Donald Trump News for May 20, 2016

Off and running. Well, it’s been a couple days since likely Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump used the “r” word (rape) to describe some of the past sexual misdeeds of the husband of his [likely] Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton – a tactic some pundits claimed would hurt him – and he’s rising in the polls, not sinking. As reported by Breitbart News:

A new round of polls have confirms a rapid tightening of the presidential race between frontrunners Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.

After trailing Clinton for months, two recent surveys — from Fox and Rasmussen — show Trump with a slight edge, +3 and +5, over Clinton. A CBS/New York Times poll taps Clinton with a 6-point lead, much narrower than the 10-point she enjoyed in that survey last month.

A number of battleground state polls, also, have shown a very close race between Trump and Clinton. Trump leads in Arizona, Georgia and Ohio, while Clinton maintains narrow leads in Oregon and New Hampshire. Pennsylvania and Florida are toss-ups.

Predictions of an inevitable Clinton landslide victory against Trump seem rather premature. More good news, and you can read it here.

Maybe he doesn’t realize it, but President Obama is actually helping Trump rise in the polls with his lax immigration enforcement policies. As noted also by Breitbart News, Border Patrol agents report that they have been ordered by higher-ups in their agency (who take their marching orders from the president) to catch-and-release illegal aliens, rather than detain them:

The vast majority of illegal immigrants the Border Patrol apprehends are released into the U.S., the head of the agents’ union testified before a Senate panel Thursday.

“We’re releasing basically everybody as long as you’re not from the country of Mexico. And even if you’re from the country of Mexico and you claim that you have a credible fear and you’re asking for asylum for one reason or another — we’re still releasing those individuals,” Brandon Judd, the president of the National Border Patrol Council, said before the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration and the National Interest.

He added, “If I were to guess, I would say that at least 80 percent of the individuals that the United States Border Patrol arrests at the border qualify for this catch and release program and in essence we are just letting them come into the United States.”

Granted, Obama’s lax enforcement and his executive amnesty is designed to achieve two things: 1) bolster Democratic voter rolls; and 2) create chaos, which is what revolutionaries do. Still, the lax enforcement of our immigration laws and border security are largely what propelled The Donald to the top of the GOP presidential roster. Maybe Obama thinks the tidal wave of humanity he is importing will become an insurmountable issue for the Trumpster. Either way, the chaos at the border is getting worse, as you can read here.

Clueless in D.C. Not that Stephen F. Hayes, a regular on Fox News for some reason, is a stupid man, just one who is caught up in the game. Writing at The Weekly Standard, Hayes this morning echoes – again – the same tired warning that Trump is just a con man, that he doesn’t have a moral compass and that he is certainly no conservative, his pick of potential Supreme Court nominees – praised even by the Lord and Master of the Republican Establishment, Dr. Charles Krauthammer – notwithstanding:

Yes, it’s a con. In the three weeks since Donald Trump became the presumptive Republican nominee the remains of modern American conservatism have decayed at an alarming rate.

Three months ago, most GOP officeholders and conservative opinion leaders understood Trump to be an ignoramus and a boor, a vain reality-television star and a longtime donor to Democrats who had built his candidacy on the kind of progressive populism most of them had spent their careers fighting. Today, many of those same Republican elected officials and prominent conservatives are hailing Trump as the future of their party and the ideological movement it houses and excoriating anti-Trump conservatives who hold to the same position they took just a few weeks ago.

What’s changed? Not Trump. 

Hayes drones on, complaining that Trump is breaking one promise after another (like deciding now to take campaign contributions). As usual, what’s missing from this tired and predictable critique of Trump is an admission that Republican voters – conservatives included – have showed up in primaries to vote for Trump in record numbers, each time rejecting the “preferred” candidates of the GOP ruling class. Hayes and others obviously have still not accepted the reality of that, and that’s not Trump’s fault of the fault of GOP voters. Hayes’ establishment has been rejected and he, like the other #nevertrump hangers-on refuse to accept that rejection. Still, the column, if you want to read it and comment, is here.