Michael Gerson says the Republicans deserve their fate. True. They spent the night in the dog’s bed and now they’re full of fleas.

What Trump actually did was ensure that hardcore conservatives stay with him until the end of his political journey, when Republicans begin the search for survivors and examine the charred black box. Trump’s performance was perfectly tuned to make a loyal Rush Limbaugh listener burst out in “Hell, yeah!” Put Juanita Broaddrick in the audience? Threaten to jail your opponent? Throw WikiLeaks in her face? Blame her for the death of Capt. Humayun Khan in Iraq? Dismiss all the fuss about sexual predation as locker-room talk? Hell, yeah!

This kind of thing has

A dance critic dissects Trump’s moves in the debate.

Donald Trump, looming behind Hillary Clinton like a mob boss, only reinforced his perception as a schoolyard bully in the second presidential debate Sunday night.

…

The dance was grim from the start. Trump entered looking exhausted. In a break with protocol, the candidates didn’t shake hands. And then Trump began lurking behind Clinton when she spoke, with his carefully planted stance, his narrowed eyes and his frown.

More a scowl than a frown. He looked ridiculous. Intimidating, yes, but also ridiculous.

“This is exactly who Donald Trump is,” Clinton said, speaking about the tapes. Trump helpfully backed her up with his demeanor. He paced and rocked and grimaced as she

Then there was the part where he announced that if elected he would appoint a special prosecutor to investigate Hillary Clinton’s email setup. Josh Gerstein at Politico reports that it “provoked a sharp blowback from former U.S. prosecutors, who said Trump’s view of the Justice Department serving the whims of the president is antithetical to the American system.”

Well ok but Trump doesn’t know much about the American system. He knows about real estate profiteering, and cheating, and bankruptcy, and pretending to be a Big Boss on tv. Oh and grabbing women by the pussy whether they want him to or not.

While presidents appoint the attorney general, they do not make decisions on whom to prosecute for crimes —

Chris Kluwe, a football (US football) player, tells Trump that even football players don’t say the kind of thing he said. I don’t really believe that claim, but he says some good things.

Now, Donald, I’m sure you’re wondering just what it is we talk about in a professional locker room, if we don’t spend all our time regarding 50 percent of the population as mobile fuck receptacles eagerly awaiting our tiny-handed grasp on their love lapels. I shall educate you!

We talk about our families. We talk about our significant others, our children, and our parents. We talk about our fears that if a Hitler wannabe who can’t even string together a coherent statement on domestic policy becomes

Paul Ryan got everybody on a conference call and said he and Trump are totally not friends any more.

Mr. Ryan informed Republican lawmakers on a morning conference call that he would never again campaign alongside Mr. Trump and would dedicate himself instead to defending the party’s majority in Congress, according to five lawmakers who participated in the call and spoke on condition of anonymity.

Effectively conceding defeat for his party in the presidential race, Mr. Ryan said his most urgent task was ensuring that Hillary Clinton did not enter the White House with Democratic control of the House and Senate, two lawmakers said.

Well there’s always gerrymandering oh right they did that already.

Trump fans were furious.

Mr.

Crude but fitting.

My cartoon in today's @thetimes. #TRUMP pic.twitter.com/ZT2JRKOKWk

— Morten Morland (@mortenmorland) October 10, 2016

… Read the rest

Matt Yglesias points out the obvious but important fact that Trump is entirely unqualified to do the job he’s campaigning for.

Trump, it turns out, doesn’t really understand anything about how the American government or American public policy works. That the former host of The Apprentice isn’t really up to speed when it comes to the details of managing public affairs is a bit dull and unsurprising. But it deserves to be front and center in a campaign in 2016.

Above and beyond the wilder and more outrageous sides of Donald Trump’s history and persona is the simple fact that he has no idea what he’s talking about. You wouldn’t ask Barack Obama to pilot a submarine — he

This isn’t a political campaign, it’s a Playboy article from the 70s. It’s heads he wins tails she loses. It’s one greedy man’s sexual assaults up against a woman who is blamed for another greedy man’s sexual predations. Two men are greedy sexual predators, yet somehow one of them gets away with blaming a woman for the other one. Trump is a pig, Bill Clinton is a pig, but Trump is attacking Hillary Clinton because Bill Clinton is a pig. How does that work?? How is Hillary Clinton responsible for Bill Clinton’s piggery?

Ok in the bigger picture you can make a case that she helped enable him by not leaving him yadda yadda – but the fact remains that … Read the rest

Deborah Cameron has written a post that explains everything about Trump and That Tape and banter and structural sexual inequality. Drop everything and read it.

She starts with the first part of the tape.

In this sequence Trump is not boasting about having sex: he’s telling a personal anecdote about an occasion when he didn’t manage to have sex (‘I failed I’ll admit it’). He then returns to what seems to be the original topic, how to assess the woman’s physical attractiveness. The first speaker’s turn suggests that this has diminished over time (‘she used to be great’), but whereas he thinks ‘she’s still very beautiful’, Trump’s reference to her ‘big phony tits’ implies that he no longer finds

Margaret Sullivan at the Washington Post wonders why NBC sat on the Trump tape for so long.

Why didn’t NBC News do the basic journalistic work of working through its own company’s archives on Trump months ago?

It may have to do with the split between the entertainment and the news divisions — both “The Apprentice” and “Access Hollywood” are products of NBC’s entertainment side, not its news side. NBC’s news reporters are often excellent — Katy Tur, for example, has covered the Trump campaign with admirable intelligence and assertiveness, and has taken a lot of flak from the campaign for doing so.

NBC’s entertainment division has had a long history with Trump because the network was the home

The news media have had enough time now to grasp that the issue is not that Trump’s remarks were “lewd.” It’s that they were contemptuous, hostile, dehumanizing, and that they boasted of sexual assault.

The BBC for instance.

More senior Republicans have withdrawn support for US presidential candidate Donald Trump after his obscene remarks about women became public.

“Obscene” is not the issue. Pee po belly bum drawers.

One of the Republican support-withdrawers says it when the BBC couldn’t manage to:

New Hampshire Senator Kelly Ayotte said in a statement: “I cannot and will not support a candidate for president who brags about degrading and assaulting women,” she said.

There. It doesn’t take many words. It’s not … Read the rest

CNN has been looking through Trump’s many appearances on the radio show of “shock jock” (i.e. flaming asshole) Howard Stern.

In more than one interview with Stern, Trump took part in conversations about Ivanka Trump’s appearance, including one about the size of her breasts.

In an October 2006 interview, Stern remarks that Ivanka “looks more voluptuous than ever,” and asked if she had gotten breast implants. Trump is willing to engage in the discussion about his own daughter, telling Stern that she did not get implants.

“She’s actually always been very voluptuous,” Trump responds. “She’s tall, she’s almost 6 feet tall and she’s been, she’s an amazing beauty.”

She’s a fine fine hamburger.

In another interview, from September 2004,