From what I’ve gathered, unless you start collecting the signatures and doing the paperwork by March at the latest, it would be exceptionally difficult to qualify in time as a 3rd party candidate on most state ballots. Starting it in June or July probably wouldn’t work.
Then again, there’s probably enough states that have write-in rules or in which he could qualify in time to effectively scuttle the GOP nominee anyway.
Erick Erickson and Bill Kristol are now begging Rubio to drop out and become Cruz’s VP pick. Two first term Cuban senators who couldn’t beat Trump on their own – that’s an interesting ballot.
If there is a way to pull this off, then Reince Priebus is a hell of a lot smarter than I am. I think at this point the GOP would be best off giving up, and letting Trump run with it.
Oh sure, Trump’s business is Trump. He’s one of the most amazing narcissists who has ever lived. His business deals take a backseat to his self promotion. Right now he’s having the time of his life.
But with the presidency comes incredible responsibility, and I’m not sure he wants that. I still think he may bail on this whole thing, but if he does, it won’t be to oversee his business ventures.
@jasg:
I was going to say, as that article notes, Obama didn’t put his money into a blind trust. What Presidents do in this regard is a perceptions thing not a legal requirement.
Frankly, I can easily see Trump letting his kids run the business for 4 years.
Sure, they did it for Romney. But it didn’t have any real impact because they were just screwing over a guy who had a small handful of delegates who the establishment perceived as a rabble rouser in favor of the guy who had won an undeniable majority of the delegates outright, but the precedent is certainly there.
Right, and blind trusts largely only make sense for highly liquid assets that you can easily manipulate. Because a blind trust can easily shield you from knowledge of what assets are in the trust, especially if the trustee is allowed to swap out stocks and bonds for similarly valued ones, obscuring your knowledge of what is in the trust.
This is really important for guys like the Federal Reserve Chairperson (who typically do put much of their investments in a blind trust, but I have no idea if this is legally required or not), one of their press conferences could easily raise or lower an entire sector’s daily share prices, and thus that position is ripe for abuse. A President has similar power–which is why most have put their liquid assets in blind trusts. Obama didn’t because most of his liquid assets were index mutual funds, and he made the argument since they are just proxies for the broad U.S. economy, putting them in a blind trust served no purpose and was not necessary (and I agree.) If 40% of his wealth had been in TransCanada stock and then he approved the Keystone XL pipeline, things wouldn’t look so good.
But Trump doesn’t have a ton of assets in " manipulable liquid assets." I.e. stocks and bonds, according to Forbes (and they said they’ve seen proof of ownership) he has around $280m in things like this, stocks, bonds, cash in checking accounts. Likely for perception reasons he would sell all of those for straight cash and convert them to U.S. Treasury Bonds (another big holding of Obama in addition to index funds, and also kosher to not be in a trust) or put them into a blind trust. But doing so with real estate (which makes up like $3bn of his Forbes reported $4bn in wealth) is just not very feasible. Real estate is not highly liquid, even if his large properties were put into blind trusts, he would still know he owned them. They also cannot be sold quietly, sale of them would require property records being created which are a matter of public record, so the media would report on it. Plus, managing/owning that real estate is really the only business Trump is in now (he doesn’t do a lot of the real estate development that he once did, and got out of things like the rental market that his dad was in even before that), so business wise it’d be really difficult to just put all of that in a blind trust.
I see reason to believe that Trump probably buys into the process his dad did–when the time is right, you turn the business over to your kids. Fred Trump chose to do so a bit earlier than Donald has (Fred lived to be 93, died in 1999 and turned his business over to Donald in the 70s.) My understanding is Donald was the principal manager of the business because his older brother was a drunk (and in Donald’s words died from his alcoholism) and his other siblings didn’t have an interest in the business. Among Trump’s kids it looks like at least 2 of them will probably take on some management responsibilities.
Of course we can all hope this is just theorizing, and Trump is never in a position where he needs to worry about how to have his assets managed as President.
I don’t think there’s any serious doubt Trump is, in many ways, smarter than hell. He has more lives in business than a cat with an MBA and he’s… well, he’s winning.
I think Trump came along at the right time. His 2000 campaign went nowhere and if he’d run this campaign in, say, 1988, he would have been jeered out of the contest before Iowa.
But as it happens he is striking the GOP with a message that appeals to underinformed, frightened people at exactly the moment when the GOP is vulnerable to a candidate appealing to those people. This isn’t what the Republicans want, but it’s the bed they made (see 10,000 other threads on the subject) and Trump is absolutely, beyond any shadow of a doubt, excellent at it. He is winning the game by playing it in a different way, one his opponents have no defense against. Trump has narcissistic personality disorder, but at this moment, that’s playing well.
Well, he’s going to have to. And then we’ll see how smart he really is.
Winning the primary in Alabama is not statistically meaningful in projecting his performance in an election. It’s like polling the concertgoers at a Foo Fighters concert about who the best band in history is; the Foo Fighters are going to win that primary, but if you asked the same question of the Western world at large you’re going to find they won’t even be the #1 pick among bands that start with “F”.
When a con artist has successfully played his con game, the definition of “smart” has to be seen in context. It’s not like solving a problem in math or physics. You’re only measuring the con artist’s “smartness” in relation to the relative stupidity of the victims that he conned. Present him with a different population, and he might not seem so smart any more.
Yes. His appeal is largely based on racism, misogyny, xenophobia and Islamophobia, pro-business and pro-wealth policies, and belligerence in foreign policy. Much of what he says represents the thinly veiled beliefs of a large core of Republican supporters, but which no one has dared to explicitly articulate. This puts the Republican establishment in the perverse position of not being able to effectively attack the things that so many of them really believe. This all changes when he goes head to head with the Democratic establishment in the general election.
His position on free trade, e.g. force companies to manufacture in the U.S. is not pro-business and I seriously doubt his pro-wealth policies have anything to do with his popularity.
I take your overall point, but who would that #1 pick be? I scanned a list of “F” bands and couldn’t think of who would clearly beat them.
As for the other stuff (the actual, on topic points, LOL), I agree with that. And something Nate Silver pointed out on the 538 podcast last night is that Drumpf only received about 35% of the total votes cast in the first four states; then last night, he got more like 36%. That is just within the GOP, and it does not suggest he’s a worldbeater.
I wouldn’t be so sure …
An analysis of Donald Trump’s tax plan by a research institute reveals two interesting points: the U.S. government would get a lot poorer, and the wealthy would get a lot richer … While the plan cuts taxes for all income levels, the biggest cuts involve the highest-income level, both in dollar terms and as a percentage of income.
I agree, though, that his position on repatriating manufacturing is a bit anomalous to the usual Republican stance. But I also think that the biggest issues driving his popularity are the aforementioned racism, anti-immigrant xenophobia, and belligerence in foreign policy.
They certainly won’t pull it off by putting Gang of Eight Rubio as their choice, Cruz would have a better shot of bringing those voters back but he is just as poisonous as Trump and the establishment hates him just as much.