The whole article is Trump backing down and refusing to talk about his statements that 9/11 happened on Dubya’s watch, which lead to Jebya’s claim that his brother kept the country safe from everyone who wasn’t his brother.
The Twitter beef is old news. What’s interesting to me is how political Trump looks when he runs from reporters and generally ducks the issue. Since when has he had a problem running his mouth? Is this the issue that finally kicks his ass hard enough to give him a headache? Does he actually have enough low animal cunning to lay low for once in his life?
I’m surprised Trump isn’t coming right at 'em on this one. As I said in another thread last night:
And not to mention, the infamous August 2001 PDB that Bush ignored was about the sixth in a string of increasingly alarming PDBs that were warning about bin Laden and possible attacks on the U.S. By then, Al Gore would have had the whole fucking U.S. government on the lookout. That FBI boss who sat on the agent’s report of Middle Eastern guys taking flight lessons who didn’t seem interested in learning how to land - he wouldn’t have sat on it; it would have been his ticket to a promotion and a bonus.
Of course, Trump isn’t enough of a news junkie to know this. But still, he should have a wonk on staff who can feed him stuff like this.
Not far off. If this is due to an Act of Staff, it would have been one of the Trumplings pointing out that Dubya’s likely still pretty popular among the people he’s courting and blaming him instead of Obama Bin Hussein isn’t a winning tactic.
I return to my surprise: Trump actually seems to be acting like a politician here. A bad, inept, and inexperienced politician, but Hell, he’s part of a field where one of the candidates is gung-ho for selling criminals into slavery so his idiocy is eclipsed by the massive insanity of others. He might actually be serious about this. I will be laughing even harder when this goes sour on him.
OTOH, my sense is that the opinion of actual Republican voters about Dubya is still quite malleable. And if Trump slammed him in the right way, you’d get a nice divide between the GOP establishment (which, if not actively defending Dubya any more than necessary, is unwilling to be openly critical of him, either) and the better part of the GOP voters. Trump could also remind them of Dubya’s attempts to pass immigration reform, which would be right up his alley as it is.
I’m not sure there is any attack against W. that would work with the primary voters, for either of 2 reasons.
Republicans may accept, rather grudgingly, that George W. Bush’s presidency was a failure, but they can’t tell you why. Sunspots, maybe. They still favor all of his ideas and policies (except immigration reform).
Jeb wouldn’t be so mad about Trump’s 9/11 remarks if he didn’t know they were true. But, if G. W. Bush bears some culpability because 9/11 happened on his watch, then Republican voters bear some culpability for putting him in office. Republican primary voters will gleefully cheer on any fight Trump wants to start, unless it’s with themselves.
Hey, a LOT of us would still like to know the answer to that. We’ve known for years that Bush’s inner circle [del]all wanted to be big big stars[/del] all wanted to invade Iraq, but they had different reasons for that, with WMDs being the reason they could sell to the public.
This tweet was apparently prompted by a revelation - from Hillary’s emails, hahahaha! - that Blair had agreed over a year ahead of time to support Bush’s Iraq invasion.
If I’d voted for Dubya back in 2000, I wouldn’t be feeling any responsibility for any of his 9/11- or Iraq-related decisions. Who could have seen that coming? Also, it was fifteen years ago. Most of us don’t feel we have to defend most of what we did that far back.
And the sheer lapse of time is one reason why I doubt that most GOP voters will feel like they have a dog in the fight if Trump says Dubya was a fucking idiot. And the main thing about Dubya and this year’s race isn’t Dubya’s policies (hell, Dubya’s practically a RINO by today’s standards), but that Dubya certainly can be wrapped around Jeb’s neck, as Trump is doing. The voters don’t need to make connections more complicated than that.
He’s saying he isn’t blaming Dubya, but he keeps pressing the attack. Smarter than saying outright it’s Dubya’s fault, but you still have to wonder how it will sound to the majority of Republicans.
Even in his best states, Trump still isn’t up to 50%. He isn’t even up to 40%. 38% looks good in a field with over a dozen participants, but when it’s one-on-one, 40% means you lose. And, finally, “The CNN/ORC polls were conducted by telephone October 3-10.” so these numbers don’t take the recent 9/11 mess into account. And the primary is still fairly young. And the election’s more than a year away. And we still haven’t seen a truly concerted assault on Trump by a terrified Republican establishment.
I was making a similar argument earlier, but polls show that the popularity of Trump and Carson goes beyond those who click them as First Choice. Ben Carson leads the “Second Choice” race, slightly ahead of Rubio. (Trump was the top “Second Choice” a month or two ago.)
53% of GOP primary voters have a favorable view of Trump, ahead of Rubio and behind only Carson.
“Trump continues to lead with every subgroup of the GOP electorate.”
I’ll still offer high odds that neither Trump nor Carson becomes the nominee, but even this much longevity is amazing … and very informative about the nature of the “Republican primary voter.”
Clipping a bunch that I will still reference for brevity. I agree the longevity is pretty amazing. I don’t dive in deep on every poll but one I saw shortly after the last debate had him WAY down the list of second choices (ISTR 5%). I didn’t dig enough to know if that was an outlier or a trend away from the higher numbers he was getting during his surge.
I’m not sure where you pulled the favorability rating from. I like to use HuffPost Pollster to look at trends for things that places like Real Clear Politics don’t track with their averages. On thereTrumps favorability has been pretty stagnant since September 1st with the favorable numbers showing just the slightest of downward trend. He’s -19.9% net on there. 55.5% unfavorable and 35.6 favorable. That’s a giant hole and he hasn’t particularly shown that he’s climbing out of it.
His demographic support could be all over the place. Some of the groups he was doing well in during his surge tend to not actually vote in primaries after saying they are likely to. That’s a problem if he can’t get out the vote.
It’s not a death knell. He has serious work to do though. Like you I’m not sure he can do it.
True, but it’s gonna take awhile for it to get to one-on-one, and I’ve never believed he actually wants to win the GOP nomination anyway, but just wants to stir things up and have a good time doing it.
In the meantime, if he wins enough delegates, he can increase the odds of nobody having the votes for a first-ballot win. If he can win 25% of the delegates, then somebody else has to win 2/3 of the rest in order to get the nomination.
Do you really expect this to hurt him noticeably? I don’t. But it’ll keep on dragging Jebbie down.
But that would give him what he would need to claim that the GOP had reneged on their deal with him, and run as an independent in the fall. I think the GOP establishment has to continue to wait for him to either self-destruct, or (more likely) simply fall short of a majority of delegates.
Considering very few Republicans actually revere Bush for a variety of reasons, it isn’t unattractive. It is actually interesting to note that Trump is many ways is the anti-Bush for the reasons I’ll elaborate before.
That assumes that virtually every non-Trump supporter would support the not-Trump candidate were the field down to Trump and one other. On the contrary having 38% right now means that he can win a two-way by winning just 20% of those who support one of the 16 other candidates right now.
Why would that hurt him? He’s gotten away with saying worse towards John McCain and Megyn Kelley among others. If anything it might help him, considering many Republican voters consider the statement true to a certain extent.
In terms of sheer resources, Trump exceeds the flavour of month GOP candidates of 2012.
But getting back to the topic of Trump being the anti-Bush. George W. Bush was seen as a sort of a moderate, “compassionate conservative” type during his initial candidacy and early months of his presidency who would be an efficient conservative reformist politician even though his policies were thoroughly conservative in a way that satisfied the three primary ideological tendencies of the Republican Party: he was a strong neoliberal free-trader for the Chamber of Commerce folk, an interventionist hawk for the neocon intelligentsia, and an unabashed social conservative for the Religious Right. On the other hand, Trump is seen as some type of an extreme right-winger when in reality most of his substantive policy stances besides those on immigration aren’t that much to the right of or even more moderate than Bush’s due to his rhetoric and persona. On the issues Trump is in many ways the inverse of Bush: he is a protectionist populist vowing to preserve Social Security and Medicare and dismisses the highminded Wilsonianism that dominated conservative rhetoric in the first decade of this millennium in favour of nation-interest foreign policy. Even on cultural issues, Bush emphasized the issues most immediately connected to biblical morality (abortion and homosexual marriage) even as he supported an extension of the assault weapons ban and immigration reform while Trump de-emphasizes those moral issues in favour of the cultural issues that are more likely to garner populist reaction namely immigration and guns.
Actually, he criticized the Clinton Administration for “nation-building” during the 2000 campaign and said the U.S. shouldn’t be doing that. It was only after 9-11 that he changed his tune.
Only tepidly, and he didn’t lift a finger to keep the ban from expiring.
Don’t look now, but Trump’s numbers are starting to climb again. In the last 5 polls on RCP, his numbers are 27, 24, 28, 25, 27, for a 26.2 average. Like those stickers you sometimes see on cars.
And the Club for Growth has apparently decided that they’re gonna dump a few tons of negative ads into Iowa to bring down Trump.
That could work. OTOH, it could make the base conclude that the CfG is just another bunch of lackeys of the GOP Establishment.
And now the WaPo has Trump at 32%. I’m thinking this is going to prove to be an outlier, since it’s 4 percentage points above where any other poll in the RCP average has him recently.
By saying he’s a “Liberal Politician”. Which isn’t even a lie: He’s taken some liberal positions in the past, and anyone who runs for office is a politician even if they claim to be an “outsider” to get votes.
IOW, they attack him on the issues, which hasn’t seemed to hurt him yet: His followers want a Personality, and until the GOP finds a way to deflate that, they’ll have a tough time peeling supporters away from him.
