Trump campaign manager Paul Manfort begged credulity earlier Sunday, when he told CNN's Jake Tapper that he was unaware of an offensive statement made by Carl Paladino, the real estate developer and failed politician who serves as co-chair of Trump's New York campaign. (Paladino lost the New York gubernatorial election by 30 points in 2010, and presently serves on the Buffalo school board.) Read more
In this episode of THE WEEKLY STANDARD Confab, Matt Labash recounts the Libertarian convention and the concomitant comic convention, while Jeffrey Anderson discusses what happened to the issues in the presidential race.
Independent presidential candidate Evan McMullin, a former CIA officer in the Middle East and South Asia, presented himself to frustrated Americans Sunday as a fresh-faced unifier with foreign policy experience. Read more
He was a big man, the biker with the belly and the handlebar mustache. Dressed in old jeans and a T-shirt, with cracked leather chaps and a black leather vest, he looked the part: an aging outlaw, a motorcyclist with a giant hog of a bike parked out on the street, a man with years of tattoos swirling up his thick arms. And there he was, hunched over the sink at a laundromat in the Black Hills of South Dakota, rinsing out baby clothes by hand while his wife made lunch for their kids in the shiny white RV parked directly behind his bike. Read more
The New York Times's Maggie Haberman and Alexander Burns have a revealing look at the tumult behind the scenes in the Donald Trump campaign. The Republican nominee for president has been under seige, they report, from advisors and aides urging Trump to remain on message and focused on winning the White House. But Trump, the Times's sources say, doesn't appear to be heeding their calls as the New York businessman's poll numbers against Democrat Hillary Clinton continue to spiral downward. Read more
A correspondent calls to my attention a remarkable op-ed in the Plain Dealer in Cleveland by Phil Van Treuren, a Republican member of the Amherst City Council in Lorain County, Ohio. Read more
Editor William Kristol's weekly Kristol Clear podcast on the surprising reason why he can't vote for Hillary Clinton; Is it cut-and-run time for GOP on Trump campaign?; And the songs Bill would add to Obama's summer playlist. Read more
The best weekend reading from around the web, including: Joseph Bottum on A. M. Juster, an outside look at American democracy, Thomas P. Curtis on competing in the first modern Olympics, and more. Read more
Seventeen-year-old ISIS volunteer Kadiza Sultana was killed by a Russian bombing strike in Syria, according to the BBC. One extraordinary thing about her is that she was already, at her age, a widow: The ISIS fighter she had married (or been married off to) had lately been killed in action. What brought her to the attention of the BBC is that she was from Bethnall Green, in the heart of London’s historically cockney East End. Within the memory of, say, someone who went to London for graduate school in 1966, romantics could still think of Bethnall Green as a backwater of Dickensian proles who picked pockets, sold vegetables out of barrows and sang garrulous songs about booze and adultery. Read more
Earlier this week both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton revealed the broad outlines of their plans for the American economy. Trump aims to accelerate growth, Clinton to redistribute the economic pie. Both have serious political problems. The Donald managed to trump his own economic plan with what could easily be taken as a threat on the life of Mrs. Clinton, and with an insistence that President Obama is “the founder of Isis", both of which attention-grabbers dominated the news and distracted attention from an economic plan containing some sensible ideas. The strategy of using outrageous statements to focus the media on one of sixteen candidates participating in the preliminary scrum that was the battle for the nomination seems to work less well in a two-person playoff. Read more
The co-chairman of Donald Trump’s New York campaign said Friday that Khizr Khan, the father of a slain Muslim-American solider, "doesn't deserve" the title of a Gold Star parent. Read more
Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump is "discrediting conservatism." That's what Bill Kristol said Friday on CNN about the New York businessman and reality-TV star. Read more
For months, Donald Trump has been talking about how the political system in the United States is "rigged." Now his campaign is looking for "election observers" to prevent "Crooked Hillary Clinton" from "rigging the election" in November. Read more
The fate of Harvard’s Fox Club will fall, for now, on the side of tradition. Thursday morning, a vote to authorize the continued election of female members narrowly failed. Read more
Of course, it was the styles for which Michael Phelps is known least that propelled him to the lead of the men's 200-meter individual medley final Thursday night. Read more
Hillary Clinton is leading Donald Trump in the battleground states of Florida, North Carolina, Virginia, and Colorado, according to four NBC News/Wall Street Journal/Marist polls released Friday. Read more
Last week, Josh Rogin reported for the Washington Post that President Obama will seek a United Nations Security Council resolution that, at the very least, calls for an end to nuclear testing. According to Rogin, the president’s diplomatic gambit is to occur in September—around the 20th anniversary of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), which President Clinton signed but the U.S. Senate rejected during ratification. Read more
A group of more than 70 former Republican officeholders and national committee staff and officers have penned a letter to RNC chair Reince Priebus urging him to stop spending party money to boost Trump’s presidential campaign and instead focus on vulnerable House and Senate seats. Politico has the scoop: Read more
In an economic address delivered in Michigan this week, Hillary Clinton tore into Donald Trump. No surprise there, of course. But what is notable is precisely what Clinton excoriated her Republican opponent for: Per Hillary, Trump is just too darn negative about the current state of the country. Read more
