what eye thynk: Donald Trump has soared to the top of the GOP presidential hopeful heap in the latest polls. He is sure to get a place on stage and in front of a national audience for the first Republican debate on August 8.
The Republican Party should be afraid...very afraid.
Fox News (has) created a Frankenstein. His name is Donald Trump...
Donald Trump is practically a mirror image of the Fox News psyche. Most of his speeches consist of repackaged stupidities plucked right out of the conservative mediascape. It's kind of brilliant, really. Trump knows his audience, and he beams back at them every idiotic thing they want to hear. Which, of course, is exactly what Fox News does.
The wonderful irony of all this is that the conservative media have ruined conservative politics... The GOP, increasingly, is no longer a national party--it's confined more and more to the South and to pockets of rural America.
As a consequence, conservatives (on the whole) are now dumber, angrier and more divorced from the facts. To the extend that Fox News has nurtured the idiocy Trump represents, they're responsible for his political life--they made it possible. The bile spewed by Trump (is) the kind of garbage you hear every day on their programs. And because so many conservatives get their news from Fox, Republican policymakers are forced to parrot those arguments to voters. This plays well with the base, but it alienates most of the country--as it should.
Fox is not really about "news" anymore. It is really just a clearing house for hate speech. The way the station has encouraged their pundits to move more and more to the right, to be more and more divisive, has allowed people like Mr. Trump to crawl out from America's darkest corners to proudly declaim their prejudices.
When Mr. Trump loses his bid for the White House, he'll fit perfectly behind a Fox "news" desk.
...Trump continues to shrug all the controversy off. Trump claimed some business partners who have cut ties with him due to his remarks about Mexican immigrants have called to personally apologize to him. He never mentioned which companies.
During his campaign announcement he said, "When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best. They're sending people that have lots of problems, and they're bringing those problems with us. They're bringing drugs. They're bring crime. They're rapists."As for the businesses he has lost? No sweat. "Yeah, I'm losing some contracts. Who cares?"...
When (Anderson) Cooper asked Trump during his CNN interview about a tweet he retweeted this weekend that targeted Jeb Bush's wife (the tweet said that Jeb Bush "has to like the Mexican Illegals because of his wife." Mrs. Bush is a Mexican immigrant.) he said he had no qualms about it, "Do I regret it? No, I don't regret it. If he loves his wife and she's from Mexico, I think it probably has an influence on him."
After all that transpired, Trump doesnt think he'll have any trouble with Latinos, boldly declaring "I'll win the Latino vote."...
...Trump may be confident that his rhetoric isn't causing any damage to his own campaign but Republicans sure are starting to worry about the impact on the GOP. Reince Priebus, Chairman of the Republican National Committee, spent 45 minutes on the phone with Trump Wednesday night urging him to "tone it down." According to the Washington Post, "Priebus told Trump that making inroads with Hispanics is one of his central missions as chairman. He told Trump that tone matters greatly and that Trump's comments are more offensive than he might imagine with that bloc."...
...There's no indication that Trump plans to tone his campaign down for the benefit of the GOP.
Mr. Trump told The New York Times that Mr. Priebus "knows better than to lecture me."
Not that I expect Mr. Trump to pay any heed, but he might want to listen to some of the immigrant workers currently building his latest hotel."It's something ironic," said Ivan Arellano, 29, who is from Mexico and obtained legal status through marriage. He now works as a mason laying the stonework for the lobby floor and walls of what will become the Trump International Hotel.
"The majority of us are Hispanics, many who came illegally," Arellano said in Spanish. "And we're all here working very hard to build a better life for our families."
Interviews with about 15 laborers helping renovate the Old Post Office Pavilion revealed that many of them had crossed the U.S.-Mexico border illegally...
..."Most of the concern is that this escalates into a bigger problem." said Daniel Gonzalez, 45, a sheet metal worker from El Salvador who crossed the border in the 1980s to escape his country's civil war. He became a U.S. citizen after a federal immigration judge granted him asylum, he said.
Republican Party leaders agonize over the prospect that Donald Trump will mount a third-party candidacy that could undermine their nominee. They fear insulting the white working-class voters who admire him. They are loath to tangle with a threat-flinging firebrand for whom there are no rules of engagement.
Since the start of Mr. Trump's presidential campaign, a vexing question has hovered over his candidacy: Why have so many party leaders...not renounced him?
It turns out, interviews show, that the mathematical delicacy of a Republican victory in 2016--and its dependence on aging, anxious white voters--make it exceedingly perilous for the Republican Party to treat Mr. Trump as the pariah many of its leaders now wish he would become.
Even as a cascade of corporations and business partners...rush to sever their ties with Mr. Trump, Republican leaders seem deeply torn and paralyzed by indecision.
A few weeks ago, those divisions were on vivid display at a regular gathering of top Republican elected officials, strategists, and the chairman of the Republican National Committee. Over dinner...some argued for a swift response, fearing Mr. Trump would mar the coming Republican presidential debates with his needless provocations. Others counseled a hands-off approach, fearing attempts to rein him in would only turn him into a political martyr and, worse, tempt him toward (a) third-party run.
Many in the GOP still blame Ross Perot for diverting votes from George Bush and handing the presidency to Bill Clinton in 1992.Dispirited party elders, worried that Republicans are handing Democratic rivals a powerful campaign weapon by allowing Mr. Trump's voice to be depicted as representative of the party, are sounding the alarm with growing urgency...
..."As a presidential candidate, he's taking a problem we already have as a party and making it worse," said Senator Lindsey Graham, another White House aspirant. "If we continue this we're going to accelerate the demographic death spiral we're in."
That would be nice.
Donald Trump represents everything that is wrong with the Republican Party. And he is doing everything right to hasten their descent into being seen as a niche party with a limited and aging base.
Personally, I'm rooting for the circus that is Trump to win a couple of early state races. No, more than that. I want him to be front and center for as long as possible; because every day he is in the news, every day he is viewed as the face of the real GOP, is another day the Democrats win.
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