A religious right activist came right out loud and said what Mike Pence has been hinting at with all his talk about Donald Trump's broad shoulders.
Dave Daubenmire posted a video Tuesday morning assuring like-minded Christians that Trump's boasts about grabbing women by the genitals with impunity should concern them less than the possibility of a person with female genitalia becoming president, reported Right Wing Watch.
“Women and men may be equal, but I think it’s pretty clear that the Bible teaches us that women should not be in authority over a man," said Daubenmire, who lost his job coaching high school football in Ohio after requiring players to pray with him and expressing offensive views about LGBT people and others.
Daubenmire, founder of Pass the Salt Ministries and an unsuccessful candidate for the Ohio statehouse, clarified why many conservative Christians are willing to overlook Trump's immoral behavior.
“Here’s the point I’m making,” Daubenmire said. “With all that’s going on with Trump and everybody screaming and hollering about that, when is the last time your pastor stood up in the pulpit and said, ‘Hey, listen, we cannot vote for Hillary Clinton because women are not to have authority over men’?"
He stated explicitly what rumors about Clinton's ill health and frailty have only implied.
"If we want to follow the Bible, that would sure be a good place to start, wouldn’t it?" Daubenmire said. "Rather than worrying so much about the immorality of a sinful man, what about the biblical principle that when a woman rules over a man … it’s a sign of judgment of the Lord?”
Donald Trump's admiration for Russian President Vladimir Putin has been disturbing for many Americans, and one Russian dissident believes that we are right to be worried about it.
Garry Kasparov, a political activist and former World Chess Champion, talked with CNN's Chris Cuomo on Wednesday about the similarities he sees between the ways that Trump talks about himself and the way dictators across the world have talked about themselves just before they took power.
"Trump demonstrates, time and again, disrespect for democratic procedures," Kasparov said. "It comes from many dictators' playbooks -- they address real pains. The issues that Donald Trump raised throughout the campaign, they are real... Then you hear -- and that's typical for every dictator to be a dictator -- 'I'm the one who can fix it. Don't ask me how.'"
He then pointed out that many of Trump's promises typically go against democratic norms, such as the mass expulsion of undocumented immigrants and the proposed ban on all Muslims entering into the country.
If there's anything good about what's happening in this country, says Kasparov, it's that Trump has been forced to get into debates with his opponent, which is something that Putin has never had to do during his tenure as Russia's leader.
Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway echoed some of her boss' language and accused Republican leaders of "pussyfooting around."
On Wednesday, ABC's George Stephanopolous asked Conway how Donald Trump was planning to win the election by attacking the Republicans who unendorsed him in the wake of a leaked tape with the billionaire bragging that he could grab women "by the pussy."
"It's going to help him take his message directly to the voters," Conway insisted. "We've been playing very nicely with members of the party. The RNC and us have a wonderful relationship."
But Conway also had a harsh message for Republicans who were not supporting the GOP nominee.
"We want the support of anybody that's going to publicly endorse us, but enough of the pussyfooting around in terms of do you support us or do you not support us," she said. "And the fact is some of these leaders have been very wishy-washy."
Watch the video below from ABC's Good Morning America.
After two days of soul searching, Gov. Chris Christie on Tuesday hopped off Donald Trump's lap long enough to say that bragging about sexual assault is indeed a bad thing. But then he hopped right back on, snuggling up to his "close friend" and saying that he still supported him, despite it all. "The hardest thing…
TRENTON -- For three days now, Donald Trump's presidential bid has been drowning in bad press from an explosive video tape scandal, but Gov. Chris Christie on Tuesday morning offered a only lukewarm rationale for Republicans to vote for the tycoon rather than Democrat Hillary Clinton. Appearing on WFAN's " Boomer and Carton" on Tuesday morning,…
The world will be in danger if Republican nominee Donald Trump becomes president of the United States, the top United Nations human rights official said on Wednesday.
U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra'ad al Hussein cited Trump's views on vulnerable communities including minorities and his talk of authorizing torture in interrogations, banned under international law, as "deeply unsettling and disturbing".
"If Donald Trump is elected on the basis of what he has said already - and unless that changes - I think it is without any doubt that he would be dangerous from an international point of view," Zeid told a news briefing in Geneva.
Trump lashed out at U.S. House Speaker Paul Ryan and other "disloyal" Republicans on Tuesday and vowed to campaign in whatever style he wants now that the party establishment has largely abandoned him. This occurred after a 2005 video surfaced last week showing him bragging crudely about groping women and making unwanted sexual advances.
Trump has said he would immediately re-authorize the waterboarding of suspected militants if elected on Nov. 8, contending that "torture works".
U.S. President Barack Obama, a Democrat, signed an executive order after taking office in January 2009 that banned waterboarding and other "enhanced interrogation techniques". Such executive orders can be rescinded by a successor.
Zeid said that he would rather not interfere in political campaigns. But when a candidate's comments pointed to a potential use of torture, prohibited under the Convention against Torture, a pact ratified by Washington, or to vulnerable groups possibly losing their basic rights, he had to speak out.
In a speech in The Hague last month, Zeid accused Trump of spreading "humiliating racial and religious prejudice" and warned of a rise of populist politics that could turn violent.
"I always believe that it's incumbent on leaders to lead and to lead in a way that is ethical and moral," Zeid said on Wednesday, when asked about Trump. "The use of half-truths is a very clever political device. Because as every propagandist knows, you allow the listener to fill in the rest."
Trump has portrayed himself as tough on national security and promised to build a wall to stop Mexican immigrant "rapists" from crossing the border.
"We have to be on guard to see that in the end vulnerable populations, populations at risk do not again see their rights deprived because of a view that is in the ascendancy based on false premises," Zeid said.
(Reporting by Stephanie Nebehay; Editing by Tom Miles and Mark Heinrich)
Donald Trump's biographers fear the Republican presidential nominee will take the United States to a very dark place out of spite as his campaign sinks into the abyss.
Politico convened a meeting of the real estate developer and former reality TV star's five biographers to ask them about the latest scandal engulfing Trump's presidential campaign, which is sinking fast with less than four weeks until the Nov. 8 election.
The biographers said the Trump captured on a 2005 hot mic recording was the same man -- albeit even worse -- they came to know in hours and hours of interviews and other research.
"I would have to say that 'grabbing by the pussy' was a little surprising to me," said Wayne Barrett, author of the 1991 book "Trump." "You know, thrusting his tongue down whatever mouth was available wasn’t much of a surprise, but 'grabbing by the pussy' was not something I had anticipated."
They agreed that Trump was controlled by his ego and his impulses, although they found he had less interest in sex than he wants others to believe.
"This is almost nothing to do with lust," Barrett said. "This is subjugation."
The biographers were deeply concerned about Trump and the threat he poses to America's democratic institutions in the next few weeks -- and potentially for the foreseeable future.
"He’s really destroyed a sense of decency or boundaries or civic behavior in the course of this election that involved almost polluting everything he’s touched in this process," said Timothy O'Brien, author of the 2005 book, "TrumpNation: The Art of Being the Donald."
Trump will likely try to destroy the Republican Party that nominated him, along with the Democratic rival who's likely to defeat him and Americans' confidence in the electoral process, in the next several weeks, O'Brien said.
"I think he is just going to wage a scorch‑the‑earth campaign for the next three weeks, and if he loses, which I think he’s going to -- I think he’s going to lose badly -- he’s then going to come up with a scenario in which it was stolen from him, that the election was rigged, because he’s survived by creating alternate realities," O'Brien said. "He’ll never say to himself he lost because he had a skeletal campaign operation, which he did; that he lost because he’s unappealing to a large swatch of the voters; that he lost because he’s willfully ignorant about public policy; that he lost because he’s a nasty and unappealing bigot. He’ll never, ever acknowledge any of that. He’ll just come up with an alternate reality that said, 'It was rigged against me.'"
The biographers said the same personality flaws that doomed his campaign to failure are the same traits that could convince a man with such deep problems to seek the White House in the first place or force himself on women believing they desired him.
"I think that what Tim is saying is consistent with the guy who would decide to have this campaign in the first place," said Michael D'Antonio, author of "Never Enough: Donald Trump and the Pursuit of Success." "You know, who would proceed knowing that he has all of these problems in his background, knowing how much audio and video exists, having been on Howard Stern and said horrible things? He just doesn’t seem to recognize his own issues and problems and how he’s perceived."
Barrett said Trump would be "a very dangerous man the next three or four weeks."
"I think we’ve got a very good preview of what the next several weeks will be like in the debate (Sunday) night," Barrett said. "I thought when he literally prowled the platform or the stage last night, we got a picture of what it’s like in his bedroom while he’s tweeting at 3 a.m. He was barking in the ugliest fashion, saying the ugliest things, and from the moment he got out there, he played the role of a victim."
He's worried Trump would take his frighteningly dark campaign to even darker and more frightening places before, and possibly after, the presidential election.
"We have seen what kind of polarization he can evoke over the course of 15 or 16 months, but I’m afraid that he’s going to attempt to deepen that in profound ways in the coming weeks," Barrett warned. "As recently as the convention, he tried to cool down those who said 'lock her up,' and now he’s saying he would lock her up and even describing the way in which he would do it."
Barrett said the primary button Trump could push to blow up the political system was racism.
"That’s been the undercurrent of the campaign throughout," Barrett said. "Believe it or not, you can be more explicit about it than he has been so far, and he may well go down that path -- and it’s a very dangerous time because he has still a substantial number of Americans who support him, and where he takes them is really quite threatening."
It seems that Donald Trump's lechery knows no bounds -- not even age limits.
Buzzfeed reports that four former teenage beauty queens are alleging that Donald Trump walked in on them while they were getting changed during the 1997 Miss Teen USA beauty pageant.
Mariah Billado, the former Miss Vermont Teen USA, tells Buzzfeed that Trump caused a panic in the dressing room when he barged in unannounced as the young women -- some of who were as young as 15 years old -- were getting dressed.
“I remember putting on my dress really quick because I was like, ‘Oh my god, there’s a man in here,’" she said.
Billado also recalled Trump trying to calm the teenagers down by saying, "Don't worry, ladies, I've seen it all before."
Three other former teen beauty queens, who wished to remain anonymous, corroborated Billado's account to Buzzfeed. Trump had previously boasted to radio host Howard Stern that he liked to pop into dressing rooms during beauty pageants to "inspect" the women as they changed, although this is the first time there have been allegations of him walking in on underage woman.
Donald Trump has a lot in common with former Confederates – white southerners who “redeemed” the South by bringing an end to Reconstruction 140 years ago. Like the “Redeemers,” Trump fears that electoral fraud threatens the republic. And like them, Trump equates electoral fraud with black and brown voters.
Trump has often claimed that only a “rigged system” could deny him victory. How? Not through sabotaged debate microphones or a biased media but through unqualified voters.
At a recent rally in Pennsylvania – a must-win state – Trump digressed from his text to remind his mostly white audience of this danger, urging them to go to “certain areas” on Election Day and “watch” who was voting. The implication, of course, was that they should challenge anyone who appeared to be unqualified. Nor was this a random remark. The Trump campaign features a website where supporters can sign up to become a “Trump Election Observer” and “Stop Crooked Hillary From Rigging This Election!”
How can “Trump Election Observers” distinguish between qualified and unqualified voters? Trump doesn’t say. But his reference to “certain areas” – and the entire tenor of his campaign – suggests that their color will give them away.
‘Intelligence and virtue’
Trump supporters listen to him speak in Colorado on Oct. 3, 2016.
REUTERS/Mike Segar
Trump’s invitation is eerily familiar to anyone who has even a passing familiarity with the Reconstruction that followed the U.S. Civil War. Slavery was abolished, black men were voting and the Republican Party of Lincoln was sparking a civil rights revolution. As I’ve written elsewhere, white southerners in the Reconstruction era saw their world turned upside down.
So too have white men in the 21st-century U.S. They have been confronted first with an African-American president and now with the prospect of the nation’s first female chief executive. Then and now, many white men have responded with disbelief.
We are living in a world where “intelligence and virtue are put under foot,” a group of South Carolina white men exclaimed in 1867, “while ignorance and vice are lifted to power.”
Disbelief gave way to fury as white southerners formed paramilitary organizations to keep “illegitimate” voters from casting ballots. The groups went by different names: White Brotherhood, Knights of the White Camelia, Red Shirts, Democratic Rifle Clubs and, most notoriously, the Ku Klux Klan. They employed persuasion, intimidation, disruption and murder to deter black voters from the polls. One of these organizations instructed its members to “control the vote of at least one Negro, by intimidation, purchase, keeping him away or as each individual may determine.”
African-American voters resisted – sometimes by taking up arms – but their tactics ultimately proved ineffective. Through violence and chicanery, white supremacists reduced black voter turnout, and by 1877, drove the party of Lincoln from power in every southern state. They would maintain an iron grip on the region until the civil rights movement of the 1960s once again shook the South’s political order.
A demographic in decline
Today, the modern Republican Party and its 2016 presidential nominee confront demographic change just as threatening – if not as dramatic – as the changes unleashed by Reconstruction. Between 2004 and 2012, the white share of eligible voters declined from 75.5 percent to 71.1 percent in the U.S., a trend that promises to continue.
Barack Obama’s victory in 2008 and reelection in 2012 underscored the implications for Republicans. Unable or unwilling, it seems, to appeal to black and Latino voters, they lost the presidency and faced an uncertain future. Like their Redeemer forbearers, they raised specious concerns about electoral fraud. In many states, they also passed laws requiring citizens to produce a state-approved photo ID before being allowed to vote.
Why the rush to secure the sanctity of the polls? It’s not because fraudulent voting is on the rise. Indeed, as one analyst quipped, “It is more likely that an individual will be struck by lightning than that he will impersonate another at the polls.” Rather, these laws target individuals lacking appropriate photo ID who are, not coincidentally, overwhelmingly poor black and brown Americans.
Trump’s expressed concerns about voter fraud are standard for modern Republicans, but his solution to the problem is both new and 140 years old. He urges supporters to take matters into their own hands by going to “certain neighborhoods” to “watch” who is voting.
And then what?
Join Russian President Vladimir Putin in denouncing the legitimacy of the U.S. election?
Or, more immediately, block black and brown people from entering the polls? Perhaps threaten them? Tackle them? Worse? Coming from a candidate who has incited violenceagainst hecklers at his rallies, the suggestion is ominous.
Trump and his Republican allies are the latest in a long line of politicians who have used law and direct action to disfranchise minority voters. Like southern proponents of white supremacy who came before them, they will probably fail. In the long term, thanks to continuing shifts in population, they are swimming against powerful demographic currents. In the short term, they face constitutional difficulties. Federal courts in North Carolina and Texas recently declared voter ID laws in those states unconstitutional.
However, the future is by no means certain. The doubt Trump casts on the integrity of the electoral system supports Putin’s efforts to delegitimize liberal democracy here and abroad.
The outcome of the election will determine whether Trump’s efforts to block measures to make the political system more inclusive will triumph in the near term. Should he win, he will almost certainly appoint judges unsympathetic to the claims of minority voters as well as women. The result would be a return to a shameful past of minority vote suppression, thereby undermining confidence in democracy and exacerbating the racial tensions that divide us.
Trevor Noah reacted in shock to Donald Trump's announcement -- or warning, as it were -- that he had unshackled himself from whatever shreds of human dignity and restraint had been holding him back.
The Republican presidential nominee issued his warning Tuesday morning on Twitter to GOP lawmakers scurrying away as his poll numbers crater amid boasts of sex abuse and worrisome debate performances.
"You mean the entire time, the shackles were still on?" Noah said, his mouth agape. "The shackles were still on (Monday), when you said this?"
Noah played video clips from a Trump rally, where the candidate called Bill Clinton a sex predator, slurred CNN as disgraceful and attacked Hillary Clinton as crooked and unelectable -- as his supporters chanted "lock her up."
"Lock her up is right," Trump said, repeating the promise he made during Sunday's debate to jail his Democratic rival.
Noah sat in stunned silence for a moment, before saying: "That was shackled Trump?"
"You're already the Hulk, basically," Noah said. "You can't go more Hulk than the Hulk."
He then adopted the Hulk's characteristic broken English.
"Hulk is like, 'Now Hulk get really angry,'" Noah said. "What do you mean, you're already Hulk? 'No, real Hulk have no pants on. You see balls-out Hulk.' Oh wow, you mean like Donald Trump? 'No, no, no -- that too far. Hulk opposite of Trump. Hulk hurt buildings, Hulk respect women.'"
Several San Antonio police officers who wore Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump's "Make America Great Again" hats during his stop in Texas on Tuesday face discipline for violating a policy against endorsing a candidate while on duty, the police chief said.
More than a dozen officers in uniform wore the red caps with Trump's slogan as they stood with the candidate at an airport, in a video posted on Trump's Twitter page.
The 25-second clip bears the words "We will make America safe & great again, together" as the officers walk away.
San Antonio Mayor Ivy Taylor later said on Facebook she was "deeply disappointed" by the display and Police Chief William McManus said in a statement the officers showed "poor judgment."
"I expect them to know better than to give the appearance of endorsing a candidate while on duty and in uniform, regardless of the political campaign or the candidate," McManus said.
The identities of the officers was not immediately clear and they could not be reached for comment.
They were escorting Trump at the end of his visit, said Michael Helle, president of the San Antonio Police Officers Association, in a statement.
"Frankly, the officers were most likely caught up in the moment and did not consider the political nature of their actions," Helle said.
Helle told the San Antonio Express-News he expected the officers to only face "benign" punishment, such as a written reprimand.
Last month, the Fraternal Order of Police, the largest U.S. organization of its kind, endorsed Trump. The group's president said at the time his members believed the Republican nominee would "make America safe again."
Trump has described himself as the "law-and-order" candidate at a time when law enforcement has become a major focus of public discussion in the United States.
Violent crime rose last year though it remains far below peak levels of the 1990s.
In the last two years, the country has seen a number of major protests against the deaths of black men in encounters with police, which has sparked a debate over police use of force and the role of racial bias in the criminal justice system.
San Antonio prohibits employees from taking action to support a political candidate while on paid duty but it allows them to engage in political speech on their own time, according to a policy document on the city's website.
As he continues his week in Washington, D.C., Seth Meyers noted the desperate situation the GOP has fallen into after another poor debate performance by Donald Trump.
Trump surrogates and GOP pundits are frantically searching for something positive, so they resorted to complimenting Trump's bizarre pacing and creepy body language. Brexit booster Nigel Farage even described it as Trump being like a "giant silverback gorilla prowling the studio."
"Prowling the studio?" Meyers wondered. "It looked like he was wandering around like he was waiting for his microwave burrito to be done."
While Trump seems to be in freefall with terrible poll numbers that don't yet even reflect the Sunday debate, Meyers was quick to note that people have counted Trump out before and he's managed to come back like a bad slasher movie. "He was on fire and then he fell off the roof, that's got to be it. Oh, my God, Hillary he's still alive!" Meyers shouted, showing a photo of Trump looming over her on the debate stage.
After his grope-tape dropped and his polling numbers followed, Republicans have been running from Trump like a political slasher movie. Appropriate, because instead of working to ease tensions and work to help the party, Trump is opting for the slash-and-burn method, attacking Paul Ryan in another of his unhinged Twitter rants. At the same time, Rudy Giuliani is threatening them by saying that if Trump wins he will remember who was with him and who was not.
"You know, Giuliani likes to think of himself as Tom Hagen from 'The Godfather,' but he's really more of an Uncle Junior from the 'Sopranos,'" Meyers said.
Trump was losing even before the debate and the "Access Hollywood" hot mic tape, but the last week has only made things worse. Instead of stomaching the reality that he's losing, however, he either believes or is pretending that he's actually winning. It makes his Twitter storm look increasingly more and more like a Charlie Sheen delusion. It's gotten so bad that Trump is even attacking the polls, saying that they're rigged against him. His proof of that comes from his large rally crowds.
"Just because you have big crowds doesn't mean you're winning the election," Meyers said. "If all you needed to win was a big crowd of people, our next president would be IKEA on a Saturday." Meyers also wondered how Trump could possibly think that everything is rigged against him. "You're a blowhard with a 7th-grade vocabulary who became a celebrity billionaire with a supermodel wife. Life isn't unfair to you, it's unfair for you."
His next four weeks of freakout also presents the looming possibility that Trump could do real, lasting damage to the country by undermining the political system. Monday he warned his supporters that the election could be stolen from them. Yet, study after study shows that the voter fraud Trump is talking about is virtually non-existent. Still, Trump is encouraging his supporters to illegally monitor polling sites for voter fraud, telling Fox News that Republicans should watch closely or the election will be taken from them.
"You want Republican to watch closely for something? May I remind you, Republicans were caught completely off-guard by a bright orange man in a bright red hat," Meyers noted. "No wonder the Republican Party is the official party of hunting accidents."
Yet, Trump cries fraud pretty much every time he disagrees with something. It's exactly the same as questioning President Barack Obama's legitimacy to be president. Now he's attempting to do the same thing by labeling Clinton as a criminal who should be thrown in jail.
He's also gone after the media and instead tied himself to right-wing sites run by people like Alex Jones, who recently called Clinton "an abject, psychopathic, demon from hell that as soon as she gets into power she's going to destroy the planet. I'm sure of that. People around her say she's so dark now and so evil and so possessed that they are having nightmares. I'm going to go ahead and say it," Jones said on his show this week. "She's demon possessed."
"First of all, you can't go that deep into Crazytown and then say, 'I'm going to go ahead and say it.' They're aliens from Mars living among us! And occupying the highest levels of government and, well, I'm just going to say it, some of them are a little rude," Meyers mocked.
It would be fine if no one took Jones seriously, but the presidential candidate of a major political party does. In an interview with InfoWars, Trump assured Jones and his supporters that he would not let them down and they would be impressed. "And I'm just going to go ahead and say it," Meyers quipped. "I won't appoint any demons to my cabinet."
Trump has isolated himself, even more, bringing his most ardent supporters closer and rejecting the GOP. One family even brought their kid to a rally dressed up as Trump. The candidate brought the kid up on stage and asked him if he wanted to go back with his parents or stay up on stage with him. The kid said "Trump." Meyers noted, "to be fair, I'd stay with Trump too if my other choice were parents who dressed me in costume and brought me to political rallies."
On CNN Tuesday night, several panelists on Don Lemon's show rolled their eyes when Trump advocate Kayliegh McEnany attempted to say that the candidate had prayed his "grabbing a woman's p*ssy" comments away and it was time to move on.
After guest Maria Cardona pointed out that the GOP presidential nominee has yet to make an unconditional apology, McEnany took offense -- then played the Jesus card.
"We can all stand here in judgment and say he didn't apologize when in fact he did five times now, and it was heartfelt," she frantically explained. "And Dr. Ben Carson came out today and he said, 'I saw him pray for forgiveness before the debate.' You have James Dobson saying he's a recent Christian and recently accepted Christ into his life. You have Sam Clovis, his co-campaign chair, saying he's a witness to his faith conversion. This is someone who is a changed person, and he's apologized for it. I'm not going to stand in judgment. On the is panel, we can be self-righteous or we can forgive."
Given a chance to respond, former Bernie Sanders campaign spokesperson Symone Sanders -- who grimaced through McEnany's 'holier than thou spiel' -- had a few things to say.
"First of all, Donald Trump only apologized because the tape came out and people found out he was saying it," she began. "Let's not forget that he led with, 'These are just words.' Well, words have power, first of all. Secondly, these aren't just words. He described predatory sexual behavior that women all across this county can identify with."
"Let's not bring Jesus down on into the gutter where Donald Trump and his thugs are," she continued. "Let's leave the Lord out of this one. I think Donald Trump definitely has to own up to these actions and he's not helping himself or the party."
