Jane Mayer wrote in the New Yorker yesterday about Trump the oligarch.

Now, with the Times reporting that congressionally crafted loopholes for real-estate magnates could have enabled Trump to legally evade all income taxes for eighteen years, while earning as much as fifty million dollars a year, we have a perfect example of how oligarchic interests have made inroads in the United States. The question now is whether the American public favors this trend.

One definition of an oligarch, according to the Northwestern University political scientist Jeffrey A. Winters, the author of “Oligarchy,” is an individual with enough money to employ the protection of what he calls the “wealth defense industry.” Oligarchs worldwide face threats of different kinds, but

A brief interlude in my fulminations at the outing of Ferrante – yes that’s going to be continuing for a bit – to share the breaking news that a judge has ordered Trump’s “foundation” to stop soliciting donations.

The New York attorney general has notified Donald Trump that his charitable foundation is violating state law — by soliciting donations without proper certification — and ordered Trump’s charity to stop its fundraising immediately, the attorney general’s office said Monday.

James Sheehan, head of the attorney general’s charities bureau, sent the “notice of violation” to the Donald J. Trump Foundation on Friday, according to a copy of the notice provided by the press office of state Attorney General Eric

Trump is still attacking Clinton because her husband fucked around without telling her, as if that were her fault.

Donald J. Trump suggested during a rally in Pennsylvania on Saturday that Hillary Clinton was not “loyal” to her husband, former President Bill Clinton, an insinuation about their relationship that plunged the 2016 presidential race further into a personal battle.

Mr. Trump told the crowd in Lancaster County, about 70 miles west of Philadelphia, that Mrs. Clinton’s only loyalty was to her donors and herself. He added: “I don’t even think she’s loyal to Bill, you want to know the truth. And really, folks, really, why should she be, right?”

Trump fucked around on his first wife. No doubt he considers … Read the rest

Somebody sent the NY Times three pages from Trump’s 1995 tax returns. You’ll want to go to the source, if you haven’t already, because it has all the documents and the extras.

Donald J. Trump declared a $916 million loss on his 1995 income tax returns, a tax deduction so substantial it could have allowed him to legally avoid paying any federal income taxes for up to 18 years, records obtained by The New York Times show.

The 1995 tax records, never before disclosed, reveal the extraordinary tax benefits that Mr. Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, derived from the financial wreckage he left behind in the early 1990s through mismanagement of three Atlantic City casinos, his ill-fated foray into

The New York Times tries not to laugh at Trump’s Twitterstorm.

The tweets started around 3:20 a.m. on Friday. Inside Trump Tower, a restless figure stirred in the predawn darkness, nursing his grievances and grabbing a device that often lands him in hot water.

On his Android phone, Donald J. Trump began to tap out bursts of digital fury: He mocked Alicia Machado, a former Miss Universe and a popular Latin American actress, as a “con,” the “worst” and “disgusting.”

In a final flourish, before the sun came up, the Republican presidential nominee claimed — without offering any evidence — that she had appeared in a “sex tape.”

It’s ludicrous, and in that sense funny – but it’s also … Read the rest

Also? Trump’s persona, his demeanor, his shtick dovetails alarmingly neatly with that of the domestic abuser. I don’t think I’d thought of it exactly that way before, but reading it caused zero surprise. Of course it does.

Or, another way of putting that is simply what I and many others have said often, which is just that he’s a bully. His bully characteristics are blindingly obvious. Naturally a bully and a domestic abuser are going to overlap neatly.

He lies. He bullies. He threatens. He calls women names. And he’s the Republican nominee for president.

…

Donald Trump and his bombastic, truth-free persona is still baffling to many. But for one select group of people ― survivors of domestic

Now for that interview in the Times.

Donald J. Trump unleashed a slashing new attack on Hillary Clinton over Bill Clinton’s sexual indiscretions on Friday as he sought to put the Clintons’ relationship at the center of his political argument against her before their next debate.

Hard to believe. A skeevy serially-unfaithful man attacks a woman because her husband is a skeevy serially-unfaithful man. Hard.to.believe. A woman’s faults are hers, and a man’s faults are hers too. Men have a free pass, women are blamed for men’s bad behavior.

In an interview with The New York Times, he also contended that infidelity was “never a problem” during his three marriages, though his first ended in an ugly divorce

The horror of Trump only gets worse.

The Guardian takes a look from the safer distance of London:

Donald Trump said on Friday that he would not necessarily accept the results of the presidential election in the event that Hillary Clinton defeated him, reversing his statement four days earlier that he would “absolutely” respect them.

After the first presidential debate on Monday, the Republican nominee told reporters “absolutely I would” honor the results of the election should he lose. In an interview with the New York Times on Friday, he backtracked: “We’re going to have to see. We’re going to see what happens. We’re going to have to see.”

Earlier that day at a rally in Detroit, Trump

Michiko Kakutani reviews a book about Hitler’s ascent. The review never mentions Trump, but Trump is present in nearly every word. (“Germany” is the main exception.)

How did Adolf Hitler — described by one eminent magazine editor in 1930 as a “half-insane rascal,” a “pathetic dunderhead,” a “nowhere fool,” a “big mouth” — rise to power in the land of Goethe and Beethoven? What persuaded millions of ordinary Germans to embrace him and his doctrine of hatred? How did this “most unlikely pretender to high state office” achieve absolute power in a once democratic country and set it on a course of monstrous horror?

Yes how? And how did Donald Trump rise to the Republican nomination in the land of … Read the rest

More on the bad person Donald Trump, by Conor Friedersdorf at the Atlantic. The title is “Donald Trump’s Cruel Streak.” Not a streak but the whole of him, I would say. It’s not as if he’s nice some of the time. The subtitle is “For decades, the candidate has willfully inflicted pain and humiliation.”

Not someone you want to elect as head of state. This bad man must not win the election.

Donald J. Trump has a cruel streak. He willfully causes pain and distress to others. And he repeats this public behavior so frequently that it’s fair to call it a character trait. Any single example would be off-putting but forgivable. Being shown many examples across many years

Adam Gopnik at the New Yorker has outstanding commentary on Trump.

For one thing, I appreciate his calling Trump “one of the hyper-nationalist demagogues and autocrats who have emerged throughout Europe and Americas in the last decade” and a sneering loudmouth.

It’s obviously comforting that he lost, Gopnik says, but it’s disturbing to see him normalized. Yes, yes it is – that’s why I keep calling him the very blunt names that fit, like liar thief cheat fraud, and misogynist racist xenophobe. He’s so off the charts terrible on so many criteria, yet there he is, being normalized.

…what was really outside any norm of decency was what he thought even after you had dutifully distilled away the incoherence

The story of how Trump treated Alicia Machado is truly ugly. Janell Ross reported on it today in the Washington Post:

The Clinton campaign viewed Machado’s experience with Trump behavior as so damning that Monday night, the campaign released a new commercial — almost a short documentary — featuring Machado. Speaking in Spanish, Machado described Trump as a man filled with grudges, racism and frightening anger, a man who contributing to her struggle with an eating disorder and, in keeping with another Trump critique Clinton raised on the debate stage, the owner of the pageant which did not pay her what she was due under the terms of her contract.

He defended his non-payment of contractors and others during … Read the rest

FiveThirtyEight on Twitter:

Trump kept up a running commentary while Clinton was speaking, although he seldom wrested the floor from her. https://t.co/loX3erQrYw pic.twitter.com/HoHf2ib0Qp

— FiveThirtyEight (@FiveThirtyEight) September 27, 2016

… Read the rest

Ezra Klein notes the coherence gap between Clinton and Trump, and what it means.

Of course, it’s obvious what it means. You couldn’t miss it. It rose off the debate like steam. Clinton has the skills needed for this job, and Trump does not. Trump does not remotely have those skills – not even a little bit. He doesn’t have truncated versions of those skills, he has their opposites. He doesn’t even know what the fuck he’s talking about.

Trump did his best to be fair. He interrupted Clinton 25 times in the debate’s first 26 minutes. He talked over both her and moderator Lester Holt with ease. But the show of dominance quickly ran into a

Trump says they tampered with his microphone.

“I had a problem with a microphone that didn’t work,” he said on “Fox and Friends.” “My microphone was terrible. I wonder, was it set up that way on purpose? My microphone, in the room they couldn’t hear me, you know, it was going on and off. Which isn’t exactly great. I wonder if it was set up that way, but it was terrible.”

“It was on and off, and it was much lower than hers. I don’t want to believe in conspiracy theories, of course, but it was much lower than hers and it was crackling, and she didn’t have that problem,” he added. “That to me was a bad problem,

Well that’s a powerful ad.

When Donald Trump speaks about women, our daughters can hear him. pic.twitter.com/0r1N6R8rV6

— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) September 23, 2016

 … Read the rest

The Economist looks at Trump and Pepe and the alt-right. It doesn’t usually like to advertise such visitors from the sewer, but this isn’t usually.

Unfortunately, and somewhat astonishingly, the Alt-Right—the misleading name for a ragtag but consistently repulsive movement that hitherto has flourished only on the internet—has insinuated itself, unignorably, into American politics. That grim achievement points to the reverse sway now held by the margins, of both ideology and the media, over the mainstream. It also reflects the indiscriminate cynicism of Donald Trump’s campaign.

Or it reflects Trump’s actual tastes. I see no reason to think they’re too finicky to enjoy a consistently repulsive movement such as the alt-right.

Much of the Alt-Right’s output will seem indecipherably

A legal scholar says Trump could be impeached before taking office (if elected).

Professor Christopher L. Peterson has found that should Trump win the election in November, he would be vulnerable to impeachment even before he takes office, thanks to fraud and racketeering lawsuits related to the Trump University case.

“In the United States, it is illegal for businesses to use false statements to convince consumers to purchase their services,” Peterson wrote in a paper published Monday titled Trump University and Presidential Impeachment. “The evidence indicates that Trump University used a systemic pattern of fraudulent representations to trick thousands of [people] into investing in a program that can be argued was a sham.”

Fraud and racketeering are serious crimes, … Read the rest