++Mark Levin said that Trump's remarks about Ted Cruz' father being next to Lee Harvey Oswald should alarm Republican voters. We're going to get creamed he said.
++Rush Limbaugh said Trump will crush Hillary Clinton in a landslide.
++Charlie Cook said that Trump's nomination puts down ballot races in play. Predicts the Democrats will take the Senate and look to gain 20 seats in the House.
++Trump's victory in Indiana is widely attributed to his anti-immigrant positions. The Southern Poverty organization said that the Trump affect is leading to greater anxiety among minorities and immigrant families and an increase in bullying.
++ Washington monthly has an article on why the GOP is still blocking Merrick Garland's nomination to the Supreme Court. It is all aimed at voter mobilization. The GOP, even with Trump as the nominee,wants the social conservatives to believe reproductive rights will be eliminated with the next Supreme Court nomination. But they note that Red State is urging a vote on Garland because they believe Hillary Clinton will nominate a more liberal, younger justice. Red State is officially of the view that Hillary Clinton will win the presidency because of Trump.
++E-mails to me from abroad express deep fear,no terror,at the notion that Donald Trump could win the nomination of a major American party. On the one hand,they mourn that this is the ultimate dumbing down of America,the acceptance of totally ignorant points of view and diminish the country in the world's eyes. The reaction is many time more negative than when Ronald Reagan win the nomination in 1980.
++On the other hand they are frightened to death of his total ignorance of foreign affairs and his statements not only against Muslims,African-Americans,and Hispanics but also his frequent statements against the Geneva Convention,already negotiated arms deals and other accepted agreements with our own allies.
++Max Fischer at VOX did an analysis of Trump's foreign policy by analyzing his statements to David Sanger of the New York Times. Fischer concluded that in effect Donald Trump wanted the United States to become the number one Rogue Nation in the world. He does not even have a rudimentary understanding of how our alliances provide us with security and stabilize the world. It is American exceptionalism on steroids without any historical understanding. Fischer delving into his various statements has come to believe that Trump has literally no understanding or sympathy of the Post-WWII world.
++Roger Stone,Trump's operative, sort of let the cat out of the bag when he talked about the Taft-Eisenhower convention where Ike got Taft's delegations from Louisiana and Texas thrown out and replaced by his own. There is a real fight between isolationists and internationalists in the Republican party. Ike beat down the Taft "American Firsters" and allowed internationalism to flourish. Ronald Reagan made internationalism acceptable to the conservative movement, an aberrant branch of which became neoconservatism. But as Michael Bloomberg noted,Trump is using language that harks back to American Firsters.
++This should split the Republican Party. Robert Kagan has supported Hillary Clinton and Mark Salter also has supported Clinton on the strength of her experience as Secretary of State and her internationalism.
++Donald Trump also upended the economic discussion of the GOP. In this he may run to the Left of Hillary Clinton trying to gain support of white working class people in the Mid-west and in states like Pennsylvania where middle class Americans have not gotten a raise in thirty years and where death rates for white males around 55 are skyrocketing due to the lack of opportunity. The 1% now live 14 years more than the 99%. Trump uses the loss of manufacturing jobs abroad as his weapon. These are people who are now reacting to the collapse of the global economy in 2008 and find their social and cultural world turned upside down.
++Van Jones warns Democrats that Trump can win the presidency. He says that he doesn't need states where there are significant Hispanic minorities and he only has to convince 3 out of 20 blacks to support him and he is president.
++Tom Hartmann said that the dominant issues for this election will be the economy and the trade deals. He says that Trump is already going after Bill Clinton ala Ross Perot on the "worst trade deal in history"--NAFTA. At this stage the pros and cons of NAFTA are no longer known but the myth that trade deals are bad has taken hold.
++Trump is also going after the modern Republican protection of hedge fund managers but will get away with his truly horrible tax policy that gives the richest even more tax breaks. But he is not of the trickle down economic school.
++What Trump found was that the "real base" of the Republican party is not so much conservative as it is nationalistic and susceptible to nativism. His nouveau riche style violates the etiquette of the country club Republicans. My father-in-law is absolutely baffled by the man and how he could capture the Republican nomination.
++Van Jones, whom I think overhyped the threat of Trump, said that FDR mastered radio,JFK mastered television as well as Reagan, Obama mastered the internet and on-line videos, while Trump mastered the social media like twitter. He said that the dynamics of politics has changed that the villain wins in Reality television and that Trump brought politics into reality television as opposed to climbing the wall into politics.
++From a political scientist point of view, the school of the Party determines is over,Trump won as an outsider even though he is very much an economic insider. By doing so,the party structure of Republicans has imploded. Additionally,the three prong stool, Karl Rove has preached, national security,economic opportunity and social conservatism has collapsed.
++The failure of the GOP to develop policy during the Obama years has hurt it and Trump is the product of a policy-free party.
++It is very sad to see but inevitable when you ignore your own serious structural problems. Red State commentators last night were saying that the GOP kept making promises to their base they never intended to keep and now they are reaping what they sowed.
++You can't promise to uproot Obamacare and not do it for five years. You can promise to block the Iranian nuclear deal and simply not do it. You can't promise when you took over the Senate you are prepared to govern and be the least productive Senate in history. You can;t campaign that Democrats never pass a budget and then when it's your chance, you can't.
++The myth of the free market got destroyed with Donald Trump, who is against all trade deals and wants tariffs. We haven't had this economic reasoning since the 19th century, which was Republican orthodoxy.
++One of the most interesting developments has been the absence of the Koch Brothers in the presidential race. Trump is anathema to them and their economic ideology.
++Larry Sabato said in an interview with a British documentarian that we have to acknowledge that the Trump candidacy destroyed the Republican Party. The resistance of the party to his nomination has pretty much vanished. They were routed and maybe a new party will be born.
++Sadly the Republican still control Congress and the state house. But in the near future what will this party believe?
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