While Trump blasts the media, Mike Pence defends the campaign’s approach
Taking a good-cop, bad-cop approach, Donald Trump and his campaign Sunday blasted the media for what they said was unfair news coverage, while running mate Mike Pence offered a more conciliatory tone in defending the GOP presidential nominee.
Trump “speaks his heart and he speaks his mind” and in doing so has drawn attention to important issues, Pence said on “Fox News Sunday.”
“Stay tuned. It’s still early in this campaign,” Pence added, noting that Trump on Monday will detail his vision for “confronting radical Islamic terrorism.”
He offered no details. For much of the last week, the Trump campaign has been responding to his repeated statements that President Obama “founded” the militant Islamic State group. Trump later described his remarks as sarcasm, but the episode was the latest to raise questions about the businessman’s temperament and ability to be commander in chief.
On Sunday, Trump took aim at the news media for what he viewed as distorted and biased reporting. He threatened Saturday to ban more news organizations from covering his campaign, and he followed up by tweeting that the “disgusting and corrupt media” was to blame for his trailing Hillary Clinton in polls.
His campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, claimed that news organizations were ignoring substantive aspects of the campaign and had essentially taken sides with Clinton.
“Here was a debate that could have been had,” Manafort said on CNN’s “State of the Union,” referring to trade, energy and other issues laid out in economic speeches by both candidates last week. “Instead, the media chose to take ... the Clinton campaign narrative and go on attack on Donald Trump.”
Pence, for his part, has spoken before about trying to get Trump’s bans against reporters lifted. On Sunday, he reiterated his support for the public’s right to know. “And we’ll continue that, we’ll continue to advance that principle.”
Asked whether his role was that of the “cleanup crew,” Pence laughed, and said that “I couldn’t be more honored to be campaigning shoulder to shoulder with a man who I believe is going to be the next president.”
How do Americans view poverty? Many blue-collar whites, key to Trump, criticize poor people as lazy
Sharp differences along lines of race and politics shape American attitudes toward the poor and poverty, according to a new survey of public opinion, which finds empathy toward the poor and deep skepticism about government antipoverty efforts.
The differences illuminate some of the passions that have driven this year’s contentious presidential campaign.
But the poll, which updates a survey The Times conducted three decades ago, also illustrates how attitudes about poverty have remained largely consistent over time despite dramatic economic and social change.
Donald Trump claims the election might be ‘rigged.’ Here’s how voting really works
Of all the controversies that have cropped up during Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, his assertion that the general election could be “rigged” inspired one of the swiftest rebuttals.
A fundamental part of any election is widespread acceptance of the validity of the results, and if Trump were to lose and claim fraud without evidence, political scientists and others argued, he would undermine the electoral process.
An examination of how votes are cast and tallied in the U.S. shows that it would be extremely difficult for anyone to commit voter fraud at a scale that would tip an election or for election officials to rig balloting. This is how the voting process works:
How @RealDonaldTrump turned a stream-of-consciousness Twitter feed into a political campaign
On Aug. 6, 2012, the Twitter account @realDonaldTrump posted an important public announcement:
“An ‘extremely credible source’ has called my office and told me that @BarackObama’s birth certificate is a fraud.”
Who was the source? (Why was “extremely credible source” in quotation marks?) Donald Trump didn’t say. Nor did he offer evidence to back up his claim. But out it went to his millions of Twitter followers — and you can still retweet it from Trump’s account, as Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s official Twitter account did last weekend.
Who will win 270?
A presidential candidate needs 270 electoral votes to win the White House. Most states predictably vote red or blue, but a small handful swing either way and make up the main election battlegrounds. What does it take to win the presidency?