Fateful Election

Paul Krugman calls combating climate change the most important issue and argues that no "energy miracle" is required.

[T]he cost of electricity generated by wind and sun has dropped dramatically, while costs of storage, crucial to making renewables fully competitive with conventional energy, are plunging as we speak. 

The result is that we’re only a few years from a world in which carbon-neutral sources of energy could replace much of our consumption of fossil fuels at quite modest cost. True, Republicans still robotically repeat that any attempt to limit emissions would “destroy the economy.” But at this point such assertions are absurd. As both a technical matter and an economic one, drastic reductions in emissions would, in fact, be quite easy to achieve. All it would take to push us across the line would be moderately pro-environment policies.

This alone puts a lot at stake.

[T]he next president won’t need to pass comprehensive legislation, or indeed any legislation, to take a big step toward saving the planet. Dramatic progress in energy technology has put us in a position where executive action — action that relies on existing law — can achieve great things. All we need is an executive willing to take that action, and a Supreme Court that won’t stand in its way. 

And this year’s election will determine whether those conditions hold.

And even after his reluctance to disavow a Ku Klux Klan endorsement, Amanda Marcotte thinks Republicans have ended up the candidate they deserve.

[The nominee's] very existence exposes the smarmy two-faced hypocrisy of the modern Republican Party. Modern conservatism is built on a base of protecting men’s dominance over women, white people’s dominance over people of color and rich people’s dominance over everyone else, but it’s generally considered impolite to say so bluntly. Instead, it’s standard for Republicans to pretend that policies obviously designed to screw people over are meant to help. That puts journalists in this terrible situation of having to pretend that Republicans mean well, since it’s generally considered impolitic to call someone a liar.

Marcotte quotes Jonah Goldberg's complaint that the nominee is “completely overturning what the Republican reset was supposed to be about after 2012, which was this idea that it was going to be a more consistently conservative but more inclusive and nicer toned party. And instead it’s going to be a less conservative but meaner toned and less inclusive party." But the party

doesn’t actually want a kinder, more inclusive Republican Party. What . . . establishment Republicans want is to be able to pursue nasty, bigoted policies while maintaining an air of gentility that garners respect in the mainstream media.

[The nominee] puncture[s] any remaining illusion that the Republican Party is a home for serious people, instead of a den of misanthropes and bullies that see politics solely as a way to preserve their own privilege while screwing over everyone else.

Update (March 5):  Hopefully, there aren't enough white men to elect a Republican.  Ronald Reagan won easily with 63 percent of the white male vote while Mitt Romney lost badly with 62 percent. David Bernstein estimates this year's nominee would need 70 percent of the white male vote to win.

Update (March 17):  The nominee loses among women voters by 21 percentage points.

Update (March 19):  Paul Waldman cites a poll indicating the gender gap is huge.

Half of U.S. women say they have a “very unfavorable” view of the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination, according to Reuters/Ipsos polling, up from the 40 percent who felt that way in October.

And Stewart Stevens writes about the demographic disadvantage for Republicans.

Over the last six presidential elections, Democrats have won 16 states every time for a total of 242 electoral votes out of the 270 needed to win. In those same six elections, Republican presidential candidates carried 13 states for 103 electoral votes.

In 1980, Ronald Reagan won 56 percent of white voters and won a landslide victory of 44 states. In 2012, Mitt Romney won 59 percent of whites and lost with 24 states. But it’s a frequent talking point that white voter enthusiasm was higher for Reagan and turnout down for Romney. Not so. In 1980, 59 percent of whites voted and in 2012, 64 percent of whites voted.

Note: I count 18 states and DC for 242 electoral votes.

Update (March 23):  Democratic strategist Doug Sosnik argues that the election is already decided.

[T]he fact that no major political party has ever nominated such an unpopular candidate for president is inescapable. The strategy that [the nominee] used to appeal to Republican primary voters who are conservative and disproportionately white will work against him with the moderate, diverse electorate this November. It is difficult to understate the level of negative attitudes toward [the nominee].

Update (March 27):  Ian Reifowitz cites an American National Election Studies survey that correlates white people's grievances and hostility toward minorities to candidate support.

If you’re a rightward-leaning white American, whether or not you harbor racial resentment is a powerful predictor of whether you support [the nominee]. Or, to put it more simply, [he] attracts white racists.

Update (April 7):  Voter ID laws do cause long lines at the polls and discourage voting. And now Rep. Glenn Grothman (R-WI) admits just that.

I think Hillary Clinton is about the weakest candidate the Democrats have ever put up. And now we have photo ID, and I think photo ID is going to make a little bit of a difference as well.

The ID laws are intended to help Republicans win.

Update (April 10):  Phil Torres argues that the need to address climate change (as well as nuclear proliferation) truly makes this election possibly the most consequential ever.

Update (April 17):  Andrew O'Hehir notes that the leading candidates to be nominated for President poll with the worst favorability ratings in the 32 years the question has been asked.

There could definitely be a dark historical irony at work here, if the year we elect our first female president — rather late in the day, it must be said — is also the year when our political system enters a period of unmistakable and perhaps terminal decline. If Hillary Clinton wins in November, it won’t happen because America has gotten over sexism or because the Democrats have forged a pathway to the future. It will be because she was nominated by the party that is dying slowly and somewhat politely, rather than the one that just blew itself up in public with a suicide vest. It will happen because many people will conclude they’d rather have a president they don’t particularly like or trust, but who is pretty much a known quantity, than a third-rate comic-book supervillain. Of such choices, history is made.

Update (May 8):  Mark Sumner cites Ross Douthat for the conservative argument against the Republican nominee.

For conservatives to support [the nominee], to assist in his election as president of the United States, would be a terrible mistake.

It would be a particularly stark mistake for conservatives who feel that the basic Reaganite vision that’s dominated their party for decades — a fusion of social conservatism, free-market economics, and a hawkish internationalism — still gets things mostly right.

Sumner points out there's some pretty strong objections to the conservative agenda.

First, that social conservatism? It’s indelibly mixed with both attitudes of ownership over women’s bodies and the assumed authority to patrol the bathrooms of America for misplaced genitalia. In fact, it’s hard to determine what constitutes “social conservatism” these days beyond belittling women and people who are differently gendered. It’s certainly not an alternate term for “good manners.” The free-market economics? They don’t work. It was voodoo then, it’s voodoo now, and it always will be voodoo. Every attempt to implement the level of deregulation Republicans want—energy markets, savings and loans, investment banks—has led to disaster. Every reduction of the top tax rate has exacerbated income disparity without ever, in any instance, leading to an increase in jobs. And the hawkish internationalism? Holy… fudge. When’s the last time “hawkish internationalism” did any good for anyone, anywhere?

But liberals and conservatives can agree on Douthat's next point.

But above all it is [the nominee's] authoritarianism that makes him unfit for the presidency — his stated admiration for Putin and the Chinese Politburo, his promise to use the power of the presidency against private enterprises, the casual threats he and his surrogates toss off against party donors, military officers, the press, the speaker of the House, and more.

Update (May 12):  Heather Digby Parton considers the Republican's quest for "unity".

Recently [the nominee] said that he planned to “renegotiate” the national debt, sparking alarms across the entire financial system. ... This is just one of many very serious issues about which it’s clear he’s completely clueless. Perhaps the most frightening of these have been his ignorant commentary on national security. Singing the praises of torture and summary execution is bad enough, but when a presidential candidate says he wants to be “unpredictable” about nuclear war, refusing to rule out using it against our allies, people tend to get a little bit nervous. Even Republicans.

So even if he were to convince the conservatives that he’s really truly one of them deep in his heart, [Speaker] Ryan would have to find a way to convince other Republicans that [the nominee] actually understands anything but building a wall, deporting immigrants, starting a global trade war, banning Muslims, treating women like dirt, massively expanding the military, giving the police more power and torturing people. Those are, after all, the only issues on which he’s been consistent. And he’s been consistent on them for more than 30 years, so it’s fair to say that this is his core agenda. Everything else is … negotiable.

Update (May 16):  In a Twitter response to the President, the Republican nominee seems to think knowledge is bad.

"In politics, and in life, ignorance is not a virtue." This is a primary reason that President Obama is the worst president in U.S. history!

Update (May 20):  Stan Greenberg argues for exploiting the Republican civil war to hand them a decisive loss in November.

Update (May 23):  I'm looking for ways to stay optimistic. Sean Illing writes about the "ground game".

Organization will matter in November. To what extent it will matter remains an open question, but there’s no doubt it will impact turnout in swing states. Without an active ground game and sophisticated targeting strategies in places like Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Michigan, [the Republican nominee] will be at an enormous disadvantage. I’m done saying he can’t win, but if his Twitter-based primary strategy works in a general election, every rule of presidential politics will be erased.

Update (May 24):  Over 450 writers have signed a petition in opposition to the Republican nominee

[b]ecause the rise of a political candidate who deliberately appeals to the basest and most violent elements in society, who encourages aggression among his followers, shouts down opponents, intimidates dissenters, and denigrates women and minorities, demands, from each of us, an immediate and forceful response.

Update (May 30):  Ed Kilgore notes

we are drifting into a general election where important media sources seem to have decided that Clinton violating State Department email protocols and [the Republican nominee] openly threatening press freedoms, proudly championing war crimes, and cheerfully channeling misogyny and ethnic and racial grievances are of about the same order of magnitude.

The press seems afraid to take him on as The Guardian editorializes.

Much of the US mainstream media seem unable or unwilling to get to grips with his candidacy. The sort of detailed scrutiny that has destroyed the ambitions of previous candidates seems lacking.

Then concludes:

A line must be drawn. Illusions must be discarded. The truth must be told. [The nominee], with his innate, rich man’s hostility to social justice and equal rights, with his greedy love of big business and corporate tax cuts, with his scornful disdain for green policies and climate change science, with his alarming ignorance of strategic realities in the Middle East and east Asia, with his cruel and ruthless contempt for the weak, the less privileged and the vulnerable of this world, with his foolhardy isolationism and protectionism, with his loathsome self-adoration, and with his hateful fear-peddling is a menacing problem, not a passing phenomenon.

Something not dissimilar to the rise of [the nominee] is happening across Europe, where xenophobic and racist parties of the right are advancing, most recently in Austria last week. [Neo-fascism], for want of a better word, is not something with which tidy, reasonable compromises can be made. It must not be appeased, bought off or left to fester. The only thing to do with [neo-fascism], wherever it appears, is to oppose it, fight it, and defeat it.

Update (June 1):  Jonathan Cohn makes a cogent observation:

One presidential candidate isn’t getting the same scrutiny as the others. And it’s the candidate who deserves scrutiny the most.

Update (June 3):  The Associated Press reports that the Republican nominee

said that the federal judge presiding over a lawsuit brought by former ... students has an "absolute conflict" in handling the case because he is "of Mexican heritage."

In other words, "Because I'm a racist, it's unfair to me to have a Latino judge involved."

And yet this doesn't matter to a young supporter of the nominee who has somehow managed to develop a deep sense of resentment.

For me ... it's resistance against ... ultra-PC culture. That’s where it's almost impossible to have polite or constructive political discussion. Disagreement gets you labeled fascist, racist, bigoted ... I feel like I have to hide my beliefs. ... I see the world becoming less and less tolerant of right-leaning views.

This is a war over how dialogue in America will be shaped. ... If [the nominee] wins, I will personally feel a major burden relieved, and I will feel much more comfortable stating my more right-wing views without fearing total ostracism and shame. Because of this, no matter what [the nominee] says or does, I will keep supporting him.

So you support a racist candidate and yet "PC culture" is intolerant because it makes you feel ashamed to express those views? Heather Digby Parton summarizes a study of people who voted for the nominee.

And after all is said and done, the analysis showed that these voters are primarily motivated by racial and ethnic animosity and resentment of social change.

Essentially they want to recapture an America that no longer exists, one that has white people at the center of the culture, on top of the world, secure in their place as the highest caste.

Update (June 5):  And because he is a religious bigot, the Republican nominee also believes a Muslin judge wouldn't be able to treat him fairly.

Also, Todd Gitlin asks whether the nominee is finally being subject to increasing scrutiny.

Update (June 7):  After his campaign suggested that female judges would also be biased against him, the Republican nominee released a written non-apology stating his previous comments about a federal judge have been "misconstrued".

Update (June 8):  Conor Lynch quotes a conservative writer that supporters of the Republican nominee just want to "burn everything down".  Lynch says the fact that he's a fraud hasn't diminished his appeal.

In many ways, [the nominee] is a reflection of much of America. Proud, prejudiced, patriotic, ignorant, materialistic, belligerent.

Update (June 17):  Gary Legum points out that while Republican strategist Rick Wilson has been outspoken against the nominee, Wilson has been part of the effort "to paint Democrats not just as ideological opponents, but as 'twisted' and 'disgusting' 'traitors' determined to destroy America."

[T]he GOP has been playing around with the zealotry and white supremacy of its base going back to Nixon’s embrace of the Southern Strategy 50 years ago. The party elites thought they could control the fire they lit, channeling it into keeping them in power while they pursued economic policies that benefited the upper classes. People like Wilson made a living tending and stoking that fire. He’s not upset that [the nominee] has destroyed the noble mantle of the Republican Party. He’s mad because the con he has helped run for decades has now been exposed, and he doesn’t want to face up to his part in it.

Update (June 19):  With Godwin's Law in mind, Leonard Pitts asks,

If one should never be too quick to make comparisons to Germany in the 1930s, is it not also important, on the rare occasions it is merited, to make sure one is not too slow?

Update (June 20):  Why is the Republican nominee setting himself up for colossal failure? What's in it for him?

Hillary Clinton raised $19.5 million [in May] and has $42 million cash on hand. [The Republican nominee] raised $3.1 million and has $1.3 million cash on hand.

*     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     Despite [the Casino] losing money every year under [the nominee's] leadership, the company paid [the nominee] handsomely, including a $5 million bonus in the year the company’s stock plummeted 70 percent.

Update (June 25):  A fair number of Republican operatives aren't interested in working for this year's nominee. Brent Swander has worked on several national campaigns.

Right now I feel no obligation to lift a finger to help ... Everything that we're taught as children — not to bully, not to demean, to treat others with respect — everything we're taught as children is the exact opposite of what the Republican nominee is doing. How do you work for somebody like that? What would I tell my family?

Chris Wilson was a senior aide for Senator Ted Cruz.

It's very clear that none of us are going to work for [the nominee]. Even if I wanted to work for [him], my wife would kill me.

Update (June 28):  With the Republican nominee seemingly more interested in promoting his business interests, Eric Boehlert asks,

If the whole thing is built to be a con, shouldn’t the press say so?

Yes.

Update (July 7):  I still can't believe the Republicans are going to nominate this asshole. Sam Stein:

[The nominee] must also know that white supremacists and anti-Semites have taken great delight in his tweet, as they have in other elements of his campaign. But instead of defusing the matter, [the nominee] has chosen to effectively say he doesn’t give a f**k about either the carefully penned letter his son-in-law wrote, or about the signals he is giving to racists and bigots. 

And that, even more than the initial tweet, says something profoundly disturbing about the candidate.

Update (July 12):  While Sean Posey warns that another demagogue is likely if the political class fails to address rising discontentment, Jonathan Rauch argues that our political system "doesn’t have a crisis of leadership; it has a crisis of followership" -- that political parties have been stripped of the means to reward or punish officeholders. This has created an unresponsive system where old fashioned compromise is nearly impossible.

[A]nti-establishment nihilism deserves no respect or accommodation in American public life. Populism, individualism, and a skeptical attitude toward politics are all healthy up to a point, but America has passed that point. Political professionals and parties have many shortcomings to answer for—including, primarily on the Republican side, their self-mutilating embrace of anti-establishment rhetoric—but relentlessly bashing them is no solution. You haven’t heard anyone say this, but it’s time someone did: Our most pressing political problem today is that the country abandoned the establishment, not the other way around.

Update (July 17):  It seems Peter Wehner has had an important realization.

For my entire adult life I have listened to the invective leveled against the Republican Party by liberals: It is a party sustained by racist appeals, composed of haters and conspiracy nuts, indifferent to the plight of the poor and the weak, anti-woman.

I have repeatedly denied those charges, publicly and forcefully. The broad indictment, the unfair generalizations, were caricature and calumny, the product of the fevered imagination of the left. Then along came [the Republican nominee], who seemed to embody every awful charge made against the Republican Party.

For many on the left, explaining what happened is simple: The Republican Party has always been this way, and [the nominee] is the logical and inevitable culmination of what the Republican Party has represented for decades. He is the ugly face of an ugly party.

Update (July 18):  Tony Schwartz who wrote The Art of the Deal calls his "co-author", the Republican nominee, a sociopath. And McKay Koppins points to feelings of being disrespected as motivation for the nominee to seek revenge against his taunters.

They’re never gonna say I didn’t run.

Update (July 19):  The Republican nominee broke with tradition and took the stage at the first night of the convention to introduce his (current) wife. "We're going to win so big." How embarrassing. He must have meant, we're going to win so bigly.

Oh, and parts of his wife's speech were plagiarized from Michelle Obama's 2008 convention speech.

Update (July 21):  Senator Ted Cruz refuses to make an endorsement. Heather Digby Parton:

Everyone assumes that he did this to set up his run in 2020 and that seems like a good bet. But it’s worth listening to his speech if that’s so. It wasn’t your typical fiery, right-wing Ted Cruz speech. It was, of course, extremely conservative, hitting all the hot button social issues and jingoistic high notes. But the rhetoric was couched in words like diversity and tolerance and respect. He even gave a nod to gays and Muslims and atheists and honored the family of Alton Sterling (which was met with stunned silence by the crowd.) It was the most “compassionate conservative” speech of the convention, contrasting sharply with the hard-edged, angry verbal violence of the all the [pro-nominee] speakers. That was not an accident.

He knew he would be booed in that hall. He also had to know that after days of watching his former rivals grovelling before the man who had grossly insulted them for months, Republicans watching at home would see someone who didn’t take potshots from afar but went into the belly of the beast, stood before the angry mob and [the nominee] himself and pointedly said they should vote their conscience in November. If his bet is that [the nominee] is going to lose big and becomes an embarrassing memory for the GOP, that’s what he’s betting he’ll be remembered for.

I have always thought Cruz was an underrated politician in the Nixon mode, an unpleasant fellow who makes up for it with intelligence, hard work and strategic foresight. He’s a liberal’s nightmare in so many ways. It would be a mistake to underestimate him.

Update (July 22):  Ezra Klein provides a long list of reasons the Republican candidate is not qualified: vindictive, bigot, sexist, liar, narcissist, authoritarian, conspiracy theorist, gullible, defensiveness, surrounded by sycophants, too lazy to learn about policy, incompetent campaign, bully, incites violence.

The simple fact of it is that [the Republican nominee] should not be president of the United States. That is not because he is too conservative, as some Democrats would have it, or because he is not conservative enough, as many Republicans would have it. It’s because the presidency is a powerful job where mistakes can kill millions, and whoever holds it needs to take that power seriously and wield it responsibly. [The nominee] has had ample opportunity to demonstrate his sense of seriousness and responsibility. He has failed.

And after watching a boring, 76 minute acceptance speech by the nominee, Jon Stewart rants on the "contortions many conservatives will have to do to embrace ... a man who clearly embodies all the things that they have said for years that they have hated about Barack Obama".

Update (July 23):  The Washington Post minces no words in referring to the Republican nominee as "a unique and present danger" to American democracy.

[W]e cannot salute the Republican nominee or pretend that we might endorse him this fall.

Update (July 23):  Could this be a clue for why the Republican nominee even sought the Presidency? Josh Marshall pieces together several facts such as the campaign only being interested in one plank of the entire GOP platform to reach a troubling conclusion.

Post-bankruptcy [the nominee] has been highly reliant on money from Russia, most of which has over the years become increasingly concentrated among oligarchs and sub-garchs close to Vladimir Putin.

[The nominee's team] was totally indifferent to the platform. ... With one big exception: ... changing the party platform on assistance to Ukraine against Russian military operations in eastern Ukraine.

[I]f Vladimir Putin were simply the CEO of a major American corporation and there was this much money flowing in [the nominee's] direction, combined with this much solicitousness of Putin's policy agenda, it would set off alarm bells galore.

There is something between a non-trivial and a substantial amount of circumstantial evidence for a financial relationship between [the nominee] and Putin or a non-tacit alliance between the two men. Even if you draw no adverse conclusions, [the nominee's] financial empire is heavily leveraged and has a deep reliance on capital infusions from oligarchs and other sources of wealth aligned with Putin. That's simply not something that can be waved off or ignored.

Update (July 24):  Frank Vyan Walton examines the potential for numerous conflicts of interest for the Republican nominee.

How does he make decisions on the world stage, and renegotiate trade deals, when he knows those decisions will have an massive impact on the companies he and his children still profit from?

Update (July 25):  The Putin connection to the Republican nominee is getting some notice.

Update (July 29):  Bob Cesca reports on the Democratic National Committee's hacked emails and the connection to Russia and the Republican nominee.

Dovetailed with mounting evidence showing Putin’s intelligence services, the FSB and the GRU, stole thousands of DNC emails and leaked them to the public via their useful idiots at Wikileaks, we have no choice but to begin asking the Watergate question: What does [the nominee] know and when did he know it? Does [the nominee] have specific information about the process and timing of the DNC email leak? Are [the nominee's] tax returns festooned with evidence of massive loans from Russian oligarchs close to Putin, as George Will suggested this week? We shouldn’t expect any answers, and it’s unlikely [the nominee] will face any legal sanctions. But, at the very least, this ought to crush [the nominee's] chances at winning the election. Of course, his angry white male supporters won’t let go of their precious Clown Dictator, but perhaps enough swing-voters will finally see [the nominee] for what he truly is: a despot in waiting.

Update (July 31):  Khizr Khan, the father of a Muslim American soldier killed in Iraq, calls on Speaker Ryan and Leader McConnell to repudiate the Republican nominee.

If your candidate wins and he governs the way he has campaigned, my country, this country, will have constitutional crises [like] never before in the history of this country.

There comes a time in the history of a nation where an ethical, moral stand has to be taken regardless of the political costs.

Also, Caroline McCain doesn't forget what the nominee said about her grandfather.

[His] statement, in my view, is unforgivable, and speaks to the kind of man he is: a coward who has never faced danger in his life, an insecure brat who shirked duty for comfort, and a man who is wholly unfit to serve as commander-in-chief.

And The Guardian reports on business ties between Russia and Republican operative Frank Mermoud.

Update (August 1):  The election news is already taking a toll for someone on Twitter.

Even as Republican leaders denounce things he's said, few have the integrity to repudiate their endorsement of the nominee. E.J. Dionne:

Every Republican politician and commentator who continues to say that [the nominee] is a superior or even morally equivalent choice to Hillary Clinton will now own their temporary leader’s brutality for the rest of their political careers.

Update (August 2):  Again, it's only the first week after the conventions and I'm not going to be able to keep up with all the verbal diarrhea coming out the Republican nominee's mouth. But here he is essentially implying that a Gold Star father sympathizes with terrorists in an interview with a Columbus, Ohio TV station (my emphasis).

[Border security is] a very big subject for me. ... And when you have radical Islamic terrorists probably all over the place, we’re allowing them to come in by the thousands and thousands. And I think that’s what bothered Mr. Khan more than anything else. And, you know, I’m not going to change my views on that. We have radical Islamic terrorists coming in that have to be stopped. We’re taking them in by the thousands.

I remember a time when Republicans honored military families. I guess that's not true anymore.

[Advisor] Stone is now employing dirty tricks against the Khan family. He tweeted on July 31 that Khan is “more than an aggrieved father of a Muslim son- he's Muslim Brotherhood agent helping Hillary” and Khizr Khan is "traced to the same radical Muslim group as @HumaAbedin.”

Update (August 4):  Mark Sumner says the Russian connection is still a big story and Sean Illing asks, is the Republican nominee truly unhinged or is he sabotaging himself?

[The nominee] is a little man with a big ego who likes the idea of being president but wants nothing to do with the responsibilities that entails. I suspect this was always about him – his brand, his fame, his business. That he’s made it this far without a plan or a vision or a plausible defense of his candidacy has to be a shock even to [him].

Update (August 6):  Andrew O'Hehir suggests that the Republican nominee is a symptom of troubling aspects of American culture that no one tries to address.

America is experiencing a health crisis on an enormous scale — a crisis that is simultaneously physical, psychological and spiritual and is hardly ever understood in holistic terms. If [the nominee] is the most prominent symptom of this systemic disorder at the moment, he is not its cause or even its leading indicator. For starters, this crisis encompasses epidemic rates of obesity and epidemic rates of suicide, dramatic evidence of a wealthy country that is literally killing itself. It’s about a nation of worsening social isolation and individualized info-bubbles and pathological delusion, a nation that spends more per capita on healthcare than any other major Western power to achieve worse outcomes, and where Baconator Fries are $1.99 at Wendy’s.

No doubt the Democrats presented a much more inclusive and dynamic vision of America at their convention than the ... Republicans did at theirs, and no doubt it’s better for my children and yours if Hillary Clinton wins the election. But Democratic cluelessness troubles me greatly. I’m not sure the Clinton-Obama-Clinton leadership of the Democratic Party has the slightest understanding of the physical and psychological dislocation of so much of America, the loneliness and desperation that has found its voice, for the moment, in [the Republican nominee]. Why would they, since they are every bit as complicit in the political economy that made all this possible as the Republicans are?

[The nominee] is not the problem with America, and [he] is not consciously trying to sabotage his own campaign. Maybe we should be grateful to [him] for what he has shown us. He is no more (or less) than the demonic personification of the central conflict in America, a nation torn by endless self-glorification, an insatiable hunger for Baconator Fries and the urge to put a bullet in its own head.

Update (August 9):  Hamilton Nolan is not impressed that Senator Susan Collins is only now announcing that she won't vote for the Republican nominee. Is there really a line that he just hasn't yet crossed for some people?

Even people who scarcely pay attention to politics at all have been well aware for months now that [the nominee] is a loudmouthed xenophobic racist know-nothing anti-intellectual nationalistic opportunistic neo-fascist aspiring dictator who combines pathological narcissism and fierce ignorance with a dangerous craving for power. Even his supporters understand this. This is old news.

And speaking of previously uncrossed lines, how about this quote? It might just stray a bit from telling people to vote against Clinton.

If she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks. Although the second amendment people, maybe there is, I don’t know.

Update (August 11):  Here's Rudy Giuliani defending the Republican nominee:

We know that [the nominee] is not particularly indirect. If [he] was going to say something like that, he’d say something like that.

What he intended was, that they should vote against her. With a crowd like that, if that’s what they thought he meant, they would’ve gone wild.

So does Giuliani suggest that the nominee could've been more direct in calling for violence? Does he also suggest that the nominee's supporters would actually like to see violence? Isn't it a problem when a candidate's defenders have to go to such extremes to claim he didn't mean what he said?

And more from Giuliani: The media coverage of the nominee isn't fair even as people like him need to be interviewed constantly to explain what the nominee meant. If the nominee meant something else, why didn't he say something else? The new cause of "misinterpretation"? The nominee said Obama is the founder of ISIS. But the media is unfair when they report what he actually says.

Update (August 12):  Oh, the ISIS comment is sarcasm! OK, let's not take anything he says seriously from here on. Or maybe the head fake is used to distract from the really damaging stuff.

And now later in the day from the great comedic mind:

Obviously I’m being sarcastic ― but not that sarcastic, to be honest with you.

Update (August 13):  Daniel Drezner describes the "doom loop" for the Republican nominee.

1) [Nominee's] polling gets a negative shock
2) Fewer moderates attend his rallies
3) Only hard-core supporters go see [him]
4) [Nominee] tailors speeches to get a rise out of his audience
5) With an audience of crazies, [he] needs to sound even crazier
6) In sounding crazier, [nominee's] poll [numbers] sink, more voters turned off
7) Only the most die-hard supporters attend his rallies
8) Back to (2)

But there's also a more insidious loop where he says something crazy, the media reports what he said, his polls go down, he blames the media for making him look bad, his supporters get angry, and now he can claim that if he loses, the system was rigged against him. Then he can prompt his supporters to engage in voter intimidation.

Meanwhile even liberal TV shows buy into the theme that Clinton is a liar despite PolitiFact ranking her as the most honest of all candidates of either party during the primary.

Also, a large study by Gallup shows that typical Republican nominee supporters are not necessarily negatively impacted by international trade agreements.

His supporters are less educated and more likely to work in blue collar occupations, but they earn relative high household incomes, and living in areas more exposed to trade or immigration does not increase [nominee] support. There is stronger evidence that racial isolation and less strictly economic measures of social status, namely health and intergenerational mobility, are robustly predictive of more favorable views toward [the nominee], and these factors predict support for him but not other Republican presidential candidates.

Bob Cesca adds his take on the Gallup study.

If you convince enough men that alleged outsiders (women, minorities, immigrants) are stripping them of their long-held power, as Fox News and others have done, there’s going to eventually be a fight, especially when one of those so-called outsiders is a black president with the middle name “Hussein.” Older white men don’t intend to hand over power quietly, and they’ve been given the green light by irresponsibly influential leaders to bury their humility, their decency and their sense of reality.

Update (August 14):  The Republican campaign is unleashing some ugly racism. And the nominee continues to blame the media for his poor showing.

If the disgusting and corrupt media covered me honestly and didn’t put false meaning into the words I say, I would be beating Hillary by 20%.

But Jake Tapper, at least, is starting to push back.

How DARE we cover the comments he makes.

Update (August 15):  Simon Maloy also discusses the Gallup study.

The still-fuzzy picture ... that emerges from all this is a bloc of voters who are acutely sensitive to economic decline (even if they aren’t necessarily feeling it themselves) and are more receptive to hypernationalist and nativist politicking due to their own racial and cultural isolation.

Update (August 16):  Chauncey DeVega argues that the Republican nominee is not crazy.

[The nominee] is acting intentionally, with premeditation and according to a plan. There is little if anything accidental about [his] lifestyle-marketing campaign of racism, bigotry, nativism and misogyny.

Update (August 18):  Supporters of the Republican nominee aren't necessarily worse off, but a Pew survey shows they believe "people like you" are worse off in sharp contrast to Clinton supporters.

Update (August 19):  Daniel Denvir criticizes the Gallup study.

It’s really pretty basic: [his] followers like the combination of his racist xenophobia, economic populism and “America First” foreign policy at a moment where profound challenges to U.S. military and economic dominance have thrown the notion of American exceptionalism into crisis.

Update (August 21):  The Republican nominee is heading for defeat, but Mark Sumner offers the depressing thought that the ugliness will continue.

[The nominee] has given license to every foul instinct and vile emotion. He’s turned caring, empathy, decency, and plain old manners into “political correctness” that can be dismissed with a stubby-fingered wave. Where conservatism has for decades waged a war against effective government, [his] campaign has been an ugly assault on the foundations of civilized society. Getting that hate-genie back in the bottle is going to take a lot longer that it did to unleash.

Update (August 22):  Referring to the Pew survey, Andrew McGill says there is a "hope gap" between the two parties.

People who have lost something aren’t voting for [the Republican nominee], at least not uniformly. It’s the people who think they’re about to lose something.

Update (August 24):  Jorge Ramos doesn't mince words.

It doesn’t matter who you are—a journalist, a politician or a voter—we’ll all be judged by how we responded to [the Republican nominee]. Like it or not, this election is a plebiscite on the most divisive, polarizing and disrupting figure in American politics in decades. And neutrality is not an option.

Update (August 25):  Hillary Clinton hits the Republican nominee hard in Reno.

From the start, [the nominee] has built his campaign on prejudice and paranoia. He’s taking hate groups mainstream and helping a radical fringe take over one of America’s two major political parties. His disregard for the values that make our country great is profoundly dangerous.

Update (August 27):  According to one of his sons, these are the reasons the Republican nominee is running for President of the United States.

[H]e opens up the paper each morning and sees our nation’s leaders giving a hundred billion dollars to Iran, or he opens the paper and some new school district has just eliminated the ability for its students to say the pledge of allegiance, or some fire department in some town is ordered by the mayor to no longer fly the American flag on the back of a fire truck. Or, he sees the tree on the White House lawn has been renamed “Holiday tree” instead of “Christmas tree.” I could go on and on for hours. Those are the very things that made my father run, and those are the very things he cares about.

Oh, and "Holiday tree" is total bullshit.

Update (August 29):  Despite claims of outreach to African Americans, a PPP poll (p.33) released by The Rachel Maddow Show gives the Republican nominee a favorability rating among blacks of zero percent (unfavorable 97, undecided 3) with a margin of error of 3 percent. It could be a somewhat negative trend (never high to begin with), but it certainly shows his campaign can't or won't fix the problem.

Update (August 30):  Kurt Eichenwald has a question for Speaker Ryan:

What is the Republican Party today? What is it you’re endorsing in this campaign? If you believe the GOP stands for racism, xenophobia, protectionism, nuclear proliferation, torture, war crimes, the reckless use of military force and fanboy support for a powerful and conniving dictator who threatens America, then please proceed. But I am sure you support none of that.

Update (September 1):  Ron Fournier has a long list of reasons why the Republican nominee should not be President.

[T]here’s no equivalence. 

On one hand, Benghazi and email and lies. 

On the other hand, mendacity, bigotry, bullyism, narcissism, sexism, selfishness, sociopathology, and a lack of understanding or interest in public policy—all to extremes unseen in modern presidential politics.

Also, James Hohmann reacts to the nominee's ballyhooed "policy" speech where he doubled-down on his racist immigration stand.

Republicans facing four more years in the wilderness will long recall the raucous rally in Phoenix as a low point of the [nominee's] campaign, perhaps even as the moment that he definitively extinguished his hopes of becoming president.

And he made a big mistake even going to Mexico thinking they were going to do anything to help him look presidential.

Update (September 2):  The speech in Phoenix shows that the Republican nominee is the same as he's always been. Chauncey DeVega says "[t]he so-called 'decent Republicans' who voted for [him] will have blood on their hands".

Several hours after returning from Mexico to a rabid crowd of supporters in Phoenix he would give one of the most violent, vicious, vile, and repugnant speeches in modern American political history. It was the political equivalent of watching a toilet or cesspool overflow where instead of running away in disgust, [The nominee's] supplicants enthusiastically wallowed and frolicked in the waste.

Many think pieces, articles, “hot takes,” and essays have pondered if [the nominee] is a fascist.

He satisfies many of the criteria.

[He] does not believe in freedom of the press. He wants to overturn standing political norms, values, traditions, and institutions in order to return to a fictive past. [The nominee] is a militant nationalist. [His] movement is based on social dominance behavior and authoritarianism. He is a strong man and leader of a cult of personality that emphasizes action, strength, and hyper-masculine energy. A direct appeal or encouragement to violence against the Other was one of the few remaining criteria for fascism that [the nominee] had not yet fulfilled. His speech in Phoenix finally checked off that empty box.

Also, Josh Marshall calls the nominee's remarks "hate speech".

Hate speech is rants meant to inflame, inspire fear or rage or violence against a particular class of people. The precise vocabulary is not the heart of the matter. There's no question that what [the nominee's] Wednesday night speech was was hate speech, a tirade filled with yelling, a snarling voice, air chopped to bits with slashing hands and through it all a story of American victims helpless before a looming threat from dangerous, predatory outsiders.

This isn't normal. It was normal in the Jim Crow South, as it was in Eastern Europe for centuries. It's not normal in America in the 21st century. And yet it's become normalized. It's a mammoth failure of our political press. But it's not just theirs, ours. It's a collective failure that we're all responsible for. By any reasonable standard, [his] speech on Wednesday night should have ended the campaign, as should numerous other rallies where [the nominee] has done more or less the same thing for months. There's a reason why the worst of the worst, the organized and avowed racists, were thrilled and almost giddy watching the spectacle. But it has become normalized. We do not even see it for what it is. It's like we've all been cast under a spell. That normalization will be with us long after this particular demagogue ... has left the stage. Call this what it is: it is hate speech, in its deepest and most dangerous form.

Update (September 5):  Paul Waldman writes about the corruption the Republican nominee has been involved with.

[His] casino bankruptcies, which left investors holding the bag while he skedaddled with their money

[His] habit of refusing to pay contractors who had done work for him, many of whom are struggling small businesses

[His] University, which includes not only the people who got scammed and the Florida investigation, but also a similar story from Texas where the investigation into [the University] was quashed

[His] Institute, another get-rich-quick scheme in which [he] allowed a couple of grifters to use his name to bilk people out of their money

[His] Network, a multi-level marketing venture (a.k.a. pyramid scheme) that involved customers mailing in a urine sample which would be analyzed to produce for them a specially formulated package of multivitamins

[His] Model Management, which reportedly had foreign models lie to customs officials and work in the U.S. illegally, and kept them in squalid conditions while they earned almost nothing for the work they did

[His] employment of foreign guest workers at his resorts, which involves a claim that he can’t find Americans to do the work

[His] use of hundreds of undocumented workers from Poland in the 1980s, who were paid a pittance for their illegal work

[His] history of being charged with housing discrimination

[His] connections to mafia figures involved in New York construction

The time [he] paid the Federal Trade Commission $750,000 over charges that he violated anti-trust laws when trying to take over a rival casino company

The fact that [he] is now being advised by Roger Ailes, who was forced out as Fox News chief when dozens of women came forward to charge him with sexual harassment. According to the allegations, Ailes’s behavior was positively monstrous; as just one indicator, his abusive and predatory actions toward women were so well-known and so loathsome that in 1968 the morally upstanding folks in the Nixon administration refused to allow him to work there despite his key role in getting Nixon elected

Update (September 7):  For the first time in 75 years, the Dallas Morning News endorsed a Democrat for President. They are not uncritical of Clinton, but make it clear "[t]here is only one serious candidate on the presidential ballot in November".

[The Republican nominee's] values are hostile to conservatism. He plays on fear — exploiting base instincts of xenophobia, racism and misogyny — to bring out the worst in all of us, rather than the best. His serial shifts on fundamental issues reveal an astounding absence of preparedness. And his improvisational insults and midnight tweets exhibit a dangerous lack of judgment and impulse control.

Update (September 9):  Breaking news from Republican campaign manager Kellyanne Conway.

So, [the nominee] believes President Obama was born  ...  in Hawaii.

Oops, no sorry.

The Washington Post's [Republican campaign] reporter Jenna Johnson noted: "[The Republican nominee] has never apologized, recanted his charges or even admitted error."

Yeah, he wouldn't want to confuse his voters.

Update (September 11):  Hillary Clinton is just speaking her mind:

You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of [the Republican nominee's] supporters into what I call the 'basket of deplorables'. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic — you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up.

Ta-Nehisi Coates thinks journalists should ask--is she telling the truth?

[T]his not an impossible claim to investigate. We know, for instance, some nearly 60 percent of [the nominee's] supporters hold “unfavorable views” of Islam, and 76 percent support a ban on Muslims entering the United States. We know that some 40 percent of [his] supporters believe blacks are more violent, more criminal, lazier, and ruder than whites. Two-thirds of [his] supporters believe the first black president in this country’s history is not American. These claims are not ancillary to [the nominee's] candidacy, they are a driving force behind it.

The Republicans have taken a step backwards in terms of outreach. The racist deserves to be defeated. If you are so adamant against Clinton that you feel compelled to vote Republican, then you should own what that entails.

Update (September 12):  Charles Blow says if the basket fits ...

[The Republican nominee] is a deplorable candidate — to put it charitably — and anyone who helps him advance his racial, religious and ethnic bigotry is part of that bigotry. Period. Anyone who elevates a sexist is part of that sexism. The same goes for xenophobia. You can’t conveniently separate yourself from the detestable part of him because you sense in him the promise of cultural or economic advantage. That hair cannot be split.

Also, Jamelle Bouie makes the same point as Coates--what offends people about Clinton's statement on her opponent's supporters? Is it not true? Are those beliefs not deplorable?

Update (September 14):  The New Hampshire Union Leader declines to endorse the Republican Presidential nominee for the first time in over 100 years.

The man is a liar, a bully, a buffoon. He denigrates any individual or group that displeases him. He has dishonored military veterans and their families, made fun of the physically frail, and changed political views almost as often as he has changed wives.

Update (September 16):  The Republican nominee for President of the United States of America officially acknowledges that President Obama was born in this country. Jonathan Capehart is not impressed.

[The nominee] has done and said many things that disqualify him as a potential president of the United States. His inability, daresay unwillingness, to ask forgiveness for stoking the racist birther lie says everything we need to know about [him]. That he is one national election away from sitting in the Oval Office because of that lie is a disgrace.

Update (September 25):  The Cincinnati Enquirer also has a hundred year tradition of supporting Republicans, but not this year.

[The Republican nominee] is a clear and present danger to our country. He has no history of governance that should engender any confidence from voters. [He] has no foreign policy experience, and the fact that he doesn't recognize it ... is even more troubling.

[O]ur reservations about Clinton pale in comparison to our fears about [the Republican].

Update (September 27):  Falling short of exceptionally low expectations, the Republican nominee displayed his true colors as an unhinged lunatic at the first Presidential debate.  Heather Digby Parton:

Last night [the nominee] demonstrated not only that he didn’t prepare but that he has no underlying knowledge of the subjects a president is required to know. He simply tried to bluff his way through with incoherent misdirection, hostility and sarcasm, even as he made the absurd claim that his temperament is his best quality. He gave the worst debate performance of his short political career. In fact, it may have been the worst debate performance of any political career.

When Clinton hit him for saying he hoped for the housing collapse, he reacted with a very plutocratic answer: “That’s called business, by the way.” He made the same mistake later when she pointed out that there were times when he hadn’t paid any taxes by saying, “That makes me smart.” These were just two of many errors, lies and flashes of ignorance, temper and petulance that characterized [the nominee's] embarrassing performance.

Also, the Arizona Republic endorses a Democrat for the first time in their history.

The challenges the United States faces domestically and internationally demand a steady hand, a cool head and the ability to think carefully before acting. 

Hillary Clinton understands this. [The Republican nominee] does not. 

Clinton has the temperament and experience to be president. [The Republican nominee] does not.

Update (September 28):  The mind of someone supporting the Republican nominee.

I am voting for the conservative party. And if this jackass just happens to be leading this mule train, then so be it.

Update (October 1):  Is the Republican nominee heading for a meltdown with his 3 am tweets? Clinton:

What kind of man stays up all night to smear a woman with lies and conspiracy theories?

Howard Dean:

People who stay up at 3:00 and 4:00 or 5:00 in the morning tweeting about sex tapes, these are not normal people. There is something the matter with him, and I don’t know what it is.

Also, the San Diego Union-Tribune endorses a Democrat for the first time in their history.

Diplomacy. Collaboration. Patience. Mitt Romney, whom we endorsed for president in 2012, exhibited those same traits as the moderate governor of Massachusetts and the business-savvy savior of the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City.

Vengeful, dishonest and impulsive, [the Republican nominee] is no Romney. This is why Hillary Clinton is the safest candidate for voters to choose in a complex world.

Update (October 6):  If this is true, then the election is over--the Clinton campaign knows exactly what kind of turnout they need to win. And they'll get that turnout. From Dan Pfeiffer:

Not enough people get this, but the Clinton Camp has every voter [identified] and modeled in the battleground states. Every voter. Think about that.

Update (October 7):  This is really blowing up. After threatening to bring up Clinton's husband as a campaign issue, a tape of the Republican nominee from 2005 shows him bragging about essentially sexually assaulting women.

The blowback from Republicans was delayed, but when it emerged, it was harsh.

House Speaker Paul Ryan, who had been scheduled to appear alongside [the nominee] on Saturday for the first time in Wisconsin, condemned [the nominee] in a statement late Friday.

“I am sickened by what I heard today. Women are to be championed and revered, not objectified," Ryan said. "I hope [the nominee] treats this situation with the seriousness it deserves and works to demonstrate to the country that he has greater respect for women than this clip suggests. In the meantime, he is no longer attending tomorrow's event in Wisconsin.”

Senator Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said [the nominee] must apologize for his “repugnant” comments.”

Utah Rep. Jason Chaffetz withdrew his endorsement of [the nominee] on Friday night, one of the most concrete signs so far that [the nominee's] support is crumbling.

The tape sat forgotten until recently? I don't believe that--someone has been holding on to this for a while, waiting to go in for the kill. Imagine the pressure brought to bear to make the candidate release this statement:

I’ve said and done things I regret. ...  I said it, I was wrong, and I apologize.

Update (October 11):  So this exchange took place between the Republican and Democratic candidates for President of the most renowned democracy in the world:

“I didn’t think I’d say this but I’m going to say it, and I hate to say it, but if I win, I am going to instruct my attorney general to get a special prosecutor to look into your situation because there has never been so many lies, so much deception, there has never been anything like it and we’re going to have a special prosecutor.”

"[I]t’s just awfully good that someone with the temperament of [the Republican nominee] is not in charge of the law in our country.”

“Because you would be in jail.”

Update (October 16):  It's a shame we can't keep the current First Lady after Barack leaves office. Anne Perkins:

Michelle Obama may have done the seemingly impossible. She may just have rescued the US elections from the grotesque and demeaning mire into which they have descended. She did something even more remarkable, and just as badly needed. With the touch of a poet, her speech last night shamed the tat and the tawdry of populism and held out the possibility of something better. She lent her extraordinary ability to say what people are feeling to every English-speaking woman in the world.

Update (October 17):  Matt Taibbi attempts to understand the disastrous campaign of the Republican nominee and what it means for U.S. politics.

Anyone who takes a close-enough look at how we run elections in this country will conclude that the process is designed to be regressive. It distracts us with trivialities and drives us apart during two years of furious arguments. It's a divide-and-conquer mechanism that keeps us from communicating with one another, and prevents us from examining the broader, systemic problems we all face together.

In the good old days, when elections were merely stupid and not also violent and terrifying, we argued over which candidate we'd rather have a beer with, instead of wondering why both parties were getting hundreds of millions of dollars from the same people.

...

[The nominee's] shocking rise and spectacular fall have been a singular disaster for U.S. politics. Built up in the press as the American Hitler, he was unmasked in the end as a pathetic little prankster who ruined himself, his family and half of America's two-party political system for what was probably a half-assed ego trip all along, adventure tourism for the idiot rich.

That such a small man would have such an awesome impact on our nation's history is terrible, but it makes sense if you believe in the essential ridiculousness of the human experience. [He] picked exactly the wrong time to launch his mirror-gazing rampage to nowhere. He ran at a time when Americans on both sides of the aisle were experiencing a deep sense of betrayal by the political class, anger that was finally ready to express itself at the ballot box.

...

If you thought lesser-evilism was bad before, wait until the answer to every question you might have about your political leaders becomes, "Would you rather have [him] in office?"

[The Republican nominee] can't win. Our national experiment can't end because one aging narcissist got bored of sex and food. Not even America deserves that. But that doesn't mean we come out ahead. We're more divided than ever, sicker than ever, dumber than ever. And there's no reason to think it won't be worse the next time.

Update (October 19):  "Such a nasty woman, " he says, interrupting her yet again. Will he accept the results of the election? "I will look at it at the time."

Update (October 25):  I think we know what time we're going back to if we really "make American great again":

Fifty-one percent say that American culture and way of life have worsened since the 1950s, while 48 percent say they have changed for the better.

Seventy-two percent of likely [Republican nominee] voters think things have changed for the worse, while about 70 person of Clinton voters think things have changed for the better.

Update (October 29):  Just how big of an asshole is the Republican nominee?  This big:

In the fall of 1996, a charity called the Association to Benefit Children held a ribbon-cutting in Manhattan for a new nursery school serving children with AIDS. The bold-faced names took seats up front.

There was then-Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani (R) and former mayor David Dinkins (D). TV stars Frank and Kathie Lee Gifford, who were major donors. And there was a seat saved for Steven Fisher, a developer who had given generously to build the nursery.

Then, all of a sudden, there was [the future nominee].

“Nobody knew he was coming,” said Abigail Disney, another donor sitting on the dais. “[He] just gets up on the podium and sits down.”

[He] was not a major donor. He was not a donor, period. He’d never given a dollar to the nursery or the Association to Benefit Children, according to Gretchen Buchenholz, the charity’s executive director then and now.

But now he was sitting in Fisher’s seat, next to Giuliani ... looking for all the world like an honored donor to the cause.

Afterward, Disney and Buchenholz recalled, [he] left without offering an explanation. Or a donation. Fisher was stuck in the audience. The charity spent months trying to repair its relationship with him.

Update (October 31):  After a letter from the FBI director re-inflamed Clinton's e-mail controversy, now comes a story about possible, regular communication between internet servers belonging to the Republican nominee's business and to a Russian bank. It just keeps getting weirder and weirder.

The researchers quickly dismissed their initial fear that the logs represented a malware attack. The communication wasn’t the work of bots. The irregular pattern of server lookups actually resembled the pattern of human conversation—conversations that began during office hours in New York and continued during office hours in Moscow. It dawned on the researchers that this wasn’t an attack, but a sustained relationship between a server registered to the [nominee's] Organization and two servers registered to an entity called Alfa Bank.

There's also a story from the New York Times stating that an FBI investigation has so far found no direct link between the nominee and Russia. And then a Mother Jones story has a former foreign intelligence official claiming that Russia has tried to co-opt the nominee.

Update (November 2):  Extracted from a series of tweets by Paul Krugman.

David Frum is right about the breakdown of democratic norms in this election, whatever happens. But it's crucial to realize (which I think he does) that this is the culmination of a process, not a sudden collapse of [an] intact system. The fact is that movement conservatives -- the GOP people overrun by [the Republican nominee] -- had already abandoned norms well before. Think about the Supreme Court blockade. Think about the political weaponization of the debt ceiling to extract budget concessions. Back under Bush, think about the purge of US attorneys -- and the way we were, you know, lied into war. At a fundamental level, the GOP decided a long time ago that there were no boundaries, no legitimacy to opponents. This was supposed to be in the service of right-wing ideology. Predictably it has gone out of their control and opened the door to thuggish authoritarianism.

What Jonathan Chait says: [an] authoritarian impulse [is] deeply rooted in conservatism; [the nominee's neofascism] is no accident, just a vulgar version.