The Donald Chronicles: Make America Hate

On Thursday Hillary Clinton made an impressive speech, outlining the extremist threat of our Homegrown Hitler, introducing those few people that haven't read about it here to "alt.right."

Here's the transcript (annotated at the WPost, though footnoted is more accurate--the factual assertions are accurate.) Also impressive in the few seconds of the speech I heard on NPR is that Clinton didn't shout it, as she too often does.  It sounds like a news report.

Since it hits many points previously noted here, I won't repeat them, but this point from the speech can't be made too often:

Parents and teachers are already worried about what they’re calling the “Trump Effect.” They report that bullying and harassment are on the rise in our schools, especially targeting students of color, Muslims, and immigrants. At a recent high school basketball game in Indiana, white students held up Trump signs and taunted Latino players on the opposing team with chants of “Build the wall!” and “Speak English.” After a similar incident in Iowa, one frustrated school principal said, “They see it in a presidential campaign and now it's OK for everyone to say this.”

Polls: A new national poll of likely voters from Quinnipiac University gives Hillary a ten point lead, 51-41.  A WPost article goes into the specific numbers to show how damaging to the Donald it is, as Clinton's numbers increased since the Q poll in June.  A national poll of registered voters by PRRI has Hillary ahead by 13 points.

In the NY Times, Michiko Kakutani reviews  books about Trump and observes:

"To read a stack of new and reissued books about Mr. Trump, as well as a bunch of his own works, is to be plunged into a kind of Bizarro World version of Dante’s “Inferno,” where arrogance, acquisitiveness and the sowing of discord are not sins, but attributes of leadership; a place where lies, contradictions and outrageous remarks spring up in such thickets that the sort of moral exhaustion associated with bad soap operas quickly threatens to ensue.

That the subject of these books is not a fictional character but the Republican nominee for president can only remind the reader of Philip Roth’s observation, made more than 50 years ago, that American reality is so stupefying, “so weird and astonishing,” that it poses an embarrassment to the novelist’s “meager imagination.”

I've thought of that Roth essay (which was basically about Nixon) over the years.  It's been proven so many times that today it seems quaint.