“Pretend we’re slightly behind. You gotta get out. We don’t wanna blow this.”
— Donald Trump, quoted by Politico.
“Pretend we’re slightly behind. You gotta get out. We don’t wanna blow this.”
— Donald Trump, quoted by Politico.
A woman who says Donald Trump raped her as a 13-year-old in the 1990s is planning a press conference at 6 pm ET today.
Huffington Post: “For months, people have wondered why this case isn’t getting more ― or, really, any ― attention in the press, even now that Trump faces an actual court date: a Dec. 16 status conference with the judge.”
Update: Politico reports the woman “abruptly canceled a news conference” today.
“Reality-TV kingpin Mark Burnett and his associates say that they aren’t pressuring anyone over a series of damaging leaks about Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s behavior on The Apprentice. But three show staffers tell The Daily Beast that’s just not so. According to these sources, Burnett’s office has been warning his staff and Apprentice alumni that if they leak Trump-related news or footage to the press, they are putting themselves in dire professional—and possibly legal—danger.”
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“Among the small number of American newspapers that have embraced Donald Trump’s campaign, there is one, in particular, that stands out. It is called the Crusader — and it is the official newspaper of the Ku Klux Klan,” the Washington Post reports.
“Under the banner ‘Make America Great Again,’ the paper’s current issue devoted its entire front page to a lengthy defense of Trump’s message — an embrace some have labeled a de facto endorsement.”
Donald Trump “proudly acknowledges he did not pay a dime in federal income taxes for years on end. He insists he merely exploited tax loopholes legally available to any billionaire — loopholes he says Hillary Clinton failed to close during her years in the United States Senate,” the New York Times reports.
“But newly obtained documents show that in the early 1990s, as he scrambled to stave off financial ruin, Mr. Trump avoided reporting hundreds of millions of dollars in taxable income by using a tax avoidance maneuver so legally dubious his own lawyers advised him that the Internal Revenue Service would likely declare it improper if he were audited.”
“Thanks to this one maneuver — which was later outlawed by Congress — Mr. Trump potentially escaped paying tens of millions of dollars in federal personal income taxes. It is impossible to know for sure because Mr. Trump has declined to release his tax returns, or even a summary of his returns, breaking a practice followed by every Republican and Democratic presidential candidate for more than four decades.”
“Over the course of decades, Donald Trump’s companies have systematically destroyed or hidden thousands of emails, digital records and paper documents demanded in official proceedings, often in defiance of court orders. These tactics—exposed by a Newsweek review of thousands of pages of court filings, judicial orders and affidavits from an array of court cases—have enraged judges, prosecutors, opposing lawyers and the many ordinary citizens entangled in litigation with Trump. In each instance, Trump and entities he controlled also erected numerous hurdles that made lawsuits drag on for years, forcing courtroom opponents to spend huge sums of money in legal fees as they struggled—sometimes in vain—to obtain records.”
“This behavior is of particular import given Trump’s frequent condemnations of Hillary Clinton, his Democratic opponent, for having deleted more than 30,000 emails from a server she used during her time as secretary of state.”
“For as long as he has been rich and famous, Donald Trump has also wanted people to believe he is generous. He spent years constructing an image as a philanthropist by appearing at charity events and by making very public — even nationally televised — promises to give his own money away.”
“It was, in large part, a facade. A months-long investigation by The Washington Post has not been able to verify many of Trump’s boasts about his philanthropy.”
“Instead, throughout his life in the spotlight, whether as a businessman, television star or presidential candidate, The Post found that Trump had sought credit for charity he had not given — or had claimed other people’s giving as his own.”
Gabriel Sherman: “Even given the October surprise of the FBI’s reviewing a new batch of emails that may be related to Hillary Clinton’s use of a private server, Trump still faces difficult odds. But he is ending the race much as he got into it: not worrying too much about the future and not listening to any of the advisers around him.”
“In recent weeks, I spoke with more than two dozen current and former Trump advisers, friends, and senior Republicans officials, many of whom would speak only off the record given that the campaign is not yet over. What they described was an unmanageable candidate who still does not fully understand the power of the movement he has tapped into, who can’t see that it is larger than himself.”
“Trump may not be all that focused on what happens to the masses of white, nativist, working-class voters who have coalesced around him, but there are people in the campaign who recognize how valuable those Trump believers could be long after the election is over.”
“Donald Trump’s list of highest-paid campaign vendors is brimming with his own name,” the Wall Street Journal reports.
“An airline he owns has drawn the fifth-largest paycheck of any company the campaign paid through Oct. 19. Mr. Trump has also paid at least eight of his golf clubs, seven of his hotels and five of his restaurants.”
“In all, the New York businessman has spent close to $10 million over the course of the election cycle reimbursing his children for travel expenses and family-owned companies for campaign services, the most recent Federal Election Commission reports show.”
“Hillary Clinton’s corruption is on a scale we have never seen before. We must not let her take her criminal scheme into the Oval Office.”
— Donald Trump, quoted by the Washington Post, on news that the FBI is investigating new Hillary Clinton’s emails.
“Donald Trump, seeking to boost momentum in the last days of the presidential election, wired $10 million of his own money into his presidential campaign Friday morning,” the Wall Street Journal reports.
“The cash infusion will be used to buy $25 million in new TV advertising in key battleground states.”
“Mr. Trump’s latest donation to his cause still falls $34 million short of the $100 million he has repeatedly said he will give to his campaign—a pledge he reiterated as recently as Wednesday.”
“With fewer than two weeks until Election Day, Donald Trump is going after John Kasich, criticizing the Ohio governor for not backing him after the Republican presidential primary,” CNN reports.
Said Trump: “Well, it’s very disappointing. The governor was an opponent of mine during the primaries. And I understand, he took a, it was a very big defeat for him, he took a very big defeat and he went down hard. But he did sign a pledge and he didn’t honor the pledge.”
Donald Trump raised a whopping $11.5 million or more on the day that the video was released of him bragging about groping women on the Access Hollywood set, Politico reports.
“Donald Trump’s claim that the 2016 presidential election is ‘rigged’ against him has become a central part of his closing argument to voters in the final days of the campaign, as the GOP nominee insists that a growing range of ‘corrupt’ public institutions are to blame for his sharply narrowing path the White House,” the Washington Post reports.
“As he heads into a potential loss on Nov. 8, Trump has expanded the scale and scope of his accusations to include Democratic rival Hillary Clinton, the media, establishment leaders from both parties and unidentified ‘global financial powers.'”
Rep. Chris Stewart (R-UT), who once compared Donald Trump to a fascist dictator and called on him to step aside, now plans to vote for him, the St. George News reports.
Said Stewart: “It is very clear that Donald Trump is a better choice than Hillary Clinton.”
“And just thinking to myself right now, we should just cancel the election and just give it to Trump, right? What are we even having it for? What are we having it for?”
— Donald Trump, quoted by Politico.
S.E. Cupp: “As a conservative woman who wanted very much to support the Republican nominee, it’s been a deeply disappointing year and a half. After helping the Republican National Committee address some of the troubling deficiencies the party faced after 2012, as outlined in its so-called autopsy report, and witnessing some real progress in our outreach to women in the ensuing years, I did not expect an egomaniacal arsonist to come along and set all that ablaze.”
“Mr. Trump has sent the party back to the Dark Ages — or at least the 1950s — with his provincial notions of masculinity and misogynist notions of femininity, his cartoonish bombast, his vulgar jocularity and his open hostility to women who question him. In short, he’s reaffirmed the worst stereotypes about Republicans that Democrats have pushed for decades.”
South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley (R) “is reaffirming her support for Donald Trump, vowing to vote for the GOP nominee despite his attacks on her earlier this year,” CNN reports.
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.
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