In this clip from mid-September when Trump was ascendant, Samantha Bee argues that many elites, especially in the media, do not see the danger of Donald Trump’s rhetoric because they belong to a class that will not be harmed, though even that is becoming an increasingly dubious assumption given the escalation of his rhetoric.
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The disastrous last few days have resulted in a sudden realization among many in the Republican party establishment that Trump has become too toxic for them and a quarter of elected Republicans now say they cannot endorse him. The responses of those who had formally endorsed him has ranged from saying that they will not vote for him, to revocation of their prior endorsement but not saying they won’t vote for him, to some (like senate majority leader Mitch McConnell) simply saying that they condemn his remarks but not actually withdrawing support. The party chair Reince Priebus is the only one of the three main leaders still supporting Trump.
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These are among the sharpest political satirists around today and of course they addressed the Trump recording and the debate.
One may think that the sensational events of the past week, such as the release of the Donald Trump recording and his ferocious performance in the last debate, would cause major swings in public opinion in support between the two candidates. But in the past, polls seem to shift by only small amounts even with major news breaking and it is not clear that those movements were due to any actual events like debates or are due to random drifts. The latest polls do seem to show more significant shifts with a large drop in support for Trump but if the past is any indication, we may see a regression to the mean and the gap with Hillary Clinton closing again.
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Nobody personifies the ‘Get off my lawn!’ sentiment better than Black and his latest rant is epic.
(This clip aired on October 5, 2015. To get suggestions on how to view clips of The Daily Show outside the US, please see this earlier post. If the videos autoplay, please see here for a diagnosis and possible solutions.)
The locker rooms of America strike back
The repeated defense by Donald Trump and his surrogates that the recording of his disgusting comments about women was simply ‘locker room talk’ has caused offense to athletes who spend a lot of time in actual locker rooms, and they have reacted angrily to what they see as a blanket slur on all of them, as can be seen here and here. Maybe Trump has his own locker room where he only hangs out with Rudy Giuliani, Roger Ailes, and Newt Gingrich. I can well believe that those four talk like that in private because they all seem to be what we used to call ‘dirty old men’ and ‘lechers’, people who become completely unhinged in the presence of women.
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Donald Trump behaved in the second debate just like I expected him to, as someone who knows that he is losing and needs to do something drastic to halt the slide. He indulged in his usual hyperbole because he is a man who speaks only in superlatives and the subtlety of a comparative seems to be lost on him. He said that the government is totally incompetent in every conceivable way and that they make terrible deals and don’t know how to wage wars. He attacked Obamacare and said the Iran deal was the worst in the history of deal making. The list of US failures went on and on. You wondered if anyone in the government was even able to tie their shoelaces.
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I have been curious as to the origins of the recording of Donald Trump that has caused such a sensation, how something made in 2005 lay dormant until Friday. Here is some background to how the recording was made. It arose in the context that Trump had been working for NBC on his own show The Apprentice from 2004 until he decided to run for president last year, and in 2005 had been invited to appear as a guest on another of their programs Access Hollywood.
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The New York Times today has a long article on the torturing of prisoners by the US at Guantanamo, CIA black sites, and at other facilities around the world where the US government has control. The descriptions and the long-lasting physical and psychological effects on the victims, many of them subsequently released because they were innocent, makes for truly depressing reading as you wonder how people could treat other human beings this way.
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The debate tonight presents Donald Trump with a difficult problem, made much harder by the recent revelations of the way he treats women. Usually the second presidential debate is a less anticipated event with fewer viewers than the first because people have a sense that they no know the candidates. But the Trump revelations have fueled great anticipation about how he will react and we may see a huge audience, even larger than the record breaking first.
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