by JASmius
And on what he didn't realize was a #NeverTrump program, to boot:
Last week, we called on Wisconsin’s conservatives to be “a firewall of rationality in the madness that is the current GOP campaign.” Voters here are well-positioned to do exactly that. They are savvy, well-informed, and deeply engaged. And they are not buying the vulgar buffoonery that Trump is selling. In the critical WOW counties around Milwaukee – Waukesha, Ozaukee, Washington – Trump is viewed positively by just 25% and negatively by 64% of GOP voters....
I am only one of the hosts here who has broken with the national talkers who drank deep from the toxic cup of Trumpism. Wisconsin boasts an unusually robust talk radio infrastructure – one that includes my colleague on WTMJ, Jeff Wagner, WISN’s Mark Belling, Jay Weber, and Dan O’Donnell, as well as Green Bay’s Jerry Bader. There are no Hannity-like Trump fan boys here....
[C]onservatives in Wisconsin take ideas seriously, which may explain the relatively wide embrace of #NeverTrump here. [emphasis added]
My broadcast comrades-in-arms, it goes without saying. And Trump had no idea, which may help explain why this interview - in which Mr. Sykes was not "hateful" but polite, firm, and yes, tough, put The Donald through the vetting wringer that the "Hannity-like Trump fan boys" never have - did not go well for him because it provoked the same arrogant, boorish, thin-skinned defiance reflex that the last three GOP debates, where Cruz and Rubio finally ganged up on him, did:
"GOP" front-runner Donald Trump, during an often-contentious interview with conservative talk show host Charlie Sykes in Wisconsin Monday, refused to say if he'd apologize for a retweet mocking the looks of Ted Cruz's wife Heidi....
....and said he "didn't even know it was a bad picture" of her.
Is that why he didn't tweet this one - which I found in a minute or two of cursory web-searching - instead....
....as opposed to this one?
If Captain Comb-Over's aesthetic judgment of the fairer sex is this piss-poor, how does he know that Kevin Williamson's description of Melania Trump as a "plastic surgery disaster" isn't spot-on target - or even know enough to be able to make this tweet have the effect that he obviously intended?
In other words, another bad and pathetic lie.
Instead, he countered, during an interview with Sykes, who as a talk show host on WTMJ in Milwaukee is a member of the #NeverTrump movement and supports Cruz, that he was hitting back at Cruz, blaming him for an online ad featuring a provocative photo of his wife, Melania.
"He knew totally about that," Trump said of Cruz. "If he didn't know about that, it would be a totally different thing."
A lame assertion that was discredited almost the instant that he uttered it last week (Make America Awesome PAC has no connection to or coordination with Senator Cruz - indeed, it would be illegal for them to do so - and Cruz immediately condemned the MAA ad, which is why Trump kept the food fight going with the above tweet and National Enquirer smear), exposing the fact that he didn't think about any of that but just reacted in emotion and ignorance, which would be the extremely dangerous and authoritarian hallmark of a Trumpidency.
Mr. Sykes asked the perfect and desperately-needed follow-up question:
"So is this your standard?" he asked Trump. "That if a supporter of another candidate, not the candidate himself, does something despicable....
And I'm still waiting to hear an answer to my question as to how a nudie pick of the third Mrs. Trump in a State (Utah) where he lost by fifty points was at all damaging to her husband.
....it's okay for you personally, the candidate for president of the United States, to behave in that same way? I mean, I expect that from a twelve-year-old bully on the playground, not somebody who wants the office once owned by Abraham Lincoln."
To say nothing of Ronald Reagan. Besides, have you ever seen a pic of Mary Todd Lincoln?
Now THERE's a candidate for the title of "Most difficult to look at".
Proving that he's incapable of owning anything that he's ever said, Trump also tried, and failed, to pass the buck on his regurgitating of Democrat/Big Labor propaganda against Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker from last summer:
He also blamed Time magazine for his criticisms of Governor Scott Walker's reforms in Wisconsin, telling Sykes that he had just repeated what the magazine had written, in March 2011, when he told Fox New's Bill O'Reilly that Walker was "too unyielding" in his dealings with the State's unions.
In essence, "Don't blame me for Time repeating what I said." Shinola, that isn't even a denial that he said it. It's like he's saying that his past self possessed him and made him say what was just as at the front of his cerebellum then as it was four years earlier. He's not just a weasel, he's an incompetent weasel. Explain to me, Trumplicans, how this constitutes or in any way remotely resembles "toughness". I defy you.
And they won't, of course. They're doubtless already evsicerating Mr. Sykes as a "RINO" and "establishment" - i.e.....
....and a "Hillary tool" (my God, the irony), because that's all they've got. They can't defend him, because Donald Trump isn't honestly and substantively defensible. All his drones can do is re-tweet his lies and evasions and insults and incoherent nonsense. To become him. Which is the very definition of cultism.
And that, and he, will not play in November - period - and the Republican Party and the conservative movement will go down in fiery flames with him:
Trump is viewed favorably by fewer than one-quarter of voters, [precisely because] he’s well-known by nearly everyone. Even if he proves successful in turning out blue-collar voters, surveys show that he turns off around one-quarter of the GOP electorate and will be a mobilizing force for Democrats who have been lukewarm toward [Mrs.] Clinton....
When it comes to Senate and House races, a combination of depressed Republican turnout and an energized Democrat base would make a toxic brew in November. Benefiting from a favorable map, Senate Democrats have recruited solid candidates to run in twelve of thirteen targeted GOP seats, only missing out in North Carolina. They even landed a respected lieutenant governor to run against entrenched Senator Chuck Grassley in Iowa. If there’s a wave election, Democrats won’t just barely take back control of the Senate, but could come close to double-digit gains....
In the House, Democrats would need to net thirty seats to win back a majority, but in a wave election, underdogs often prevail. The Cook Political Report rates thirty-one GOP-held seats as competitive (either as toss-ups or lean Republican). Of those thirty-one districts, twenty-three are based in urban or suburban areas where Trump’s brand of populism is unlikely to be a selling point....
The reality is that Trump’s nomination has the potential to reverse the gains that Republicans have spent the past six years building up — with Barack Obama out of the picture after 2016. [emphases added]
Precisely the mission of the Trump candidacy that I've been predicting since "the witless ape rode the escalator" last June. Sooner or later, you're all going to learn to heed my wisdom. Just not soon enough to gain - or save - anything from doing so.
By the way, here's the Hillary Clinton-Donald Trump Electoral College crystal ball Nate Silver - who was the most accurate pollster in 2012 - tweeted out today.
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Nate Silver
✔@NateSilver538
Here's what the map might look like in an election held today. Trump's Rust Belt strength would help him keep MO, IN
9:15 AM - 24 Mar 2016
3,2993,299 Retweets
2,5482,548 likes
Trump flips Arizona, Georgia, and North Carolina to Hillary. That might earn him her Treasury or Commerce Commissar slot. After all, she is going to need all that "populist" energy for her 2020 reelection campaign - or Vice President Castro's term of his own.
UPDATE: Remember this scene from Rocky III?:
Substitute Trump for Clubber Lang, Cruz for Rocky Balboa, and Heidi Cruz for Adriane Balboa, and that would be any remaining GOP debate.
And there are New York Trumplicans who are actually claiming to be surprised by this garbage? Suuuuuuure they are.