“[We] asked people who aren’t voting for Donald Trump, would you consider voting for him? And among women, with whom he is down almost 20 points anyway, women who are not voting for him, the number who say, yes, they would consider it is zero.”

**************

First update here.

… interviews Diane Von Furstenburg about her experience as an immigrant to the United States.

Here they are, after the interview.

After Newsweek asked for a copy of the IRS audit letter sent to Trump, a campaign spokesperson last week pointed to the campaign’s website and the letter that was released by Trump’s attorneys at the Washington, D.C., firm Morgan, Lewis & Bockius. A follow-up query to the campaign asking for a copy of the actual IRS audit letter itself has gone unanswered. Newsweek offered to accept a redaction of any personal information that might be in the letter, such as a Social Security number, although generally audit letters contain just a name and address, which in Trump’s case is well known to be Trump Tower.

In lieu of producing the audit letter, there’s really no proof that Trump is being audited.

… I like Vlad Putin!

******************

[Trump] has offered the most pro-Kremlin slate of statements of any U.S. presidential candidate since Henry Wallace’s Progressive Party campaign of fellow travel in 1948. Trump has suggested that NATO is obsolete and should be dismantled or drastically scaled back. He’s indicated he would not necessarily come to the aid of NATO allies in the event of a Russian attack. He spoke about conceding Russian annexation of Crimea, a region of Ukraine that Moscow annexed in 2014, in what the global community almost universally views as a violation of international law.

On a personal level, Trump has expressed his admiration for Putin’s style of leadership, expressed hope that the two men would get along well, and claimed that he knew Putin, only to say later that they had never met.

Meanwhile, … all indications are that the Trump campaign maneuvered to soften language in the Republican platform backing Ukraine in its dispute with Russia. Manafort then denied this, a claim that is disputed by extensive reporting on the process.

… Trump … has publicly wished that Russia would release Hillary Clinton’s emails from her time as secretary of state, a plea for foreign interference in the American state that shocked and appalled foreign-policy hands of every political stripe.

He’s the one who never asks you a question, talks endlessly about himself — and has nothing to say. He doesn’t read, has no original ideas and thinks he knows more than you do because he once heard something on the news…

Trump hasn’t bothered to learn anything more about the Constitution, or the government, or government policy than he knew a year ago. His campaign still consists of test-marketing insults one rally at a time. Occasionally he tries to impersonate a devoted churchgoer, or an antiabortion activist, or an NRA believer, but he usually botches the role because he hasn’t prepared. And he hasn’t prepared because he’s not really interested in what anyone else believes — not Christians, not anti abortion activists, not gun enthusiasts. He has only one interest.

… His extreme self-regard is one of the qualities that make him unfit to be president… But it also explains why, even as we follow his campaign minute by minute, we feel almost demeaned. All this time, all this attention, and what will we have learned?

The true trademark of the insufferable bore is the conviction that he is doing you a great favor by spending time with you. Trump brings this to his campaign every day — his conviction that he is doing the entire country a great favor, that serving as president would represent an enormous sacrifice.

*******************

[At] a meeting at Trump Tower between Mr. Trump and governors from around the country, Mr. Trump offered a desultory performance, bragging about his poll numbers, listening passively as the governors talked about their states and then sending them on their way.

Mr. Trump never asked them for their support, three people briefed on the meeting said.

I’m a gun owner and Donald Trump doesn’t speak for me – or any of the gun owners I know. His suggestion on Tuesday that we “second amendment people” could take matters into our own hands if Hillary Clinton makes undesirable supreme court justice selections makes all gun owners look unhinged. But he doesn’t speak for us. He speaks only for himself.

… The responsibility to keep Trump out of the White House is on all of us, and that includes gun owners. We can’t let our care for the second amendment mean we turn a blind eye to this latest of many red flags.

After all, in the navy’s firearms training, we learn that ignoring the signs of danger can get us killed – so why would we ignore them here at home?

… Mr. Trump’s mood is often sullen and erratic, his associates say. He veers from barking at members of his staff to grumbling about how he was better off following his own instincts during the primaries and suggesting he should not have heeded their calls for change.

He broods about his souring relationship with the news media…

[Associates also] described their nominee as exhausted, frustrated and still bewildered by fine points of the political process and why his incendiary approach seems to be sputtering.

He is routinely preoccupied with perceived slights…

[Trump is still] relying impulsively on a pugilistic formula that guided him to the nomination…

We are the RNC, we stand for loyalty
To goons and chumps and Donald Trump’s yuge landslide victory
We went to convention hall when a meeting it was called
And when they shouted Kill the bitch
We thought it quite a stitch.

Oh the RNC is sticking to delusion
It’s sticking to confusion
It’s sticking to illusion
Oh the RNC is sticking to delusion
Til the day it dies.

The RNC is wise to the tricks of Hillary spies,
We won’t be awed by voting fraud, we’ll organize our guys.
We know we’ll get our way upon election day
Our fists we’ll pump for Donald Trump
And this is what we’ll say

Oh the RNC is sticking to delusion
It’s sticking to confusion
It’s sticking to illusion
Oh the RNC is sticking to delusion
Til the day it dies.

Sigh.

Read more about the Mass Morass here.

… for our own good.

[Trump’s] campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, told The Huffington Post in May that Trump’s documents are too dense to be made public: “His tax returns are incredibly complicated. I wouldn’t understand them, so how are the American people going to?”

Scathing Online Schoolmarm says: Nicely put.

It’s easy if you try
No Hill above us
Only you and I
Imagine all the people
Tweeting U-S-A

Imagine there’s no countries
It isn’t hard to do
Only white America
Not too many Jews
Imagine all the people
Banished from our shores

You may say I’m a dreamer
But I’m not the only one
I hope some day you’ll join us
Don’t forget to bring your gun

…than… you!

Years before he ran for the White House, Trump built his political brand by accusing President Obama of concealing his past. Trump called on Obama to release his college applications, transcripts and other records, asking how such a “terrible student” got into Ivy League schools. The business executive also demanded that Obama release his passport records and, most famously, his birth certificate, declaring in a video released before the 2012 election: “We know very little about our president.”

… [Trump himself] has refused to release many of the same documents that he demanded from Obama, including college transcripts and passport records. He has shirked the decades-old tradition of major nominees releasing their tax returns and other documentation to prove their readiness and fitness for office. And he has yet to release records showing why he received a medical deferment during the Vietnam War and whether he has actually donated the millions of dollars he claims to have given to charity.

He has got to learn to use language that has been thought through and that is clear to everybody, and to stick to that language.

No one ever said being a kindergarten teacher is easy.