Why Not Trump?

"Donald Trump and other embattled Republican candidates are resorting to a particularly bizarre and dangerous tactic in the closing days of the campaign — warning that they may well seek to impeach Hillary Clinton if she wins, or, short of that, tie her up with endless investigations and other delaying tactics. • Of all the arguments advanced by the Trump forces, this has to be among the most preposterous. In effect, what they’re saying is, Mrs. Clinton won’t be able to govern, because we won’t let her. So don’t waste your vote on her. Vote for us. • In a rational world — you know, one that values comity and progress in the national interest — this line of argument would be seen as incendiary at worst and hopelessly wacky at best. Not so in Trumpland, where the candidate himself warns (as he did in Miami on Wednesday) that a Clinton victory would “create an unprecedented and protracted constitutional crisis,” raising the specter that government would be severely hobbled by congressional Republicans’ open-ended investigations and a determination to impeach Mrs. Clinton. All this even if she was fairly elected by a majority of American voters."

The totalitarian state is racing to build a nuclear weapon that could reach the United States.

Legal experts call it the worst-case scenario: The day after the election arrives and the outcome turns on a dispute in one state.

"Two women accused Donald Trump of inappropriate touching in interviews with the New York Times, claims his spokesman called fiction but which may further damage the Republican presidential candidate's chances of winning the Nov. 8 election. • The report on Wednesday was followed by a stream of similar allegations from several other women, putting more pressure on Trump as he lags Democratic rival Hillary Clinton in national opinion polls. The campaign was already struggling to contain a crisis after a video surfaced last week showing the candidate bragging in 2005 about groping women and making unwanted sexual advances."

Astonishingly, Donald Trump is right about something!

After recently being caught on a 2005 tape gloating about sexual assaults, Trump issued an unapologetic apology in which he focused on the “big difference” between words and actions. And he has a point.

But there’s abundant evidence that Trump has indulged in not just scurrilous rhetoric, but also in heinous actions. Several more women have stepped forward to offer on-the-record accounts of having been aggressively groped or kissed by Trump against their will, right after he met them.

I also find entirely credible the allegations of Jill Harth, a former business partner of Trump’s, that he assaulted her in 1992 and 1993. Equally credible is the assertion by a former Miss Utah that Trump inappropriately kissed beauty contestants on the lips.

Some Republicans have demanded laws to ban transgender women from entering women’s restrooms or locker rooms, but instead they might focus on the risk of Trump doing this. He has boasted that he marched unannounced into changing rooms to ogle beauty pageant contestants naked, and a former contestant, Miss Arizona, Tasha Dixon, said he did just that as they were changing into bikinis. “Some girls were topless,” she said. “Other girls were naked.”

Donald J. Trump was emphatic in the second presidential debate: Yes, he had boasted about kissing women without permission and grabbing their genitals. But he had never actually done those things, he said.

“No,” he declared under questioning on Sunday evening, “I have not.”

At that moment, sitting at home in Manhattan, Jessica Leeds, 74, felt he was lying to her face. “I wanted to punch the screen,” she said in an interview in her apartment.

More than three decades ago, when she was a traveling businesswoman at a paper company, Ms. Leeds said, she sat beside Mr. Trump in the first-class cabin of a flight to New York. They had never met before.

About 45 minutes after takeoff, she recalled, Mr. Trump lifted the armrest and began to touch her.

According to Ms. Leeds, Mr. Trump grabbed her breasts and tried to put his hand up her skirt.

When Donald J. Trump told Hillary Clinton at Sunday’s presidential debate that if he were president, “you’d be in jail,” he was threatening more than just his opponent. He was suggesting that he would strip power from the institutions that normally enforce the law, investing it instead in himself.

Political scientists who study troubled democracies abroad say this is a tactic typical of elected leaders who pull down their systems from within: former President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, the fascist leaders of 1930s Europe.

Today’s United States, unlike the countries in those cases, has strong institutions and norms that prevent any president from going that far, these experts stress. But Mr. Trump’s threat to jail his opponent for her deletion of thousands of emails sent from a private server while she was secretary of state, they warned in interviews on Monday, would chip away at the things that make American democracy so resilient.

Mr. Trump’s comment was “a threat to the rule of law, a threat to the stability of our institutions, a threat to basic agreements that are necessary for democracy to function,” said Adrienne LeBas, a political scientist at American University.

Jill Harth’s first concern with Donald Trump’s hands wasn’t that they were small. It’s that they were everywhere.

Harth and her longtime boyfriend were in meetings with Trump to forge a business partnership. “He was relentless,” Harth recalled in an interview, describing how on Dec. 12, 1992, he took the couple to dinner and a club — and then situated himself beside Harth and ran his hands up her skirt, to her crotch. “I didn’t know how to handle it. I would go away from him and say I have to go to the restroom. It was the escape route.”

We’ve all heard of Trump’s unethical or loutish behavior, most recently in a 2005 recording unearthed by The Washington Post on Friday in which he boasts of kissing and groping women. The story that Harth and the boyfriend, George Houraney, tell of their interactions with Trump over six years — including business cheating and attempted rape — shows how that predation worked in practice. “He name-dropped continuously,” Harth said under oath in a deposition in a subsequent lawsuit, “when he wasn’t groping me.”

Harth and Houraney were simply an ordinary Florida couple thrilled that Trump wanted to partner with them. And that’s when the nightmare began. (Trump strongly denies these improprieties.) Anyone thinking about voting for Trump would do well to listen to Houraney and Harth.

The 2016 presidential campaign has been so dramatic, The Times writes, that it has often felt like something beyond even Hollywood’s wildest imagination — which is, perhaps, why movie theaters around the country are inviting people to watch election night coverage on the big screen. In some cities, there will even be “red” theaters and “blue” theaters.

However your students will be watching, here are some ideas for helping them understand what to pay attention to, and how to join the conversation themselves.

We’ll continue to update this post with new information and tools from The Times until Election Day, Nov. 8.

Donald Trump will almost certainly pivot to media after Nov. 9 — and a cast of right-wing washouts are waiting

4 of Donald Trump's statements from the debate stage in Las Vegas didn't seem to match up with existing video.

“We have to make sure that this election is not stolen from us,” Donald Trump told an audience in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., on Monday.

It was only the latest of many attempts to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the election. In August, his campaign began inviting supporters to sign up online as “Trump election observers” who would help “stop Crooked Hillary from rigging this election.” And on Oct. 1, he told a crowd in Manheim, Pa., to “watch your polling booths,” because he had heard stories about “certain areas” of Pennsylvania, and “we can’t lose an election because of you know what I’m talking about.”

Given his flirtation with racist talk throughout his campaign, Mr. Trump’s exhorting supporters to watch “certain areas” sounds like an invitation to harass and intimidate minority voters. And his call for volunteer observers, supposedly to prevent voter fraud at the polls (which is virtually nonexistent), fits well into the long and shameful history of suppression of the minority vote by partisan poll watchers.

Nearly all states permit designated poll watchers to observe voting. Many allow each political party to appoint a certain number of watchers, and some allow voting-rights groups and other organizations to appoint observers as well. But while poll watchers can be helpful in reporting violations to election officials, partisan groups have used them to intimidate voters.

MOSCOW — Saying relations with the United States have deteriorated in a “radically changed environment,” President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia withdrew Monday from a landmark nuclear security agreement, in a troubling sign that the countries’ cooperation in a range of nuclear areas could be threatened.

The treaty, on the disposal of plutonium, the material used in some nuclear weapons, was concluded in 2000 as one of the framework disarmament deals of the early post-Cold War period.

It required Russia and the United States to destroy military stockpiles of plutonium, a deal that represented another encouraging step away from nuclear doomsday and an insurance policy against the materials falling into the hands of terrorists or rogue states.

The deal has no bearing on the numbers of nuclear weapons deployed by Russia or the United States. Instead, it concerns 34 tons of plutonium in storage in each country that might go into a future arsenal, none of which has yet undergone verifiable disposal.

In 1928, the Nazi Party got 2.6 percent of the vote in Germany. In 1933, Adolf Hitler was the German chancellor. Leader of the country. And soon the world would be on the road to war and holocaust. How did that happen? How did Hitler come to power in a democracy? A new history tells the story but many are thinking about it now, as rightwing populism has surged across Europe and raised its voice in the U.S., too. This hour On Point, how Hitler came to power, and lessons for today.

"Ahead of the second presidential debate Sunday night, the secret Donald Trump audiotape of him bragging about groping and kissing women — and let's be clear, if he did what he's bragging that he did, it would be assault — has shaken the presidential race and is reshaping the presidential map."