Campaign 2016 | Praxis

After Scorning Him, Big Donors Are Now Seeking Room in Trump’s GOP

In his unlikely rise to the Republican nomination Donald J. Trump attacked lobbyists, disparaged big donors and railed against the party’s establishment. But on the shores of Lake Erie this week, beyond the glare of television cameras, the power of the permanent political class seemed virtually undisturbed. Though Mr. Trump promises to topple Washington’s “rigged system,” the opening rounds of his party’s quadrennial meeting accentuated a more enduring maxim: Money always adapts to power. In Cleveland, even some of those who had worked against Mr….

Meet Alex Jones, the Conspiracy Radio Host Who’s Donald Trump’s Biggest Media Ally

“There’s no way the Trump people would have reached out to me a year and a half ago, if he wasn’t aware of the work,” Jones would tell me later in the week. “He’s been what you call a ‘closet conspiracy theorist’ for 50 years. I think he’s been a chameleon in the system, and now he sees the time to strike.” When I pressed for details about the Trump outreach, Jones clammed up. (Trump guested on his radio show last December, but hasn’t been a…

Donald Trump’s RNC Convention Speech Transcript

Friends, delegates and fellow Americans: I humbly and gratefully accept your nomination for the presidency of the United States. Who would have believed that when we started this journey on June 16, last year, we — I say we because we are a team — would have received almost 14 million votes, the most in the history of the Republican party? And that the Republican Party would get 60 percent more votes than it received eight years ago. Who would have believed it? The Democrats…

Republicans Ignored Average Joes for So Long, They Turned to Donald Trump

But if Trump’s working-class supporters were voting as much for the man as for his message, they were also clearly voting against a party leadership that pays them lip service while ignoring their concerns. Some of these concerns are rooted in racial anxiety, and an older generation’s inevitable fear of change. But many of them are rooted in basic human vulnerability — a very personal exposure to stagnant wages, family breakdown, military quagmires (America’s wars are disproportionately fought by volunteers from downscale Red America) and…

People Who Don’t Like Clinton or Trump Don’t Really Vote Anyway

One in four Americans have an unfavorable opinion of both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, more than double the rate who disliked both candidates in 2012 and about four times higher than in 2008. This high level of joint unpopularity could foreshadow low voter turnout or the rise of a third-party candidate, but there are reasons why these outcomes are by no means sure things at this point. Overall, 35% of U.S. adults interviewed over the course of June had a favorable view of the…

Ted Cruz Just Made the Same Mistake Ted Kennedy Did in 1980

After a long and bitter primary battle, businessman Donald Trump is now officially the Republican nominee for president. Despite promising to support whoever the eventual nominee was, many of his vanquished opponents stayed home instead of attending the GOP’s national convention in Cleveland. That reaction is not exactly a surprise considering that Trump essentially used an insult comic shtick as one of his prime arguments against his competitors. Given Trump’s constant lying and his continual reversals of his own positions, refusing to endorse him is…

Steve King Isn’t Just a Racist, He’s Completely Ignorant of the History of Western Civilization

Following a Monday appearance on MSNBC, Iowa Congressman Steve King is finally getting some of the attention he deserves. Although he supported Ted Cruz in his state’s caucuses, King is in many ways a forerunner of Donald Trump. During a panel discussion segment led by MSNBC host Chris Hayes, King was challenged by Esquire writer Charlie Pierce about the fact that delegates at the Republican National Convention were overwhelmingly older and white. The congressman took umbrage at and mounted a strange and irrelevant defense over…

GOP Missed Opportunity to Adopt Trump’s More Centrist Social Positions

People form their opinions about a party based on what its platform includes. Political scientists Elizabeth Simas at the University of Houston and Kevin Evans at Florida International University have found that in years that parties adopt particularly conservative platforms, voters tend to see the nominee as more conservative too. “Voters are in fact picking up on the parties’ objective policy positions,” they wrote in a 2011 paper. That means that a platform like this one could have lasting impacts on how the Republican Party…

Trump’s Ghostwriter Regrets Helping ‘Sociopath’ Billionaire

Last June, as dusk fell outside Tony Schwartz’s sprawling house, on a leafy back road in Riverdale, New York, he pulled out his laptop and caught up with the day’s big news: Donald J. Trump had declared his candidacy for President. As Schwartz watched a video of the speech, he began to feel personally implicated. Trump, facing a crowd that had gathered in the lobby of Trump Tower, on Fifth Avenue, laid out his qualifications, saying, “We need a leader that wrote ‘The Art of…

The GOP’s Strategic Sclerosis Is Becoming Fatal

Somewhere in recent years, the GOP’s engagement with modern America and how to best project those values into a nation of 320 million people became dysfunctional. As the country has diversified, the party has remained monochromatic, has grayed, and rather than allowing some birch-like give on shifting cultural norms, has become an unbending oak of ideological purity. The GOP now finds itself lacking an intimate’s ability to criticize productively, given its demographic and cultural divergence from the majority of the country. […] According to the…

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