People "might not like Clinton but they are scared to death of Trump and his insanity."

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Trump: The madman fades
By Doug Thompson, August 12, 2016

By now, the convention poll “bounces” should have faded and public opinion surveys return to normal to show voter preference spreads back at where they stood, more or less, before the gatherings in Philadelphia and Cleveland.

Norms, however, don’t appear to exist in Campaign 2016 and polls show Hillary Clinton continuing to pull away from the floundering campaign of Donald Trump.

Part of Trump’s fade, of course, is directly attributable to his mouth.  His unending rants and lies have finally started to sink in to a nervous electorate that appears to finally realize that a madman is the GOP candidate for President.

They might not like Clinton but they are scared to death of Trump and his insanity.

Republicans, at an increasing rate, run away from their ticket leader.  An incredible number announce they are not only are they abandoning Trump they will vote for Clinton.

The Republican National Committee faces mutiny within its ranks from GOP calls for the party to wash its hands of its failed Presidential nominee and focus its expenses on trying to save the legislative majorities in Congress.

In my 50-plus years as either a newspaperman covering campaigns or a political operative (for 12 of those years), I have never seen such defections and dissatisfaction within a party.

Big bucks donors who pumped millions into the campaign of Republican Mitt Romney now say “no dice” to Trump while directing their funds at Congressional candidates.

Hedge fund billionaire Paul Singer has donated $7 million to nine Super Fund PACs that back only Republican Congressional candidates.  His donations to Trump?  Not a dime.

On Thursday, more than 75 longtime Republicans and party veterans urged the RNC to shift all of its resources to vulnerable Senate and House candidates.

“It’s a trend that’s been picking up momentum,” says Mike Shields, president of the Congressional Leadership Fund.

“You can’t win a presidential election in modern America without women and minorities,” a Nevada Democrat told Politico this week. “Hillary will crush him by historic proportions with those two groups.”

“Trump is under-performing so comprehensively it would take video evidence of a smiling Hillary drowning a litter of puppies while terrorists surrounded her with chants of ‘Death to America,” said an Iowa Republican.

How bad are things in Trump-land?  In a lawsuit filed in North Carolina, a staff member of the Trump campaign said Trump’s state director puled a gun on him and threatened to shoot his kneecap.

The State Director, Earl Phillip, was finally and quietly replaced, but the campaign staffer went to court after he said the leadership of the campaign did nothing else that was needed to reduce the volatile and explosive atmosphere of the campaign.

Vincent Bordini reported the incident but said nothing happened to Phillip initially.  He wasn’t fired or suspended.  He was later replaced as state director but remained on the staff.

In a book scheduled for release on Aug. 23, Marc Fisher and Michael Kranish portray Trump as “frustrating, naive” and “forever on the make.”

In the book, “Trump Revealed: An American Jouirney of Ambition, Ego, Money, and Power,” the authors show a man who talked constantly about himself in grandiose terms and exaggerated claims.

The book says:

Trump was charming, yet forever on the make, like Lonesome Rhodes from “A Face in the Crowd,” a 1957 movie starring Andy Griffith as a folksy, but ultimately cynical Arkansas traveler who soars from a filthy jail cell to the pinnacle of American celebrity and political power.

Interesting analogy.  At the end of “A Face in the Crowd,” Lonesome Rhodes, his political power gone after the public learned that he really despised them, stood in the balcony of his penthouse in New York, screaming into the night.

If Trump is screaming into the night from the top of The Trump Power [sic] in New York after his defeat in the general election this November, it will be a fitting end to a nightmare this country sadly endured in 2016.

If, somehow, he wins the nightmare will endure and the nation may not survive.
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