Koch network refusing to help Donald Trump
From a luxury hotel on the edge of the Rocky Mountains, some of the nation’s most powerful Republican donors are rebelling against Donald Trump. Billionaire industrialist Charles Koch, host of the exclusive weekend retreat, did not mention Trump by name as warned that political leaders are giving “frightening” answers to America’s challenges. One of his chief lieutenants was more direct as he made clear that Koch’s expansive political network would not use its tremendous resources to help Trump win this fall. “We’re focused on the Senate,” said Mark Holden, general counsel and senior vice president of Koch Industries. He noted that none of the presidential candidates are aligned with the Koch network “from a values, and beliefs and policy perspective.” Trump’s dire warnings of growing crime in America, Holden said, simply aren’t accurate. “We’re much safer,” Holden said. “That’s what the data shows.” Koch described the 2016 “political situation” this way: “We don’t really, in some cases, don’t really have good options.” The comments came Saturday, the first of a three-day gathering for donors who promise to give at least $100,000 each year to the various groups backed by the Koch brothers’ Freedom Partners — a network of education, policy and political entities that aim to promote a smaller, less intrusive government. The ambitious Koch network has invested hundreds of millions of dollars to influence politics and public policy over the last decade, but don’t plan to spend anything to help Trump, even if some of the 400 or so deep-pocketed donors gathered in Colorado Springs this weekend think it should. Trump thumbed his nose at the gathering from Twitter. “I turned down a meeting with Charles and David Koch,” the New York billionaire tweeted. “Much better for them to meet with the puppets of politics, they will do much better!” The weekend’s agenda for the estimated 400 donors gathered in Colorado Springs featured a series of policy discussions and appearances from at least three governors, four senators and four members of the House of Representatives, including House Speaker Paul Ryan. Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin and Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey talked up policy successes in their states on Saturday night, avoiding discussion of the 2016 presidential contest altogether. When it was his turn, Colorado Sen. Cory Gardner touched on the race for the White House, although he did not mention Trump’s name. “Forty years worth of Supreme Court justices are going to be determined this November,” Gardner told donors, a reference to the next president’s ability to fill at least one existing vacancy on the high court. Those yet to appear include Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, Texas Sen. John Cornyn, South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott, Utah Sen. Mike Lee, Rep. Mike Pompeo of Kansas. Rep Jason Chaffetz of Utah and Rep. Mike Coffman of Colorado. Koch later told his guests that America’s frustrated electorate is looking at the wrong place — politicians — for answers. “And to me, the answers they’re getting are frightening,” he said without naming any politicians, “because by and large, these answers will make matters worse.” Charles and David Koch have hosted such gatherings of donors and politicians for years, but usually in private. The weekend’s event includes a small number of reporters, including one from The Associated Press. Koch has put the network’s budget at roughly $750 million through the end of 2016. A significant portion was supposed to be directed at electing a Republican to the White House. It will instead go to helping Republican Senate candidates in at least five states: Ohio, Pennsylvania, Nevada, Wisconsin and Florida, Holden said, noting that the network has dedicated $42 million so far to television and digital advertising to benefit Republican Senate candidates. In some cases, the network may try to link Democratic Senate candidates to Clinton, he added, but there are no plans to go after her exclusively in paid advertising. The organization may invest in a handful of races for governor and House of Representatives as well. And while the network will not be a Trump ally, it won’t necessarily be a Trump adversary either. “We have no intention to go after Donald Trump,” Holden said. Republished with permission of the Associated Press.
Officials dismiss Donald Trump’s assertions about NFL and debates
Both the NFL and the Commission on Presidential Debates are rejecting Republican Donald Trump‘s assertions about the fall debates, which the billionaire businessman says have been rigged by his opponents to draw a smaller audience by scheduling two of them at the same time as a football game. Trump began by making an accusation in a tweet posted Friday night: “As usual, Hillary & the Dems are trying to rig the debates so 2 are up against major NFL games. Same as last time w/ Bernie. Unacceptable!” Trump expanded his conspiracy theory when asked about the debates during an interview for Sunday’s “This Week” on ABC: “Well, I’ll tell you what I don’t like. It’s against two NFL games. I got a letter from the NFL saying, ‘This is ridiculous. Why are the debates against’ – ’cause the NFL doesn’t wanna go against the debates. ‘Cause the debates are gonna be pretty massive, from what I understand, OK?” Asked about Trump’s assertion, NFL spokesman Brian McCarthy tweeted on Saturday: “While we’d obviously wish the Debate Commission could find another night, we did not send a letter to Mr Trump.” A Trump aide said Saturday that the Republican candidate “was made aware of the conflicting dates by a source close to the league.” The aide was not authorized to speak by name and requested anonymity. The nonpartisan, independent presidential debate commission serves as the event sponsor and sets the participation criteria, dates, sites and formats. The sites and dates for three presidential debates were announced in September 2015. “The CPD did not consult with any political parties or campaigns in making these decisions,” the commission said in a statement issued Saturday. Two of the three debates will be televised at the same time as an NFL game. On Sept. 26, the night of the first debate, ESPN will carry the Monday night game featuring the Falcons vs. the Saints. On Oct. 9, the second debate will air opposite the Sunday night game featuring the Giants vs. the Packers on NBC. The Democratic Party was criticized during the primary race for scheduling debates between Clinton and Sen. Bernie Sanders on Saturday nights and holiday weekends, times when viewership is low. The Sanders campaign suggested that was an effort to limit the size of the audience. Trump told ABC: “You know, Hillary Clinton wants to be against the NFL. She doesn’t – maybe like she did with Bernie Sanders, where they were on Saturday nights when nobody’s home.” The Clinton campaign did not comment on Trump’s assertions. In the ABC interview, Trump said three debates were “fine” and that he’d rather have three than one. Republished with permission of the Associated Press.
Martin Dyckman: Khizr Kahn challenges a ‘morally untethered’ Donald Trump
Thousands of speeches have I heard and forgotten since my first byline 64 years ago. Very few have deserved to be remembered nearly as much as Khizr Kahn‘s 368-word address to the Democratic National Convention Thursday night. Eloquent and powerful in its simplicity and directness, it was timely, to the point, and to the heart as well as the head. He spoke of his son Humayun, a naturalized Muslim-American, an Army captain who died saving his soldiers from a suicide bomber in Iraq. Had it been up to Donald Trump, he said, “he never would have been in America.” Then, in calm and measured words, he hurled a powerful challenge at Trump: “Have you even read the United States Constitution? I will gladly lend you my copy.” He pulled it from his suit pocket. “In this document,” he said, “look for the words liberty and equal protection of the laws. “Have you ever been to Arlington Cemetery? Go look to the graves of brave patriots who died defending the United States of America. You will see all faiths, genders and ethnicities. “You,” he said to Trump, “have sacrificed nothing and no one …” Unless you were watching Fox “News” (why, oh why would you?) you could see and hear it live. As reported by Variety, Fox “chose to cut away from the elder Khan’s speech, in favor of a series of other prepackaged stories.” One of them was a day-old clip of FBI Director James Comey‘s news conference on the ISIS threat. It was as if Trump himself had called the shot. But you can still hear and see the speech for yourself on YouTube and at other links that neither Trump not Fox can suppress. It’s a personal issue with me. Cousins who had sought refuge in France died in the Holocaust because the United States would not let them come here. The State Department was infested at the time with anti-Semites. (Read about them in Eric Larson‘s book, “In the Garden of Beasts.”) Among their pretexts: there might be spies and saboteurs among the refugees fleeing Hitler. Does that sound familiar? Fellow immigrants — unless your ancestors met the boat at Jamestown, this means you — all of us have been the intended victims, at one time or another, of bigots like Trump. Laws on immigration, voting, even property rights targeted specific ethnic groups of all races and religions. An anti-foreigner party nicknamed the Know Nothings was strongly influential in the 1840s and threatened for a time to infest the infant Republican Party, where its ghost stalks again. Trump’s bigotry on that issue speaks for itself. Khizr Kahn raised two other points that bear more discussion. Has he ever read the Constitution? In one infamous interview, Trump denied that the Constitution (in the 14th Amendment) guarantees citizenship to everyone born here. Later, he vowed to “stand up for Article Two, Article Twelve, you name it …” There are only seven articles, along with 28 amendments. For all that, it’s one of the shortest founding documents on earth. That palm-size booklet Kahn offered to lend to Trump — I have a copy also — has only 38 pages. But even that is probably way beyond Trump’s attention span. A larger question is whether Trump, who boasts of getting his information from television, ever reads or absorbs anything. Tony Schwartz, the guilt-ridden co-author of Trump’s “The Art of the Deal,” for which he spent months shadowing the subject, told Jane Mayer in the New Yorker (July 25) that Trump “has no attention span.” “This fundamental aspect of who he is doesn’t seem to be fully understood,” Schwartz said. ” … It’s impossible to keep him focused on any topic, other than his own self-aggrandizement, for more than a few minutes, and even then … “If he had to be briefed on a crisis in the Situation Room, it’s impossible to imagine him paying attention over a long period of time …” What, if anything, has Trump ever sacrificed? Like many another affluent young man, Trump escaped the draft with a series of routine student deferments. In the end, he got a medical deferment despite having been active in college sports. None of that was inherently dishonorable. But contrast that with the suffering John McCain endured at the same time as a prisoner of war in Hanoi — the ordeal that Trump has mocked because McCain couldn’t avoid capture. And consider Trump’s 1997 interview with Howard Stern in which he described the risks he had run of catching a sexually transmitted disease as “like Vietnam … better than Vietnam, a little better … “It is my personal Vietnam. I feel like a great and very brave soldier,” he said. Did it not occur to him that a lot of truly brave soldiers came home without their genitals? Or that many more never came home at all? Or was he just being flip? No matter. It is the unguarded comments people make that best reveals their true selves. In that unspeakably ugly moment, Trump exposed himself to be what David Brooks, The New York Times conservative columnist, recently said of him: “He is a morally untethered, spiritually vacuous man who appears haunted by multiple personality disorders.” And yet he might become president. God save the United States from that. ___ Martin Dyckman is a retired associate editor of the newspaper now known as the Tampa Bay Times. He lives in suburban Asheville, North Carolina.
