US Presidential Election: Analysisof Trump's tweets reveals angry, negative tweets written by Trump; more positive tweets by someone else - NEW UPDATES

New: Trump fires up recruitment of poll watchers as he warns of election ‘cheating’

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump is asking supporters to become election monitors, warning voters Friday night that “cheating” might rob him of a win.

At the same time, outside groups are readying to help the campaign watch the polls. Donald F. McGahn II, the Trump campaign’s attorney, stopped by the Denver meeting of the Republican National Lawyers Association to plot the strategy and explain how the campaign could help the lawyers build a sophisticated election-protection network. Read More

"The effort reflects a key tension point between the parties, with Republicans warning of voter fraud designed to help Democrats, such as ineligible people casting ballots, and Democrats accusing GOP officials of exaggerating the dangers of voter fraud to justify new laws that Democrats say are designed to disenfranchise minorities and other Democratic voters. It has become commonplace for presidential campaigns to amass legal teams steeped in the intricacies of election law — but it is unusual for a candidate to so directly predict wrongdoing by an opponent.

For Democrats, the worry comes not from the specter of voter fraud, which is rare, but from Trump supporters intimidating legitimate voters. They have seen True the Vote, an outgrowth of the tea party movement, train poll watchers to challenge voters in every election since 2012, and preemptively challenge voters who listed commercial addresses or dormitories as their homes. In 2012, Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) speculated that True the Vote was involved in “a criminal conspiracy to deny legitimate voters their constitutional rights,” a view that many Democrats still hold about election challenges." Dvid Weigel, The Washington Post

New: Donald Trump Tweets Analysis Finds He Only Writes The 'Angrier' Ones, Others Write The Rest For Him

An analysis of Donald Trump's tweets suggests that different people write them. Trump writes the aggressive tweets. Read More

New: Researchers Crack the Code on Trump and When He Actually Tweets
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A group of internet and social media experts have officially cracked the code on Donald Trump and when he’s the one sending out his tweets. The research was done after those on the web started talking about a pattern emerging in the Republican presidential candidate’s social media habits. Read More

"Now that someone has been able to crack the code on Trump and when he tweets, it only makes the candidate look that much worse. This is especially true because Robinson has said Donald Trump is the one who usually retweets comments made by people the campaign would rather he stay away from.

To some degree, this research also shows just how hard it is for the Trump campaign to keep their candidate under wraps. The campaign has attempted to sprinkle in some more light-hearted comments here and there, if for no other reason than to not have Donald’s Twitter account be nothing but vitriol.

The fascinating byproduct of this research is going to be looking at how Trump and his campaign use social media moving forward. Since researchers have been able to crack the code on Trump and his Twitter usage, it will make it harder for him and the campaign to claim Donald Trump didn’t tweet something out truly inflammatory when he did." Oliver Vandervoort, Inquisitr

New: Two people write Trump’s tweets. He writes the angrier ones.

My recent work has concerned text-mining and sentiment analysis, so I wanted to quantify the difference in Trump’s tweets. The data clearly shows that the Android and iPhone tweets are from different people, posting at different times of the day, and using hashtags, links and retweets in distinct ways. What’s more, the Android tweets are angrier and more negative, while the iPhone tweets tend to be benign announcements and pictures. This survey looks at 628 iPhone tweets and 762 Android tweets. Read More

This statistical analysis of Trump's online persona confirms the widening observation of Trump as being a very angry, negative person. It raises more questions about his mental fitness to be the President of the United States. America needs someone who is cool-headed and positive in the Oval Office.

New: Donald Trump is exhausting. That doesn't mean the media — or America — can ignore him.

Nothing important happens in August. That gives journalists two choices: detach from the news cycle for other things, or indulge in the “silly season” — “the time of year,” as Chris Weigant wrote in 2013, “when everyone in the political arena decides to focus on some amazingly silly ‘issues,’ through nothing more than sheer boredom.”

"But like so many other cherished political norms, Donald Trump has ruined the silly season. Because while the controversies Trump causes are often ridiculous, they’re rarely genuinely silly. Nothing Trump does or says is inconsequential enough to justify ignoring. Read More

Trump turned a silly story about a simple act of campaign hyperbole into proof that he doesn’t think about the consequences of what he’s saying — that in fact he positively believes he shouldn’t be held accountable for those consequences. That is a terrible trait in a president or a would-be president, and it is a terrible trait in a leader of millions of passionate supporters who are already primed to believe that Democrats will steal the election.

That’s not silly. Few of the things Trump says truly are." Dara Lind, Vox

New: The Latest: Trump threatens to pull credentials of NY Times

Donald Trump is threatening to take away the campaign press credentials of The New York Times.

Trump is frequently critical of the Times and upped his attacks on the newspaper during a Saturday night rally in Fairfield, Connecticut.

Trump denounced the paper’s recent coverage of him and said, “Maybe we’ll start taking the press credentials away.” Read More

New: News Analysis: Trump's dubbing Obama as IS "founder" to hurt himself with many U.S. voters

While Trump has galvanized white, blue-collar men in a way not seen in decades, this demographic is narrow, and analysts said now Trump needs to appeal to a broader audience.

While Trump's bombastic rhetoric and actions worked well to fire up a populist segment of the Republican primary electorate, they are increasingly alienating a wide range of moderate, educated general election voters, Mahaffee noted. Read More

Those who wish Trump would become more statesman-like fail to realize that Trump is incapable of being anything more than what he is. He is not going to undergo some kind of miraculous transformation and become Mr. Nice Candidate who woos the hearts of undecided voters. It runs counter to his nature. He may try it for a while but it won't last. He'll become Mr. Nasty Candidate again. If they want a more statesman-like candidate, they need to disown him as the GOP candidate and replace him with somebody else. But they do no have a legal mechanism to do that. They are stuck with Trump.

New: How Donald Trump’s bizarre voter-watch effort could get the GOP in trouble

After telling an audience in Altoona, Pa., that he would seek their help in policing the polls in November to root out voter fraud — something that even the state of Pennsylvania has noted doesn't exist in any meaningful way — Donald Trump's campaign nationalized the effort on Saturday morning. Now eager Trump backers can go to Trump's website and sign up to be "a Trump Election Observer." Do so, and you get an email thanking you for volunteering and assuring you that the campaign will "do everything we are legally allowed to do to stop crooked Hillary from rigging this election."

There are any number of problems with this, again starting with the fact that the frequency of in-person voter fraud in elections is lower than getting five numbers right in the Powerball. But there's a potentially bigger legal problem noted by election law expert Rick Hasen of the University of California at Irvine: Trump's unnecessary effort could be violating a prohibition against voter intimidation that applies to the Republican Party. Read More

Will deeper digging into Trump's plans reveal grounds for charging Trump with conspiring to violate the civil rights of Pennsylvania voters?

New: Mitch McConnell Issues Sternest Warning Yet That GOP Is In Danger Of Losing Senate

He said the party’s chances of keeping control of the Senate are “very dicey.” Read More

New: Has Donald Trump hit bottom?

The unraveling of Donald Trump’s candidacy continues apace, a long and steady decline since the high point three months ago. If he were deliberately trying to avoid winning the election, he could hardly be doing a better job. Read More

Trump may have a strategy but he is not sharing it with his Republican allies. He is not giving them an opportunity to evaluate his strategy and to draw attention to its weaknesses. Trump relies heavily upon what he describes as his "gut-instincts." This make work for him in business when he is negotiating deals. But will it work for him in the political arena. Trump's consistent message has been let me run the country and things will get better. He is essentially saying the same things about his campaign to the GOP. Let me run the campaign and we will win the White House. Trump may have something up his sleeve. He may not. But one thing observers should know by now. Trump delights in keeping people in suspense. It keeps him in the center of attention. To a large extent that's what Trump is about--being the center of attention.

Trump also loves to play people for a patsy. A patsy is someone who is "easily taken advantage of, cheated, blamed, or ridiculed." Patsy is the third role in the Karpman Drama Triangle to which I referred in an earlier comment. The Karpman Drama Triangle "maps a type of destructive interaction that can occur between people in conflict." Trump is the kind of person who likes to precipitate a crisis in order to reap attention from the part he plays in the crisis. This is one of several personality dynamics which disqualify him for the office of President of the United States.

New: Tim Kaine just called out Donald Trump’s history of housing discrimination

Before Trump moved into the business of luxury high-rises and casinos, he helped run a rental empire built by his father in New York that catered to working- and middle-class tenants. In the early 1970s, the Justice Department accused the family of discriminating against black tenants across 39 properties the Trumps managed. The Trumps eventually signed a consent decree that required the company, among other things, to proactively list units in minority publications. Read More

While disclosure of this history reflects poorly on Trump, it is going to have little impact upon his base. What might hurt him with his base is exposure of the various ways that he has treated badly the different groups forming his base. Trump supporters can be expected to try to pressure undecided family members, friends, and coworkers into voting for Trump. Revelations of his mistreatment of white low and middle class individuals and families would weaken the influence his supporters might exercise with undecided voters and put his supporters in the uncomfortable position of supporting a candidate who does not genuinely care about their plight and is using them as a stepping stone to gain public office.

New:Trump campaign launches drive to recruit 'election observers'

Donald Trump's campaign is seeking to recruit "election observers" following the Republican nominee's repeated claims that the general election is "rigged."

In a move that's unprecedented in a presidential election, the campaign late this week launched a page on its website proclaiming, "Help Me Stop Crooked Hillary From Rigging This Election! Please fill out this form to receive more information about becoming a volunteer Trump Election Observer." Read More

The twentieth century Fascist and Nazi Parties stationed thugs at the polls to intimidate voters, to discourage them from voting for opposition candidates, and in some cases to keep them from voting. Fascist and Nazi Party leaders used the possibility of voter fraud to justify what they were doing. The same thing has happened in more recent times in countries with a "strong man" leader whose party sought to control the outcome of the elections.

New: Is Trump Pushing Supporters to Intimidate Minority Voters With Fraud Warnings?

Donald Trump is doubling down with the “rigged election” claims. Rather than walk back his past statement, or claim he was being sarcastic, the Republican presidential candidate straight out told supporters on Friday that there’s only one possible explanation if he ends up losing the crucial state of Pennsylvania: through cheating. “The only way we can lose, in my opinion—I really mean this, Pennsylvania—is if cheating goes on," he said late Friday. Nevermind that the Real Clear Politics polling average notes Hillary Clinton has a 9.2-point advantage over Trump in recent surveys. “We’re going to have unbelievable turnout, but we don’t want to see people voting five times, folks,” the Republican presidential nominee said. Read More

New: Trump’s run at blue Connecticut

Struggling where he should be leading, the GOP nominee diverts to a state that Republicans do not win. Read More

"It’s a move that is flummoxing and infuriating Republicans who believe Trump should be spending time and resources in winnable states, not in a place that few consider to be competitive." Katie Glueck, Politico

New: Trump’s Missing Money

If you’re watching the Olympic games, you may have noticed “Hillary for President” ads. She’s bought $13.6 million worth, while Donald Trump has bought none. In fact, since garnering the Republican nomination, he’s spent $0 on TV. Nonetheless, the Trump campaign spent $63m in July. What happened to it? Read More

"There’s a third explanation for the missing $63m. The end-of-June FEC report indicates that Trump had lent his campaign $50m. Although Trump promised to forgive this loan, NBC news reported that he never filed the papers to actually do this. Perhaps Trump repaid himself from the $63m, leaving little money for ads and field staff." Bob Burnett, The Huffington Post

New: Snap Judgment: A Vote for the Sake of the World

This week, for the first time since moving to Israel 31 years ago, I registered to vote in an US election.

This is a column to explain why. It is not though, an endorsement of any one candidate – though I freely confess that if I cast my ballot it will be for Hillary Clinton, in order to prevent the election of Donald Trump. Read More

Warning of election fraud, Trump sparks fear that his backers may intimidate minority voters

In remarks with strong racial overtones, Donald Trump told a mainly white rural crowd in Pennsylvania on Friday that vote fraud could cheat him out of victory and vowed to dispatch police who support him to monitor polls in “certain parts” of the state. Read More

Trump says he will only lose Pennsylvania if there’s widespread voter fraud. That’s very wrong.

Donald Trump held a rally in Altoona, Pa., on Friday night, during which he told the audience that the only way Hillary Clinton could win the state was if "in certain sections of the state they cheat." Read More

Donald Trump: Clinton Can Only Win Pennsylvania If ‘They Cheat’

Republican Donald Trump on Friday said the only way Hillary Clinton can win Pennsylvania is if “they cheat,” and backed away from comments calling President Barack Obama and Clinton the founders of the Islamic State militant group. Read More

Nothing is ever Trump's fault. As a social worker I routinely worked with clients who blamed others for the problems that they themselves created. They would never take ownership of these problems, and invariably sought to shift the blame to someone else. This included those who brought the problems to their attention. Having worked with this type of client for more than two decades, I cannot take seriously Trump's protestations of blamelessness. As one of the earlier articles that I posted suggested, the main reason that Trump supporters cannot recognize Trump's characterological flaws and other limitations is "cognitive dissonance." They have an emotional investment in their candidate that blinds them to his shortcomings. The more videos I watch and the articles I read, the more convinced, I become that he is not presidential material.  I have serious reservations about Clinton too.