After patting himself on the back following the Orlando massacre, Donald Trump went on to suggest the usual Republican response when there’s a mass shooting in America – that more club-goers needed more guns. Asked about that statement on Sunday, Chris Cox, the executive director of the National Rifle Association’s Institute for Legislative Action, said Trump’s answer “defies commonsense.”
“We have a serious problem in this country, a catastrophic situation,” Cox said. “It has nothing to do with firearms. It has nothing to do with the Second Amendment or even gun control and it has everything to do with radical Islamic terrorists.”
Cox was asked about presumptive GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump‘s comments that the outcome in Orlando would have been better had more people in the club been armed.
Cox said the Pulse nightclub’s gun-free-zone policy didn’t prevent Omar Mateen from “mowing down innocent people.”
Cox, however, said he does not want people drinking a nightclub armed to the teeth.
“What Donald Trump has said is what the American people know is commonsense, that if somebody had been there to stop this faster, fewer people would have died. That’s not controversial, that’s commonsense,” he said.
“No one thinks that people should go into a nightclub drinking and carrying firearms. That defies commonsense. It also defies the law. It’s not what we’re talking about here,” he added.
It’s been a week since the attack in Orlando and much of what’s happened is predictable. Both political parties have rolled out their positions on gun control, and both are very familiar. Democrats want new background checks and to ban sales of guns to anyone on the no-fly or terrorist watch lists. Republicans counter by saying that more people should be carrying guns and that denying anyone their second amendment rights is abhorrent. Further, the man responsible for the massacre wasn’t on any list when he purchased his guns, so changes in the law wouldn’t have stopped his actions.
It’s a tiresome debate, and the more it drags on, the more we will see horrible scenes like the one in Orlando. Remember that there was an armed guard at the door to the Pulse nightclub, and he couldn’t stop Omar Mateen from entering the club. The NRA fantasy is that a nightclub full of armed patrons would have killed Mateen before he could have done damage, but the reality is that it’s likely that far more than 49 people would have died if there was a shootout because most people just aren’t very good shots. I could imagine bullets being sprayed all over the club and more innocent club-goers losing their lives. More guns is not the answer. It’s a punchline.
The most sensible reform would be to know who has guns in this country. Background checks, licenses, and ones that need to be renewed like driver’s licenses, and mandatory safety classes should be the law of the land. More than that, the culture needs to change. This was an attack on gays, plain and simple. It was a terror attack too, but only insofar as Omar Mateen’s personal and religious views were hostile to the LGBTQ community. Despite the positive changes in marriage laws and more widespread acceptance of gay rights, we clearly have more work to do.
As for politics, this past week was a terrible one for Donald Trump, as he acted as though this was a personal referendum on whether he was right that we’d have a terrorist attack on American soil. He also repeated his call to bar all Muslims from coming or returning to this country until…well, he hasn’t said. Polls show his appeal to women, Muslims, Hispanics and African-Americans dropping like a stone. Hillary has rightly been supportive and empathetic, and she’s smart enough to get out of the way when her opponent is imploding.
It’s been a sad week, and one full of national and personal reflection. Can we please not do this anymore?
The most powerful Republican in Congress has drawn a line in the sand against the leader of the Republican party – if Donald Trump tries to carry out any of his more insane policies, Paul Ryan has said he “would sue!”
In an interview with the Huffington Post Thursday, Ryan stated that he doesn’t agree with Trump’s Muslim Ban proposal, and floated taking a President Trump to court if he tried to implement such a ban or some of his other controversial proposals unilaterally.
“I would sue any president that exceeds his or her powers,” Ryan said in a back-and-forth about Trump’s claims that he could implement a Muslim ban or build a Mexican border wall without congressional approval.
Ryan said he wasn’t sure of the “legal question” of whether Trump could institute a Muslim ban on his own as president.
“That’s a legal question that there’s a good debate about,” he said, citing the 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act.
“On the broader question, are we going to exert our Article I powers and reclaim this Article I power no matter who the president is? Absolutely,” Ryan said. He also said he discussed the limits of the executive power with Trump.
Just 32 percent of Americans view the Republican Party favorably as it prepares to formally nominate Donald Trump for president, the latest Bloomberg Politics national poll shows, the lowest level recorded since the poll’s inception in September 2009.
The Democratic Party, by contrast, is seen favorably by 49 percent. Congress is viewed favorably by just 24 percent, the lowest since March 2010 and a response that found near bipartisan agreement in the poll.
Those views will not only shape the presidential race between Trump and Hillary Clinton, they could spill over into down-ballot contests that that will determine control of Congress and governorships after November.
“This is obviously related to perceptions of Trump,” said pollster J. Ann Selzer, who oversaw the survey. “This bleeds out into perceptions of the party and to other GOP politicians.”
By ‘majority’ I mean around 70 percent. By ‘sensible’ I mean anyone who is not a member of the Republican party.
Seven in 10 Americans see Donald Trump unfavorably in a new ABC News/Washington Post poll, up 10 points in just the past month to a new high since he announced his candidacy for president. But Hillary Clinton reached a new high for unfavorability as well, 55 percent.
The results mark the striking challenges facing both candidates, cementing their position as the two most unpopular presumptive major party nominees for president in ABC News/Washington Post polling dating to 1984.
Trump’s result reverses a boost he received after securing the Republican presidential nomination, from 37-60 percent favorable-unfavorable in mid-May to 29-70 percent now, after a week in which he took sharp criticism for suggesting that he was being treated unfairly by a federal judge because of the judge’s Mexican heritage.
Trump’s unfavorable score is a point from his highest on record, 71 percent in late May last year, just before he formally entered the presidential race June 16. His decline in favorability in the past month was broadly based across groups.
There are some who say what President Obama did today was unprecedented. But when Donald Trump – the leader of the Republican party and Republican presidential candidate – continually misleads his followers with unconstitutional talk of religious tests for Muslims entering the United States, then the sitting president had no choice but to stand up and smack down Trump’s ignorance.
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, accompanied by New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, left, takes questions from members of the media during a news conference on Super Tuesday primary election night in the White and Gold Ballroom at The Mar-A-Lago Club in Palm Beach, Fla., Tuesday, March 1, 2016. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)
AP Photo/Andrew Harnik
And fittingly so. Chris Christie is a disgrace to the Republican party… and that’s saying a lot considering that the very meaning of the word ‘disgraceful’ references the Republican Party as an example.
Chris Christie, the sitting governor of New Jersey, has been diminished to an errand boy for Donald Trump’s campaign, according to a New Yorker report published online on Monday.
“[Christie] has transformed himself into a sort of manservant, who is constantly with Trump at events,” Ryan Lizza wrote in the magazine’s June 20 issue. Lizza also said one anonymous Republican source told him a friend on Trump’s campaign “used Snapchat to send him a video of Christie fetching Trump’s McDonald’s order.”
The piece, which traces Republicans coming to terms with Trump as the presumptive nominee, is the latest humiliation for Christie since he became a prominent surrogate for the businessman’s campaign.
After appearing on camera with a panicked, deer-in-the-headlights look in his eyes for much of a Super Tuesday press conference with Trump in March, Christie was forced to hold a presser of his own to clarify, “No, I wasn’t being held hostage.”
Donald Trump was appropriately slammed and scrutinized by sensible Americans over the last week for his racist attacks on a Federal Judge, and he has looked for a way out since the words about the judge fell out his mouth. Well Trump may have found a way to end the bleeding… albeit temporarily.
Today, the Republican presidential nominee went on Fox News and suggested that President Obama – the same president who waged a very successful war against ISIS and other terrorists in the Middle East – is a terrorist sympathizer.
CNN’s Jake Tapper had something to say about that!
Good news: The primaries are over. Well, except for the DC primary this Tuesday, but that one really won’t count for much.
Bad news: The general election is on our doorstep, promising us five months of mudslinging, advertisements across numerous screens and multiple forms of media, and, oh yes, some policy prescriptions.
At this point, Donald Trump is in the midst of a bad media week, what with him questioning a judge because of his ethnic background, and a continuing ignorance of American foreign policy. In fact, if I was Xi Jinping, I’d be very excited about the prospects of Donald Trump being elected because then I could get into a trade war that I’ll win and reap the benefits of an American pullback in Asia. China will be happy to fill that vacuum and make life pretty distressing for Japan and South Korea.
And that’s on top of things that Trump has already said about Mexicans and women and Muslims that didn’t seem to disqualify him in the minds of the slice of the GOP that stood with him during the primaries and that forms the basis of his electoral hopes come the fall. The big problem, though, is that Trump has not unified the GOP, and even though his poll numbers increased briefly, he’s fallen farther behind Hillary Clinton and hasn’t won a horse race poll since the middle of May. And that’s even before Hillary gets her Democratic unity bounce after Bernie leaves the race. Things ain’t looking up for Donald and I think he knows it.
Hillary Clinton has had her bad weeks, but this one was not one of them. She won the Democratic nomination, even without the super-delegates, and she made a blistering speech that savaged Trump as the know-nothing that he is. This woke up many Democrats and Independents who figured that only Trump knew how to manipulate the media. His feeble attempts at belittling her as not looking presidential only showed how un-presidential he is. And for all the talk about his getting the better of her during debates, he’d better understand that she actually knows what she’s talking about on policy, and that’s what people look for in the fall. I have no doubt that Hillary will slice, dice, set it and forget it during the debates, leaving Trump to fulminate and call her names. Good luck with that.
So much has also been said about both candidates being rather unpopular,. but really, most Republicans don’t like Hillary and most Democrats don’t like Trump, so what did you expect? Americans thought Gerald R. Ford was a nice guy, but where did that get him? By the end of a presidential campaign, nobody likes anybody. This time, we’ve just gotten a bit ahead of ourselves.
At this point, it’s Hillary’s to lose. President Obama is finally popular and Elizabeth Warren is the best thing to happen to the Democratic social media feed ever. Trump tried to raise some money over the weekend and many GOP donors followed Nancy Reagan’s advice and just said no. Much of the money will go to saving the Senate and the House from absolute devastation. Hillary will raise an obscene amount of money, win, then appoint a Supreme Court justice who will vote to eviscerate the Citizen’s United decision. Unless the e-mail thing gets worse.
But for political junkies, it’s the mainline, and no matter how this election takes shape, we will follow it. And it’s not even Father’s Day yet.
In an interview with Joy Reid on MSNBC, comedian D.L Hughly got serious for a moment when the subject of Republican presidential nominee, Donald Trump, was mentioned, And before the Trump question was fully asked, Hughley answered, “Donlad Trump is a racist!”
Hughley then associated the rest of the Republican leadership with Trump’s racism, quoting House Speaker Paul Ryan as saying that Trump’s basically a “textbook” racist. “And if you can say that,” Hughley continued about Ryan, “it’s because you’re not affected by racists.”
Hughley ended the piece on Trump saying that “if I’m in a car, I committed a crime and the dude in the car with me pretend that he don’t know, that ain’t going to work. You’re a co-conspirator. And if you know that he is a racist, you’re a co-racist. Simple as that!”
USA Today reports: Donald Trump often portrays himself as a savior of the working class who will “protect your job.” But a USA TODAY NETWORK analysis found he has been involved in more than 3,500 lawsuits over the past three decades — and a large number of those involve ordinary Americans, like the Friels, who say Trump or his companies have refused to pay them.
At least 60 lawsuits, along with hundreds of liens, judgments, and other government filings reviewed by the USA TODAY NETWORK, document people who have accused Trump and his businesses of failing to pay them for their work. Among them: a dishwasher in Florida. A glass company in New Jersey. A carpet company. A plumber. Painters. Forty-eight waiters. Dozens of bartenders and other hourly workers at his resorts and clubs, coast to coast. Real estate brokers who sold his properties. And, ironically, several law firms that once represented him in these suits and others.
Trump’s companies have also been cited for 24 violations of the Fair Labor Standards Act since 2005 for failing to pay overtime or minimum wage, according to U.S. Department of Labor data. That includes 21 citations against the defunct Trump Plaza in Atlantic City and three against the also out-of-business Trump Mortgage LLC in New York. Both cases were resolved by the companies agreeing to pay back wages.
Yes, there were some politics involved in this un-endorsement, but at least the Illinois senator stepped up and did the right thing.
Kirk, facing a tough fight with Rep. Tammy Duckworth (D-IL) to keep his Senate seat, released a statement saying, “While I oppose the Democratic nominee, Donald Trump’s latest statements, in context with past attacks on Hispanics, women and the disabled like me, make it certain that I cannot and will not support my party’s nominee for President regardless of the political impact on my candidacy or the Republican Party.”
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