A white nationalist radio host who was credentialed by Donald Trump's campaign to cover the Republican National Convention recently argued that Hillary Clinton was violating God's law by running for president -- and that women should not even have the right to vote.
James Edwards, host of The Political Cesspool, reflected on Chelsea Clinton's speech at the Democratic National Convention and opined that Hillary Clinton could "not be the mother God wants you to be" because she was an "extremist radical, feminist."
"So I’m sure that there is love between Hillary Clinton and her daughter, but I did not see the family and familial bonds out of the Clinton family that I saw from the Trump family," he explained. "Does anyone really believe that Hillary Clinton and Bill Clinton sleep in the same room? Does anyone really believe that Hillary Clinton even sleeps with men?”
“Should Hillary Clinton be president of the United States?” Edwards asked his listeners, adding that "under God’s law, a woman should not even have dominion over her household."
"There are natural roles and abilities that men and women have that are God-ordained and together, they are complementary of one another, and together, a man and a woman can raise a family," the radio host insisted. “The husband is the ruler of the house under God’s law, and that’s the law that I abide by,”
Edwards went on to assert that the country would be "better" if women did not have the right to vote.
"I mean, ask yourself that because we see women are so — even more than men, and even though men now — need this status, they need to be accepted, they need food, water, shelter, and status in order to survive, but women especially need that," Edwards said. "You know, I think the model before suffrage was a husband and a wife come together as a unit and the man casts the vote for that family."
Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has made no secret of the fact that he favors traditional energy sources like coal and oil over newer, cleaner sources such as solar and wind power.
The Hill reports that during a rally on Monday, Trump made a rather novel argument against wind power by claiming it's responsible for slaughtering birds on an unimaginable scale.
"The wind kills all your birds," Trump said. "All your birds, killed. You know, the environmentalists never talk about that."
They probably don't because the number of birds killed by wind turbines is incredibly small compared to the number of birds killed by other things.
President Barack Obama on Tuesday came out swinging against Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump -- and he even said that Republican leaders should consider rescinding their endorsements of him.
"The Republican nominee is unfit to be president... and he keeps proving it," Obama said during a press conference. "The notion that he would attack a Gold Star family that made such extraordinary sacrifices on behalf of our country, the fact that he doesn't appear to have basic knowledge of critical issues -- in Europe, the Middle East and Asia -- means that he's woefully unprepared to do this job."
Obama then turned his attention to Republicans who have loudly condemned Trump for his statements about the Khan family while continuing to support his candidacy.
"I think what's been interesting is the repeated denunciations of his statements by leading Republicans," Obama said. "And the question I think you have to ask yourselves is, if you are repeatedly having to say, in very strong terms, that what he has said is unacceptable, why are you still endorsing him?"
Check out Obama's full challenge to Republican leaders below.
Donald Trump has vowed to make Christmas greeting compulsory, but a former "Daily Show" correspondent joked that he's already inspired yuletide celebrations in an extremely unlikely demographic: Islamic State militants.
"ISIS is just waiting for Trump to be president, they’re so excited," Mandvi said. "He’s stirring those feelings in people here that is the same thing that fundamentalists are stirring in people on the other side of the world. ISIS is like, ‘Please waterboard more people, it makes our job so much easier.’ He gives ISIS and the terrorists every justification to say, ‘See, everything we’ve been saying is true, that America is about arrogance, violence and ignorance. Now they’re showing their true colors!'"
"This is like Christmas for ISIS -- and they don’t even celebrate Christmas," Mandvi said.
The Indian-born Mandvi said this year's presidential election was shaping up as crucial in the way Americans view themselves, and in how the nation is perceived worldwide.
"It really does feel like the America we know, especially as immigrants, the America my parents came to, under a Trump presidency, those things disappear," said Mandvi, who moved to Florida as a teenager, after living for more than a decade in the U.K. "The things we believe in, the things that make this country great, the diversity, the multiplicity of what this country is. What he’s managed to do is galvanize this voice of fear that is mostly based in white men. A majority of his voters are angry white men, and often not college educated. There’s this idea that somehow the America that white people have benefited from is slipping away, and a fear that immigrants are taking over. First a black president, then a female president. This is outrageous!"
Mandvi said Trump had triggered an irrational response in his supporters, who don't even care whether the Republican nominee tells easily debunked lies or slanders the Muslim parents of a U.S. soldier who died a hero in Iraq.
"They don’t care," Mandvi said. "He’s an outlet for rage and anger. I used to think it’s about reason. It’s not. It’s a purely emotional reaction. Fear is not a rational emotion. You can’t take away somebody’s fear by saying statistics show…they’re just afraid. This is how dictators come to power. Hitler. Mussolini. By exploiting the collective insanity."
Mandvi, who is Muslim but says he's spent more time in bars than mosques, said he's taking a fatalistic view of the coming years.
"There’s a very Buddhist part of me that says maybe this is America’s time to experience the demagogue and see how that feels," he said. "Those people who are now supporting him, like the Germans in 1937, will ultimately realize that the whole thing is a lie. We’ve had a great run for 240 years. There’s a part of me that resigns itself to the universe. I will fight Trump with every ounce of whatever I have, but if that’s what wins, then there’s a collective insanity that has taken over."
"If he wins, then revolution begins," Mandvi said. "It’s the job of the citizenry to rise up, speak up, the artists, activists, to speak out against it."
Just as Donald Trump's Khan crisis is slowly beginning to fade after he attacked the family of war hero who sacrificed his life for his fellow soldiers, another controversy has popped up after the candidate said women could avoid sexual harassment by running away and changing careers.
Asked how he would feel if his daughter Ivanka were sexually harassed by a co-worker, the GOP presidential nominee replied with a simplistic answer: "I would like to think she would find another career or find another company if that was the case.”
Appearing on CNN's New Day, Trump spokesperson Kayleigh McEnany was asked to defend Trump's statement.
"I mean I think that that's the same advice my father would probably give me. It's the same advice I would give to my sister. Get away from the situation," she replied. "If someone is harassing you, if someone’s being aggressive, move jobs, get away from the situation."
CNN guest, attorney Richard Socarides, was quick to point out the flaw in McEnany's reasoning.
"You're entitled to work in an environment that is free from harassment, that is free from illegal activity, and one in which you are allowed to succeed based upon your merits," he replied. "But, but more importantly here. I think that this remark, when I heard this remark, the first thing I thought about was Mitt Romney and that 47 percent because this remark, it exposes a worldview of things, exposes, you know, shows Donald Trump, the way he thinks about something. Of course he has always been the boss. And so I think he feels that he's entitled to act however he wants."
Socarides then went in for the kill, mentioning Fox News serial harasser Roger Ailes whom Trump has also been defending.
"I'm sure he also thinks that his friend Roger Ailes was viciously attacked by this woman. I think this shows a view of things that is pretty shocking."
In an interview with "CBS This Morning," the son of GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump seemed to think that women allowed sexual harassment to occur.
Eric Trump was responding to a comment his father made in a USA Today piece, in which he said that his daughter Ivanka would either find a different career or job if she was harassed in the workplace.
"I think what he's saying is, Ivanka is a strong, powerful woman, she wouldn't allow herself to be objected to it," the younger Trump said. "And by the way, you should take it up with Human Resources, and I think she would as a strong person, at the same time, I don't think she would allow herself to be subjected to that. I think that's a point he was making, and I think he did so well."
Out of the one-third who said they experienced sexual harassment at work, only 29 percent reported the incident. One of the reasons women don't report the incident is out of fear that the problem won't be resolved, according to the Human Rights Library at the University of Minnesota. Another reason is that they fear that they'll be blamed for the incident, something often seen among survivors of rape.
Unlike the Trump family, many women don't have a choice where they can work, particularly in an economy that is still struggling. Similarly, putting the onus on the person wronged to find another job does little to punish the harasser while the harassed is forced to move on searching for a safe work environment.
Donald Trump on Monday lashed out at The New York Times, which he said was an "absolute disaster" because the reporters were unable to "write good."
"The media is very unfair, they are very biased," Trump said of the coverage of his attacks on the Khan family. "You look at CNN and you look at The New York Times. I call it the failing New York Times because it won't be in business for more than probably a few years unless somebody goes in a buys it that wants to lose a lot of money."
Singling out the Times as "so unfair", Trump noted that the paper wrote "three or four articles about me a day."
"No matter how good I do on something, they'll never write good," he said. "I mean, they don't write good. They have people over there like [presidential campaign correspondent] Maggie Haberman and others, they don't write good."
"They don't know how to write good," Trump charged. "And I guess if they did, they're certainly not doing it. But The New York Times is just absolutely a disaster."
Watch the video below from Fox News, broadcast Aug. 2, 2016.
U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton raised nearly $90 million in July for her campaign and the Democratic Party, with more than half the donations coming from new donors, the campaign said on Tuesday.
Clinton's campaign said it had $58 million in the bank as it starts August, and that the donations it received last month averaged $44. Of the $90 million raised, $63 million was for Clinton's presidential campaign while about $26 million was for other Democrats, it said in a statement.
In June, Clinton, the Democratic nominee raised $68.5 million.
The campaign credited last week's Democratic National Convention with the boost in fundraising in July. It said its best 24-hour period for online fundraising began Thursday night when Clinton accepted the party's nomination for the Nov. 8 presidential election. The campaign said it raised $8.7 million during that period.
In a fundraising email to supporters, the Clinton campaign stressed it could not take a single vote for granted as it seeks to make history in November with the election of the first woman to be U.S. president.
"If we underestimate our opponent or take this race for granted, we’ll lose," the email said, referring to Republican nominee Donald Trump.
(Reporting by Susan Heavey and Doina Chiacu; Editing by Frances Kerry)
Thousands of supporters attended Republican nominee Donald Trump's campaign event outside of outside of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania on Monday. But what started out as a peaceful protest of anti-Trump advocates quickly devolved into a shouting match, calling Trump supporters racists.
The small group of protesters were polite and encouraged those entering the rally site to "enjoy the event." Instead of a "thanks" they were met with insults and snide remarks.
"Our message is that we want everyone to love each other," said protester Lindsey Knause, a graduate of the school where the rally was being held. She stood among signs saying "free hugs" and others advocating for peace. "We don't want to spread hate like he is doing."
According to PennLive, protesters tried to be friendly and respectful of the passersby, but it was the Trump supporters that began yelling at them. The protesters could only take so much.
After approximately three hours, thousands of Trump supporters were turned away from the rally because the event reached capacity. The anti-Trump protesters began shouting "You're racists" at the Trump supporters, who shouted back, "Get a job!" and "Stop living off the government."
Police intervened and stood between the two groups with batons ready if the fight got physical.
Anti-Trump protester Dan Seiple was visiting his parents in the town when he learned of the protest at the school. He was bothered by the fact that the school would allow Trump to hold a rally on campus.
"I was pretty appalled to see my alma mater was hosting this event," he said. "I'm freaked out that this is even going on. I question the education I received here."
No one was harmed in the shouting match.
Check out a video below of the ordeal from PennLive:
In a scathing commentary piece published on Syracuse.com, a New York Republican congressman announced that he will be voting for Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton in November, saying GOP nominee Donald Trump is "unfit to serve our party and cannot lead this country."
With his announcement, Rep. Richard Hanna, a three-term congressman serving New York's 22nd District, becomes the first GOP member of Congress to turn his back on his own party's choice and publicly state that he will vote for the opposing party's nominee.
"Months ago I publicly said I could never support Trump. My reasons were simple and personal. I found him profoundly offensive and narcissistic but as much as anything, a world-class panderer, anything but a leader. Little more than a changing mirror of those he speaks to," Hanna wrote. "I never expect to agree with whoever is president, but at a minimum the president needs to consistently display those qualities I have preached to my two children: kindness, honesty, dignity, compassion and respect. I do not expect perfection, but I do require more than the embodiment of at least a short list of the seven deadly sins."
"If I compare the life stories of both candidates I find Trump deeply flawed in endless ways. A self-involved man who is worth billions yet is comfortable -- almost gleefully -- using bankruptcy laws to avoid the consequences of his own choices. A man of character would not defend his actions but rather display shame and or at least regret. He is unrepentant in all things. Think about those average people who paid for his choices."
Like other conservatives before him, Hanna said Trump's comments on the parents of a fallen war hero were the last straw.
'In his latest foray of insults, Mr. Trump has attacked the parents of a slain U.S. soldier. Where do we draw the line? I thought it would have been when he alleged that U.S. Sen. John McCain was not a war hero because he was caught. Or the countless other insults he's proudly lobbed from behind the Republican presidential podium," he wrote. "For me, it is not enough to simply denounce his comments: He is unfit to serve our party and cannot lead this country."
Hanna then stated he will be casting his vote for Clinton, saying he's doing it based upon his belief that, "being a good American who loves his country is far more important than parties or winning and losing."
"I trust she can lead. All Republicans may not like the direction, but they can live to win or lose another day with a real candidate. Our response to the public's anger and the need to rebuild requires complex solutions, experience, knowledge and balance. Not bumper sticker slogans that pander to our disappointment, fear and hate."
If you're a political party that's losing key officials with just 100 days to go before a presidential election, what does that say about your prospects?
Per Politico, the Republican National Committee has lost its director of film and digital media to a political ad agency, despite the fact that there will be a presidential election in a little more than three months.
Matthew Mazzone, who worked at the RNC for the past four years, has officially joined Poolhouse, a company that describes itself as "a leading political advertising agency and media consulting firm building ad campaigns for political campaigns, Fortune 500 companies and issue advocacy associations."
So what about Mazzone caught Poolhouse's attention?
“We strive to house the most creative and talented people in the political ad world, Matthew epitomizes both," company co-founder Tim O'Toole said in a prepared statement. "From concept to creation, Matthew's experience at the RNC allowed him to touch every aspect of production. His political acumen combined with knowledge of what it takes to craft an ad that is emotional and compelling is what Poolhouse does."
With a tough election coming up, the RNC could really use someone with the ability to craft "emotional and compelling ads" -- and now they've lost him.
Hillary Clinton recently described Donald Trump’s ideas as “dangerously incoherent”. “They’re not even really ideas,” she said, “just a series of bizarre rants, personal feuds and outright lies.” She wasn’t wrong; incoherence is a prominent feature of Trump’s rule-breaking rhetorical style.
But in the context of political communication, what’s especially striking about Trump is that he rarely make use of that sharp political tool: the central metaphor.
A good central metaphor is typically one of the hallmarks of any effective political speech. It provides a logical core around which an argument can cohere. Enoch Powell’s famously divisive “rivers of blood” speech carefully builds in intensity until it compares his own foreboding about immigration policy to the prophecy from Virgil’s Aeneid about seeing the river Tiber “foaming with much blood”.
In American politics, Franklin D. Roosevelt famously used a war metaphor in his depression-era Inauguration speech, when he proclaimed: “I assume unhesitatingly the leadership of this great army of our people dedicated to a disciplined attack upon our common problems.”
One of the reasons this speech worked so forcefully was FDR’s ability to identify the resonance between the power of the post-depression American workforce and that of an army in a battle.
In classical rhetoric, Aristotle even went so far as to say that the ability to discern these types of similarities was a sign of genius. As he saw it, a similarity between two things – a workforce and an army, say – can generate a new type of meaning for the listener. It can collapse all the complex problems and ideas together and thereby make them both intelligible and gripping.
This has long been considered the definition of astute political rhetoric, and perhaps never more so than in the 21st century, the age of the glib soundbite. But Trump, who has careened through almost every conceivable political norm in this election cycle, almost never uses the kind of coherent metaphors that political rhetoricians have relied on for millennia.
Dead or alive
Linguists sometimes make a distinction between “live” and “dead” metaphors. Dead metaphors are those used so often in our everyday speech that we forget they are metaphors, and instead hear them as literal language. It doesn’t take much to grasp this concept; did you notice that you can’t actually “grasp” a concept but that it’s a dead metaphor?
Like the rest of us, Trump uses plenty of these: recall when he cackhandedly tweeted that the Scots were taking their country back. Of course, one doesn’t literally “take back” a country, but we use the metaphor so often that its figurative quality no longer stands out to us.
Live metaphors are much more difficult to craft. While the term wasn’t around in Aristotle’s time, the examples he used are the types of metaphors we might call a live metaphor. Like FDR’s metaphor of the “great army”, live metaphors tend to have a lasting as well as immediate impact. They have the power to define, unify, and grab the attention of the listener. Most of all, they help to create a central, coherent structure on which the speaker can build their argument.
Donald Trump rarely uses live metaphors, but when he does, they literally make headlines. In his eagerly anticipated “serious” foreign policy speech in April, he said he was going to “shake the rust off American foreign policy”. This live metaphor became the headline for the Financial Times’s review of the speech. The metaphor certainly gets our attention – but did he mean to say “shake the dust off?” And is he really going to shake the US that hard?
Aristotle wouldn’t have been impressed.
Thrown together
Trump’s usual rhetorical stock-in-trade is a random tumble of metaphors, some dead, some alive. When he said in May that China is “raping our country” it certainly caught people’s attention. But then in the next line of the speech he said, “we have the cards, don’t forget it”.
Having or holding the cards is almost a dead metaphor; we understand the phrase without thinking of a card game. But then comes the next line, and unlike FDR’s famous link between “the great army of the people” and the “attack on the common problem”, a rape metaphor and a card game metaphor hardly resonate with each other at all.
Because of this sort of metaphorical chaos, Trump’s speeches generally lack a unifying image. But then again, perhaps incoherence is precisely what makes his rhetoric so appealing.
To those who rally behind Trump, his brash and outrageous statements aren’t gaffes, but examples of truth-telling bravery. The reason for this may be not just about the content of Trump’s speeches, but their structure. In casual spoken English, our metaphors and our speech are not always perfectly pitched, and can sound more like a series of fragmented ideas.
This is precisely what Georgetown University linguist Jennifer Sclafani has pointed out about Trump’s style: because his sentences are fragmented and they jump around, his rhetoric “may come off as incoherent and unintelligible when we compare it with the organised structure of other candidates' answers. On the other hand, his conversational style can also help construct an identity for him as authentic, relatable and trustworthy, which are qualities that voters look for in a presidential candidate.”
So whether or not Trump is elected, his campaign may yet have a deep and lasting impact on modern political rhetoric. All the rules of functional speech, it seems, can be broken.
"Any decent human being would respect the Khan's loss and move on," Meyers said. But not Trump. The GOP nominee doubled down, attacking Capt. Khan's mother for not saying anything at the convention. Mrs. Khan has said that she has a hard time speaking when she sees a photo of her son. The grief is too much to bear.
The way Trump gets around making erroneous accusations like this is by saying "you tell me, but plenty of people have written that" and "a lot of people have said that."
"I feel like Trump needs to start giving us names when he says, 'a lot of people have said that.' Because I bet 75 percent of them are Twitter eggs," he said showing a tweet from someone who hasn't fully set up their Twitter account yet.
Meyers explained that Trump made it even worse with his "trademark vanity and narcissism" when he implied that he had sacrificed as much as the Khans with his business success. "Having tremendous success is literally the opposite of making a sacrifice. While Trump is reading his tiny Constitution he might also check out his 'Li'l Dictionary.'" Earlier Meyers suggested Trump might like Mr. Khan's pocket Constitution better because it would make his hands look bigger.
So, instead of apologizing, Trump defended himself. He issued a statement where he simultaneously claimed he read the Constitution, while also proving that he hasn't actually read the Constitution.
"While I feel deeply for the loss of his son, Mr. Khan who has never met me, has no right to stand in front of millions of people and claim I have never read the Constitution, (which is false) and say many other inaccurate things," the statement from the campaign reads.
"He does have the right to say that according to the Constitution," Meyers explained, as the audience exploded into applause. "If you're going to insist you read the Constitution, maybe don't swing and miss at the First Amendment. That's like saying, 'I know the 10 Commandments — just ask my neighbor's wife, who I covet.'" Though to Trump, freedom of speech is actually a Second Amendment right, "as his mouth technically qualifies as a handgun," Meyers said.
"No offense, I think I want a president who would remember meeting Vladimir Putin. How many shark-eyed, shirtless equestrians do you know?" Meyers asked.
"Almost immediately Trump was caught in another lie," Meyers pointed out, before reading the statement from the NFL. "Even the NFL is distancing itself from Trump."
Meyers concludes that the ordeal highlights a deeper problem within the Republican Party. "Because a normal, healthy, functional political party would disavow and ostracize a candidate who would attack the family of a fallen soldier or seem not to know that Russia had already invaded Ukraine," Meyers said. "Instead, House Speaker Paul Ryan issued a statement that didn't even mention Trump by name." The statement made it look like he doesn't even know who is making these outlandish claims.
"Ryan's like a mom saying, 'Who ate the chocolate cake?' While Trump has icing all over his face," Meyers joked, with a graphic of Trump covered in frosting and sprinkles.
"But this is the problem," Meyers concluded. "While our country is filled with principled conservatives the Republican Party seems incapable of dispelling a demagog like Trump. Even John McCain, who publicly denounced Trump today, is still supporting him. And if you support and denounce the same person then you don't know the definition of at least one of those words. Maybe you need to borrow Trump's 'Li'l Dictionary.'"
