"Trump is not just a small, greedy person, but a cruel one, too. ... he is personally cruel and rapacious: He, and his presidential candidacy, are directly screwing you." C'mon, people, wake up and see #Lyin'Donald for what he is.

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COMMENTS: 
*  Since Trump and his enablers have succeeded (with the willing collusion of much of the media) in turning the presidential race into a cheap circus, I don't see much point in the Dems trying to engage him directly. You know what the response will inevitably be: more lies, more dodging, more demagoguery, and increasingly vile insults.  Instead, maybe the Dems should focus on putting the rest of the GOP on the spot -- the GOP leadership, members of Congress, governors, and all down-ticket runners -- pressing them to justify their support of him and explain how in hell he is supposed to be representing their traditional policies.
   *  I have a different opinion. Attack him in subtle (or like Warren not so subtle) ways to goad him into the expected over reaction. I really think most voters have no interest in an unhinged bat case as president and I do think he will react hyperbolically to the right attacks.
   *  The game definitely has to be Make Donnie Blow.
*  "Just air all the Clinton rumors and you'll win" has all the potential of "just make Obama veto all our legislation and we'll break his presidency."
*  ... Meet the shady fundraisers for Trump — including one guy who bribed NYC pension with $1 million  https://www.rawstory.com/2016/05/meet-the-shady-fundraisers-for-trump-including-one-guy-who-bribed-nyc-pension-with-1-million/
*  Regardless of your opinion of Elizabeth Warren, you have to admit those were devastating hits on the Donald. Even if half of what she said sticks, the guy is gonna have a hard time winning this election. His comments about profiting from the economic crash make Romney's 47% comments seem really innocent!
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Elizabeth Warren just absolutely shredded Donald Trump. There’s a lot more like this to come.
By Greg Sargent, May 25, 2016

THE MORNING PLUM:

Early in the 2012 campaign, when top Democratic strategists were debating how to target Mitt Romney, they worked to hone their message about him down to a single, tight, pithy phrase. According to one senior Democrat in on the discussions, they finally settled on this:

“When people like him do well, people like you get screwed.” While this sentence never appeared in any Dem messaging, it functioned as a thematic guide, the senior Dem tells me.

Now Democrats are wrestling with how to deliver a similar message about Trump, while also dealing with a key strategic problem: In many ways, Trump is a very different kind of billionaire from Romney.

Elizabeth Warren delivered an extensive, blistering speech last night about Trump that will serve as a template for how Democrats will attack him — both in terms of how they’ll prosecute his business past and how they’ll try to undercut his central arguments about the economy. Here’s a video of highlights:



Speaking in D.C. May 24, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), slammed GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump, saying the "central question" of the 2016 election is "whether this country works for billionaires like Trump and their big bank friends or whether this country works for everyone else. " (Sarah Parnass/The Washington Post)

The line that is driving all the attention this morning is Warren’s suggestion, in the context of Trump’s 2006 comment that a housing crash might enrich him, that the Donald is a “small, insecure money-grubber.” But Warren isn’t merely dissing Trump’s manhood. Warren — who went on to note that Trump “roots for people to get thrown out of their house” because he “doesn’t care who gets hurt, as long as he makes a profit” — is making a broader argument. Trump is not just a small, greedy person, but a cruel one, too.

That theme is also threaded through Warren’s broadside against Trump on taxes. He isn’t just paying as little as possible — and openly boasting about it — because he’s greedy. He isn’t just refusing to release his returns because he doesn’t want to reveal he’s not as rich as he claims (another shot at Trump’s self-inflated masculinity). All this, Warren suggests, also reflects a larger moral failing: Trump plays by his own set of rules, engorging himself, while simultaneously heaping explicit scorn on social investments designed to help those who are struggling in the same economy that made him rich. Warren notes that Trump recently likened paying his taxes to “throwing money down the drain” — i.e., he is reneging on the social contract — after “inheriting a fortune from his father” and “keeping it going by scamming people.” Thus, Warren is making a broader argument about Trump’s fundamental cruelty.

One lingering question is what kind of affirmative argument Hillary Clinton will make in terms of how she’d be better than Trump on the economy. Trump argues that Clinton belongs to a corrupt elite that has screwed over working people for decades, with bad trade deals that sucked jobs out of the industrial Midwest and lax immigration policies that gave Americans’ livelihoods away to parasites and criminals. The system is failing those people, and he’d snap it over his knee and get it working again.

The Clinton response is to cast Trump as a sleazy fraud, to undercut his claims to economic prowess. But it’s also to lay out a programmatic economic agenda: A minimum wage hike; equal pay for women; paid family leave; expanded child care; investments designed to boost American businesses’ ability to compete in a globalizing economy, rather than protectionism that would start destructive trade wars. (Warren laid out a similar slate of policy solutions in her speech’s conclusion.) Clinton strategist Joel Benenson has argued that policies designed to make a concrete difference in people’s lives actually can win the argument against the seemingly seductive, but ultimately empty, story Trump is telling.

It remains to be seen whether that will be enough as an affirmative argument for Clinton. But one thing is now clear: Democrats are honing an attack on Trump that is subtly different from the one on Romney. The challenge in both cases: How to drive home that the GOP nominee isn’t actually on your side. Romney was depicted as a plutocratic, aloof elitist and symbol of the rapacious cruelties of global capitalism: When he did well, people like you got screwed. Trump is not like Romney; he is adeptly posing as the Man in the Street’s Billionaire. But he is personally cruel and rapacious: He, and his presidential candidacy, are directly screwing you.
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