donald-trump

Here Are Some of the Many Words Melania Trump Has Said

Allie Jones · 01/26/16 09:32AM

The future First Lady of the United States, Melania Trump, does not give many interviews. She’s spoken out so little during her husband Donald’s campaign, in fact, that yesterday the Associated Press published an entire profile of the woman that hangs on a few words she once uttered on an episode of The Apprentice.

Remember When Donald Trump's Wife and Donald Trump's Mistress Got in a Public Brawl in Aspen?

Gabrielle Bluestone · 01/25/16 03:48PM

In 1990, Donald Trump’s marriage to a beautiful blonde model was nearing its end, and his marriage to a different beautiful blonde model was just about to bloom. The two ladies (Ivana Trump and Marla Maples, respectively) allegedly became aware of this on the scenic slopes of Aspen, where they got into a verbal—or, depending on who you ask, physical—confrontation over the rotting jack-o-lantern real estate tycoon himself.

Trump Pulls Veterans Campaign Ad That Depicted Russian Soldiers

Jordan Sargent · 01/22/16 05:25PM

Donald Trump put a new veteran-focused campaign ad up on Facebook today, but it was pulled down before most anyone could see it after commenters pointed out that the footage clearly depicted Russian veterans wearing the distinctive St. George ribbon and pins with the Communist hammer and sickle.

The National Review Makes Its Case Against the Republican Party

Tom Scocca · 01/22/16 03:00PM

Donald Trump, the National Review tells us, is a huckster, a dangerous demagogue, and an irresponsible fool. The first voice that the National Review brings out to tell us so, in the anti-Trump blurb collection that the magazine promoted to the New York Times yesterday and released to the bedtime internet last night, is the voice of Glenn Beck.

Trump, Beck warns us, is the latest avatar of “ever-expanding government,” a proven sympathizer with the Obama Administration’s tyrannical goals. “While conservatives fought against the bank bailouts,” Beck writes, “Donald Trump called them ‘something that has to get done.’” This is an interesting reconstruction of the politics around the question of whether to let the finance industry collapse; “it needed to be done,” was also how the Republican presidential nominee at the time described the bailout of AIG. (The bailout “was, unfortunately, necessary,” Republican Senate candidate Carly Fiorina said.)

The more notable historical oddity, though, is that the National Review should give that space to Glenn Beck at all. The magazine originally defined its place in the conservative intellectual world through William F. Buckley’s bold attacks on the John Birch Society and the paranoid conspiratorialist wing of the Republican Party. Beck is a neo-Bircher who built his career by weeping on television about the wicked machinations of America’s hidden enemies. Yet there he is, leading off Buckley’s magazine’s effort to explain why Donald Trump doesn’t belong in the conservative movement.

The further one reads through the National Review’s anti-Trump pleadings, the more sense Beck’s participation makes. If Buckley declared that his magazine “stands athwart history, yelling Stop,” the Trump package stands alongside history muttering “History? History, history... Hmm, nope, doesn’t ring a bell.”

There are, at this point, two fairly straightforward thoughtful arguments that a conservative publication could make against the rise of Donald Trump. One would be a pragmatic or tactical one: Despite his theatrical contempt for liberal elites, Trump is unpredictable and insufficiently committed to the conservative movement’s plans and goals. Where a President Ted Cruz would fill the federal bench with names from a Federalist Society spreadsheet (or a spreadsheet Cruz himself had prepared for the Federalist Society), for all anyone knows, a President Trump might appoint Nancy Grace to the Supreme Court. That would surely make liberals mad, but it wouldn’t get the big job done.

The other argument that a conservative publication could make against the rise of Donald Trump would be an unsparing self-examination and self-criticism, reckoning with the currents of brutish populism that have run from Nixon through Reagan through George W. Bush to the present-day circus, and humbly apologizing for its role in creating them. Any real attempt to write Donald Trump out of the Republican Party needs to engage, head on, with the fact that Donald Trump is currently polling far ahead of the field with people who identify as Republican voters. What is the conservative movement if it is not the way that voters who identify as conservative are moving?

Report: Despite What We Is Try's No to Spin Up, Sarah Palin Trades Snow for Dirt

Allie Jones · 01/20/16 01:55PM

Earlier today, official Trump supporter Sarah Palin reportedly did not show up to a Trump rally in Iowa as planned. She seemed to deny that anything is amiss, however, in a Facebook post this afternoon. “Trading in the beautiful snow of Iowa for the red dirt of Oklahoma as planned, despite what the media is try’s no to spin up!” she wrote, in near-English. “Thank you Iowa - get out and caucus on February 1st!”

Ted Cruz Attack Ad on Donald Trump Can't Keep All These "P.C. Liberals" Straight

Brendan O'Connor · 01/19/16 08:45PM

The Courageous Conservatives PAC, which supports Ted Cruz, released a new campaign ad on Monday criticizing Donald Trump’s (actually hilarious) endorsement of Bill de Blasio for New York City mayor. When the scary voice-over mentions the mayor siding with “P.C. liberals to let the homeless run wild on city streets,” it shows an image of an elderly black man speaking into a megaphone. However, this photograph is from a demonstration against the de Blasio administration’s homelessness policies—specifically, the aggressive deployment of the NYPD in East Harlem to harry and harass the homeless people who live there.