The Future President, Donald Trump

You love spending billions a copy?

As I said at that price there should not be an ejection system.

No, I'm saying that...

Trump proposed preventing US citizens re-entering the country if they are Muslim.

Can you think of three ways this violates the US Constitution?

Re: izzythepush (Post 6084885)
just read the petition is now past 250,000 signatures

Trump, in a formal statement from his campaign, urged a “total and complete shutdown” of all federal processes allowing followers of Islam into the country until elected leaders can “figure out what is going on.”

Asked by The Hill whether that would include American Muslims currently abroad, Trump spokeswoman Hope Hicks replied over email: “Mr. Trump says, ‘everyone.’ ”

Quote:

Trump, in a formal statement from his campaign, urged a “total and complete shutdown” of all federal processes allowing followers of Islam into the country until elected leaders can “figure out what is going on.”

Asked by The Hill whether that would include American Muslims currently abroad, Trump spokeswoman Hope Hicks replied over email: “Mr. Trump says, ‘everyone.’ ”

http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/presidential-races/262348-trump-calls-for-shutdown-of-muslims-entering-us

Trump later backed away from that the next day.

Trump said everyone. That word is simple enough and it was confirmed by his spokesman. Unless you think Trump doesn't mean what he says, I suppose.

It was reported by several news agencies before he updated his meaning the next day.

That still leaves you ignoring the religious test that Trump is imposing on people. Do you think you can ignore the Constitution like Trump?

A Senate committee on Thursday rebuked Donald Trump by endorsing a measure that says barring individuals from entering the United States based on religion would be un-American.

The Republican presidential front-runner has called for blocking Muslims from entering the country in the aftermath of attacks in the United States and abroad.

The Senate Judiciary Committee voted 16-4 for the nonbinding amendment pushed by Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont, the panel's top Democrat. The language was added to an unrelated bill on nuclear terrorism.

The four Republicans who opposed it included GOP presidential candidate Ted Cruz of Texas. Cruz was not present but voted by proxy, as is regular practice when lawmaker cannot attend a committee vote.

The amendment states that "it is the sense of the Senate that the United States must not bar individuals from entering into the United States based on their religion, as such action would be contrary to the fundamental principles on which this nation was founded."

Leahy said the amendment sends "a clear and direct message that America welcomes people from all countries of all faiths."

Among the 16 backing Leahy's amendment was the committee chairman, Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, who faces re-election next year. South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, another GOP candidate for president, also backed the measure.

After the hearing, Cruz spokesman Phil Novack called the amendment a "political stunt."

"A nuclear terrorism bill is not the place for political games," Novack said.

After voting against the amendment, Cruz voted in support of the nuclear terrorism bill to which it was attached, again by proxy. The committee approved that bill 17-3.

In addition to Cruz, Republicans voting against the amendment were Sens. Jeff Sessions of Alabama, David Vitter of Louisiana and Thom Tillis of North Carolina.

Sessions spoke for almost half an hour opposing the language, saying it was overly broad and could hamper immigration authorities' ability to screen applicants on religious issues.

Tillis said he opposed the amendment because it could slow down passage of the nuclear terrorism bill. Vitter, who was not present, also voted by proxy.

Over a long weekend on assignment for Playboy magazine, Mark Bowden found that behind the garish Trump façade lies only more ugliness.
BY MARK BOWDEN
I spent a long, awkward weekend with Donald Trump in November 1996, an experience I feel confident neither of us would like to repeat.

He was like one of those characters in an 18th-century comedy meant to embody a particular flavor of human folly. Trump struck me as adolescent, hilariously ostentatious, arbitrary, unkind, profane, dishonest, loudly opinionated, and consistently wrong. He remains the most vain man I have ever met. And he was trying to make a good impression. Who could have predicted that those very traits, now on prominent daily display, would turn him into the leading G.O.P. candidate for president of the United States?

His latest outrageous edict on banning all Muslims from entering the country comes as no surprise to me based on the man I met nearly 20 years ago. He has no coherent political philosophy, so comparisons with Fascist leaders miss the mark. He just reacts. Trump lives in a fantasy of perfection, with himself as its animating force.

Before I met him back in 1996, I felt bad for him. He’d had a rough 10 years. He had just turned 50 and wasn’t happy about it. He looked soft, from his growing jowls to the way his belt bit deeply into the spreading roll of his belly. As a businessman he had crashed and burned, rescued only by creditors who had to bail him out lest they be dragged down with him. His enterprises were being run by court-appointed managers, who had put him back on his financial feet mostly by investing heavily in Atlantic City, which was then on the rise.

He had insulated himself from failure with bluster. In public he was still The Donald—still rich, still working hard at being a symbol of excess. I was working on a profile of him for Playboy, which was his kind of magazine. He considered himself the magazine’s beau ideal, and was inordinately proud of having been featured on the magazine’s cover some years before. His then wife, Marla Maples, told him, sardonically, that he ought to buy the magazine: “You bought the Miss Universe Pageant; it’s right up your alley.” He must have figured it was a safe bet to agree to cooperate for my story. But well before I left him, we both knew he probably wouldn’t like the final product.



I was prepared to like him as I boarded his black 727 at La Guardia for the flight to Mar-a-Lago, his Florida home—prepared to discover that his over-the-top public persona was a clever pose. That underneath was an ironic wit, an ordinary but clever guy. But no. With Trump, what you see is what you get. His behavior was cringe-worthy. He showed off the gilded interior of his plane—calling me over to inspect a Renoir on its walls, beckoning me to lean in closely to see . . . what? The luminosity of the brush strokes? The masterly use of color? No. The signature. “Worth $10 million,” he told me. Time after time the stories he told me didn’t check out, from Michael Jackson’s romantic weekend at Mar-a-Lago with his then wife Lisa Marie Presley (they stayed at opposite ends of the estate) to the rug in one bedroom he said was designed by Walt Disney when he was 18 (it wasn’t) to the strength of his marriage to Maples (they would split months later).

It was hard to watch the way he treated those around him, issuing peremptory orders—“Polish this, Tony. Today.” He met with the lady who selected his drapery for the Florida estate—“The best! The best! She’s a genius!”—who had selected a sampling of fabrics for him to choose from, all different shades of gold. He left the choice to her, saying only, “I want it really rich. Rich, rich, elegant, incredible.” Then, “Don’t disappoint me.” It was a pattern. Trump did not make decisions. He surrounded himself with “geniuses” and delegated. So long as you did not “disappoint” him—and it was never clear how to avoid doing so—you were gold.

What was clear was how fast and far one could fall from favor. The trip from “genius” to “idiot” was a flash. The former pilots who flew his plane were geniuses, until they made one too many bumpy landings and became “******* idiots.” The gold carpeting selected in his absence for the locker rooms in the spa at Mar-a-Lago? “What kind of ******* idiot . . . ?” I watched as Trump strutted around the beautifully groomed clay tennis courts on his estate, managed by noted tennis pro Anthony Boulle. The courts had been prepped meticulously for a full day of scheduled matches. Trump took exception to the design of the spaces between courts. In particular, he didn’t like a small metal box—a pump and cooler for the water fountain alongside—which he thought looked ugly. He first questioned its placement, then crudely disparaged it, then kicked the box, which didn’t budge, and then stooped—red-faced and fuming—to tear it loose from its moorings, rupturing a water line and sending a geyser to soak the courts. Boulle looked horrified, a weekend of tennis abruptly drowned. Catching a glimpse of me watching, Trump grimaced.


“I guess that’ll have to be in your story,” he said.

“Pretty much,” I told him.

This apparently worried him, because on the flight home a day later he had a proposition.

“I’m looking for somebody to write my next book,” he told me.

I told him that I would not be interested.

“Why not?” he asked. “All my books become best-sellers.”

The import was clear. There was money in it for me. Trump remains the only person I have ever written about who tried to bribe me.

As I’ve watched his improbable political rise, it is clear that he hasn’t changed. The very things that made him so unappealing apparently now translate into wide popular support. Apart from the comical ego, the errors, and the self-serving bluster, what you get from Trump are commonplace ideas pronounced as received wisdom. Begin registering all Muslims in America? Round up the families of suspected terrorists? Ban all Muslims from entering the country? Carpet-bomb ISIS-held territories in Iraq (killing the 98-plus percent of civilians who are, in effect, being held hostage there by the terror group and turning a war against a tiny fraction of the world’s Muslims into a global religious crusade)? Using nuclear weapons? The ideas that pop into his head are the same ones that occur to any teenager angry about terror attacks. They appeal to anyone who can’t be bothered to think them through—can’t be bothered to ask not just the moral questions but the all-important practical one: Will doing this makes things better or worse? When you believe in your own genius, you don’t question your own flashes of inspiration.

I got a call from his office some days after my profile of him appeared in the May 1997 issue of Playboy. I had already heard how he’d blown his stack to Christie Hefner. I was traveling at the time, working on my book Black Hawk Down. The call came to me in a motel room in Colorado, from his trusty assistant, the late Norma Foerderer.

“Mr. Trump would like to talk to you,” she said.

I waited, sitting on the edge of the bed, bracing myself.

Foerderer came back on the line. She said:

“He’s too livid to speak.”

Donald Trump insisted to CNN's Don Lemon on Thursday that people supported his proposed ban on allowing Muslims to enter the country. Not only do "the people" agree with him, Trump told Lemon, but "[m]any Muslim friends of mine are in agreement with me. They say, 'Donald, you brought something up to the fore that is so brilliant and so fantastic.'"

On Thursday, a poll from NBC News and the Wall Street Journal was released that might undermine Trump's confidence about the level of support that proposal enjoys -- if anything can undermine Trump's confidence on anything.

Overall, 57 percent of Americans disagreed with Trump's proposal, as it was articulated by the pollster. Only a quarter viewed it favorably.

The language of the question there matters. First of all, it doesn't mention the qualification Trump applied to his proposed ban, which was that it would only be in effect until "our country's representatives can figure out what is going on." The ban is temporary, in other words, or, if you prefer, indefinite. That might make a difference in how people see it.

Second, the poll question mentions Trump by name. We've seen in the past that including the name of a politician -- say, President Obama -- can shift poll results, but it was probably hard to avoid here.

Unsurprisingly, it's Republicans who are least opposed to Trump's proposal.

Going a level deeper, though, the poll reveals something else interesting: Americans generally view Muslims more positively than they do Trump himself.

Granted, the number of people who view Muslims very positively isn't huge, but, then, neither is the number of people who view Trump that way. The questions are different in each case, but while nearly 60 percent of Americans view Muslims somewhat positively, about that same percentage views Trump negatively.

For establishment Republicans peeking in at this poll nervously, one other bit of good news: Trump's comments about Muslims are seen as being distinct from the views of the Republican party -- even more so than his past comments about Mexican immigrants. It's early, and a lot of people haven't formed an opinion yet, but it seems as though the Democrats' attempts to loop all Republicans together with Trump hasn't worked yet.

Trump's rhetoric on this is unlikely to change, of course. Even if he didn't have a habit of cherry-picking polls, which he does, he tends to embrace a worldview in which he's approved of regardless of what he does.

Even by his Muslim friends.

"My Donald Trump was a Democrat," he said. "My Donald Trump is pro-choice. My Donald Trump is what we call a Northeastern Republican, you know, fiscally conservative, socially liberal. But that's changing."

Snider said that he has previously not allowed other politicians who oppose abortion rights to use his music, such as GOP vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan in 2012.

You can't be more tired of hearing Trump all day long than I am. I just want to put in that the number 2 Republican in the polls scares me much more than him. Cruz is truly evil.