RUTHFULLY YOURS

Donald Trump’s fortunes rise as the fortunes of the US seem dimmer, as the image of the US political establishment is deflating, and as the self-confidence of the US working and middle classes is eroding.

In 2008, the US electorate was driven by a sense of urgency to snatch America from its economic and social crises, and therefore approached the inexperienced presidential candidate, Barack Obama, as the “Light Worker,” possessing mythical capabilities to heal the country. In 2016, a growing segment of the US electorate has lost its confidence in the political establishment, looking for a strong man on a white horse to stop the slippery slope trend of recent years.

Trump reverberates the intensifying frustration of the general constituency with career politicians, and GOP voters’ disillusionment with the GOP party machine and GOP legislators on Capitol Hill, who have failed to stifle President Obama’s implementation of his goal to fundamentally transform the US landscape internationally and domestically, socially, educationally, medically, economically, legally, ethnically, diplomatically and even militarily.

Trump is leveraging the growing gap/rift between the working and middle classes and the economic-intellectual-media “elites;” between the growing number of state and federal-supported/employed people and the rest of the population; between voters in the major urban centers and the “flyover” Americans of Middle America (not only “Joe Six Pack” and “Lunch Pail Mabel”); and between Metropolitan (“Wall Street”) and Micro-politan (“Main Street”) America.

Trump capitalizes on the significant erosion – especially since the 2008 economic meltdown – of America’s self-confidence, optimism, patriotism and conviction in its moral, economic, scientific, social and military exceptionalism, compared to the rest of the world.

On Thursday night, live in front of nearly 17 million Americans watching on national television, Donald Trump abandoned a central plank of the hawkish immigration platform that has helped propel him ever closer to the Republican presidential nomination.

The H-1B visa program makes it easier for employers to import highly skilled foreign labor, and has been widely abused to undercut American workers. Trump has declared himself against such abuses, stating in the immigration platform available on his website that, if president, he would require employers using H-1B visas to hire American workers first. Just last Sunday, Trump highlighted two former Disney IT workers replaced by foreign workers.

But by Thursday night, the front-runner had changed his tune. When moderator Megyn Kelly cited his previous waffling on the subject, Trump announced that he was “softening” his website’s hard line. “We need highly skilled people in this country,” he said. “And if we can’t do it, we’ll get them in.”

Yet one flip-flop was not enough. Just after midnight, Trump’s campaign announced that he was reversing his reversal in a statement that promised to “end forever the use of the H-1B as a cheap labor program, and institute an absolute requirement to hire American workers first for every visa and immigration program. No exceptions.”

Well, then. Will the real Donald Trump please stand up?

A few years back, I began reliving, in reverse, the most treasured part of my upbringing. On sunny summer Sundays, my son, age seven and falling in love with baseball, would curl up next to me on the couch to watch the game. The great American ritual of a man passing on to his boy not just the national pastime but a cultural heritage; the odd bits of hard-knocks wisdom sprinkled around the infield-fly rule. There was even symmetry across the decades: The Mets providing just enough drama to break your heart in the end.

There was, however, a vexing intrusion on the ritual: the remote control. And not because we didn’t have a remote control for our black-and-white RCA TV set in the Bronx circa 1966; it was because we didn’t need a remote-control back then. And not because there were only six other channels, as opposed to today’s 600; it was because, as his wide-eyed seven-year-old was taking it all in, my dad wasn’t worried about having to switch off Viagra commercials between innings.

So what is the natural progression from turning the campus and pop culture over to Amerika-hating radicals, to the vigorous years-long media defense of Bill Clinton’s right to turn the White House into a cathouse, to the inability of a father to watch baseball with his young son at one o’clock on a Sunday afternoon without being ready to address erectile dysfunction?

It is the cretinous Donald J. Trump campaign.

Hillary Clinton’s Super Tuesday victory gives her a clear path to the Democratic presidential nomination, but Bernie Sanders has never been her biggest obstacle to the White House. Her real liability is an email scandal that has put her in legal jeopardy.

Camp Clinton is arguing that the State Department’s Monday release of the final batch of emails ends the controversy over her private server. Yet that release is merely the end of one judicially mandated exercise overseen by a bureaucracy friendly to the former Secretary of State. The real action is in the courts, the FBI and Justice Department.

But even the friendly State Department review has been damaging. Of 30,000 emails Mrs. Clinton turned over to State, we now know that 2,093 were classified as “confidential” or “secret.” Another 22 were classified “top secret”—and State withheld their contents from public release. Mrs. Clinton keeps claiming these were “retroactively” classified, but that’s been vigorously disputed by intelligence community members, who note that at least some of the top-secret emails refer to intelligence projects classified from the beginning.

The latest release provides fresh evidence that Mrs. Clinton knew her server held national secrets. In one email from April 2012, aide Jake Sullivan forwarded Mrs. Clinton a blog post from a jihadist group. Mrs. Clinton replied: “If not classified or otherwise inappropriate, can you send to the NYTimes reporters who interviewed me today?”

The fact that Mrs. Clinton had to ask if this one was classified suggests she knew that people were sending sensitive information to her unsecure server. The new email dump also shows then-Sen. John Kerry sending Mrs. Clinton intelligence he’d obtained from top Pakistani generals.

There’s more to come. Federal judges have spent the past year doing what the State Department wouldn’t—that is, upholding the Freedom of Information Act. Judge Emmet Sullivan recently granted Judicial Watch discovery into whether State and Mrs. Clinton deliberately thwarted FOIA laws. CONTINUE AT SITE

‘He may be a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch.” That observation is attributed (possibly erroneously) to Franklin D. Roosevelt, expressing his feelings about Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza García. That’s the American version of “The enemy of my enemy is my friend,” and it has produced mixed results as a foreign-policy guideline: Saddam Hussein, the Afghan muhajideen, and the Pakistanis were our sons of bitches right up until they weren’t. Moammar Qaddafi was our son of a bitch for about five minutes, and a fat lot of good it did him.

Strange thing: A fair number of purported Republicans annoyed at enemy-of-my-enemy thinking as a rule of thumb for international affairs have embraced it as a model for choosing a president. This isn’t going to work out well for them.

Donald Trump is not your son of a bitch. He’s just a son of a bitch.

To long for a strongman to rule over us with a whip hand is unworthy of Americans, but Americans are human beings, too, and they suffer from a common human affliction: They desire to be dominated by a strong man. The man on the horse offers them protection for their vulnerability, direction for their directionlessness, strength for their weakness. All he demands in return is servility, which devotees of Der Apfelstrudelführer — singing hilariously homoerotic hymns to his purported status as “alpha male” — are all too happy to provide.

It has provided an embarrassing display: Ann Coulter, who affirmed that she’d be happy to support Trump even if he “wants to perform abortions in White House” — actual quote, there — huffed that Marco Rubio was being unseemly when he criticized her man on his own terms. Sean Hannity, who purported to be a Catholic, repeated ancient Martin Luther-era slanders against the papacy and the Catholic Church when the pope seemed to criticize the great man.

“Abject” is not a strong enough word for Laura Ingraham’s performance. Point to Trump’s corruption and his support of odious politicos ranging from Chuck Schumer to Nancy Pelosi to Harry Reid to Herself, and they’ll scoff: “He was a businessman — what do you expect?” Well, George Soros is a businessman, too — what do you expect? Point to Trump’s inconsistencies — the so-called conservative does not believe in free enterprise, property rights, the First Amendment, the Second Amendment, or the rest of the Bill of Rights — and people who denounce George Will for once having had dinner with Barack Obama when he was president-elect will weep that you’re a “purist.”

Donald Trump has lied about practically everything a human being can lie about — ask his wives and children — but he did tell the truth about one thing: He really could shoot people down on Fifth Avenue (assuming that the TV tough guy actually knows how to operate a firearm) and none of these unsouled minions would bat an eye, their eyes being exhausted from batting them at Der Apfelstrudelführer.

Donald “D-minus” Trump won big on Tuesday evening, but lost big on Tuesday morning. Before scoring victories in seven primaries, Trump suffered a legal setback that could explode in his face later this election year.

Donald “D-minus” Trump won big on Tuesday evening, but lost big on Tuesday morning. Before scoring victories in seven primaries, Trump suffered a legal setback that could explode in his face later this election year.

A four-judge Appellate Court panel in Albany rejected Trump’s motion to dismiss Attorney General Eric Schneiderman’s (D., N.Y.) $40 million fraud lawsuit on behalf of some 5,000 students who spent up to $35,000 at Trump University. They learned little, and now ask — as Billy Joel once did — “Is that all you get for your money?” The judges unanimously cleared this case for trial. Thus, the potential Republican presidential nominee soon could address twelve Manhattan jurors under oath, rather than 12,000 Michigan voters under blue skies.

“I’ve won most of the lawsuits,” Trump told CNN February 25. “I could settle it right now for very little money, but I don’t want to do it out of principle.”

However, the Washington Post gave Trump’s denial three out of four Pinocchios for being “mostly false.” Trump has won specific court rulings. Regardless, he faces three suits that denounce him for highly shady business practices.

New York State’s case accuses Trump of “engaging in persistent fraudulent, illegal and deceptive conduct in connection with the operation of Trump University.”

Specifically, Schneiderman states that Trump & Co. “used the name ‘Trump University’ even though they lacked the charter necessary under New York law to call themselves a University.” State officials told them in 2005 that they were breaking the law. Nonetheless, “Trump University did not change its name until May 2010 and never received a license to operate in the state. As a result, many students believed they were attending a University, when they were not.”

In another exclusive for Fox News, intelligence correspondent Catherine Herridge reports that the FBI is investigating whether Hillary Clinton shared computer passwords with her closest aides to allow sensitive intelligence to “jump the gap” between the classified systems and Clinton’s unsecured homebrew server. The government forbids sending or storing classified information outside secure, government-controlled channels, and has prosecuted employees for violations.

An intelligence source familiar with the Clinton probe told Fox News that “if [Clinton] was allowing other people to use her passwords, that is a big problem.” The sharing of passwords is strictly prohibited in the Foreign Service Officers Manual.

Such passwords are required to access each State Department network. This includes the network for highly classified intelligence — known as SCI or Sensitive Compartmented Information — and the unclassified system, known as SBU or Sensitive But Unclassified, according to former State Department employees.

According to Herridge, there are several potential ways classified information could have gotten onto Clinton’s server:

Reading intelligence reports or briefings, and then summarizing the findings in emails sent on Clinton’s unsecured personal server.
Accessing the classified intelligence computer network, and then lifting sections by typing them verbatim into a device such as an iPad or BlackBerry.
Taking pictures of a computer screen to capture the intelligence.

Last week, I pointed out that Donald Trump is a bit too comfortable with standard Democrat talking points regarding illegal immigration.

In Thursday’s debate, he tip-toed to the left a little more.
Republican front-runner Donald Trump said Thursday he is softening his stance on visas for highly-skilled workers.

“I’m changing. We need highly-skilled people in this country,” Trump said during the Fox News Republican debate in Detroit. “If we can’t do it, we will get them in.”

Trump’s stance toward awarding H1-B visas is different from the one he takes on his campaign website, which argues that more visas for highly-skilled foreigners would “decimate American workers.”

“One of the biggest problems we have is people go to the best colleges … as soon as they’re finished, they get shoved out. They want to stay in this country,” Trump said at the debate. “They want to stay here desperately. They’re not able to stay here. For that purpose, we absolutely have to be able to keep the brainpower in this country.”

Trump said he was now in favor of the H1B-visa program – despite what his website still says.

“So you are abandoning the position on your website?” Fox News debate moderator Megyn Kelly asked.

“I’m changing it and I’m softening the position because we have to have talented people in this country,” Trump said.

The Donald Trump that showed up at his Super Tuesday news conference was a different Donald Trump than we’ve seen before. We’ve witnessed angry Trump, flustered Trump, (at least once) gracious Trump, and exuberant Trump. This was presidential Trump. Kind of.

The presidential bit was Mr. Trump’s pivot toward the general election, and his promise that he is a “unifier” who is creating “a much bigger party” that can’t be “beat.” He then reverted to true Trump style to warn that if Republican power players succeeded in taking him out, they’d also take out his new loyalists, meaning the party would “lose everything” in November.

Both claims are worthy of some analysis. GOP turnout, no question, is epic. More than 8.5 million people turned out for Republican races on Super Tuesday, a stunning 81% higher than the 4.7 million in 2012. (The other side, by contrast, saw turnout fall 32% from 2008, the last contested Democratic primary.) Vermont aside, every single Republican primary and caucus has drawn record numbers.

Let’s stipulate that Mr. Trump is behind some of this. Both surveys and anecdotal evidence show that he is pulling new people to the polls. Yet let’s also stipulate that so, too, are the other Republican candidates. The reality is that a lot of Americans are rebelling against the Obama presidency. Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio and John Kasich are inspiring their own droves. CONTINUE AT SITE