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Trump’s Triangulation (and How To Not Fall For It)

Yesterday, leaders of the building trades unions went to the White House, to meet with Donald Trump.  Trump was just signing the executive orders to move ahead with the Keystone XL pipeline, and the Dakota Access Pipeline, both projects that many of those unions support.

When they came out, the union leaders spoke glowingly of Trump, who just delivered two projects to them.  In fact, North America’s Building Trades Unions put out this release, which positively gushed about Donald Trump.

Donald Trump is, if nothing else, an avid salesman of himself.  He got what he needed – the unequivocal praise of unions, for the price of just two projects.

Meanwhile, he is pushing through a harshly anti-labor nominee for the Labor Department, opposes any minimum wage, and supports so-called “Right to Work” laws that will end unions. Nowhere in their press release was any warning from the unions that they’d oppose Trump on such moves.

Looking at the whole exercise, I was reminded of the 1990s, when Bill Clinton engaged in what became known as “triangulation.”

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The Trump Show.

When all the world is a show, people stop being people.  They become characters and props.

Donald Trump views the world as his stage – a kind of “Truman Show,” except one in which he, the title character, controls everything around him so he can live in the show in which he wants to live.

Once contained within an actual reality show, now Trump sees the planet as one giant shoot of “The Apprentice,” where everyone has a role – good guy, bad guy, etc. – that he determines.

When you take that into account, Donald Trump’s press conference this week makes sense.

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How Hillary Clinton Can Counter Trump’s Debate Strategy

Yesterday, I posted something about Donald Trump’s likely debate strategy – lie, lie, and lie again, knowing that it would fall to Hillary Clinton to correct him, now that moderators have decided against challenging lies.

Forcing Clinton to do the job means she will have nearly no time to talk about what she believes, what she wants to do, or to launch attacks on Trump.

So, how can Hillary Clinton combat that strategy?

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How Trump Will Win the Debates, With Moderators’ Help

“I do not believe it is my job to be a truth squad. It’s up to the other person to catch them on that.” – Chris Wallace, FOX News, on how he will moderate the debates.

Thanks, Chris Wallace.  You just gave Donald Trump his roadmap to winning the debates.

OK, that’s unfair to Chris, a little bit.  The other moderators surely won’t spend all of their time fact checking, either.

Therein lies the Trump strategy.

Tell lies and half-truths non-stop.

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Trump Dispute On Wall Could Be an Implosion

I’ll make this short and sweet. Donald Trump’s campaign is built on three pillars:

  1. He will make foreign leaders fear and respect us, because he’s tough
  2. Relatedly, he will make great deals for America, because he can strong arm others
  3. Unlike “crooked Hillary” and the establishment, he will never lie to you, and will tell it like it is

In one news cycle, it is possible he has blasted those three pillars with dynamite.

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Trump’s New Message is a Winner. Here’s How Hillary Can Counteract It.

Donald Trump 9.0 was launched last night (or is it 10.0?  9.5? I lost track).

For a brief moment in time, fueled by a teleprompter filled with messaging from new campaign manager Kellyanne Conway and campaign CEO, Breitbart’s Stephen Bannon, Trump had a narrative that finally worked.

To use a phrase of Trump’s, I hated to just give him credit for something, “believe me.”

Now, if he regresses to his usual self, he’ll say something horrible and the campaign will be caught up in a whirlwind of controversy.  But what if he doesn’t?  This new campaign message can work, quite effectively.  So, what should Hillary do?

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Bernie, Israel, Britain, and Perspective

It is hard to remember that Israel, now much maligned for how it handles the West Bank, Gaza, and Palestinians, was once a group of fighters seeking to oust an occupying force — the British — from what was, then, the “Palestinian Mandate.”

Throughout the  1920’s and 30’s, as the British restricted Jewish immigration into modern-day Israel, Zionists, who were seeking a homeland, began to form paramilitary groups, like Haganah and Irgun.  They bombed British military installations, and important infrastructure, as Zionists continued to illegally bring in more Jews.

Things came to a real head in 1939, with the release of the so-called “White Paper.”  That document, from the British government, rejected the notion of a partitioned Jewish homeland outright, and severely restricted all Jewish immigration, as a means to crush all dreams of a Jewish homeland.

Then came Hitler.

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