Hillary Clinton's Brutally Disappointing Weekend
Looks like Hillary Clinton has a case of the Mondays. At this moment, Donald Trump is actually ahead in the Real Clear Politics average of national polls, by two-tenths of a percentage point. Trump leads the ABC News/Washington Post poll by two points, the Rasmussen poll by five points and the Fox News poll by three points; he trails the CBS News/New York Times poll by six points and the NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll by three points. Is it too early to refer to "presidential race favorite Donald Trump" or "underdog Hillary Clinton"? That's the good news for Trump this weekend. The bad is this most unexpected question: "Will Trump have a money problem as the general election progresses?" Interviews and emails with more than 50 of the Republican Party's largest donors, or their representatives, revealed a measure of contempt and distrust toward their own party's nominee that is unheard of in modern presidential politics. More than a dozen of the party's most reliable individual contributors and wealthy families indicated that they would not give to or raise money for Mr. Trump. This group has contributed a combined $90 million to conservative candidates and causes in the last three federal elections, mainly to "super PACs" dedicated to electing Republican candidates. When Trump says things like this Sunday morning . . . I filed my papers about a week ago. Everybody is amazed at the numbers. I'm very liquid. To finance a billion dollars I would have to sell a building, have to do something like that. Will I do that? I could. I have the option of doing it. I have a lot of cash and cash flow. Would I do that? I don't know. I have the option of doing it. Doesn't that make donors less likely to give? If Trump can always sell a building if he needs the money, why give anything? A presidential campaign traditionally needs money for a lot of reasons, including infrastructure and get-out-the-vote operations, but a big one is to get their message out over the airwaves. As we've just seen in the GOP primary, Donald Trump has figured out television commercials aren't quite as necessary as usual if you can get your message out in between the commercial breaks. He basically makes the television media cover him just about every day by offering some new controversy or revelation; he's mastered the art of attaching himself to breaking news. A plane disappears, he asserts that it's terrorism, and then a good chunk of the coverage is, "is this premature, did he jump the gun," etc. So while Trump will need a lot of money for a presidential bid, he might not need as much as a traditional GOP candidate would need. What really ought to worry Republicans is that Obama put his money into infrastructure and very targeted TV advertising -- Lifetime, the Food Network, etc. -- while Romney spent his ad dollars in broadcast television, and we saw how that worked out. Trump and the RNC need a GOTV infrastructure, and Trump claimed that stuff is "overrated." For example, right now there is no organized Trump general-election campaign staff in Ohio: After winning the GOP nomination on a tight budget with a skeletal staff, Mr. Trump doesn't have any general-election staff in the state, and senior aides in New York and Washington haven't made contact with the state Republican Party. Efforts to recruit the state's experienced operatives who helped elect Gov. John Kasich have so far been unsuccessful, people familiar with the matter said. The good news for Trump is that polling is close in Ohio. The bad news is, how likely is he to win a tight race if Hillary's getting a big head start in setting up her get-out-the-vote operations? I'm scheduled to talk about this on CNN this morning, around 11:50 Eastern. The Wrap-Up from Louisville Friday morning, TripAdvisor steered me down Fourth Street in Louisville to the Brown Hotel, where J. Graham's cafe offers a delicious heart-attack-in-a-dish called the Hot Brown. 
Ingredients: Turkey, cheese, bacon, more cheese, tomatoes, more cheese, toast, even more cheese. Not shown: Defibrillator paddles. Shortly after I sit down for breakfast, Donald Trump Jr. sat down at the table diagonally opposite me. Now, I'm not a big fan of eavesdropping journalism and those, "You won't believe what this famous Washington person said into his cell phone on Acela!" reports. Donald Trump Jr. has a right to eat his breakfast unmolested as much as anyone. But if he speaks loud enough for me to hear, I don't feel quite so guilty about mentioning what I heard him say in this newsletter. Trump Jr. referred to the controversy about New York state's 2013 SAFE Act, which banned all magazines that hold more than seven bullets and pre-1994 high capacity magazines, and prohibited the carrying of guns on school grounds. The law was rushed through so quickly and written so unclearly that it initially appeared to criminalize police officers' firearms. (The law was a predictably hackish effort by Andrew Cuomo and his allies to speed through a gun-control law after Sandy Hook.) Trump Jr. said something similar about trade deals, that the people writing them have little knowledge of how they would actually work and have no real grasp about how what's written in the agreement will affect the people who actually have to live under the rules. Presuming the younger Trump's view of government is shaped by his father's perspective, this may explain the candidate's ebullient confidence that running the executive branch will be a piece of cake and he'll bring the sprawling federal bureaucracy to heel quickly. We live in a world where congressional Democrats voted to pass Obamacare without reading the full text of the legislation, Representative Sheila Jackson Lee thinks the U.S. has already landed astronauts on Mars, Congressman Hank Johnson fears the island of Guam will become so overly populated that it will tip over and capsize, Maxine Waters warns that because of spending cuts, "over 170 million jobs could be lost"; Nancy Pelosi asserts that "every month that we don't have an economic recovery package, 500 million Americans lose their jobs," Harry Reid contended, "Everybody else [besides GOP members of Congress], including rich people, are willing to pay more [ in taxes]. They want to pay more," Republican senator Thad Cochran declared in 2014 that "the Tea Party is something I don't know a lot about," and of course, Representative Todd Akin proclaimed, "If it's a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down." There's no shortage of lawmakers who seek to make sweeping changes to laws, without understanding the basics of the topic at hand. Take Representative Diana DeGette of Colorado: To your last question: 'What's the efficacy of banning these magazine clips?' I will tell you, these are ammunition, they're bullets, so the people who have those now, they're going to shoot them. So if you ban, if you ban them in the future, the number of these high capacity magazines is going to decrease dramatically over time because the bullets will be shot and there won't be any more available. (DeGette is mixing up clips and ammunition. The magazine is what holds the bullets and is almost always re-used.) In other words, we've had no shortage of high-ranking government officials who have no clue about what they're talking about, are spectacularly misinformed, dumber than a bag of hammers, are simply crazy, or all of the above. In light of all this, Trump probably thinks, How hard can it be? Simply by virtue of not being a moron, Trump feels he is destined to govern better than they do. Indeed, it's a low bar to clear. Idiot lawmakers are part of our problem in this country, but our circumstances wouldn't be significantly improved if we replaced dumb, misinformed progressives with smarter, better-informed progressives. Barack Obama gets the presidential daily briefing every morning, which is presumably chock full of the best information our government can gather about what's going on in the world, focusing on the most dangerous places and menacing threats. If he doesn't want to see ISIS rising, no amount of briefings can get him to see ISIS rising. But the problem with DeGette, and Cuomo, and most of our worst elected officials is that they mix a refusal to learn, acknowledge, or accept new information and a philosophy based upon some shaky-at-best assumptions: that government officials know best, that they will put the public or national interest ahead of their own interests, that the impact of basic forces like supply and demand can be mitigated by regulation, that disarming law-abiding citizens will lead to less crime, not more, and so on. ADDENDA: In case you missed it, the NRA endorsed Trump, and he thanked them in a typically stream-of-consciousness speech. In case you've been wondering what Gwenyth Paltrow wants you to buy . . . For the Dad or Grad in your life, currently just $11.05 . . .  | 
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