| | | | Trump doubles down on calling Clinton a 'bigot' | | Donald Trump just called Hillary Clinton a "bigot." Again.
In an interview today with CNN's Anderson Cooper, Trump was given a chance to walk back his comments from the night before. He passed it up.
"She is a bigot," he told Cooper. "She is selling (African-Americans) down the tubes because she's not doing anything for those communities. She talks a good game. But she doesn't do anything."
As for his hemming and hawing over immigration, Trump kept the waters muddy.
The Republican nominee did not clarify whether he still wants to forcibly deport the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants in the United States. The deportation force had been a key element of his immigration platform, but he suggested earlier this week he was "softening" on the idea.
One thing he was clear on: "No legal status for undocumented immigrants." CNN's Theodore Schleifer reports. Less clear: Whether he would still forcibly deport the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants in the United States, a major tenet of his immigration platform. | | Clinton shines a light on the 'alt-right' | | "From the start, Donald Trump has built his campaign on prejudice and paranoia," Hillary Clinton said during a blistering speech in (swing state) Nevada today.
Democrats have been arguing this for months, but Clinton went much, much further -- painting Trump as a vehicle for the conservative "fringe," in particular the emerging "alt-right."
"A man with a long history of racial discrimination, who traffics in dark conspiracy theories drawn from the pages of supermarket tabloids and the far reaches of the Internet, should never run our government or command our military," Clinton said.
And she was just getting warmed up. CNN's Dan Merica has the full story.
Sound familiar? I thought so, too. That sentence took the same form as an earlier hit, from Clinton's convention speech, when she said of Trump: "A man you can bait with a tweet is not a man we can trust with nuclear weapons."
The alt-what? Clinton used the speech to underline Trump's embrace of the conservative news outlet Breitbart (he hired their boss as his campaign CEO last week) and some of the right's less seemly elements. The alt-right is a particularly insidious movement that has been championed by Breitbart and other right-wing shops.
Here's my semi #longread on who they are, what they believe and why we're talking about them. Even better, watch CNNMoney's Brian Stelter's explainer video.
For a broader look at Clinton's "Tale of Two Trumps," Bloomberg's Sahil Kapur weighs in on her contradictory, if ultimately effective, messaging. | | About that: Campaign manager Kellyanne Conway responded with some word association of her own, saying: "Clinton lied about her emails, she lied about Colin Powell, and today she lied about Donald Trump."
"We're living in her head rent-free," Conway continued, "and that must terrify the political insiders who want to keep things exactly the way they are."
Trump himself responded before Clinton spoke, saying at a rally in New Hampshire that while "I have not seen Hillary Clinton's remarks" and "I don't want to dignify them by dwelling on them too much," he had to respond "for the sake of all decent voters she is trying to smear."
"She lies and she smears and she paints decent Americans as racists," Trump said. "She bullies voters who only want a better future and tries to intimidate them out of voting for a change."
CNN's Jeremy Diamond has the full story from Manchester. | | Republican immigration agitation | | As the political world continues to await definitive word from Trump on his (new?) immigration and deportation policies, and the candidate parcels out suggestions he might slip or flip, some folks on the right are getting angry -- more on Ann Coulter in a second -- and some, like Eric Cantor (above), are just kind of laughing. But as CNN's Ashley Killough reports, Jeb Bush seems less amused.
CNN's Z. Byron Wolf slacked this note on the latest 2016 oddity:
"The weird thing about today is that Hillary Clinton unleashed a remarkable screed against Trump and his campaign associates, painting them denizens of the darkest, most hate-filled parts of the Internet underworld and putting the election in terms of a 'moment of reckoning.' At just about exactly the same time, Republicans who worried that Trump would move to the middle on immigration were saying they told ya so." | | No, this is not a late-summer repeat. Up in Maine, Gov. Paul LePage is making headlines once again with what the Portland Press Herald forgivingly describes as "racially charged statements about drug dealers" coming to the state.
The trouble began on Wednesday night, when he told a town hall meeting that, by his count, blacks and Hispanics have made up "90-plus percent" of drug busts this year.
In an effort to make it better(?) on Thursday, LePage said this: "If I am a racist for trying to (stop) black people and Hispanic people and white people and Asian people who come up (Interstate 95) with heroin that will kill Mainers, then I plead guilty. I do plead guilty."
The Press Herald's Scott Thistle has the very latest on this mess. | | | An (after)word please? One person most definitely not interested in a softened or muddled Trump immigration policy proposal is right-wing commentator Ann Coulter, who is peddling her new book, "In Trump We Trust." She gave her take on Twitter overnight. | | Feds dig into Leslie Jones hack | | Law enforcement agencies opened a federal investigation into the alleged hacking of comedian Leslie Jones' website, the Department of Homeland Security said on Thursday.
The site, JustLeslie.com, is down now, but not before attackers posted her personal information and racist imagery. The probe into who did it and their motive will be carried out by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Homeland Security Investigations. CNN's Wesley Bruer has the details.
CNNMoney's Sandra Gonzalez and Sara Ashley O'Brien have more on the hack and the "Saturday Night Live" star's difficult summer. (With a cameo from alt-right gadfly Milo Yiannopoulos.) | | | Slate's Mark Joseph Stern has a modest pitch for you: The Clinton Foundation is not a scandal. It's a phenomenal, life-saving success ... Jane Mayer is in The New Yorker with this modestly gleeful reflection on Roger Ailes and "the scandals of the scandalmongers" ... Gawker may be dead but its sisters and brothers are alive and well -- here's Gizmodo's Matt Novak on how the EpiPen mess is affecting one of its most prominent celebrity voices. | | | Get the Nightcap, a comprehensive summary of the most important political news, delivered to your inbox daily. | | | | | |
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