Subject: Negative Clips 5.12.2016
From: "Price, Jenna" <[email-masked]>
To: "Miranda, Luis" <[email-masked]>
Cc: "Palermo, Rachel" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 12 May 2016 04:52:55 -0700

NEGATIVE-REPUBLICANS

The Art of the Duck<http://www.rollcall.com/news/opinion/the-art-of-the-duck#sthash.AaBzBizb.dpuf>
ROLL CALL // PATRICIA MURPHY
For a group of people who love to talk, Republican senators have been curiously quiet since Donald Trump became their party’s likely nominee for president. Will they endorse him? Do they agree with him? Will they be at his convention? The press wanted to know last week, but senators, for the most part, weren’t talking. But with the Senate back in session Monday, reporters were impossible to avoid, especially in the Capitol during votes. They were waiting at the tops of escalators and at the bottom of staircases, in a pack outside the party lunches, and in a mob by the Ohio Clock. Looking for any way to avoid talking about Trump, senators’ evasion tactics ranged from the basic duck to Houdini-level escapes. Pennsylvania Sen. Patrick J. Toomey told a scrum to read his op-ed in the Sunday paper to find out what he thinks about Trump (spoiler alert: He’s still waiting to decide) and then hopped onto a senators-only elevator. Illinois Sen. Mark S. Kirk seemed to use an aide as a human shield to avoid questions. "We're not doing any Trump questions today," the aide told reporters.

Trump Civil War: Republican brothers John McCain and Lindsey Graham on different sides of battle<https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/wp/2016/05/12/trump-civil-war-republican-brothers-john-mccain-and-lindsey-graham-on-different-sides-of-battle/>
WASHINGTON POST // PAUL KANE
Sen. Lindsey Graham paused for five full seconds and stumbled over his words pondering the question: When is the last time he split with fellow Republican Sen. John McCain on a major issue? “I don’t know, let me think about it,” Graham (S.C.) finally said of his closest Senate friend. “There have been several. I just can’t recall right now, right off the top of my head.” Yet that’s what has happened in the wake of Donald Trump’s ascendancy to presumptive Republican nominee for president. In the Republican civil war over Trump, this is perhaps the most glaring example of two “brothers” fighting on opposite sides of the battlefield. It reflects a larger chasm in the Republican Party over whether to embrace the anti-establishment businessman that could end up costing the party the presidency in November. A former Trump rival in the presidential campaign, Graham is part of the anti-Trump coalition promising to never support the businessman — he has declared the presumptive GOP standard bearer’s positions anathema to conservatives on everything from immigration to fitness to oversee the world’s most powerful military. He told reporters Tuesday that “no re-education camp” would change his mind and added he would likely write someone else in for president when he casts his ballot this fall.

Donald Trump’s policy problems<http://www.politico.com/story/2016/05/donald-trumps-policy-problems-223092>
POLITICO // DARREN SAMUELSOHN AND MANUELA TOBIAS
Donald Trump rode a tidal wave of populism to the Republican nomination, but a President Trump would face a different reality: Major limits on executive power and a stingy Congress that would block him at most every turn. POLITICO deployed its policy experts to study a week’s worth of Trump commentary and decipher what he’s saying, how his ideas would work and how far he could really go with positions that are unorthodox at best, and often heretical to his party’s ideology. Here’s what we found: Trump bounces across the political spectrum, sounding like John McCain on defense spending, Ross Perot on trade, Joe Biden on crumbling roads and bridges, and, well, Donald Trump on border security. He even has a little bit of Bernie Sanders in him when it comes to prescription drug prices. On other issues like Common Core, his ideas are disconnected from reality, since the federal government doesn’t have any say over the educational standards. But there’s also a tougher takeaway on Trump’s policies: Many of his proposals are either unrealistic in terms of executive power or would run into a brick wall with Congress, making a Trump administration borderline impotent on the very issues that are driving his supporters to the polls.

The Party Surrenders<http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/12/opinion/campaign-stops/the-party-surrenders.html?ref=opinion>
NEW YORK TIMES // ROSS DOUTHAT
With Marco Rubio’s grudging, painful statement this week that he intends to support “the nominee” (for many Republicans, He Who Must Not Be Named), and with Paul Ryan possibly contemplating assimilation, it’s a good time to take one last look back at what I got wrong — oh, so very wrong — about the Republican Party’s leadership in the age of Donald Trump. Before Trump’s emergence, the Republican elite was in the midst of a long-running civil war, pitting the much-hated “establishment” against the much-feared “base,” the center-right against the Tea Party, the official party leadership against a congeries of activists, media personalities and up-and-coming right-wing politicians. This civil war was real enough, with competing leaders, clear battle lines, tough infighting and insulting rhetoric. But beneath the noise of battle, the establishment’s leaders and the base’s tribunes were often in near-agreement on policy (or, in some cases, on the absence thereof). The establishment wanted a more cosmopolitan and compromise-oriented party and the base a more socially conservative and combative one. But on many issues they were fighting about how to fight, as much as about what specifically to do. Because of this underlying agreement, the G.O.P. elite’s civil war actually covered over many of the deeper ideological divisions within the party’s rank and file.

Trump’s false claim that ‘there’s nothing to learn’ from his tax returns<https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2016/05/12/trumps-false-claim-that-theres-nothing-to-learn-from-his-tax-returns/>
WASHINGTON POST // GLENN KESSLER
Donald Trump has a history of promising to release his tax returns — and then not doing so. In 2011, when Trump was spearheading the movement questioning whether President Obama was born in the United States, Trump told ABC News that he would release his tax returns if Obama released his long-form birth certificate. “I’d love to give my tax returns,” he said. But once Obama released his birth certificate, Trump hedged. “At the appropriate time I’m going to do it,” he said. The appropriate time never came. Then, in 2012, Trump criticized Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney for being slow to release his tax returns. He was asked by Fox News if he’d ever have a problem releasing his returns. “No,” Trump said. “I actually think that it’s a great thing when you can show that you’ve been successful, and that you’ve made a lot of money, that you’ve employed a lot of people. I actually think that it’s a positive.” But apparently, that was then. Trump now says he won’t release his taxes, citing a pending audit — not even back taxes from 2002 to 2008 that his lawyers claim have been cleared without penalty. Never mind that the first president to release his taxes, Richard Nixon, did so in in the midst of an audit.

Sarah Palin, the political mother of Trump<https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/sarah-palin-the-political-mother-of-trump/2016/05/11/bdbedc32-17bb-11e6-aa55-670cabef46e0_story.html>
WASHINGTON POST // DANA MILBANK
“I know Russia well. I had a major event in Russia two or three years ago, Miss Universe contest.” — Donald Trump “You can actually see Russia from land here in Alaska.” — Sarah Palin. Mark Salter, the longtime John McCain consigliere, was just asked by Politico’s Glenn Thrush whether he believed McCain’s choice of Sarah Palin as his 2008 running mate “opened the door a crack for a Trump-style candidate.” “Maybe a little,” Salter said after a pause. Stuff and nonsense. Salter was being modest. Palin’s nomination didn’t crack the door for Trump. It birthed him. Palin is, politically, the Mother of Trump. Some of their similarities, such as their curious ways of justifying their knowledge of Russia, are superficial. Trump, asked by NBC’s Chuck Todd where he gets his military advice, said: “Well, I watch the shows. . . . You know, when you watch your show and all of the other shows.” This had more than an echo of Palin’s reply to Katie Couric in 2008 about which newspapers or magazines she reads: “Um, all of them, any of them that have been in front of me all these years.”