Today in Campaign 2016
As a wise man once sang, except for death and paying taxes, everything in life is only for now.
Well, and this campaign cycle. This will go on forever.
Here’s a quick rundown of the biggest stories from the campaign trail today, where tax returns were the talk of the town, despite the PR wizardry of “John Miller.”
- Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump told ABC’s Good Morning America this morning that his tax rate is “none of your business,” apparently doubling down on his refusal to release his tax returns before the general election. “It’s none of your business, you’ll see it when I release,” Trump said during a phone interview with the program. “But I fight very hard to pay as little tax as possible.”
- The Washington Post has a fascinating piece out this morning about Trump public-relations veteran “John Miller,” also known as “John Barron,” also known as... Donald Trump himself. According to numerous 90s-era reporters and writers in New York, Trump masqueraded by phone under those pseudonyms as a way of leaking flattering information about himself and his company to tabloids and gossip columns. One example: Trump-as-Miller-slash-Barron called a reporter to detail a date Trump had with Madonna at the Plaza Hotel, describing the singer as arriving to the date “in a beautiful evening gown and combat boots.”
- Casino magnate and Republican kingmaker Sheldon Adelson has officially endorsed fellow tycoon Trump for president, in a Washington Post op-ed appropriately headlined “I endorse Donald Trump for president”. “While the primary cycle still has some important elections ahead, it is clear that Donald Trump will be the Republican nominee for president,” Adelson wrote. “I am endorsing Trump’s bid for president and strongly encourage my fellow Republicans ... to do the same.”
- Congressman Steve King declared on CSPAN this morning that the House Task Force on Executive Overreach - a partisan component of the House Judiciary Committee of which King is the chair - that the committee will likely call for hearings on Barack Obama’s letter to public schools ordering them to allow transgender students to access restrooms that match their stated gender identities. “I oppose that piece of policy. I think it is an executive overreach,” King said. “And it’s a topic we’re likely to bring up in a future hearing before the task force that I chair.”
- The Los Angeles Times has endorsed Hillary Clinton’s presidential bid ahead of the California primary on June 7, although the headline might not be easy to swallow for some on the Clinton team: “For all her faults, Hillary Clinton is vastly better prepared than Bernie Sanders for the presidency.”
- Former secretary of defense Leon Panetta told CNN today that he has no interest in “gambling” on the foreign policy initiatives proposed by Trump, which he called “crazy.” At the same time, Washington Post readers were served an op-ed by former CIA director David Petraeus, in which the retired four-star general warned voters against “anti-Muslim bigotry,” which he said aides the cause of Islamist terrorism.
- Texas senator and onetime presidential candidate Ted Cruz may not be sure about his feelings on the presumptive Republican nominee, but he is sure about one thing: He’s not interested in serving on the supreme court anytime soon. “That is not a desire of my heart,” Cruz said during an interview with a local Fort Worth radio host in Texas, when asked about the possibility of being nominated to fill the seat vacated by the death of Antonin Scalia.
- Consumer advocate, perennial presidential candidate and Palm Beach County’s best friend Ralph Nader told US News & World Report that Clinton is going to win the Democratic nomination “by dictatorship.”“Twenty-five percent of superdelegates are cronies, mostly,” Nader said. “They weren’t elected... They were there in order to stop somebody like Bernie Sanders, who would win by the vote.”
That’s it for today - enjoy your weekend, and see you on the trail!
The Washington Post has dropped the full transcript of Donald Trump pretending to be his own public-relations manager, which is exactly as hilarious as you think it would be. Here are some of the highlights of an interview with “John Miller”:
- “He’s coming out of a marriage, and he’s starting to do tremendously well financially.”
- “Have you met him? He’s a good guy and he’s not going to hurt anybody.”
- “Well, [Madonna] called and wanted to go out with him, that I can tell you.”
- “By the way, I’m sort of new here.”
- “I’m sort of handling PR because he gets so much of it.”
- “I’ve never seen somebody so immune to - he actually thrived on the bad press initially.”
If you don’t read the whole thing, you are missing out.
Congressman Steve King told a radio interviewer that presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump might suffer more damage to his campaign if he releases his tax returns than if he continues to withhold them from the American public.
“My blunt answer to that would be probably not as much as if he released his tax records, John,” King said on the John Gibson Show. “And I’m not defending him for that - I think he should release them. I think it should have been available so that during the primary voting process people could evaluate it. I can’t imagine that there’s good news in there that would help him politically if Donald Trump hasn’t released them. He seems to be able to reveal everything that helps him. And there’s some of those things that aren’t revealed, I’m gonna suspect that the don’t help him.”
King also said that, after reading through Trump’s supposed “balance sheet” that detailed his putative $8.7 billion fortune, he had “a lot of questions.”
“About $3 billion of that is what the Trump brand is worth,” King said. “I don’t know what the King brand is worth but I never put it on a balance sheet. And so I think there’s much about finances that could be picked apart by the Democrats and it would’ve been better to vet that in the Republican primary.”
Consumer advocate, perennial presidential candidate and Palm Beach County’s best friend Ralph Nader told US News & World Report that former secretary of state Hillary Clinton is going to win the Democratic nomination “by dictatorship.”
“Twenty-five percent of superdelegates are cronies, mostly,” Nader said. “They weren’t elected... They were there in order to stop somebody like Bernie Sanders, who would win by the vote.”
Nader, for his part, won’t say which candidate he supports in the primary, or for whom he expects to cast his ballot in the general election. He does, however, wish that there were a “None Of The Above” option.
“It gives people a voice to say, ‘No, we don’t like anybody on the ballot,’ ” Nader said.
The term “shade” is bandied about all too frequently these days, but White House press secretary Josh Earnest came as close to throwing it as most government officials ever will in a line of commentary about the lieutenant governor of Texas, who critiqued the Obama administration’s new transgender bathroom policy for American public schools.
“Well, I think this does underscore the risk of electing a right-wing radio host to a statewide office,” Earnest said, when asked about criticism of the policy from Dan Patrick, who dubbed the policy “social engineering.”
WATCH: White House explains decision to instruct public schools to give transgender students access to bathrooms. https://t.co/XoDx5g0hws
— ABC News Politics (@ABCPolitics) May 13, 2016
Hillary Clinton may not be able to count on support in the mountain region in the same way Barack Obama and her husband did, writes the Guardian’s Dan Roberts.
Bill Clinton returned to Appalachia this week with a familiar song ringing in his ears.
Fleetwood Mac’s Don’t Stop (Thinking About Tomorrow) was a campaign anthem that helped the “Big Dog” win two presidential elections in the 1990s in this mountain region.
It played him off stage again in Kentucky on Thursday afternoon and by the time he arrived in the state’s hard-pressed eastern coalfields that evening, it was to serve as the theme of a speech designed to rally his wife’s campaign in 2016.
“The problem is that people think every tomorrow is going to be just like yesterday,” he told a group of miners in Prestonburg. “The question is, are we going to get back in the future business, and are you going along for the ride?”
The miners had booed when he walked on stage. These days the mountains appear instead to belong to a politician offering something more potent than hope.
Even among Republicans, Donald Trump divides opinion in many parts of the country. Not so in Appalachia, where his success in the party’s recently completed primary elections here was universal enough that it could serve as a new definition of the region’s rugged borders.
Of the 420 counties seen as sharing a culture that transcends state lines, Trump won all but 16 , including a sweep of western Pennsylvania, eastern Ohio and the western uplands of Virginia with potentially profound ramifications for the general election.
As expected, conservatives state government officials are protesting Barack Obama’s decree that all public schools must allow transgender students to use bathrooms that comport with their stated gender identity, with Texas lieutenant governor Dan patrick calling the decree “social engineering” that will disrupt education.
“We’re not going to be blackmailed by his 30 pieces of silver,” Patrick said, in reference to the threat of cutting off federal funds for school districts that violate the policy. “Our parents do not want their children showering together. They do not want boys in the girls rooms. This will be the end of public schools as we know it.”
The decree, sent from the Department of Justice and the Department of Education, cites federal anti-discrimination legislation - Title IX - that prohibits educational discrimination on the basis of gender. Patrick, a former talk-radio host, told CNN that Title IX doesn’t cover transgender students.
“It was about not discriminating against race, color, religion and sex — the sex that you are, not the sex that you think you are,” Patrick said. “[Obama] issued a policy that does nothing to improve our schools, nothing to improve math and reading scores. This is about social engineering that’s going to be totally disruptive to our school day. Parents are not going to accept it.”
The US presidential election is dividing states – and bedrooms.
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Donald Trump told the Today Show this morning that “it was not me on the phone” when played a recording of himself pretending to be his own spokesperson in the 1990s, but according to old depositions, he knew “John Barron” all too well.
Updated
Donald Trump’s stance on Muslim immigration to the US and his rhetoric against Isis has caught the attention of Hindu groups in India, reports Vidhi Doshi in Mumbai.
“He’s our hero,” Vishnu Gupta, leader of the Hindu Sena, said. “We are praying for Trump because he is the only one who can help mankind.”
Gupta’s motives for supporting Trump were simple: “He’s the only many who can put an end to Islamic terrorism.”
Trump’s hardline stance on Muslim immigration to the US and his rhetoric against Isis and other terror organisations seem to have caught the imagination of the young Hindu fringe leader, who has grown up in a political climate where communal strife between Hindus and the Muslim minority has led to violent clashes on both sides.
Trump has made contradictory claims on his stance on India. His promise torevise US immigration policy and take outsourced “American” jobs back from India have raised anxiety in the country, especially among the middle classes, who often aspire to study or work in the US or have relatives in the country.
At a rally earlier this week, Trump mocked an Indian call centre worker and mimicked his accent. On the other hand, earlier this year, in an interview with CNN, he said: “By the way, India is doing great. Nobody talks about it. I have big jobs going up in India.”
Texas senator and onetime presidential candidate Ted Cruz may not be sure about his feelings on the presumptive Republican nominee, but he is sure about one thing: He’s not interested in serving on the supreme court anytime soon.
“That is not a desire of my heart,” Cruz said during an interview with a local Fort Worth radio host in Texas, when asked about the possibility of being nominated to fill the seat vacated by the death of Antonin Scalia.
“I have had several opportunities in the past to go to the bench and I certainly deeply respect the job the justices do,” Cruz said. Cruz, a former solicitor general for the state of Texas, has been named as a potential supreme court nominee if a Republican - Donald Trump - were to succeed Barack Obama, whose own nominee is languishing in the face of congressional inaction. (Trump, for his part, has said that he’d “have to think about” it in an interview with the Daily Mail last week.)
“I think we need a strong conservative president who will appoint not just one but two, three, four five Supreme Court justices who are principled constitutionalists,” Cruz said.
When we write our history of the campaign that ended in Donald Trump’s election to the presidency, the first chapter will focus on this tweet:
Donald Ducks on Releasing His Taxes: What a Quack. https://t.co/qRmKjJlWJC
— Correct The Record (@CorrectRecord) May 13, 2016
Key defense figures caution against Trump's 'crazy' policies
Former secretary of defense Leon Panetta told CNN today that he has no interest in “gambling” on the foreign policy initiatives proposed by presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, which he called “crazy.” At the same time, Washington Post readers were served an op-ed by former CIA director David Petraeus, in which the retired four-star general warned voters against “anti-Muslim bigotry,” which he said aides the cause of Islamist terrorism.
“The real challenge is to provide world leadership. And that’s the difference between Secretary Clinton and Trump,” Panetta told Chris Cuomo this morning. “Trump is talking about the world in a way that takes us back to the 1930’s.”
“He’s talking all this isolationism, ‘America First,’ he’s talking about distributing A-bombs around the world - those are crazy positions,” Panetta continued, describing Trump’s positions on nuclear proliferation and isolationism “almost as if he’s not even thinking.”
As Panetta hit Trump by name on the air, Petraeus avoided calling out the presumptive Republican nominee directly, instead issuing a blanket statement cautioning against “inflammatory political discourse that has become far too common both at home and abroad against Muslims and Islam, including proposals from various quarters for blanket discrimination against people on the basis of their religion.”
Those proposals likely include Trump’s signature issue of banning foreign Muslims from entering the US.
Petraeus called such policy “counterproductive” and “playing directly into the hands of al-Qaeda and the Islamic State.”
“The terrorists’ explicit hope has been to try to provoke a clash of civilizations - telling Muslims that the United States is at war with them and their religion,” Petraeus wrote.
“When Western politicians propose blanket discrimination against Islam, they bolster the terrorists’ propaganda.”
Updated
The Los Angeles Times has endorsed Hillary Clinton’s presidential bid ahead of the California primary on June 7, although the headline might not be easy to swallow for some on the Clinton team: “For all her faults, Hillary Clinton is vastly better prepared than Bernie Sanders for the presidency.”
In keeping with several other semi-enthused endorsements from local and regional papers, the piece begins by lauding the efforts of Clinton’s opponent, Vermont senator Bernie Sanders, congratulating him for his “passionate excoriation of a ‘rigged economy’ and his call for a sweeping political revolution energized millions of Americans, especially young voters.”
Still, the editorial board writes, “Sanders lacks the experience and broad understanding of domestic and (especially) foreign policy that the former secretary of state would bring to the presidency ... his prescriptions are too often simplistic, more costly than he would have us believe and unlikely to come to pass.”
“By contrast,” the board writes, “Clinton, for all her faults - and they range from a penchant for secrecy to a willingness to modify her positions to suit the popular mood to a less-restrained view of the use of military force than we are entirely comfortable with - is vastly better prepared than Sanders for the presidency.”
While describing Clinton as “inauthentic to some,” the board emphasized her grasp of “the complexities of government and policy” that it called “unmatched” by any of the other candidates who ran for president this year - in particular Donald Trump, whom the board derided as “unprepared, unsuited for the job and dangerous.”
In an interview last night with Fox News’ Sean Hannity, presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump declared that investigations into his background by members of the Washington Post reporting team will backfire on the newspaper’s owner, billionaire Jeff Bezos, whom Trump casually threatened to investigate for alleged antitrust violations once he assumes the presidency.
“It’s interesting that you say that, because every hour we’re getting calls from reporters from the Washington Post asking ridiculous questions. And I will tell you, this is owned as a toy by Jeff Bezos, who controls Amazon,” Trump said, before citing the online retail giant’s dirt-cheap tax rates as evidence of Bezos’ malfeasance.
“Amazon is getting away with murder, tax-wise,” Trump continued. (His own tax rates, as he told Good Morning America today, are “none of your business.”) “He’s using the Washington Post for power so that the politicians in Washington don’t tax Amazon like they should be taxed. He’s getting absolutely away - he’s worried about me, and I think he said that to somebody, it was in some article, where he thinks I would go after him for antitrust, because he’s got a huge antitrust problem because he’s controlling so much. Amazon is controlling so much of what they’re doing, and what they’ve done is he bought this paper for practically nothing, and he’s using that as a tool for political power against me and against other people.”
Trump continued, alleging that the Washington Post is fabricating stories that paint him in a poor light as a way to prevent Trump’s election.
“And I’ll tell you what: We can’t let him get away with it,” Trump thundered. “So he’s got about 20, 25 - I just heard they’re taking these really bad stories - I mean, they, you know, wrong, I wouldn’t even say bad. They’re wrong. And in many cases they have no proper information. And they’re putting them together, they’re slopping them together. And they’re gonna do a book. And the book is gonna be all false stuff because the stories are so wrong. And the reporters - I mean, one after another - so what they’re doing is he’s using that as a political instrument to try and stop antitrust, which he thinks I believe he’s antitrust, in other words, what he’s got is a monopoly. And he wants to make sure I don’t get in.”
“So, it’s one of those things. But I’ll tell you what, I’ll tell you what: What he’s doing’s wrong. And the people are being - the whole system is rigged. You see a case like that. The whole system is rigged. Whether it’s Hillary or whether it’s Bezos.”
In a letter to the states, the Obama administration is telling every public school district to allow transgender students to use bathrooms that match their gender identity.
The letter, signed by officials from the Departments of Justice and Education, is not bound by law, but contains an implicit threat: that schools choosing not to abide by the recommendation could face lawsuits or lose federal aid.
Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump told ABC’s Good Morning America this morning that his tax rate is “none of your business,” apparently doubling down on his refusal to release his tax returns before the general election.
“It’s none of your business, you’ll see it when I release,” Trump said during a phone interview with the program. “But I fight very hard to pay as little tax as possible.”
WATCH: "It's none of your business, you'll see it when I release." - @realDonaldTrump on what his tax rate is... https://t.co/cdVHOF1hFV
— Good Morning America (@GMA) May 13, 2016
Trump said in an interview with the Associated Press on Wednesday that he would not overrule legal advice not to publicly disclose his tax returns before an audit is complete - including if the audit is not completed before November’s election.
Although not legally required of presidential candidates, the release of tax returns has been considered the norm for party nominees since Gerald Ford released a copy of his tax returns in 1976. Trump has previously declared in a presidential debate that he would release his tax information, and shrugged off delays as due to the inherent complexity of his personal fortune.
“I have very big tax returns,” Trump told NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday. “I’m sure you’ve seen the picture where the returns are literally from the floor to up to here. They’re extremely complex.”
There are no laws prohibiting tax returns under audit from being released. Richard Nixon released his own taxes under audit in 1973.
Congressman Steve King declared on CSPAN this morning that the House Task Force on Executive Overreach - a partisan component of the House Judiciary Committee of which King is the chair - that the committee will likely call for hearings on Barack Obama’s letter to public schools ordering them to allow transgender students to access restrooms that match their stated gender identities.
“I oppose that piece of policy. I think it is an executive overreach,” King said. “And it’s a topic we’re likely to bring up in a future hearing before the task force that I chair.”
Although the notice is not a direct legal threat and echoes previous comments from the White House, the letter makes clear that schools have legal obligations to protect transgender students and that they risk federal funding if they do not comply.
“A school may provide separate facilities on the basis of sex, but must allow transgender students access to such facilities consistent with their gender identity,” the letter reads. “A school may not require transgender students to use facilities inconsistent with their gender identity or to use individual-user facilities when other students are not required to do so.”
The notice also makes clear that transgender students must have access to facilities “even in circumstances in which other students, parents or community members raise objections or concerns.”
“As is consistently recognized in civil rights cases, the desire to accommodate others’ discomfort cannot justify a policy that singles out and disadvantages a particular class of students.”
Donald Trump: Anything I say now is a 'suggestion'
Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has a message for his supporters: Everything I say is merely a suggestion.
.@realDonaldTrump: 'Anything I say right now is a suggestion'https://t.co/3fvlS0jPat
— FOX & Friends (@foxandfriends) May 13, 2016
In a call-in interview with Fox & Friends this morning, co-host Brian Kilmeade asked Trump about an interview he conducted with the candidate earlier in the week, in which Trump characterized his proposal to ban all foreign Muslims from entering the US as “just a suggestion.”
“Yeah, it was a suggestion,” Trump said. “Look, anything I say right now, I’m not the president. Everything is a suggestion - no matter what you say, it’s a suggestion.”
“I feel strongly that we have to do something about - when you look at radical Islamic terrorism, we have a president, as you folks know very well, we have a president who won’t even use the term for the World Trade Center, he won’t use the term,” Trump continued. “And we have to do something, and you’re not going to do something until you know what the problem is.”
The Washington Post has a fascinating piece out this morning about Trump public-relations veteran “John Miller,” also known as “John Barron,” also known as... Donald Trump himself.
According to numerous 90s-era reporters and writers in New York, Trump masqueraded by phone under those pseudonyms as a way of leaking flattering information about himself and his company to tabloids and gossip columns.
One example: Trump-as-Miller-slash-Barron called a reporter to detail a date Trump had with Madonna at the Plaza Hotel, describing the singer as arriving to the date “in a beautiful evening gown and combat boots.”
In a phone call to NBC’s Today show this morning, however, Trump denied that he was John Miller or John Barron.
“No, I don’t think it - I don’t know anything about it,” he protested. “You’re telling me about it for the first time and it doesn’t sound like my voice at all. I have many, many people that are trying to imitate my voice and then you can imagine that, and this sounds like one of the scams, one of the many scams - doesn’t sound like me.”
“It was not me on the phone,” he said later. “And it doesn’t sound like me on the phone, I will tell you that, and it was not me on the phone. And when was this? Twenty-five years ago?”
Updated
Casino magnate and Republican kingmaker Sheldon Adelson has officially endorsed fellow tycoon and presumptive presidential nominee Donald Trump for president, in a Washington Post op-ed appropriately headlined “I endorse Donald Trump for president”.
“While the primary cycle still has some important elections ahead, it is clear that Donald Trump will be the Republican nominee for president,” Adelson wrote. “ I am endorsing Trump’s bid for president and strongly encourage my fellow Republicans – especially our Republican elected officials, party loyalists and operatives, and those who provide important financial backing – to do the same.”
Like many fellow Republican eminences who were, at first, wary of endorsing the first-time candidate, Adelson couched his support of Trump in antipathy towards his presumed general election opponent: Hillary Clinton.
“The alternative to Trump being sworn in as the nation’s 45th president is frightening,” Adelson wrote. “As Republicans, we know that getting a person in the White House with an ‘R’ behind his name is the only way things will get better. That opportunity still exists. We must not cut off our noses to spite our faces.”
What to expect from the campaign trail today
Good morning, and happy Friday the 13th! Watch out for ladders, cracks in the sidewalk, black cats and summer camps staffed by amorous teenagers.
Here’s what to expect from the campaign trail today:
- Vermont senator Bernie Sanders will travel to North Dakota today, hosting rallies in Fargo and Bismarck where he is expected to highlight his commitment to issues close to Native American voters, after he called for “a new relationship with the Native American people” at an Oglala Lakota reservation yesterday morning. Sanders’ wife, Jane, will also travel to North Dakota, where she will host a town hall meeting in Grand Forks.
- Meanwhile, another campaign spouse will be hitting the trail: former president Bill Clinton will be spending time in Passaic County and Ewing Township in New Jersey at “organizing events” to talk with supporters of Hillary Clinton and increase volunteering for her campaign in the Garden State.
- Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg is trying to calm the villagers by announcing that he plans to invite “leading conservatives and people from across the political spectrum” to talk with him about accusations of political bias at the social media company. Zuckerberg made the announcement Thursday evening in a Facebook post that continued to deny the allegations of bias and the claim that the Facebook trending topics team suppresses conservative news.
- Aides to presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump told MSNBC that they won’t yet rule out the option of Trump using new funds raised in the general election to pay himself back for loans in the primaries. Although Trump was keen on telling primary voters that he was “self-funding” his campaign, most of his eight-figure personal spending was structured as a loan to his campaign – which can now be paid back with donations to his general election campaign.
- As for news in actual government – it does happen – Barack Obama will order all US public schools to allow transgender students to access restrooms that comport with their stated gender identities, in a move that escalates the national fight over LGBT rights that has erupted in response to North Carolina’s controversial “bathroom bill”. The US justice and education departments will send the decree that offers guidelines to school districts across the country on how to protect transgender students from discrimination. The letter “does not add requirements to applicable law”, but provides extensive guidelines on how to ensure that trans students are treated fairly and have access to appropriate facilities.
Now on with the show!
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