“Donald Trump, who in recent days has accused Bill Clinton of rape and suggested he and Hillary Clinton may have had a role in the death of one of their close friends, plans to focus next on the Whitewater real estate scandal,” Politico reports.
Trump campaign adviser Michael Caputo emailed a researcher at the Republican National Committee asking him to “work up information on HRC/Whitewater as soon as possible. This is for immediate use and for the afternoon talking points process.”
Coming this summer: Bush by Jean Edward Smith.
“Smith demonstrates that it was not Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, or Condoleezza Rice, but President Bush himself who took personal control of foreign policy. Bush drew on his deep religious conviction that important foreign-policy decisions were simply a matter of good versus evil. Domestically, he overreacted to 9/11 and endangered Americans’ civil liberties.”
“The State Department’s inspector general sharply criticized Hillary Clinton’s exclusive use of a private email server while she was secretary of state, saying she had not sought permission to use it and would not have received it if she had,” the New York Times reports.
The report said that Clinton “had an obligation to discuss using her personal email account to conduct official business” with officials responsible for handling records and security but that inspectors found “no evidence” that she had.
Greg Sargent: “Early in the 2012 campaign, when top Democratic strategists were debating how to target Mitt Romney, they worked to hone their message about him down to a single, tight, pithy phrase. According to one senior Democrat in on the discussions, they finally settled on this: ‘When people like him do well, people like you get screwed.'”
“While this sentence never appeared in any Dem messaging, it functioned as a thematic guide, the senior Dem tells me. Now Democrats are wrestling with how to deliver a similar message about Trump, while also dealing with a key strategic problem: In many ways, Trump is a very different kind of billionaire from Romney.”
“Donald Trump is man who cares about no one but himself—a small insecure money-grubber who doesn’t care who gets hurt so long as he makes a profit off of it.”
— Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), quoted by Fortune.
First Read: “Maybe the biggest political story over the past couple of weeks has been how Trump has consolidated the GOP vote. Our own NBC/WSJ poll found the percentage of Republicans backing him in a contest vs. Clinton has gone up from 72% in April to 86% now. And if that holds, it’s significant for Republicans because it helps them on the down-ballot front.”
“In particular, more Republicans rallying around Trump means that the Democratic outside Senate targets — in Arizona, Iowa, Missouri, and North Carolina — are a steeper climb. After all, there is a big difference between Trump being at 47% in the popular vote and being at 42%-44%.”
“She screams and drives me crazy.”
— Donald Trump, quoted by Time, saying he “can’t listen” to Hillary Clinton’s attacks against him.
Donald Trump responded to Hillary Clinton’s attempt to tie him to the 2008 housing crisis saying he was being a good businessman, the New York Times reports.
Said Trump: “I am a businessman, and I have made a lot of money in down markets. In some cases, as much as I’ve made when markets are good. Frankly, this is the kind of thinking our country needs, understanding how to get a good result out of a very bad and sad situation. Politicians have no idea how to do this — they don’t have a clue.”
Donald Trump took several jabs at New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez (R) after she said she was “too busy” to appear with him at a rally, the Washington Examiner reports.
Said Trump: “Since 2000, the number of unemployed people in Albuquerque has doubled. Who’s fault is it? Is it your fault or is it your government’s fault? Since 2000, the number of people on food stamps in New Mexico has tripled. We have to get your governor to get going, OK? She’s got to do a better job.”
He added: “Your governor has got to do a better job. She’s not doing the job.”
A top RNC official sought to soothe business leaders worried about Donald Trump’s influence on the Republican party, saying at a private meeting that the presumptive nominee would not dictate the party’s platform, The Hill reports.
“Seeking to dispel the notion that his robotic utterances in the run-up to the New Hampshire primary alone doomed the trajectory of his campaign, Marco Rubio pointed to his decision to quarrel with Chris Christie over the point of his repeated lines on the debate stage rather than let it go,” Politico reports.
Said Rubio: “I think if we had made a strategic decision in New Hampshire different from the one I made — which was not to engage with Chris Christie, but to try to just ignore it and just stay on message — that would have been a nothing.”
“House Speaker Paul Ryan has begun telling confidants that he wants to end his standoff with Donald Trump in part because he’s worried the split has sharpened divisions in the Republican Party,” Bloomberg reports.
“Ryan aides say nothing has been decided about a possible Trump endorsement. But Trump’s campaign manager, Paul Manafort, told a small group of Republican lawmakers Thursday that he expects Ryan to endorse the party’s nominee as early as this week.”
Politico: “With Republican voters beginning to fall in line behind their presumptive nominee, the election is expected to be tight and hard fought in the battleground states the same way it was four years ago when a more formulaic candidate, Mitt Romney, was the GOP nominee — with key counties won or lost based on hyper-local organizing efforts mimicking precinct fights in local races.”
“Trump’s unorthodox campaign style, marked by personal attacks and contradictory positions, has many Democratic voters believing the match-up against Clinton will be something extraordinary, the likes of which the country has never seen before. That may be true in terms of the nature of the debate, but the recent set of polls foreshadow a more ordinary election that breaks along familiar party lines just like it did between Romney and President Obama.”
Wall Street Journal: “May has been a very merry month for Donald Trump, with recent polls showing him narrowing the gap with Hillary Clinton, or in some cases overtaking her, in a general-election matchup. But while Mr. Trump has seen his support tick up recently, it’s the more dramatic slide in Mrs. Clinton’s numbers that has been a driving factor in her diminishing lead.”
“To some degree, there has been a rallying effect for Mr. Trump since he effectively wrapped up the GOP nomination… But there’s also some evidence that the extended Democratic nomination battle is weighing down Mrs. Clinton’s numbers.”
Washington Examiner: How committed are Trump’s voters?
“Hillary Clinton has a new partner in her battle against Donald Trump: Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who gave a speech Tuesday mirroring Clinton’s own talking points accusing Trump of profiting from the housing crash of 2008,” the Washington Post reports.
“Warren has stayed out of the ongoing Democratic primary race between Clinton and Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont — she is the only Democratic woman in the Senate who has not endorsed Clinton — but she recently has become more aggressive in taking on Trump on his favorite medium, Twitter.”
New York Times: “With Mr. Trump as the Republican standard-bearer, the line separating the conservative mischief makers and the party’s more buttoned-up cadre of elected officials and aides has been obliterated. Fusing what had been two separate but symbiotic forces, Mr. Trump has begun a real-life political science experiment: What happens when a major party’s nominee is more provocateur than politician?”
“That the Republican Party has embraced someone willing to traffic in the most inflammatory of accusations comes as wish fulfillment for an element of the right that is convinced that the party lost the past two elections because its candidates were unwilling to attack President Obama forcefully enough.”
Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton “rolled to wins in Washington’s relatively low-stakes presidential primary Tuesday night,” the Seattle Times reports.
“In the Republican race, Trump was dominant, taking more than three-quarters of the vote and continuing his now-unobstructed march to the GOP nomination.”
“On the Democratic side, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton beat Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders. She had nearly 54 percent of the vote in Tuesday’s returns in a major reversal — though purely symbolic — from March caucuses, in which Sanders dominated.”
Taegan Goddard is the founder of Political Wire, one of the earliest and most influential political web sites. He also runs Political Job Hunt, Electoral Vote Map and the Political Dictionary.
Goddard spent more than a decade as managing director and chief operating officer of a prominent investment firm in New York City. Previously, he was a policy adviser to a U.S. Senator and Governor.
Goddard is also co-author of You Won - Now What? (Scribner, 1998), a political management book hailed by prominent journalists and politicians from both parties. In addition, Goddard's essays on politics and public policy have appeared in dozens of newspapers across the country.
Goddard earned degrees from Vassar College and Harvard University. He lives in New York with his wife and three sons.
Goddard is the owner of Goddard Media LLC.