David A. Graham

The story of Trump Institute isn’t entirely novel, but its entry into the top of the headlines tells us something about just how much damaging material there might be about Trump still waiting to be discovered. Outlets including Ars Technica and The Daily Beast reported on the Trump Institute this spring, but The New York Times now has a big report about it, including the juicy news that the course materials at the Institute were plagiarized. That was discovered by the Hillary Clinton-aligned Democratic opposition research firm American Bridge, which appears to have tipped the Times off. And how many more such morsels does American Bridge have up its sleeves, just waiting to be doled out to a hungry press corps?

There was no shortage of differences between recent rallies by Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump in this newly minted battleground state, but it was the thing they shared in common that stuck out most. Sooner or later, and usually sooner, every conversation came back to Trump’s unpopularity, his temperament, and whether he’s qualified to be president.

Despite the Iowa Republican’s effort to block her, putting Tubman on the $20 bill isn’t about political correctness—it’s about historical correctness.

In essence, Trump could either raise $45.7 million to pay himself back over the next month—a challenging prospect for a fundraiser starting almost cold, especially because he’d still need to raise enough to keep his campaign afloat—or he could forgive his own loan. He wisely decided to spin it as a gift.

“The fact that officers are shuttling people through the system in a callous and unthinking way is an indictment of the whole system, but actually an argument that this particular defendant is not guilty of the crime.”

Even though I've been tracking gaffes the whole campaign, some of these crack me up or surprise me.

What the FEC report shows is how Trump has chosen perhaps the worst possible fundraising compromise. On the one hand, he has reversed course on his pledge to self-fund, a crucial primary-election talking point that allowed Trump to argue he was untainted by owing any donors. Yet even as he surrenders his purity, he’s not successfully raising much money. Hillary Clinton can’t claim any moral high ground on donations either, but she has $42.5 million in the bank to show for it.

Looking back at many of the news stories from June 16 of last year, however, a reader is struck by how much about the Trump campaign a lay observer would have understood right there, off the bat. Once you set aside predictions about Trump’s failures, many news stories are downright prescient.

Donald Trump is conducting an unprecedented experiment in running a barebones campaign, in which he is not only the candidate, but also his campaign’s top surrogate, rapid-response operation, de facto press secretary, and primary fundraiser.

Celebrating his 70th birthday, the presumptive Republican nominee provided attendees a mix of red meat and bewilderment, veering between denunciations of Hillary Clinton, President Obama, and The Washington Post (all well received) and proclamations of his strong support for LGBT Americans (met with some apprehension).

“It was a really confusing day. I was just confused and overloaded with thoughts.”

In a fiery, disjointed speech in New Hampshire on Monday, Donald Trump angrily denounced the attacks in Orlando, political correctness, immigration, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and the American Muslim community.

"Look, we’re led by a man that either is not tough, not smart, or he’s got something else in mind."

What was Perdue thinking? Maybe he didn’t know better—though that’s a good argument against quoting Scripture you don’t understand, which in turn is a reminder of the importance of humility in understanding God’s word. (“For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.”)

"For more than a year now across thousands of miles and all 50 states, tens of millions of Americans have made their voices heard. Today I just want to add mine."

The Trump Organization has a famously small staff for a company of its (reported) size. Trump has made his name by being extremely available to the media, and by franchising essential operations out of house: He sells the rights to use his name to a developer, and then they do all the work. That’s more or less what he’s proposing to do with the campaign. He’ll syndicate his name to the RNC, and the party will run his campaign.

In April 2015 when Clinton announced, I posed 10 questions about her campaign. How'd I do? A look back, plus one GIF of Bernie Sanders laughing at me.

With the field now set, the two presumptive nominees have their paths laid out to November. Clinton has consolidated her party’s core, and her task now is to win over reluctant Sanders backers and convince independents that Trump is dangerous. Trump, who was supposed to already be unifying his party, will first have to reassure Republican officials and voters horrified by the events of the last week. The next six months will be a popularity contest between two unusually unpopular candidates.

The furor over Trump’s attacks on Judge Gonzalo Curiel, the Mexican American jurist presiding over the Trump University case, has complicated matters for Republicans. Many of them have been horrified by Trump’s remarks, and have condemned them, often in blunt terms. House Speaker Paul Ryan, who endorsed Trump last week, said, “Claiming a person can’t do their job because of their race is sort of like the textbook definition of a racist comment.” Senator Bob Corker of Tennessee, another endorser, declined to say whether Trump was fit to be president. They’re just two of many. Top Trump backers including Jeffrey Lord responded by insisting that folks like Ryan are the real racists.