The Media Never Raised the Bar for Donald Trump →

Brian Beutler, writing for New Republic:

Donald Trump’s closing argument is that he can use a teleprompter. Not necessarily that the words he reads off the teleprompter are true or intelligent, just that he can say all of them out loud and in order. In the final days of this campaign, we have returned to where we began, with an odd fixation on whether this man who aspires to the presidency can avoid saying anything ignorant, bigoted, inscrutable, or otherwise disqualifying for an hour or so at a time, once or twice a day.

There has been much talk in the past year or so about what we will talk about “when we look back on this election.” I think this element—the shocking false equivalency of the two campaigns—is the sneaky favorite.

The Media vs. Donald Trump →

Ezra Klein, writing for Vox:

There is a case to be made that the media created Donald Trump. It was, reportedly, his anger at being dismissed by political pundits that led him to run for president in the first place. And it was, arguably, the media’s wall-to-wall coverage of his every utterance that powered his victory in the Republican primary.

But slowly, surely, the media has turned on Trump. He still gets wall-to-wall coverage, but that coverage is overwhelmingly negative. Increasingly, the press doesn’t even pretend to treat Trump like a normal candidate: CNN’s chyrons fact-check him in real time; the Washington Post reacted to being banned from Trump with a shrug; BuzzFeed News published a memo telling reporters it was fine to call Trump "a mendacious racist" on social media; the New York Times published a viral video in which it simply quoted the most vile statements it heard from Trump’s supporters.

This is not normal.

This piece is a bit meandering, a little at war with itself, but I think it reflects overall what I’ve been saying from the start—the Left thinks the media is biased and the Right thinks the media is biased. You know what that means? The media is doing something right.

What We Learned About Trump's Supporters This Week →

Ryan Lizza, writing for The New Yorker:

On Friday, a researcher with Gallup brought some much-needed data and clarity to this debate. Jonathan Rothwell, an economist who drew on eighty-seven thousand interviews in the organization’s polling database, expected to find that Trump’s strongest base of support existed in areas of America adversely affected by international free-trade agreements and lax immigration policy. He made a surprising discovery.

There are certainly people out there who have casted their lot in with Trump as an economic penny-in-a-fountain. Their stories are easy to find if you’re willing to read and/or listen enough (I have). But those people, unfortunately, are part of a group that also includes the type of people that Rothwell details here—folks who, consciously or not, see the Great in Trump’s infamous slogan as a synonym for White. And while I don’t think folks, who by no fault of their own, have found themselves staring down the barrel of a job market, an economy, that they no longer recognize, I’m reminded here of the chorus of an H2O song that I listened to as a teenager:

Guilty by association
Judged for who I know
Can’t keep all my friends out of trouble
When they got no place to go

Alex Rodriguez: Alien →

Jeb Lund, writing for Rolling Stone:

So, tonight, he will not take the field in his final game, apparently too much of a liability for a team trying to convince itself that it's not going nowhere—a team that spent 2014 driving a .256/.304/.313-hitting Derek Jeter around the country in a ceremonial glass float like the Baseball Pope while local burghers at every MLB outpost heaved offertories at him.

A-Rod won't get anything so lavish. After 696 career home runs, he'll get a pregame ceremony, take his at bats, give a curtain call at the dugout and retire – that pre-funeral decades in advance of the real one.

I shield my eyes whenever I hear that small but vocal minority of Yankees fans who never warmed to A-Rod start yapping about “Real Yankees.”

Love the Fig →

Ben Crair, writing for The New Yorker’s Elements blog:

All kinds of critters, not only humans, frequent fig trees, but the plants owe their existence to what may be evolution’s most intimate partnership between two species. Because a fig is actually a ball of flowers, it requires pollination, but because the flowers are sealed, not just any bug can crawl inside. That task belongs to a minuscule insect known as the fig wasp, whose life cycle is intertwined with the fig’s. Mother wasps lay their eggs in an unripe fig. After their offspring hatch and mature, the males mate and then chew a tunnel to the surface, dying when their task is complete. The females follow and take flight, riding the winds until they smell another fig tree. (One species of wasp, in Africa, travels ten times farther than any other known pollinator.) When the insects discover the right specimen, they go inside and deposit the pollen from their birthplace. Then the females lay new eggs, and the cycle begins again. For the wasp mother, however, devotion to the fig plant soon turns tragic. A fig’s entranceway is booby-trapped to destroy her wings, so that she can never visit another plant. When you eat a dried fig, you’re probably chewing fig-wasp mummies, too.

You have no idea how much you never knew about the fig.

Stress Over Family Finances Propelled Hillary Clinton into Corporate World →

Amy Chozick, writing for The New York Times:

Even some of Mrs. Clinton’s allies privately say they are mystified by her choice to make the Wall Street speeches, given the likelihood that they would become an issue in a presidential campaign. And to some of them, her financial moves clash with the selfless Methodist credo to do good for others that she so often says guided her toward a life of public service.

But her longtime friends say the contradiction is rooted in Mrs. Clinton’s practicality and the boom-and-bust cycles that have characterized her life with Bill Clinton.

At no time did those stresses fall more squarely on Mrs. Clinton’s shoulders than in the difficult two-year period in Arkansas when she and her husband found themselves cast out of office, financially strained and deeply uncertain about the future. And the memory of that time shaped her desire to be free from financial burden.

This is almost getting boring at this point, but I really want people to read this entire piece, and then imagine that, instead of a woman at the center of it (I suppose some of you will have to block out the Clinton surname as well), a man is.

Because if HRC were a man, every single campaign speech would begin with this story. The sacrifice. The setting aside of arbitrary principles to protect your family. The buckling down, the survival. It’s the kind of self-made, up-by-the-bootstraps tale that is, frankly, quite Republican.

But, because she’s a woman, and because there is something inherently unsettling to some on the right (and very much so on the left) about a woman in power, making the money, rolling her sleeves up and getting dirty, this story has to be sought out. Discovered.

Hillary Clinton is by no means a perfect candidate. But anyone who tries to boil it down, make it simple, explain it all away in a soundbite? Be careful. They’re probably banking on you not digging too deep.

Why Trump's Crazy Talk About Obama and ISIS Matters

John Cassidy, writing for The New Yorker:

When he’s not tied to a teleprompter, Trump often seems to say the most provocative thing that comes into his head, with little thought for the consequences for his campaign, or for the campaigns of other Republicans. He’s like a small child, trying to be the center of attention, even if that means he has turned himself into an object of outrage and ridicule.

Donald Trump is going to lose in November. That much is becoming clearer every day. But he still has 88 more days to do incredible damage to our country. Make sure you read this one all the way to the end.

What to Remember About the Presidential Election When Donald Trump's Comeback Narrative Begins →

Jon Favreau, writing for The Ringer:

Remember this moment of the campaign.

I say this not to gloat about Donald Trump’s latest meltdown — that’s what Twitter is for — or because I think the race is anywhere close to over. It is entirely possible, even likely, that the polls will tighten again between now and November. Bounces fade. Memories are short. Hillary Clinton could commit some horrible gaffe or become embroiled in some scandal, real or imagined. The unusually high percentage of Republicans who are now telling pollsters they aren’t supporting their party’s nominee could shrink. Trump could show up at the debates with an entirely new personality that makes him a palatable human being for the first time in this campaign. You never know.

Still, even if none of this occurs, the media will eventually grow tired of the “Trump’s finished” story line and move on to the much more clickable “Trump’s comeback” narrative. Any day now, some Quinnipiac poll that shows a tied race in Pennsylvania will force Democrats to lose control of their bladders. A Trump surge in a stray tracking poll will result in a CNN Breaking News Countdown Clock that will tick down the seconds to an emergency panel of 37 pundits. The sheer hysteria of the “How Could She Blow This?” pieces will dwarf the collective freak-out that followed President Obama’s first debate loss in 2012. It won’t be pretty.

And that’s when we’ll all need to stop, take a deep breath, and remember this moment.

Quinnipiac poll results in Florida, Ohio, and Pennsylvania will be released tomorrow morning at 6am.

Donald Trump Sells Out to Trickle-Down Economics →

John Cassidy, writing for The New Yorker:

A plan aimed at the middle class, however, could have complemented Trump’s populist line on immigration and trade, wrong-footed the Democrats, and allowed him to claim he had a three-pronged approach to raising wages and living standards. In short, it would have made him a much more formidable candidate.

The problem was that moving in that direction would have singled that Trump was a genuine populist insurrectionary, rather than a cosseted billionaire who plays one on television.

In less than three days, Trump went from publicly non-endorsing Paul Ryan to kowtowing to his tax plan, reading it (poorly) off of a teleprompter like a hostage crisis script. It should be fun to watch Trump’s supporters flip-flop with him.

The DNC Hack Is Watergate, but Worse →

Franklin Foer, writing for Slate:

We should be appalled at the public broadcast of this minutiae. It will have a chilling effect—campaign staffers will now assume they no longer have the space to communicate honestly. This honest communication—even if it’s often trivial or dumb—is important for the process of arriving at sound strategy and sound ideas. (To be sure, the DNC shouldn’t need privacy to know that attacking a man for his faith is just plain gross.) Open conversation, conducted with the expectation of privacy, is the necessary precondition for the formation of collective wisdom and consensus. If we eviscerate the possibility of privacy in politics, we increase the likelihood of poor decision-making.

The scourge of "Transparency," and the jargonization of it as a concept, is the root cause of this "scandal." What amazes me is how often these nimrods call for transparency out of one side of their mouth, while foaming out of the other side about their privacy.