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Once he emerged as the early front-runner for the Republican Presidential nomination, this summer, his airport comings and goings posed a delicate staging issue: a rogue wind off the tarmac could render his comb-over fully erect in front of the campaign paparazzi. So, in Laredo, Trump débuted a protective innovation: a baseball hat adorned with a campaign slogan that he recycled from Ronald Reagan’s 1980 run for the White House — ‘Make America Great Again!’ The headwear, which had the rigid façade and the braided rope of a cruise-ship giveaway, added an expeditionary element to the day’s outfit, of blazer, pale slacks, golf shoes—well suited for a mission that he was describing as one of great personal risk.
You know, if this were another country, we could maybe call for an expedited election, right? I would love that. Can we do that? I’d like to have the election tomorrow, I don’t want to wait.
— Donald Trump, quoted by The Hill.
3
Number of key states where Hillary Clinton has worse honesty ratings than Donald Trump, with just 32% each finding her honest and trustworthy in Florida and Pennsylvania, and 34% in Ohio, according to a new Quinnipiac poll.
He had a crazy policy of self deportation which was maniacal. It sounded as bad as it was, and he lost all of the Latino vote. He lost the Asian vote. He lost everybody who is inspired to come into this country.
— Donald Trump, quoted by Newsmax, calling Mitt Romney’s immigration proposals “mean-spirited” in November 2012.
24%
Donald Trump’s lead over the GOP presidential race, followed by Jeb Bush at 13%, Ben Carson at 9%, Marco Rubio at 8%, Scott Walker at 8%, Rand Paul at 6%, Ted Cruz at 5%, Carly Fiorina at 5%, John Kasich at 5% and Mike Huckabee at 4%, a new CNN/ORC poll finds. Key finding: “Trump is the biggest gainer in the poll, up 6 points since July according to the first nationwide CNN/ORC poll since the top candidates debated in Cleveland on Aug. 6. Carson gained 5 points and Fiorina 4 points.”
The ideas once languished at the edge of Republican politics, confined to think tanks and no-hope bills on Capitol Hill. To solve the problem of illegal immigration, truly drastic measures were necessary: Deport the undocumented en masse. Seize the money they try to send home. Deny citizenship to their U.S.-born children. … Now, all of those ideas have been embraced by Donald Trump, the front-runner in the Republican presidential race, who has followed up weeks of doomsaying about illegal immigrants with a call for an unprecedented crackdown.
The worst-case scenario for Republicans is if Trump decides to run a third-party campaign. Even managing to get his name on the ballot in a handful of states would bring victory out of reach for the GOP’s eventual nominee. The best-case scenario is that Trump straggles through the race, eventually supporting the nominee. But this scenario is also far from ideal. It means that Trump has shaped the tenor of the race in almost precisely the opposite way the party establishment had hoped.
— Jonathan Chait, writing in New York magazine.
I am Batman.
— Donald Trump, quoted by CNN, to a young boy while giving him a helicopter ride at the Iowa State Fair.
Well I think he’s probably right, I am the most fabulous whiner. I do whine, because I want to win…I am a whiner, and I’m a whiner and I keep whining and whining until I win.
— Donald Trump, quoted by The Hill, saying he agreed with conservative author Rich Lowry that he is “the most fabulous whiner in all of American politics.”
Demagogues like Donald Trump exhaust the patience of the political press corps because reporters fundamentally misunderstand the candidate’s appeal. … Reporters like to think that logic and reason hold sway, so they believe a demagogue can be easily disarmed by exposing his crimes against logic, his pandering to the uninformed and his manipulative emotionalism. They’re entirely wrong—as the last month of The Donald’s unlikely rise to the top of the Republican presidential heap has demonstrated day after day.
— Jack Shafer, on Politico.
