Trump update

Michael C. Bender, NY Times - Working-class voters delivered the Republican Party to Donald J. Trump. College-educated conservatives may ensure that he keeps it.Often overlooked in an increasingly blue-collar party, voters with a college degree remain at the heart of the lingering Republican cold war over abortion, foreign policy and cultural issues.These voters, who have long been more skeptical of Mr. Trump, have quietly powered his remarkable political recovery inside the party — a turnaround over the past year that has notably coincided with a cascade of 91 felony charges in four criminal cases.Even as Mr. Trump dominates Republican primary polls ahead of the Iowa caucuses on Monday, it was only a year ago that he trailed Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida in some surveys — a deficit due largely to the former president’s weakness among college-educated voters. Mr. DeSantis’s advisers viewed the party’s educational divide as a potential launching point to overtake Mr. Trump for the nomination. MORE

NBC News - Donald Trump is sparking fears among those who understand the inner workings of the Pentagon that he would convert the nonpartisan U.S. military into the muscular arm of his political agenda as he makes comments about dictatorship and devalues the checks and balances that underpin the nation’s two-century-old democracy.A circle of appointees independent of Trump’s political operation steered him away from ideas that would have pushed the limits of presidential power in his last term, according to books they’ve written and testimony given to Congress. Most were gone by the end. In a new term, many former officials worry that Trump would instead surround himself with loyalists unwilling to say no. Trump has raised fresh questions about his intentions if he regains power by putting forward a legal theory that a president would be free to do nearly anything with impunity — including assassinate political rivals — so long as Congress can’t muster the votes to impeach him and throw him out of office. MORE

Two interesting Trump quotes - “I speak in long complex sentences, and I have a lot of material in each paragraph…I talk about a lot of different things and cover a lot of territory.” ... Also Trump: “This is a tough hurricane. One of the wettest we've ever seen from the standpoint of water."  From RpsAgainstTrump