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UPDATE:

Chris Cillizza makes this very common mistake here:

“President Donald Trump is the walking, talking epitome of the sanctification of partisanship over all our other, real, values. (Yes, the irony is not lost on me — and should not be lost on you — that the modern patron saint of partisanship is someone who has been, literally, a Democrat, an independent and a Republican all within the last decade or so.) This is a man who has declared, repeatedly, that the mainstream media is the “enemy of the people.” A man who said his Democratic opponent in the 2016 election should be jailed. A man who has called elected officials of his own party who disagreed with him “incompetent,” “weak and ineffective” and “so bad,” among many other things. A man who, while McCain was home in Arizona fighting the brain cancer that eventually killed him, would use the story of McCain voting against health care repeal legislation to symbolize the Arizona senator’s alleged backstabbing. (“One senator decided to put the thumb down,” Trump would say in his standard stump speech. “That was not a good thing.”)
“To be clear: Trump doesn’t take this if-you-aren’t-with-me-you’re-against-me view out of any sort of principles. After all, he made his living in the private sector as a deal-maker, someone who always saw compromise as possible — even in the darkest of situations. And as I noted above, Trump has been all over the map in terms of his personal politics. This is not a man wedded to a certain, unwavering view of what’s right in the world.”

This is a very common zombie argument-that Trump’s ‘been a Democrat most of his life’-something Joe Scarborough has said countless times.

In truth he’s been consistently a Republican, though as someone who did real estate in NYC he had to get along with a lot of Democratic politicians and knew how to make the right sounds and noises-which might explain how he developed his true talent of being an agent provocateur with a reputation of being ‘a different kind of Republican.’

Regarding that, he certainly hasn’t governed as a different kind of Republican and one explanation for that is: he’s not a different kind of Republican. 

If you look at it more closely you’ll see that he had one ‘Democrat’ period during 2004. This regards a very interesting episode that still hasn’t been talked about nearly enough-when he and Roger Stone supported Al Sharpton in the 2004 primary.

There is reason to believe however, that this was not a sincere conversion to Democratic principles but actually a kind of black box active measures campaign against John Dean who was seen as the biggest threat to George W. Bush.

I’ve argued in Chapter A that the reason Sharpton-believe it or not-never endorsed Clinton in 2016-after vowing many times that an endorsement was imminent-might be related to the 2004 campaign-perhaps he owed a big favor to Stone and Trump. That 2004 run while not successful was very important in terms of giving Sharpton a new level of mainstream respect and credibility-before he was not seen as someone the mainstream took very seriously.

Sharpton later downplayed Stone’s role-sure he bankrolled the campaign but that didn’t mean he ran it. Well what would running it look like? If Stone actually selected Sharpton’s campaign manager would that qualify as ‘running it?’

Here was Salon at the time:

“The only surprising aspect of the Sharpton-Stone relationship is how brazenly the pair now display their bipartisan dalliance. While Stone quietly began providing advice to the reverend almost a year ago, his name surfaced last October when he showed up at a Sharpton birthday party/fundraiser in New York. That was not long after Sharpton campaign manager Frank Watkins, a former Jackson aide, abruptly resigned. In place of Watkins, Stone installed Charles Halloran — a white, Kentucky-born political operative whose ties with the Republican consultant were cemented in 2002, when they worked together on billionaire Thomas Golisano’s quixotic Independent campaign for New York governor. Although he is a career Democrat, Halloran has become professionally dependent on his connections with Stone. Last winter, his Republican patron obtained a lucrative job for Halloran in Bermuda, running the conservative United Bermuda Party parliamentary campaign.”

“Appointing the campaign manager only suggests how pervasively Stone influences Sharpton. His current role is even more crucial. An extraordinary investigative report by Wayne Barrett in the Village Voice describes in detail how Stone controls the campaign’s staffing, financing, and often its message. In addition to placing half a dozen of his associates in the Sharpton camp, Stone has managed the successful solicitation of enough contributions to make Sharpton 2004 eligible for federal matching funds.”

More on the Roger Stone-Al Sharpton alliance  from Mark Ames:

“As it turns out, Al Sharpton entered the 2004 Democratic primaries on the payroll and orders of Roger Stone, who directed Sharpton’s attacks from the race politics-left against Howard Dean. And as the New York Times revealed that year, it was Donald Trump who took credit for introducing Al Sharpton — a one-time FBI informant — to his old friend and lobbyist, GOP dirty trickster Roger Stone.”

Ames chronicles Trump-Stone’s partnership in black box jobs that all ultimately served to help the establishment GOP.  For example, Trump’s first run for President in 2000 was on the Reform party ticket but the main effect of his campaign was to: destroy Pat Buchanan’s campaign and the Reform party itself from within so that Buchanan and the Reform party wouldn’t get to play spoiler to the GOP nominee as both had in 1992 and 1996.

FN: Cillizza’s widely shared misconception that Trump was at one point an ‘independent’ is probably due to Trump’s running on the Reform party ticket in 2000 but this too was a black box job to help the GOP-to make sure Pat Buchanan didn’t cause trouble for the eventual establishment GOP nominee-as it turned out W.

After W won the primary Stone worked directly for him.

“That year, 2000, was a busy year for the Donald Trump-Roger Stone partnership.”

“Stone had been hired by the George W. Bush campaign to carry out two major black bag jobs that we know of: Sabotaging the Florida recount vote, using a mob of “angry” Cubans and Republican “preppies” to storm a Miami-Dade recount and stop it in its tracks, which Stone — hired for the job by James Baker — succeeded in doing.”

So add 2000 to the number of Presidential campaigns Stone has rigged for the GOP-working with CREEP to rig it for Nixon in 1972-on this much more below; the many dirty tricks  of Stone in 2016 both on the Russiagate and Comeygate side; in reality 2016 will prove to be his masterpiece but ultimately at the expense of his freedom; and 2000 in setting up the Florida Cuban side of the Brooks Brothers’ riots that shutdown the recount… And having his pal Donald Trump run on the reform ticket in 2000 to sabotage it from within.

“How Roger Stone and Donald Trump destroyed George W. Bush’s potential rivals in 2000 is less well known. That year, George W. Bush faced two known threats, and Roger Stone was tasked with neutralizing them: Pat Buchanan, whose 1992 run nearly crippled Bush’s father in the primaries; and Ross Perot’s Reform Party, which drained enough votes in ’92 and ’96 to ensure Clinton victories.”

“So in the lead-up to the 2000 election, Roger Stone cleverly cajoled Pat Buchanan into taking control of Perot’s Reform Party, then used his friend Donald Trump to run a rival campaign against Buchanan for the Reform Party candidacy—only to drop out of the race, and attack Buchanan’s Reform Party as a cesspool full of Hitler lovers and racists. Stone inserted moles like William Von Raab, secretly funded by Trump, into Buchanan’s campaign, according to the Village Voice.”

“The operation wound up destroying the Reform Party’s brand and burying it for good, stinking it up too much for a late entry by Ross Perot. The Reform Party’s chairman, Pat Choate, called the “Trump/Stone operation” a “Republican dirty trick” meant to “disgust people and drive them away from the Reform Party. They were doing everything in their power to make a mess.”

“The point, however, is that it worked: The Reform Party and Pat Buchanan caused no damage whatsoever to George W. Bush’s election bid in 2000, unlike Ralph Nader’s effect on Al Gore’s run.”

Again, Trump has been a Republican for most of his life like his father, Fred Trump, had been but as they operated in NY they had to learn how to get along with the Democratic party establishment here; and not necessarily advertise that they were Republicans too much. Note that soon after he did his job on the Reform party he re-registered as a Republican.

As for 2004-Trump’s ‘Democrat period’-note that he supported W in 2000 and supported McCain in 2008:

“In early 2004, with former Vermont governor and articulate antiwar candidate Howard Dean electrifying Democrats and antiwar voters and posing a potentially deadly threat to the Bush campaign, Roger Stone secretly funded and staffed Al Sharpton, and sent him into the Democratic Party primaries to smear Howard Dean and suck the life and joy out of his campaign. It worked.”

“Again, quoting the great Village Voice reporting by Wayne Barrett from 2004:

While Bush forces like the Club for Growth were buying ads in Iowa assailing then front-runner Howard Dean, Sharpton took center stage at a debate confronting Dean about the absence of blacks in his Vermont cabinet. Stone told the Times that he “helped set the tone and direction” of the Dean attacks, while Charles Halloran, the Sharpton campaign manager installed by Stone, supplied the research. While other Democratic opponents were also attacking Dean, none did it on the advice of a consultant who’s worked in every GOP presidential campaign since his involvement in the Watergate scandals of 1972, including all of the Bush family campaigns.

“The Times quoted Trump in 2004 taking credit for introducing Al Sharpton to Roger Stone. But it was Barrett’s merciless reporting on Sharpton’s “blackface bucks”—the legions of race-baiting Republicans who donated cash and resources to Sharpton’s anti-Howard Dean run—that is something worth re-reading today, as we’re already seeing stunts like using black Tea Party activists to play the same old racism card and thereby sabotage and suck the life out of another popular Vermont candidate, Bernie Sanders….”

The legendary, late Wayne Barrett made it crystal clear Trump’s role in the Stone-Sharpton merger. This brings us to something important regarding both Roger Stone-and Donald Trump; indeed, if you want to know what Trump’s true politics are, he’s a Roger Stone Republican.

And what are Roger Stone’s politics? Ames himself puts it well in his title:’

“Behind the scenes of the Donald Trump – Roger Stone show.”

“Anti-establishment politics is a racket.”

For more on Stone’s politics let’s look at how the inimitable italkyoubored describes them:

“I don’t think Stone ever says what policy he is for in this memoir, and he might well consider a focus on policy a distraction. There is only winning and losing an election, and five methods for achieving a victory recur again and again in races that Stone is involved with, four methods that create a mirror maze of confusion, misdirection, and elimination. The first is through association, by having a candidate receive an endorsement from a person or group who potential supporters of the candidate are predisposed to view as an opponent, or through association with something unquestionably malevolent made via protesters, pamphlets, or other means funded by Stone’s campaign but without any fingerprints. The second is by having a group, funded by allied interests, oppose a candidate or policy due to some larger moral principle that everyone can agree on – the issue is not candidate A versus B, but opposition to crime, gambling, or child abuse. The third is the smear, saying your opponent is corrupt, weak, racist, a rapist, a murderer, a pedophile, always helpfully done not through you, the opponent on which this tar might stick, but through a phantom proxy. This last is used very, very often by Stone. The fourth, and one of the most effective, is through fragmentation of the vote. There is, say, overwhelming support for candidate A, who will raise the minimum wage, versus candidate B, who won’t. You split this overwhelming vote by funding another candidate, who wants to raise the minimum wage even higher, and who chastises candidate A for compromising their principles and being beholden to business interests for not asking for a higher wage. Through a vote split, candidate B, the one who says he believes the condition of workers must be improved, but not through easy sounding solutions like a higher minimum wage, scores a victory. At the same time, you make great efforts to keep the votes for your own candidate or issue from being fragmented. The fifth is vote suppression, of black and latino voters, who tend to poll democrat. The first four have been employed in elections that Stone has been involved in, with Stone often taking credit. The fifth has been employed alongside Stone’s efforts, though perhaps without the collusion of Stone.”

Note that he boasted in his book to depressing Black turnout by pushing the story of Danny Williams-an alleged Black son Bill Clinton fathered out of wedlock and refused to see. 

“In the book’s appendix, you cite traffic figures for the propagation of the meme around Danney Williams, who continues to claim that he is Bill Clinton’s secret love child.”

“Frankly, I think anybody who has seen the multiple videos will say that Danney and his mother and his aunt make a pretty compelling argument. Remember, this isn’t a court of law. This is the court of public opinion. Obviously, many African-American voters believe that Danney is Bill’s son. As I show in the book, in the places targeted [with the Williams meme by the Trump campaign], African-American voter participation was down overall, and Clinton’s share was off from her national averages.”

This is right out of the Nixon-CREEP-Pat Buchanan-Roger Stone playbook. Back to Mark Ames:

“The main thing is that Nixon and his team wanted Muskie out, the Democrats divided, and an unelectable leftist to emerge from the rubble as Nixon’s opponent. What’s painful to swallow is how successful they were in manipulating that outcome.”

Note the similarity to the black bag job against Howard Dean in 2004.

“It was Pat Buchanan who laid out the Nixon ‘72 strategy in a memo titled “Muskie Watch,” advising that the GOP attacks should “focus on those issues that divide the Democrats, not those that unite Republicans.” Buchanan argued:

 “It should exacerbate and elevate those issues on which Democrats are divided—forcing Muskie to either straddle, or come down on one side or the other.”

“Another 1971 Buchanan memo reads,

Maintain as guiding political principle that our great hope for 1972 lies in maintaining or exacerbating the deep Democratic rift.

“That “deep Democratic rift” referred to the far-right populist wing of the party in the South, led by George Wallace; and the left multiracial wing of the party, represented then by black congresswoman Shirley Chisholm, and by McGovern, who wound up winning the nomination.”

“Buchanan argued that having Wallace—Alabama’s symbol of segregation—run from the far-right in the 1972 Democratic primaries (but not run in November as a third party candidate, which would hurt Nixon) would divide the Democratic Party, and turn voters off. Lo and behold, they succeeded in convincing Wallace to run in the Democratic primaries in a dirty quid pro quo, and Wallace was doing a good job of dirtying and dividing the Dems until a real-life Travis Bickle stuck his pistol out from a crowd and popped Wallace’s spinal cord.”

George Wallace was yet another angle of Watergate that hasn’t been appreciated. When Nixon’s defenders would say that Watergate didn’t change the election result they were defining Watergate very narrowly-as solely about the botched break in-which  was a disaster, unlike the Watergate 2.0 break in via hacking the DNC system; this shows you how much more efficient the digital revolution makes GOP dirty tricks.

But it was the actions of CREEP-led by Buchanan, with Stone playing an important role at the tender age of 19-that arguably did materially change the result of the 1972 election. In both taking out Muskie and, indeed, getting Wallace through threats and bribes to run as a Democrat.

“Another Nixon strategy was funding a black left run against the Democrats and against Muskie. Thanks to an amazing, deep-researched piece on Roger Stone on a site called italkyoubored.com, I came across some incredible passages that are a kind of open black box for contemporary politics—unless of course you think Nixon was an exception, and all those bad folks were punished and banished from our peaceable kingdom.”

“In an October 5, 1971 memo, Pat Buchanan—co-founder of the American Conservative magazine & Nixon’s favorite killer, the kind of guy Roger Stone dreamed of becoming (and one day, destroying)—wrote:

Top level consideration should be given to ways and means to promote, assist, and fund a Fourth Party candidacy of the Left Democrats and/or the Black Democrats….There is nothing that can so advance the President’s chances for reelection – not a trip to China, not four and a half per cent unemployment – as a realistic black…campaign….We should continue to champion the cause of the blacks within the Democratic Party.

“As luck should have it, Muskie was hounded at his Florida hotel room during the primaries there by “angry” black picketers—who were secretly under Nixon’s White House supervision—demanding, angrily, that Muskie agree to name an African-American vice presidential candidate. [Source: Rick Perlstein’s “Nixonland”] And just as Pat Buchanan and Nixon hoped – even pledging money to fulfill that hope – New York Democrat Shirley Chisholm announced her independent run for president, the first African-American woman to ever do so. In secret Nixon White House files, Chisholm’s candidacy was part of “Operation Coal”—one of several operations under the rubric “Operation Gemstone” which culminated in the bugging of Watergate, the Democratic Party campaign headquarters.”

“Shortly afterwards, Muskie had his alleged meltdown in front of reporters—as snow fell on his face, he lashed back at the Nixon White House, but some national reporters mistakenly described the melting snowflakes on Muskie’s face as tears, and described his anger as a “breakdown.” Muskie was finished. Sort of like how Vermont front-runner in 2004, Howard Dean, was finished off by the one-two of Dean’s screechy “woo!” gesture, and Al Sharpton accusing Dean of being anti-black during the debates.”

Stone reportedly told Sharpton in 2004 that we share a common obsession, we both hate the Democratic party. 

This is certainly true of Sharpton’s buddy Don King-for that reason I thought it fitting to have a picture of the two of them along with Trump for this post’s featured picture.

One last point in closing. Some have pointed out that Trump donated roughly 50-50 to the parties in the past as proof he’s .

“Another way of judging his political history is through his political donations, which NPR investigated in 2015. According to its report, Trump’s political donations were more or less evenly split until about 2010, when Trump finally stopped donating to Democrats and began donating exclusively to Republicans. At that point he also significantly upped his political donations, with 2012 — the year of Obama’s second presidential election victory — as his biggest year.”

Right. Before 2010 he wasn’t primarily a politician but a businessman in NYC who needed to make friends with powerful Democrats in the city and state. Once he got involved in politics his donations reflected his true beliefs-Republican.

“His history of donations to Democratic presidential candidates was something that Trump got attacked for during the Republican primary. Politifact, for instance, pointed out that Jeb Bush in particular used Trump’s history of Democratic campaign contributions and membership to disparage him. However, Politifact also emphasized that Bush used several claims that were only half true — namely that Trump had been a Democrat for longer than he had been a Republican “in the last decade” and that Trump had donated more to Democrats than to Republicans. Looking at the decade from 2005-2015, Trump was only a Democrat from 2005-2009, and then he was a Republican from 2009-11 and then from 2012 onwards.”

While Bustle is rightly pushing back on the idea that Trump ‘has been a Democrat for most of his life’-as Joe Scarborough has said many times-they get it wrong that Trump was a Democrat from 2005-2009. I mean you can check his registration but he endorsed John McCain in 2008 which to me makes him a Republican. 

UPDATE:

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