The revenge that drives Trump

This election is going to be analyzed for decades to come for what it says about Donald Trump, the Republican party, and the large numbers of people who support him. There have already been numerous attempts to understand what the hell is happening. Much of this speculation right now is in the media but later we will see more academic studies, trying to tease out such things as the root causes of the Trump phenomenon, whether this is something transient or a long-lasting trend, who really are the people who responded to Trump’s message, and whether they were drawn to him because of economic concerns and a sense that the system was rigged against ordinary people or by more ugly xenophobic and racist feelings.
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Don’t worry Donald, you’ll always have Ben

I’ve got to admit that I am fascinated by Ben Carson. People may be forgiven for thinking that his eyes-closed, slow, monotonous delivery suggests that he himself is asleep when he is not putting others to sleep. But in this interview where he was defending Donald Trump, he became so animated and aggressive (he even asked the host to cut off the microphone of another guest) that it seems like this is the one thing he really cares about
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The phony ‘grand bargain’ argument to cut social security benefits

Beware of those who try to scare us about the deficit. David Dayen exposes the agenda behind those who are pushing the deficit and debt as a huge problem and then use it to urge cuts in Social Security benefits. The people whom Social Security benefits the most are the less well-off, and cutting their benefits without raising the cap on contributions is just another way for the wealthy a way to achieve their goal of making life easier for themselves and harder for those who are not well-to-do. Both Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton propose to maintain (and perhaps even increase) benefits and pay for it by raising the cap on contributions.
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Trump’s narrow path to victory

For the benefit of those readers who do not live in the US and may be a little unclear about how the president is actually chosen, this post outlines the main details. The president is formally elected by something called the Electoral College, a largely virtual institution that exists just for the purpose of electing the president every four years. Each of the 50 states plus the District of Columbia is allocated a certain number of what are called ‘electoral votes’ equal to the sum of the Senators and members of the House of Representatives that the state sends to Congress. You need to win a majority of those votes to be elected president.
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The Trump book reports

Donald Trump is intellectually lazy, someone who cannot be bothered to learn enough about a topic to go beyond broad generalities. If you watched the debates, you will notice that in response to questions that involve detailed knowledge of specifics, he tends, like Sarah Palin, to wander all over the lot, spewing out a lot of words in run-on sentences that convey little.
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Reflections on the final debate: It truly was fear and loathing in Las Vegas

Although the title of this post was from Hunter Thompson’s famous book on the 1972 election campaign, it turned out to be prophetic when it came to the debate. Donald Trump tried to instill deep fear in the American people about the dire situation the country is in at present and how much worse it will get under a Clinton presidency, while Clinton warned us how dangerous it would be to have someone with the attitudes and temperament of Trump in charge of the world’s biggest economy and the most powerful weaponry. (You can read the transcript here.)
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Fear and loathing in Las Vegas tonight

Tonight we will see the final big-stage performance of the long-running production of Donald Trump: Unshackled!, when he and Hillary Clinton take part in the final debate. He and his advisors must know that they are running out of time and, going by the poll numbers, have to do something dramatic to avoid going down to defeat next month. Although it is not clear how much these big set piece political events influence the race, this will be the last chance for Trump to speak directly to a large nationwide audience and I expect him to come out with both guns blazing as he tries to unsettle Clinton as well as lash out at anyone whom he sees as working against him. His list of enemies is, of course, a long one by now and growing longer by the day as more reports emerge about his predatory activities.
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