night before this summer's Democratic National convention – at precisely the time Hillary will be trying to recover from persistent attacks by rival Bernie Sanders that she is beholden to corporate interests.
The film follows the same storylines as Schweizer's 'Clinton Cash' book, which was released right as Hillary Clinton was getting on the campaign trail last year.
At the time Republicans like Sen. Rand Paul, who was also seeking the highest office, called it 'big news' that will 'shock people.'
The New York Times said it was 'proving to be the most anticipated and feared book' of the presidential cycle thus far.
Schweizer narrates the hour-long documentary and says his investigation of the Clintons basically followed what he called the 'oldest adage in American politics.'
'Follow the money,' he noted.
While the Clintons were 'dead broke' upon leaving the White House, as Hillary Clinton once said, the couple brought in at least $136.5 million between 2001 and 2012.
Speaking fees helped pay the bills, but what was notable, Schweizer pointed out, was that while Bill Clinton had been out of office for nearly a decade, all of the sudden his speaking fees skyrocketed.
The issue that's most familiar to Americans is that of the Keystone XL Pipeline, which Hillary Clinton signed off on after one of the pipeline's major stakeholders paid her husband $2 million for speeches
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The documentary Clinton Cash connects the dots between Hillary Clinton's 'shocking' approval of the Keystone XL Pipeline and money given to her husband by a major stakeholder to speak
The reason? Hillary Clinton was just announced as President-elect Barack Obama's secretary of state.
The author noted that of the 13 speeches in his career that fetched the ex-president more than $500,000, 11 of them were during his wife's reign as secretary of state.
Politifact, for the record, rated this accounting as true.
From there, Schweizer looked at who was giving money to Bill Clinton, either for paid speeches or to the Clinton Foundation, and then whether those donors ever got anything in return from Hillary Clinton's State Department.
The example that's likely the most familiar to Americans revolves around the Keystone XL Pipeline project.
TD Bank, which had a stake in the pipeline project going through, had never sponsored a Bill Clinton speech before, but then suddenly moved $2 million his way.
At the same time, Schweizer pointed out, the State Department had to approve the project.
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The documentary also looks at some of the unsavory allies the Clintons have made around the globe, in part because those people are enriching the Clinton Foundation
Hillary Clinton soon decided to support the pipeline delaying the Obama's rejection of it.
'It was shocking,' Schweizer noted in the film. 'Organizations like Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth were stunned, they wanted investigations, but everybody was mystified.'
'Nobody could understand why Hillary Clinton would sign off on this deal, particularly when she had been in favor of dealing with climate change and her boss, Barack Obama, by all indications, seemed to be opposed to this deal as well,' the writer added.
In another instance, Bill Clinton is paid $750,000 by the Swedish telecom company Ericsson, which was in trouble by the U.S. for selling equipment to Iran.
A week later, the documentary points out, the State Department ruled that Ericsson and other companies were off the hook and could provide oversight to themselves.
Beyond those cases, Clinton Cash explores some of the Clintons unsavory alliances in Africa, especially in countries where the leaders are known for civil rights abuses and corruption.
It also details the Clintons dealings in Haiti after the country's disastrous 2010 earthquake, calling what occurred 'disaster capitalism.'
READ MORE
www.politifact.c...First look at explosive Hillary documentary, ¿Clinton Cash¿ | New York Post
Tuesday, May 10, 2016
Trump Won with the Working Class Voters the GOP Forgot
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by JOHN HAYWARD10 May 20161,454
Where did all the Trump voters come from, and where did the Cruz evangelicals go? One of the great mysteries of the 2016 primary is how so many assessments of the Republican electorate turned out to be wrong. The primary electorate that gave us Donald Trump as the presumptive nominee was dramatically different from the one that chose Mitt Romney in 2012.
Jeb Bush thought there was a huge, quiescent moderate majority nostalgic for a return to the Bush era, or looking for a doggedly inoffensive candidate like himself, blessed with endorsements from all the right people and a campaign war chest so huge it was supposed to scare other candidates out of the race. Senator Rand Paul thought the GOP’s libertarian moment had arrived, driven by young voters who were deeply concerned about privacy issues in the online era and weary of interventionist for Bush and Obama alike. Senator Marco Rubio thought he had crossover appeal to every faction of the Republican Party and so much electability that GOP voters would be crazy to turn him down. Governors like Rick Perry and Scott Walker thought voters in other states would be impressed by their successful resumes.
Most baffling was the miscalculation of Senator Ted Cruz, who was counting on a Southern conservative and evangelical firewall that should have made him an early front-runner. Cruz had every reason to think those voters were out there and every reason to suppose they would be unwilling to support Donald Trump, on both moral and policy grounds.
Instead, Trump cleaned up with evangelicals, and his eventual victory in the primary was heralded by many observers as a death knell for “movement conservatism.” At the very least, we were told, conservatives were in such disarray that they couldn’t unite around a candidate who could stop Trump, even though well over half the party didn’t want him as the nominee.
The alternative theory of Trump’s primary victory is that he’s bringing new voters into the Republican primaries, and it’s clearly not just a few saboteurs looking to set Hillary Clinton up with her preferred GOP opponent.
NBC News is the latest outlet to run a story on Trump bringing new voters into the GOP fold, noting that the 2016 Florida primary saw tens of thousands more votes cast than Mitt Romney’s take in the 2012 general election, and the lion’s share of the new votes went to Trump. In Establishment-friendly Northeastern races, Ohio Governor John Kasich pulled vote totals comparable to Romney’s primary vote in 2012, but Trump’s new voters swamped him.
Mitt Romney, accompanied by Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fl at the University of Miami, Wednesday, Oct. 31, 2012, in Coral Gables, Fla.
Sean Trende at RealClearPolitics suggested in January that neglected white working-class voters were coming back to the GOP after taking a pass on Mitt Romney in 2012. Trende described them as “mostly lower-income, blue-collar voters who lived in areas that had also voted for Ross Perot,” who had been turned off by “Mitt Romney’s wealth and upper-class demeanor.”
As Trende noted, President Obama’s re-election campaign shrewdly exploited this sense of distance, through such measures as an Ohio ad blitz that rather blatantly asserted Romney was “not one of us,” while Obama’s friends in the media slammed Romney as “a car-elevator-owning businessman who made statements such as ‘I like being able to fire people.’” (Notice how the same media is now serenely untroubled by the fabulous wealth and opulent lifestyle of Hillary Clinton, who somehow raked in multi-millions without any positive economic activity or job creation whatsoever, as detailed in “Clinton Cash.”)
“Missing voter” theories abound after big elections, because so much of the eligible American electorate consistently chooses not to vote. With voter participation well under 60%, even in big presidential elections, the “missing electorate” is big enough to be a theoretical game-changer in virtually every race. It’s arresting when a missing electorate returns, as Trende suggests is happening with Trump.
Along the way, he makes the point that Ted Cruz was fundamentally wrong about who the missing voters were, as he frequently quoted analysts who misunderstood what Trende was saying in his 2012 election post-mortem.
They weren’t evangelicals miffed that Mitt Romney was a Mormon, or a moderate. The missing voters weren’t mainly conservative Christians at all, since Trende notes that that cohort has always maintained a level of voter participation far above the national average. Many of the missing voters disengaged from politics long before 2012, and it’s mostly because they didn’t think either party had anything to offer them.
The key to understanding this theory is to remember that Ross Perot brought a lot of disengaged working-class people into politics too, and besides his famous disdain for deficit spending, the big planks in his platform were opposition to illegal immigration and criticism of big trade deals, particularly the North American Free Trade Agreement, which both Bill Clinton and George H. W. Bush supported. In the second presidential debate in 1992, Perot famously spoke of “a giant sucking sound going south” to describe the effect NAFTA would have when American jobs went to Mexico.
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Ross Perot speaks at the “No To This NAFTA” rally on Saturday, Sept. 18, 1993 on the steps of the state Capitol in Lansing, MI. (AP Photo/Lennox McLendon)
It’s no surprise that Donald Trump is talking about NAFTA too, and getting a huge response at his campaign rallies, even as analysts on the Left and Right scratch their heads and wonder why he’s talking about a “settled issue” from two decades ago after Bill Clinton signed it into law.
To the missing voters, NAFTA has never been a settled issue, or a forgotten one. They’re still hurting from the shift of jobs and opportunities out of the country. They were told not to worry about it, because new high-tech jobs with better pay and working conditions would replace the “jobs Americans just won’t do”… and then thosejobs got sent overseas as well, or filled with H1-B visa workers.
There is a line of argument from free trade enthusiasts that insists such policies are good for the country overall. We’re told that controlling legal immigration, or even cracking down on illegal immigration could significantly damage the U.S. economy. These grand strategies overlook the fact that the people who have been getting clobbered for decades to provide this higher level of national prosperity are tired of being the designated losers. On both the Left and Right, there is anger from people who believe they have been exploited to make others wealthy. That’s the fundamental argument of liberal ideology, but Republican leaders really should have noticed when a substantial number of theirtraditional constituents began feeling that way.
These disaffected working-class people are especially weary of master plans that deliberately injure Americans for the benefit of big U.S. investors and foreign interests. That’s why a willingness to speak frankly about immigration was such a powerful signal to the missing voters, a sign that Trump was aware of them, in a way that few other Republicans were.
Trump supporters at a Reno, Nevada, rally (AP Photo/Lance Iversen)
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The core element of any fair deal for neglected American workers is the acknowledgement that America exists, and its government understands that it has a unique responsibility to American citizens. There is nothing inherently hostile or xenophobic about that understanding. The put-upon citizens of the most open and generous country in the world are tired of being insulted as selfish and hateful for insisting our national priority should be our nation.
For decades now, our central government has asserted the wisdom and moral stature to pick “winners and losers.” Those assertions are especially loud from Barack Obama, but he wasn’t the first to make them. The people who feel they’ve been picked as losers, for generations, are tired of it.
Trende talked about the shifting “priorities” of these voters, which could go a long way toward explaining why Cruz didn’t get the support he was looking for in the South. It’s not so much a question of those votersrejecting Constitutional conservatism, as their political priorities shifting to more immediate concerns.
They’re under attack by the federal government, and they want relief. Intellectual discourse on the Constitutional basis for freedom of religious expression has less political value when the federal government is sending a battalion of lawyers to escort men into the women’s restroom. They still care about our future of unsustainable government debt, but their more immediate concern is getting the economy moving for their regions and income brackets again. Abstract discussion about the proper limits of government gives way to more concrete concerns: What will you do to bring the jobs back, nourish our wages back to health, and make us feel like something more than targets?
Romney got creamed because he couldn’t appeal to these disenfranchised working-class voters. He should have been able to do it, because his message of creating a business-friendly environment where jobs could flourish was reasonable and consistent with what the missing voters want. They’re looking for opportunity, not food stamps and welfare checks.
The problem was that Romney never made his message directly relevant to the alienated working class. He didn’t speak their language or act like he personally cared about them, the way Trump does. Romney was so thoroughly defined by the Obama campaign’s early attacks that he would have needed enormous populist charisma to overcome it. He had no detectable populist energy at all.
Romney would bring a hundred entrepreneurs onstage to support him, but not their employees. For some reason, it didn’t occur to his campaign that they could repel Obama’s foolish assault on venture capitalism by deploying an army of regular folks whose jobs had been saved by capital investment. He took great umbrage at Obama’s “you didn’t build that” speech, http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2016/05/10/trump-won-working-class-voters-gop-forgot/
Monday, May 9, 2016
Trump the Hamiltonian: 8 Words that Tell You Donald Trump Is Serious About American Jobs and Manufacturing
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Getty Images/AFP PHOTO/Karen BLEIER
by JAMES P. PINKERTON9 May 20161,396
Only rarely does water flow uphill, do clocks run backwards, or does hell freeze over. And it’s even more rare when an MSM-er doesn’t trash Donald Trump.
Michael Hirsh is a certifiably blue-chip establishment journalist: His resume includes stints at Newsweek and National Journal, and he is now the national editor atPolitico.
And yet, on May 5, even as most of the MSM was busy flailing away, as usual, at Trump, Hirsh raised eyebrows when he published a provocative article headlined, “Why George Washington Would Have Agreed With Donald Trump/ Watch Out, Hillary: The Founding Fathers would have loved ‘America First,’ and they might have been right.”
Hirsh’s story was mostly a discussion of Trump’s foreign policy, and it must be said that he was, shall we say, judicious in his actual personal praise for Trump. Yet at the same time, Hirsh afforded Trump — and, as we shall see, Trump advisers — plenty of pixels to make their argument. And the result was a piece that ended up displaying more than a little sympathy for the Trumpian worldview.
Deploying a broad-gauge historical perspective, Hirsh put Trump’s campaign — notably, his April 27 speech to the Center for the National Interest in DC — into useful context:
Trump is also correct in suggesting that the current global system is an aberration in American history, that it may not be sustainable forever under current conditions, and that America should focus more on fixing our own economic house for a long time to come (a view shared, incidentally, by Barack Obama, who loves to say “it’s time to focus on nation-building at home”). The U.S. share of global defense spending has soared to more than a third of the total, while the American economy has dropped in size to one-quarter of global GDP; America spends more in total than the next seven largest countries combined: China, Saudi Arabia, Russia, Britain, India, France and Japan. And to what end exactly? No one can quite say.
Yes, that is a good question to ask about our far-flung commitments: To what end exactly? And since it’s the American taxpayers — as well as their sons and daughters in uniform — who are bearing the burden of internationalism, maybe we, the people, should start demanding some better answers. (As an aside, we can add that the Washington Post’s David Ignatius, another high-ranking MSM-er, asked some of the same probing questions in his latest column, even if he seemed more sure than Hirsh that Hillary Clinton has all the answers.)
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In his concluding paragraph, Hirsh observed that, through it all, Trump is undeniably connecting with his audience:
At a time when many Americans are angry and feel dispossessed, and when they blame the rest of the world for their ills — egged on by Trump’s rhetoric about getting “raped,” for example by China — it may be that voters do want another choice. Trump appears to be offering one, and a lot of people are listening.
Interestingly, it wasn’t too long ago that Trump’s views on foreign policy and national security were seen by many as crippling to his candidacy. After Trump attacked George W. Bush’s handling of 9/11 and the Iraq War in the February 13 debate in Greenville, SC, an unnamed Republican “strategist” chortled to Katie Glueck, another Politico reporter, “Trump’s attack on President George W. Bush was galactic-level stupid in South Carolina.” Well, not so fast there, Mr. Insider-Expert; Trump, of course, triumphed in the Palmetto State primary a week later.
Looking back on that moment, we might today observe that Bush 43 is popular in much of the Republican Party, and yet at the same time, there’s considerable disgruntlement about the way that the “Great War on Terror” has been fought over the last 15 years — especially by those who actually did the fighting and the bleeding.
Indeed, when one thinks about Republican politics in this young century, we can see that at times, the GOP platform has seemed to consist mostly of foreign wars, open borders, and cuts to earned entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare. By that reckoning, maybe it’s hard to believe that Republicans have done indeed as well, politically, as they have done. (Thank God for Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi!)
Still, the landslide defeats that the Republicans suffered in the 2008 and 2012 presidential elections speak to a deep weakness in the party’s national agenda — what might be called, uncharitably, the Bush-McCain-Romney agenda. And that’s what Trump obviously seeks to change.
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But does Trump really mean it? Or, to put it another way, can he really do it? In view of his track record, in life and, more recently, in politics, it would be a mistake to underestimate him. Yet, at the same time, whether one loves him or loathes him, it must be observed that he will not be governing alone — the Constitution guarantees that.
As veteran anti-tax activist Grover Norquisttold the Washington Post, if the New Yorker wins in November, his “art-of-the-dealing” will be put to the test. Speaking of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Speaker Paul Ryan, Norquist said, “The three of them have to agree.” And so, Norquist — who is regarded as more libertarian than Trump — added, thinking of a President Donald, “I sleep well at night.” That is, our constitutional system guarantees a carefully modulated outcome.
This stipulation, about the stubborn power of the separation of powers, brings up another point: Politics is a team effort. And speaking to the importance of team-building, former Reagan education secretary Bill Bennett said of Trump, in the same Post article, that this is not the time to criticize Trump for his alleged faults, but rather, “Now is the time to surround him with good people and work with him at the convention.”
Norquist and Bennett are correct. As our possible 45th president, Trump would still have to negotiate with the Congressional leadership — maybe even Democratic leadership. Yes, the White House is the bully pulpit, but politics is always, and only, the art of the possible. Or, as Washington wits say, “The President proposes, and the Congress disposes.”
So we should pay close attention to the team that Trump pulls together. For starters, there’s the question of his running mate. As an astute analyst here at Breitbart observed the other day, the most important decision that Trump will make between now and the election is his vice-presidential pick.
Yet the rest of the Trump team is important, too. As they also say inside the Beltway, “personnel is policy.” And so, already, people are starting to flyspeck the Trump campaign for portents of things to come.
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And so far at least, fans of American jobs and domestic manufacturing — which is to say, almost all Americans — should be heartened by what there is to see. As bespeaks his background as a builder, Trump has always been a champion of the “tangible economy” — that is, of the America that actually makes things, as opposed to just moving around zeroes on a spreadsheet. And certainly, Trump’s proposed tax and trade policies signal his strong commitment to factories and blue collars.
Yet, in our continuing examination of the campaign tea leaves, we might wish to pause over this intriguing quote from that Michael Hirsh article in Politico; a senior adviser told Hirsh that at the base of Trump’s foreign-policy vision was a “Hamiltonian emphasis on having financial independence through manufacturing.”
So, there are the eight words that mean so much. There are the eight words — Hamiltonian emphasis on having financial independence through manufacturing — that mean so much to our economy, offering us a way out of the zero-sum financialism of recent decades and also the solid prospect that we will continue to preserve our political sovereignty in the next century.
So let’s think about those words and parse them out.
First, “Hamiltonian” refers, of course, to Alexander Hamilton. Having dropped out of college to join the fight, Hamilton served as George Washington’s aide-de-camp through most of the American Revolution, although toward the end of the war, in 1781, he took command of a combat battalion and led it to victory at the Battle of Yorktown.
After the war was won, later in the decade, he co-authored The Federalist Papers — a body of work that helped persuade the states to ratify the Constitution. Then, in 1789, President Washington appointed him to be our first Secretary of the Treasury. And oh yes, he’s the guy who’s also remembered for having been killed in an 1804 duel. Even great soldiers can get outgunned.
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Hamilton has always been prominent; his image has graced the $10 bill since 1929 —and with no end in sight, even as other dead white males find themselves on the outs.
However, Hamilton has gone from big to bigger, having enjoyed a huge revival in recent decades. In 1997, the prominent American historian Michael Lind publishedHamilton’s Republic: Readings in the American Democratic Nationalist Tradition; that work, as well as other of Lind’s writings, inspired scholars to rethink, and revise upward, their assessment of Hamilton’s role as a key nation-builder. Then, in 2005, another historian,Ron Chernow, wrote a highly regarded biography of Hamilton, further raising his standing.
Of course, the most startling breakthrough came in 2015, when Lin-Manuel Miranda debuted Hamilton, the musical, on Broadway. Who knew that a man who had been dead for more than two centuries could be such a sensation? Miranda’s opus managed to combine rousing entertainment with solid scholarship — Chernow was closely involved in its production. In fact, the show has been honored with a record 16 Tony nominations.
Yet amidst all the hoopla, it’s important not to lose sight of exactly what Hamilton, the man, actually stood for in his life and why he is important today — and important to Trump.
First and foremost, as we have seen, he was a staunch American patriot.
Second, he was both a visionary and a policy wonk. He could see a Greater America, but he also had the patience to navigate his way through the mass of detail that is actual governance.
http://www.breitbart.com/2016-presidential-race/2016/05/09/hamiltonian-8-words-tell-donald-trump-serious/
Wednesday, March 30, 2016
Dear , this is UNREAL. I don't have anywhere else to turn -- so I'm turning to you.
Ted Cruz
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Monday, March 28, 2016
Sahil Kapur: Democrats Worried Donald Trump Could Win with Working Class Voters
The mathematical path to victory that I found most plausible—if he does have one—is essentially he needs to win Florida and flip three out of four midwestern states that President Obama won in 2012… That’s going to be an extremely difficult task, but the issue of trade and unorthodox policy proscriptions he’s put on the table mean that I don’t think people should not completely write him off on this, and a lot of Democrats are increasingly taking him seriously.
Listen to the entire interview here: