Trump could have avoided paying taxes for years, report says
Donald Trump’s troubled presidential ambitions were rocked anew Saturday night with a New York Times story that said the Republican nominee had declared a nearly billion-dollar loss on his tax return for 1995 that “could have allowed him to legally avoid paying any federal income taxes for up to 18 years.”
Trump did not mention the story during a speech that lasted more than an hour before thousands of cheering supporters in Manheim, a central Pennsylvania town.
His campaign issued a statement condemning the Times story but not directly refuting it.
September provides biggest fundraising haul of election for Hillary Clinton
Hillary Clinton raised $154 million in September, marking her largest haul of the election cycle, her campaign announced Saturday.
In the campaign’s joint fundraising operation with the Democratic National Committee, $84 million was raised for Clinton and her running mate, Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine, and about $70 million for the party.
Combined, Clinton and Democrats enter October with about $150 million in the bank as they seek to stave off Republicans and Donald Trump.
Amid reports that Trump is being urged by Republicans to make a hefty donation to his own campaign, Clinton’s campaign manager, Robby Mook, said in a statement it’s important that donors “must continue to step up in order to have the resources we need to mobilize millions of voters across the country.”
In August, Clinton and Democrats raised $143 million and finished the month with $68.4 million in the bank to Trump’s $50.2 million.
In leaked recording, Clinton frets that Sanders supporters ‘don’t see much of a future’
Hillary Clinton appeared perplexed by the electorate.
On one side, it’s “nationalist, xenophobic, discriminatory,” while on the other is a “deep desire to believe that we can have free college, free healthcare.”
“I am occupying from the center-left to the center-right. And I don’t have much company there,” Clinton said privately at a fundraiser in Virginia in February, in the thick of the primary race.
Audio of Clinton’s closed-door statements emerged this week, first published by the conservative Washington Free Beacon, which says it came from “hackers who breached the email account of a campaign staffer.”
In her nearly-hourlong remarks, Clinton, who at the time was locked in a contentious primary battle with Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, also offered her view of his supporters.
“Some are new to politics completely. They’re children of the Great Recession. And they are living in their parents’ basement,” she said. “They feel they got their education and the jobs that are available to them are not at all what they envisioned for themselves. And they don’t see much of a future.”
Sanders, who was especially popular with young voters, is now working to boost Clinton’s support among the same demographic in her general election battle against Republican Donald Trump. Sanders is scheduled to campaign for Clinton next week in Iowa and Minnesota.
Clinton appears to be trying to understand the demands of Sanders’ supporters in her remarks, which didn’t immediately threaten to unsettle her campaign as when she called half of Trump’s supporters “deplorables” at another fundraiser last month.
“The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic —you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up,” she said.
She later expressed regret for referring to “half” of Trump’s supporters as “deplorables.”
How much do allies pay for U.S. troops? A lot more than Donald Trump says
Five years ago, Hillary Clinton reached one of the least-noticed diplomatic agreements of her tenure as secretary of State — a deal obligating Japan to continue paying nearly $2 billion a year to help defray the cost of U.S. troops stationed on its territory.
The money is used to build housing and training areas for U.S. forces, pay wages to thousands of Japanese workers on U.S bases and supply water and power.
The payments, which began in 1978 and are considered a pillar of the post-war U.S.-Japanese alliance, cover about a third or more of the cost of keeping 49,000 U.S. troops in Japan.
The five-year extension was disclosed in a dry communique after closed-door talks in June 2011 between Clinton and Japanese officials at the State Department. Clinton didn’t announce the deal, but the payments were never a secret.
Newt Gingrich to Donald Trump: ‘No excuse’ for tweetstorm in the wee hours
At least one of Donald Trump’s top surrogates is not pleased by his early-morning Twitter rant.
“You can’t tweet at 3 o’clock in the morning. Period. There’s no excuse. Ever. Not if you’re going to be president of the United States,” former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said Friday night on Fox News’ “Hannity.”
Early Friday morning, Trump unleashed a barrage of tweets complaining about critical news stories that rely on unnamed sources within his campaign and assailing former Miss Universe winner Alicia Machado, saying Hillary Clinton was “duped” into highlighting Machado’s story during the first presidential debate. Trump, without evidence, tweeted that Machado had made a sex tape and that Clinton’s campaign perhaps helped her gain U.S. citizenship this year.
Machado has said Trump called her “Miss Piggy” when she gained weight after the pageant in the 1990s, and “Miss Housekeeping,” in reference to her Latino roots.
Many Republicans fear that Trump’s tweets will only hurt his standing — already low in polls — among Latinos and women.
“He’s got to become much more disciplined,” said Gingrich, who is advising Trump. “For a while there, I thought he had really turned a corner. This last week, I think has been, frankly, a lost week, a week which has hurt him, which has shaken his own supporters.”
In addition to his tweetstorm, Trump began attacking Clinton over her husband’s marital infidelities, telling the New York Times that he could both trip up Clinton and turn female voters against her by doing so.
“She’s nasty, but I can be nastier than she ever can be,” he told the newspaper.
He also said that he thought his own history of infidelity did not undermine the attack. In 1991, after Trump’s affair with actress Marla Maples became public, his first wife, Ivana, divorced him.
Gingrich, who led impeachment proceedings against President Bill Clinton over his affair with Monica Lewinsky — while Gingrich himself was unfaithful to his wife — has warned against Trump reviving the controversy.
“It’s totally the wrong direction to go,” Gingrich told the Washington Post. “He should not let them bait him into a swamp where they can revel in the mud.”
Hillary Clinton trolls Donald Trump with 3 a.m. tweetstorm — on public service
Hillary Clinton unleashed a barrage of tweets early Saturday morning about public service.
Nearly 24 hours earlier Donald Trump served up several tweets attacking a former Miss Universe winner.
Opinion: Trump’s bizarrely bad debate performance does not disturb his fans
Donald Trump dumps on LAX, but L.A. Mayor Eric Garcetti defends airport upgrades
The sentence structure was a mess, but it was clear during Monday’s presidential debate that when Republican nominee Donald Trump mentioned Los Angeles International Airport, he was not paying the facility a compliment.
“You land at LaGuardia, you land at Kennedy, you land at LAX, you land at Newark, and you come in from Dubai and Qatar and you see these incredible — you come in from China, you see these incredible airports, and you land — we’ve become a third-world country.”
Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti shot back this week, noting that LAX is undergoing billions of dollars in upgrades.
“The comment is just another example of Donald Trump throwing around wild insults without regard for facts,” said Garcetti, a supporter of Hillary Clinton.
Republicans fear Donald Trump is playing into Hillary Clinton’s hands by lashing out on infidelity
The airwaves and newspaper headlines were filled with talk of infidelity and impeachment. When the votes were counted, the result was a shock: For only the second time since the Civil War, the president’s party had gained seats in the House of Representatives.
Republicans learned a lesson. “It was a huge blunder,” said Scott Reed, a GOP strategist, recalling the party’s 1998 midterm debacle and the sympathy the attacks on Bill Clinton engendered for the president and then-First Lady Hillary Clinton.
So it is inexplicable to Reed and many other Republicans that Donald Trump is seeking to recover from his stumbling debate performance by dredging up Bill Clinton’s womanizing and escalating his attacks on a former Miss Universe whose transgression, Trump suggests, was putting on a few pounds.
In a predawn barrage unleashed Friday on Twitter, Trump made an unsubstantiated charge that Alicia Machado, the 1996 pageant winner, had performed in a sex tape. He also asserted that Hillary Clinton helped Machado become a U.S. citizen just so the Democratic presidential nominee could cite the former beauty queen’s past difficulties with Trump in an attack during Monday night’s debate.