Monday Open Thread [6.6.16]

With 65% reporting, Hillary Clinton won the Puerto Rican primary 59% to 38%. If this margin holds, Hillary will win 36 pledged delegates to Bernie’s 24. According to the AP delegate count, that puts her at 2,357 delegates, 26 delegates away from the majority threshold of 2,383. That will be reached at 8 pm tomorrow night, and history will be made.

Josh Marshall on the meltdown of Trump:

But after two rallies and a flurry of interviews there’s no question Clinton has gotten to Trump in a big way. As she said, he is very thin skinned. (Emphatically denying that you’re thin-skinned is not a credible rebuttal.) Given who he is, being denigrated by a strong woman must cut deeply. Underneath the angry talk, he appears befuddled and uncertain about just how to respond. That is mainly because even before her assault he’d maxed out his invective. She was crooked, a liar, untalented, a lightweight, a sexual predator by proxy. How exactly do you escalate from there?

His furious effort to wring more aggression out of the English language has proved a rather unconvincing rebuttal to her central charge that he is temperamentally unfit, too emotionally unstable to serve as President. He now says flatly that she should be in jail, says he’ll find an Attorney General who will imprison her. He now also calls her a “thief” which somehow is the reason she set up her own email server. Overshadowed by the “my African-American” stumble in Friday’s speech in Redding was a bizarre interlude in which Trump gave a glowing evocation of the supporter who cold-cocked and beat a protester in Tucson on March 20th as an example of his little-heralded but purportedly expansive support among African-Americans. He’s trying to escalate but has little room to go. He’s maxed out. The transcripts of the two speeches read like compressed literary spittle.

His affect is also different. Both rallies struck me as significantly hotter than anything we’ve seen before from Trump, more sweat, more chopping hands, more yelling – simply more electric, frenzied and angry.

As Clinton and her team certainly anticipated, hitting him hard as mentally unstable and unfit for the presidency has placed Trump in a sort of Chinese finger puzzle of his own creation. The only mode of response he knows – an escalating and bellicose round of personal attacks with increasingly hyperbolic accusations – only confirms Clinton’s diagnosis. The harder he fights the tighter the charge sticks.

Jonathan Chait says Donald Trump has no idea what he is doing: “Donald Trump’s election as president of the United States would pose an unprecedented threat to the health of American democracy and possibly world stability. There is, however, an upside: Trump’s campaign is an absolute garbage fire. By all accounts it is the most organizationally and strategically inept campaign for a successful major-party nominee in recorded history.”

“To the extent that running a competent campaign matters, it will hurt Trump very badly. Yes, he won the Republican primary by relying on a massive imbalance of media coverage and exploiting a divided, extremely large field that failed to coalesce against him. Yes, he tapped into deep strains of anger in the conservative base that fellow Republicans ignored. But he’s not a political savant, and he hasn’t abolished the rules of politics.”

The AP reports that then-Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott (R) opened a civil investigation of “possibly deceptive trade practices” into Trump University but the probe “was quietly dropped” in 2010 when the school “agreed to end its operations in Texas. Trump subsequently donated $35,000 to Abbott’s successful gubernatorial campaign.”

In addition, Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi (R) briefly considered joining “in a multi-state suit against Trump University. Three days after Bondi’s spokeswoman was quoted in local media reports as saying the office was reviewing the New York lawsuit, the Donald J. Trump Foundation made a $25,000 contribution to a political fundraising committee supporting Bondi’s re-election campaign. Bondi soon dropped her investigation, citing insufficient grounds to proceed.”

“Donald Trump has paid men on his campaign staff one-third more than women, while Hillary Clinton has compensated men and women equally,” according to a Boston Globe analysis of payroll data for both campaigns.

“Trump’s campaign staff is also far less diverse than that of his likely Democratic opponent. Only about 9 percent of his team are minorities, compared with nearly a third of Clinton’s staff.”

“A growing number of Republican lawmakers and strategists fear that Donald Trump’s hostile remarks about minorities and his un­or­tho­dox strategy have imperiled his campaign at the end of a five-week head start on Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton that they hoped would fortify him heading into the general election,” the Washington Post reports.

“Their concerns increased again Sunday after Trump said he thought a Muslim judge might treat him unfairly because he wants to temporarily ban most foreign Muslims from entering the country.”

New York Times: “Republicans, concerned about how his contentious statements could harm their ability to retain control of the Senate and have a detrimental effect in down-ballot races, have struggled with how to distance themselves from Mr. Trump’s language without alienating his die-hard voters.”

BuzzFeed says Hillary’s “The Speech” has broken through on the campaign trail: “In the days since San Diego, aides and supporters have said they see the speech ‘breaking through the noise,’ as one put it — and resonating on the trail to a degree Clinton hasn’t seen in past efforts to draw sustained attention to Trump’s failed businesses, for instance, or to his comments about profiting from the housing crisis.”

“Clinton and her aides were particularly gratified to see voters respond with recognition to the speech across California, where she and her husband are on a five-day breakneck schedule of roughly 40 combined events and retail stops.”

E.J. Dionne Jr. says Clinton scores, Ryan punts:

Instead of sticking to his vaunted principles, Ryan forged a link between the Republican Party and Donald Trump that may endure in public consciousness long after this campaign is over.

There will be some brave dissenters, especially among Republicans and conservatives who do not hold elected office (and former presidents named Bush).

But party leaders have decided that Trump’s nativism and racism, his utter disrespect for the judicial system, his soft spot for foreign dictators and his latent authoritarianism matter far less to them than holding on to power in Congress. It will be up to the voters to decide how big a price Ryan, Mitch McConnell & Co. should pay for this. […]

And so Ryan and his colleagues will now be stuck defending an indefensible man even as Hillary Clinton occupies Lincoln’s high ground in proclaiming our country as “the last best hope of Earth.” There is, however, this: Many who say they support Trump will be praying quietly and fervently for Clinton to prevail. Ryan may be among them.

Charles M. Blow at The New York Times writes about the Madness of America:

I understand that Trump represents a clear and present danger, and having a passionate response that encompasses rage and fear is reasonable.

It is understandable to want to make one’s displeasure known.

But there is a line one dares not cross, and that is the one of responding to violent rhetoric with violent actions.

As I have said before, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said it best in his 1967 book “Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?,” and he is worthy of quoting here at length:

“The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it. Through violence you may murder the liar, but you cannot murder the lie, nor establish the truth. Through violence you may murder the hater, but you do not murder hate. In fact, violence merely increases hate. So it goes. Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.”

Doyle McManus at the Los Angeles Times asks what message will California send to the Democratic Party on Tuesday?

If Sanders wins in California, he’ll be emboldened to stay in the race long enough to give his superdelegate strategy a try. It will look quixotic, but he can argue that by winning in the nation’s biggest state, he will have earned one more chance.

If Sanders loses in California, though, his claim as a contender will quickly evaporate. He might be able to justify lingering until the last primary in Washington, D.C., on June 14. But he’ll face a barrage of pleas from other Democrats – leaders such as Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Vice President Joe Biden, both of whom Sanders counts as friends – to acknowledge that he’s lost and throw his support to Clinton.

In 2008, Clinton didn’t concede the nomination to Barack Obama until four days after the last primary. “That gives us until June 18 or so to decide,” a Sanders advisor told me last week. (He insisted on anonymity to discuss hypothetical future events instead of merely expressing confidence in total victory.)

Besides, he added, the candidate and his supporters will need “breathing space” – time to face up to the end of their campaign and grieve.

“He can’t simply snap his fingers and tell his supporters: Now we’re for Hillary,” the advisor said.

It has been clear for months, since March 15 at the earliest, or the New York primary on April 19 at the latest, that Bernie was not going to win the nomination. Fine, you need more “breathing space.” You have until June 15.

Donald Trump slammed Newt Gingrich’s criticism of his racist attacks on Judge Curiel and Latino and Muslim judges in general this morning on Fox & Friends.

Trump, who says he has “very strong, very thick skin,” responded in an interview with Fox & Friends on Monday morning. “As far as Newt is concerned, I saw Newt,” he said. “I was surprised at Newt. I thought it was inappropriate what he said.”