Donald Trump’s domination of the headlines with mounting outrages has served as a highly convenient distraction for the GOP; Much of the media and the public believes it is all about him, and he is dragging his poor party down into the fever swamps. Thus the Republicans escape accountability for their Frankenstein.

But Jeet Heer, a senior editor at The New Republic, isn’t having it. He brings a moment of clarity to the 2016 presidential campaign in his TNR post arguing that “The Republican Party, no less than its nominee, is incapable of accepting the Democratic Party’s right to rule.” As Heer explains:

As shocking as it was, Donald Trump’s suggestion that “Second Amendment people” would be able to deal with Hillary Clinton and the judges she appoints—a clear appeal to political violence—should not be seen as the nadir of his candidacy. Rather, it was part of his larger pre-emptive attack on the legitimacy of Clinton’s presidency. The “Second Amendment” talk is of a piece with his claims that the election is being “rigged” against him. Trump is poisoning the well, so that even if Clinton wins, she’ll govern over a population in which a significant minority rejects the notion that she has the right to rule at all.

Yet the coming legitimacy crisis won’t be solely Trump’s fault, even if he’ll deserve the bulk of the blame. As in so many other areas, Trump is merely pressing to their logical conclusion ideas that have been advocated by the last generation of Republicans, albeit more subtly. In truth, the last time Republicans wholeheartedly accepted the legitimacy of a Democratic president was Jimmy Carter in the late 1970s. Since then, both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama have faced repeated attacks from an opposition that refused to fully accept their victory as final. Clinton had to fend off ginned-up scandals that suggested he and his wife were crooks and murderers, while Obama has had to contend with birthers who think he has no legal right to be president and conspiracy theorists who believe ACORN stole the election on his behalf.

Heer adds that “It wasn’t Trump who created the bogeyman of voter fraud, which resulted in laws making voting more difficult. That’s a mainstream Republican position, advocated in the respectable pages of The Wall Street Journal and enacted into laws by Republican governors across America, in states like North Carolina and Wisconsin.”

Regretfully, it’s not only Republicans who are entertaining the bogeyman delusion, says Heer. “Both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have gone out of their way to say that Trump is not a normal Republican, in the hopes that they can shake loose Republican votes. But after the election, this polite fiction has to end. We need to confront the fact that Trump, as extreme as he is, is all too representative of his party.”

And those who think that defeating Trump will end the GOP-driven “legitimacy” crisis are going to be disappointed. “If Trump isn’t the only cause of the legitimacy crisis, then his defeat in November won’t be the cure for it either. America has a political problem that goes deeper than Trump: The Republican Party refuses to accept the fundamental idea that when it loses an election, it has to accept the results.”

“The Republican Party has been recklessly playing with matches for more than two decades,” concludes Heer. “Now they’ve handed over a flamethrower to a pyromaniac. However scary Trump might be, the GOP desire to burn everything down long precedes him.”

It’s really about the modern Republican party’s core contempt for democracy. For them, it’s all about destruction of the adversary in the pursuit of absolute authority, even if their refusal to negotiate in good faith damages the health and well-being of millions of citizens. And when they lose, their strategy is to undermine the very legitimacy of the election and its consequences.

Today’s GOP would no longer be recognizable to Republicans who voted for Eisenhower, let alone Teddy Roosevelt or Lincoln. We can do our best, however, to insure that they will be so badly beaten in November that a few of the GOP survivors will see the folly of their party’s flirtations with anarchy, and return to the more patriotic  conservatism that once empowered their best leaders.

MSNBC correspondent Joy-Ann Reid shreds the Trump facade and does it better than anyone so far in her Daily Beast post, “Dear White Working Class, Your Man Trump Is Pretty Establishment After All.” An excerpt: “Far from offering something new that could rescue the white working class and restore their life chances, Trump is rolling with a bunch of Calvin Coolidge bluebloods who probably wouldn’t wipe their noses on a blue-collar worker, let alone have any interest in restoring the solid, middle-class jobs they used to count on, back when unions still had strength in the manufacturing world and the New Deal mostly helped people like them. Erect big trade barriers and resurrect the American steel industry? Who’s going to lead that initiative in the Trump administration? Cerebrus Capital Management CEO Stephen Feinberg or billionaire poker player Andy Beal? Good luck with that, Sheboygan…It’s no real surprise that Trump, the scion of a wealthy father who has stiffed so many U.S. banks none of them will do business with him anymore, leaving him to borrow money from Credit Suisse and the Russians, may have pulled the ultimate con: charming the working stiffs while the monocled Monopoly Men hid in the background, waiting to be broken out of CryoFreeze and put back in charge of the economy…So surprise, working-class white people. You thought picking Trump was your way of sticking it to the establishment? Apparently, the establishment has decided that you’ve had your fun, and now, they’re taking control of the Trump campaign.”

Former GOP congressman Chris Shays provides a good example of a Republican endorsement of Clinton:

Abby Phillip takes a peek at Clinton and Democratic longer-range strategy in her WaPo Politics post, “Is Hillary Clinton contesting Texas? Not really, but she is trying to expand Democratic influence into deep-red territory.”

Marc Caputo notes at Politico that “Democratic U.S. Rep. Patrick Murphy is catching up to Sen. Marco Rubio and is nearly tied with him in a new Quinnipiac University poll that suggests Donald Trump is a drag on the incumbent Republican.”

In addition to the growing exodus of GOP elected officials now denouncing their party’s presidential candidate, Brain Trust Republicans are also deserting at an accelerating rate, as post columnist David Ignatius reports: “Fifteen prominent Republicans who had served in past GOP administrations met Sunday for a private soul-searching session that one attendee described as “painful and empathetic.” The next day, eight of them joined in signing the public declaration by 50 top GOP former national security officials warning thatTrump would be “the most reckless President” in U.S. history.”

Nate Silver has a sobering FiveThirtyEight post explaining why Dems should not get too overconfident, despite Trump’s meltdown.

You may have noticed that TDS is not in the business of advising the Repubican Party. But, looking at the big, longer-range picture, a better GOP would be good for America and good for the Democratic Party, encouraging Dems to step up their game, which is also good for the US of A. In that spirit, here’s a worthy suggestion from Vicente Feliciano’s post, “If Trump loses, does GOP establishment lose its working-class base?” at The Hill: “…Two generations ago, the Republican leadership accepted that President Franklin Roosevelt’s Social Security program and unemployment insurance, which were initially fiercely resisted, were here to stay. Some years later something similar occurred with President Lyndon Johnson’s Medicare initiative. Now ObamaCare should be, however grudgingly, accepted…And the Republican business establishment should accept that it is time to climb down from their high horse of unfettered free-market policies and get on with the dirty task of advocating market-friendly government interventions that advance the interests of the working class. Otherwise, the “blue wall” of 18 states and the District of Columbia — which provides Democrats with 242 of the 270 electoral votes required to win the presidency, and which Democrats have won in each of the last six presidential elections — will reach the 270 mark. And rightly so.”

Also at Politico, Burgess Everett has some insights about Democratic strategy to stop Trump in the Rust Belt: “…Trump is threatening a serious play for voters in this part of the country with visits to Wisconsin Friday and Michigan on Monday — including this city in conservative Western Michigan where the state may be lost and won, top officials in both parties say…If Kaine and Clinton can help take these two states off the map now, it gives Democrats more resources to spend in Ohio, Florida and Pennsylvania and even traditionally GOP states like Arizona and North Carolina as the general election draws near. That will not only help Clinton but Democrats in competitive Senate races in all five battlegrounds.”

Alas, in the state that hatched Priebus, Ryan and Walker, the hydra-headed voter suppression snake refuses to die. Ian Milhiser has the bad news at ThinkProgress.

Now might be a good time for Democrats engaged in the interminable globalist vs. nationaists trade argument to give it a rest and think about a reasonable compromise that can unify Dems and advance our trade policy to a more beneficial level. At In These Times, Leon Fink, editor of the journal Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas, has a timely post on the topic, “On Trade, Our Choices Aren’t Only Xenophobic Nationalism Or Neoliberal Globalization.” As Fink frames the argument,

Few issues are receiving a more insipid—and thus more harmful—treatment in our public discourse than world trade. Along with immigration, “free trade” is now the foremost symbol of a supposed either/or choice between globalism and nationalism.

“Globalists” generally hail the liberal marketplace as the engine of economic prosperity and assail its critics as uneducated and irrational isolationists, while “nationalists” instinctively identify trade with economic decline (or at least the loss of good working-class jobs), rising inequality and a general loss of control over the future.

…Absent a move towards what we might call progressive internationalism, we are forced to choose between “globalists,” heedless of the consequences of development for those outside the professional and financial classes, or “nationalists,” suspicious of and hostile towards the world beyond our borders. Neither posture holds out much prospect for economic renewal, either at home or abroad.

…This framework risks closing off our best possibilities for building a progressive economic future. We need a new paradigm.

Fink reviews the effects of trade agrrements, from Breton Woods, to Smoot-Hawley and NAFTA agreements, leading up to the current conflict over TPP. He pegs the still-central argument as “how best to tackle the negative effects of globalization without upsetting the entire applecart of world trade?” and notes, “Oddly, most other problems of world economic integration have found solutions through compromise, whereas trade has remained the province of extreme either/or.”

Perhaps the “extreme either/or” character of the TPP debate is symptomatic of the hyper-polarization of the 2016 political environment. Fink reminds his readers that it wasn’t so long ago that international economic policy conflicts were resolved through well-reasoned compromises, like mining and fishing territorial agreements, or IMF/World Bank protection of vulnerable currencies. However, explains Fink,

…There is no such movement towards an adoption of mutually-agreed international principles on matters of trade. In a politically suffocating manner, one is either pro-free trade (most big business and most Clinton-Bush-Obama policies), anti-free trade (Donald Trump with a proposed 45% tariff on China) or stumbling in the middle (pro-then-anti-TPP Hillary Clinton). The Trans-Pacific Partnership, in particular, attempts to overcome First World skepticism with side agreements on labor, affecting workers in Vietnam, Malaysia, and Brunei, but the record of enforcement for such guarantees is spotty at best.

The options here present a silly, self-defeating set of choices and one that both workers and consumers in the United States and Europe need quickly to transcend.

Fink calls for a new world framework which establishes “Not just financial stability, but the regulation of trade and debt” and “Global exchanges” that “yield equitable employment as well as enhanced bottom lines.” He urges that “NAFTA or TPP-type agreements” should provide “a step ladder of wage increases in the cheaper-labor countries as well as plans for displaced workers in the higher-wage countries before approving massive shake ups. In return, poor countries could count on significant debt relief.”

Instead of drifting into hyper-partisan camps bellowing against the evils of globalism or protectionism, Democrats should light a path forward to a new era of mutually-beneficial trade agreements that protect workers and transcend ideological extremes. Republicans are ideologically incapable of providing the needed leadership. For Democrats, it could be the pivotal compromise that wins the support of millions of working-class families and ensures a stable majority well into the future.

In his Wall St. Journal op-ed, Ruy Teixeira explains “Why the Democrats Have Turned Left.” In addition to the demographic transformation that is profoundly changing American politics, public skepticism is growing about our economic system’s failure to deliver economic progress. Teixeira adds, “Mrs. Clinton has repeatedly said that during her first 100 days she would call upon Congress to dramatically increase spending on roads, bridges and other public works, including to provide universal broadband and build a clean energy grid. Her $275 billion program, if implemented, would represent the greatest investment in American infrastructure since the development of the interstate highway system in the 1950s.”

Ed Kilgore observes in his New York Magazine post, “Trump No Longer Kicking Ass With the White Working Class,”: “As the New York Times’ Nate Cohn noted on July 25, Trump was winning white working-class voters at a better than a two-to-one clip in some surveys (66-29 in a July CNN poll, 65-29 in a July ABC/Washington Post poll) …That could be changing. A new NBC/Wall Street Journal survey showed his lead among non-college-educated white voters drooping to 49-36. Similarly, McClatchy/Marist pegs it at 46-31. These are not world-beating numbers. And you have to wonder: If Trump is losing his special appeal to the voting category that has long been his campaign’s signature “base,” where is he supposed to make that up?”

A downer convention of historic proportions for the GOP: “Gallup has been tracking the response from voters to conventions since 1984, and the Republican National Convention of 2016 was the first for which more people said it made them less likely to back the candidate.” – from Philip Bump’s post “The new Post-ABC poll shows just how badly Donald Trump blew his convention” at The Fix.

According to a new poll by Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, conducted July 9-20 for the Black Youth Project at the University of Chicago, “Twenty-four percent of young blacks, 23 percent of young Latinos, and 19 percent of young Asian-Americans live in gun owning households, though just 10 percent of Latinos and Asian-Americans and 11 percent of African-Americans say they own one personally…Yet more than half of Americans age 18 to 30 say it’s more important to control gun ownership than to protect gun rights. That includes 76 percent of young Asian-Americans, 63 percent of African-Americans, and 60 percent of Latinos. Young whites are divided, with 53 percent saying it’s more important to protect gun rights and 46 percent saying it’s more important to control gun ownership.” (M.O.E. 3.8 percent).

The legality of a major Illinois voter suppression law is on deck, reports Rich Miller at Crain’s Chicago Business.

Adam Eichen and Bob Vallier report at billmoyers.com, via salon.com: “The approximately 8 million American expats make up a voting bloc nearly double that of Washington state, the 13th most populous state in the nation. Were they to constitute a state, they would have about 14 electoral votes. Americans abroad are students and retirees, military and diplomatic personnel, people on short- and long-term job assignments, Americans with foreign spouses and their children…This year, DA’s[Democrats Abroad’s] global primary had record turnout. The 34,570 voters who cast ballots exceeded the number of Democrats who showed up for state party presidential caucuses this year in Nebraska, Idaho, Alaska, Hawaii and Wyoming, according to votes compiled by University of Florida turnout expert Michael McDonald’s United States Election Project...Expat votes often make the critical difference in close contests across the country…Just ask Sens. Al Franken (D-MN) and Jon Tester (D-MT) — both of whom were elected by slim margins in 2008 and 2012, respectively. The number of votes they received from abroad exceeded their margins of victory in their first Senate races.”

From Bill Weissert’s AP report, “Divided America: Texas Hispanic Voting Bloc Largely Untapped“: “Texas is home to 10.2 million Hispanics, 19 percent of the country’s Latino population. Excluding noncitizens and those under 18, about 5 million Texas Hispanics will be eligible to vote in the 2016 presidential election, but less than half may register and fewer still are likely to cast ballots…No Democrat has won statewide office here since 1994, the country’s longest political losing streak…A 2014 Gallup poll found that Texas Hispanics prefer Democrats to Republicans by a 19 percentage-point margin. Nationwide, Democrats enjoy a more comfortable 30 percentage-point advantage.”

The latest Sabato’s Crystal Ball electoral college forecast: 347 D to 191 R, basically unchanged from March 31. Sabato adds, “We’ve made modest changes since: Pennsylvania has morphed from Likely Democratic to Leans Democratic, while Virginia — after Tim Kaine was added to the Democratic ticket — went the other way from Leans Democratic to Likely Democratic. Arizona and Georgia went from Likely Republican to Leans Republican, and usually reliable Utah from Safe Republican to Likely Republican…Today we add one further alteration: We are moving Colorado from Leans Democratic to Likely Democratic. This also does not affect the Electoral College total, though it does push a competitive state further toward Clinton.”

ACORN founder Wade Rathke has a messaging suggestion that taps the positive “invest in America” flip side of whatever traction Trump gets with the working-class as a result of his anti-trade posture: “T-shirts saying “Build Infrastructure, Vote Hillary” may not seem like a catchy slogan, but it might wrong foot the Republicans and catch them in the bind of their own base, including the angry and entitled white voters, who want to see this kind of economic interference that delivers growth and visible progress.” Might make a good fall campaign slogan and bumper sticker as well.

In the wake of Trump’s meltdown in the polls, buzz is building across the trad media, as well as the internets, that Trump may bail. The argument boils down to ‘Trump will quit because his ego is too big to cope with a huge rout’ vs. ‘Trump won’t quit because his ego is too big.’  At Politico Steven Shepard posts on an “insider poll” of GOP activists in 11 swing states, which found that “70 percent, said they want Trump to drop out of the race and be replaced by another Republican candidate — with many citing Trump’s drag on Republicans in down-ballot races. But those insiders still think it’s a long-shot Trump would actually end his campaign and be replaced by another GOP candidate.”

But Michael Tomasky warns that “It’s Too Early for Liberals to Gloat About Trump” at The Daily Beast, and observes “It’s a good week to gloat if you’re a liberal, but gloat weeks are exactly the weeks that make me a little nervous.” Tomasky advises, “that that’s how to beat Trump: get under his skin. Tick him off. Unnerve him. Bait him, goad him, see what he’ll say…He has grudges and resentments and a constant need to be seen as dominating…feed his grudges in the hope that he’ll say something offensive”

NYT columnist Paul Krugman warns of the perils of the Clinton campaign tilting too far to the right to accommodate Republican refugees:”There’s absolutely no evidence that tax cuts for the rich and radical deregulation, which is what right-wingers mean when they talk about pro-growth policies, actually work, or that strengthening the social safety net does any harm…Trumpism is basically a creation of the modern conservative movement, which used coded appeals to prejudice to make political gains, then found itself unable to rein in a candidate who skipped the coding…If some conservatives find this too much and bolt the party, good for them, and they should be welcomed into the coalition of the sane. But they can’t expect policy concessions in return. When Dr. Frankenstein finally realizes that he has created a monster, he doesn’t get a reward. Mrs. Clinton and her party should stay the course.”

Well, this is disappointing — when the largest organization representing senior citizens makes deals with an organization which develops state-level legislation that screws consumers and suppresses voting.

At ThinkProgress Bryce Covert spotlights “The States That Do Nothing To Help Working Parents” according to a new report from the National Partnership for Women & Families. The 12 states that earned an “F” grade are depicted in black.

At The New York Times Leah Wright Regueur, author of “The Loneliness of the Black Republican: Pragmatic Politics and the Pursuit of Power,” drills down on the question, “Why Can’t the GOP Get Real with Black Voters?,” and notes of the Republican convention “Of the 2,472 delegates, only 18 were black. It is the lowest percentage on record, lower even than 1964, the year the party selected Barry Goldwater as its presidential nominee.”

“Clinton showed up in small factories in places the new American economy has all but forgotten: Johnstown, Pa.; Pittsburgh; Youngstown, Ohio; places where a guy straight out of high school used to be able to support his wife with a mining or manufacturing job and even give his kids a shot to move up in the world. And these white voters have even been the focus in the diverse swing states of Colorado and Nevada, where Clinton has been fundraising and making public appearances late this week.” – from Kasie  Hunt’s “Hillary Clinton Looks to Win Over White Working-Class Male Voters” at nbc.com.

Libertarian presidential candidate Gary Johnson, who will be on the ballot in every state, jockeys for a place in the upcomming debates. “The eligibility requirements, set by the nonpartisan Commission on Presidential Debates, state that a candidate has to hit 15 percent in five national surveys a few weeks before the debate to earn a place on the stage,” according to Josh Katz at The Upshot.

And yet another opportunity squandered?

Robert Kagan’s latest Washington Post column, “There is something very wrong with Donald Trump” merits a slow, serious read, especially by Trump’s fellow Republicans. Kagan, a senior Brookings fellow and Clinton supporter, explains:

One wonders if Republican leaders have begun to realize that they may have hitched their fate and the fate of their party to a man with a disordered personality. We can leave it to the professionals to determine exactly what to call it. Suffice to say that Donald Trump’s response to the assorted speakers at the Democratic National Convention has not been rational.

Why denigrate the parents of a soldier who died serving his country in Iraq? And why keep it going for four days? Why assail the record of a decorated general who commanded U.S. forces in Afghanistan? Why make fun of the stature of a popular former mayor of New York? Surely Trump must know that at any convention, including his own, people get up and criticize the opposition party’s nominee. They get their shots in, just as your party got its shots in. And then you move on to the next phase of the campaign. You don’t take a crack at every single person who criticized you. And you especially don’t pick fights that you can’t possibly win, such as against a grieving Gold Star mother or a general. It’s simply not in your interest to do so.

The fact that Trump could not help himself, that he clearly did, as he said, want to “hit” everyone who spoke against him at the Democratic convention, suggests that there really is something wrong with the man. It is not just that he is incapable of empathy. It is not just that he feels he must respond to every criticism he receives by attacking and denigrating the critic, no matter how small or inconsequential the criticism. If you are a Republican, the real problem, and the thing that ought to keep you up nights as we head into the final 100 days of this campaign, is that the man cannot control himself. He cannot hold back even when it is manifestly in his interest to do so. What’s more, his psychological pathologies are ultimately self-destructive…

Kagan, of course, is not the lone ranger in suggesting that Trump may be more than a little unhinged, and in a dangerous way. See here, here and here for example. “He must attack everyone who opposes him, even after he has defeated them,” Kagan continues. “He must continue talking about Texas Sen. Ted Cruz’s father, even after Cruz has thrown in the towel. He must humiliate New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, even after Christie has lain down before him.”

Kagan’s Fellow WaPo columnist Eugene Robinson has also observed Trump’s tantrum about the Democratic convention and commented that “he’s alarmingly thin-skinned. Referring to critics who spoke at the Democratic National Convention, Trump said Thursday that he wanted to “hit a number of those speakers so hard, their heads would spin.” And: “I was going to hit one guy in particular, a very little guy.” Trump made clear Friday on Twitter that he was talking about “ ‘Little’ Michael Bloomberg, who never had the guts to run for president.” (The bet here is that ‘Little Michael Bloomberg’ would likely flatten Trump in any such physical altercation).

Kagan doesn’t use the word. But millions of Trump-watchers must be thinking that this may be the first overtly sadistic presidential nominee of a major political party. Trump seems unmoved by criticism of his cruelty, or worse, maybe he likes it, since many sadists have a masochistic side. As Kagan adds, “he is unable to control his responses to criticism. He must double down every time, even if it means digging himself deeper and deeper into the hole.” Worse, adds Kagan,

And because it is a defect and not a tactic, it would continue to affect Trump’s behavior in the White House. It would determine how he dealt with other nations. It would determine how he dealt with critics at home. It would determine how he governed, how he executed the laws, how he instructed the law-enforcement and intelligence agencies under his command, how he dealt with the press, how he dealt with the opposition party and how he handled dissent within his own party. His personality defect would be the dominating factor in his presidency, just as it has been the dominating factor in his campaign. His ultimately self-destructive tendencies would play out on the biggest stage in the world, with consequences at home and abroad that one can barely begin to imagine. It would make him the closest thing the United States has ever had to a dictator, but a dictator with a dangerously unstable temperament that neither he nor anyone else can control.

Kagan believes that “his defects will destroy him before he reaches the White House. He will bring himself down, and he will bring the Republican Party and its leaders down with him.” It’s scant comfort, however, because an individual with such disturbing ‘character defects’ has risen as far atop one of the major political parties as has Trump, and that some horrific event, such as a terrorist attack, scandal or economic meltdown just might put him in charge as the leader of the world’s most powerful nation.

If Democrats needed a reason to reject complaisancy or overconfidence and get busy organizing a record GOTV effort, Kagan’s column is a good starter.

Just the headlines and links:

Donald Trump isn’t crazy

Air Force mother booed at Pence event

Donald Trump’s revisionist history of mocking a disabled reporter

From ‘Yes we can’ to ‘I alone can fix it’

Trump steers clear of the Khans, but finds other distractions: The GOP nominee attacks Hillary Clinton at a rally but interrupts himself with seemingly random thoughts and grudges.

Meet Trump’s latest political enemy: Fire marshals

Donald Trump’s praise for Vladimir Putin

America’s Electronic Voting Machines Are Scarily Easy Targets

Trump: Wind power ‘kills all your birds‘

Donald Trump’s Long, Fruitless Quest for Business in Russia

Harry Reid To Intel Community: Give Donald Trump Fake Briefings

Trump Defends Roger Ailes: ‘He Helped Those Women’

Trump boots baby from Virginia rally

In their New York Times article, “Donald Trump’s Draft Deferments: Four for College, One for Bad Feet,” Steve Eder and Dave Philipps report that during the Vietnam War era Trump:

…stood 6 feet 2 inches with an athletic build; had played football, tennis and squash; and was taking up golf. His medical history was unblemished, aside from a routine appendectomy when he was 10.

But after he graduated from college in the spring of 1968, making him eligible to be drafted and sent to Vietnam, he received a diagnosis that would change his path: bone spurs in his heels.

The diagnosis resulted in a coveted 1-Y medical deferment that fall, exempting him from military service as the United States was undertaking huge troop deployments to Southeast Asia, inducting about 300,000 men into the military that year.

The deferment was one of five Mr. Trump received during Vietnam. The others were for education.

Trump’s military deferrment history is not so different from that of many young men during the era. But Trump has called attention to himself with comments disparaging Sen. John McCain’s p.o.w. experience, explaining, “I like people who weren’t captured.”  He has also been criticized for disrespecting the grieving Khan family, who lost their son, Captain Humayun Khan, in the Iraq war.

As for Trump’s actual physical condition at the time, Philipps and Eder note,

Mr. Trump’s public statements about his draft experience sometimes conflict with his Selective Service records, and he is often hazy in recalling details.

In an interview with The New York Times last month, Mr. Trump said the bone spurs had been “temporary” — a “minor” malady that had not had a meaningful impact on him. He said he had visited a doctor who provided him a letter for draft officials, who granted him the medical exemption. He could not remember the doctor’s name.

“I had a doctor that gave me a letter — a very strong letter on the heels,” Mr. Trump said in the interview.

Associated Press’s Thomas Beaumont explains why “Kaine May Give Democrats an Edge in Swing-State Virginia” and quotes Virginia Republican strategist Chris Jankowski: “Tim Kaine is an example of putting someone on the ticket that will impact their home state…Putting him on the ticket turns Virginia from a true, toss-up state to one that leans Democratic.” Beaumont adds, “Kaine has been a fixture in a metro area that accounts for 10 percent of Virginia’s voting population, including heavily Democratic Richmond…it’s this doughnut around Richmond —- politically and culturally diverse Henrico County to the north, east and west, and whiter, GOP-leaning Chesterfield, to the south and west — where Kaine’s potential impact on the presidential ticket can really be seen…”Chesterfield is the county to watch,” said former longtime Republican state Sen. John Watkins. “If Kaine can help shave Trump’s margin to less than 10 percentage points, Clinton will win Virginia.”

Harold Meyerson argues that “The Democrats must be the party of the 99 percent” at pbs.org.: “The Democrats need to be, as the Occupy movement put it, the party of the 99 percent. Their economic agenda needs to recognize how deeply the fundamental changes in capitalism over the past four decades have wounded the American people and diminished the American middle class. They need to respond with economic reforms as far reaching as those of the New Deal were in the 1930s. This pivot in the party’s central direction need not and cannot lead it to abandon its advocacy for minority rights, but now is the time to reinvent its majoritarian program: an economics to create a more thriving and egalitarian nation.”

In Matt Viser’s Boston Globe article, “Bruising contest now heads to swing states,” he notes, “Trump is also continuing the approach that worked for him during the primary campaign, but could be risky during a general election: spending very little on television ads…As of mid-July, his campaign and super PAC supporters had reserved only $655,000 in television and radio ads, according to an analysis by Ad Age. Clinton had reserved $111 million across 10 states, with much of it concentrated in Florida and Ohio.”

At Bloomberg View Ramesh Ponnuru and Francis Wilkinson discuss “Two Views on the Democrats’ Strategy to Isolate Trump.” Wilkinson speculates about the down-ballot effects of a Trump meltdown, “Democrats didn’t like Mitt Romney one bit. But they didn’t think he was, as Trump ghostwriter Tony Schwartz went so far as to suggest about Trump, a “sociopath.” And it’s hard to imagine most Democrats getting especially anxious at the prospect of Romney controlling nuclear codes. That’s simply not the case with Trump…If you effectively make the case that Trump is a candidate better suited to the “Friday the 13th” franchise than to the leadership of the free world, that implies a question or two about the party that nominated him for president.”

At The Washington Post, Iraq war veteran Rafael Noboa y Rivera has an eloquent description of the difference between the Democratic and Republican convention that merits repetition: “…Patriotism isn’t just about wars and tanks and planes and troops. It’s about the ideas that make America great, not empty boasts that you’ll make it great again…No one who watched Clinton’s convention — least of anyone who saw Khizr Khan’s dramatic elegy of his son’s sacrifice, and consequent challenge to Trump — can doubt that Democrats are abounding in that love…Contrast that with the carnival of fear and terror we saw the preceding week in Cleveland. There, Trump and his minions painted a nightmarish hellscape of an America only one man could save. Where Obama said Americans do not seek to be ruled, Republicans prostrated themselves before Trump and implored him to rule over them. Nowhere in Cleveland was there to be found love of what America is, or what it is becoming; only fear, terror and fury. Only that, and a desperate, animal desire to restore America to a pale caricature fantasy. What patriotism was there to be found in the empty exhortations to “make America great again,” when that America explicitly doesn’t include me or my friends or anyone I know?”

Blue Nation Review’s Eric Kleefeld provides an encouraging report on the good news from appeals courts,  “Three GOP Voter-Suppression Laws Struck Down — in One Day” But Democrats should remain vigilant, because Republicans also have a history of voter suppression tricks that can be deployed independent of legal status, including: providing misleading information about polling places, intimidation of Latino voters by phony “security” guards, “voter caging,” putting few or faulty voting machines in minorty precincts, creating parking problems near polls, reducing the number of polling cites to create long lines and others. And Democrats should never forget the “Brooks Brothers Riot” and its disastrous consequences.

And despite the favorable court rulings for Democrats, there are other unresolved legal issues, as Michael Wines reports in his NYT article “Critics See Efforts by Counties and Towns to Purge Minority Voters From Rolls.” As Wines notes, “…Republican legislatures and election officials in the South and elsewhere have imposed statewide restrictions on voting that could depress turnout by minorities and other Democrat-leaning groups in a crucial presidential election year…A June survey by the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund found that governments in six former preclearance states have closed registration or polling places, making it harder for minorities to vote. Local jurisdictions in six more redrew districts or changed election rules in ways that diluted minorities’ votes.”

At rollcall.com Shawn Zeller gives Democrats a little something to worry about: “…Obama’s solid Electoral College win in 2012 was predicated on some narrow state wins. His margins were extremely tight in Virginia (115,910 votes), Colorado (113,099), Ohio (103,481) and New Hampshire (40,659) and the crucial state of Florida went his way by only 73,189 votes out of more than 8 million cast.” However, concludes Zeller, “Rory Cooper, a former spokesman for Eric Cantor of Virginia when Cantor was the Republican House majority leader, says Trump’s argument that he can expand the Republican presidential playing field into Democratic strongholds is hard to believe…”He is underwater with women, young people, Hispanics and with African-Americans. To make inroads in blue states, you have to make inroads into those communities,” says Cooper…”

This headline, and the story that goes with it, flags a possible turning point that will substantially reduce Trump’s acceptability to veterans and their families.

In his HuffPo article “Understanding Trump,” Psycholinguist George Lakoff, author of “Dont Think Like an Elephant” and other works, takes an in-depth look at the 2016 presidential election and finds an emblematic contest between leaders of the nurturing ‘Mommy’ and authoritarian ‘Daddy’ parties.

It’s hard to imagine a more authoritarian personality than Donald “I alone can fix it” Trump to head the ‘Daddy party.” As presidential candidates go, he is the all-time poster boy for name-calling, bellowing authoritarianism and narcissistic male chauvinism. He favors simplistic “solutions,” like building a wall between the U.S. and Mexico, banning Muslim immigrants and openly using torture and assassination of family members of terrorists as political remedies. Google ‘Trump Mussolini’ and you get around 468,000 hits.

As the first woman and mother nominated presidential candidate by one of the two major parties, Clinton is quite literally a perfect fit for leader of the “Mommy party.” In addition, she has acquired a polished skill-set as a negotiator and advocate during her career roles as First Lady, Senator from New York and Secretary of State, as well as during her earlier work as an advocate for the Childrens Defense Fund. However, nurturing Moms can also be pretty tough, as Bernie Sanders, Martin O’Malley and others who have done political battle with Clinton can attest.

The nomines of the two major parties set the stage for a full-blown Lakoffian analysis of the political messages and Lakoff provides it. Among his insights:

…In a world governed by personal responsibility and discipline, those who win deserve to win. Why does Donald Trump publicly insult other candidates and political leaders mercilessly? Quite simply, because he knows he can win an onstage TV insult game. In strict conservative eyes, that makes him a formidable winning candidate who deserves to be a winning candidate. Electoral competition is seen as a battle. Insults that stick are seen as victories — deserved victories.

Consider Trump’s statement that John McCain is not a war hero. The reasoning: McCain got shot down. Heroes are winners. They defeat big bad guys. They don’t get shot down. People who get shot down, beaten up, and stuck in a cage are losers, not winners.

The strict father logic extends further. The basic idea is that authority is justified by morality (the strict father version), and that, in a well-ordered world, there should be (and traditionally has been) a moral hierarchy in which those who have traditionally dominated should dominate. The hierarchy is: God above Man, Man above Nature, The Disciplined (Strong) above the Undisciplined (Weak), The Rich above the Poor, Employers above Employees, Adults above Children, Western culture above other cultures, Am,erica above other countries. The hierarchy extends to: Men above women, Whites above Nonwhites, Christians above nonChristians, Straights above Gays.