Mr Trump said during his announcement speech: "I'm using my own money. I'm not using the lobbyists. I'm not using donors. I don't care. I'm really rich."

The real estate tycoon claims a personal fortune in excess of $US10 billion, although analysis from Bloomberg puts his worth at $US2.9 billion.

In 2012, combined spending on the presidential election was around $US2.6 billion.

In 1992, businessman H. Ross Perot drew heavily on his fortune as founder of the tech giant EDS to pour $US63.5 million into his quixotic independent presidential campaign.

Mr Perot won almost 19 per cent of the popular vote, but failed to win a single state, much less the presidency.

In 1996 Mr Perot invested a more modest $US8.2 million into a second presidential campaign as a Reform Party candidate, this time only attracting 8.4 per cent of the vote.

read more: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-08-05/fact-file-president-donald-trump-republican-nomination/6660786

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what this does not tell you is that it appears every time Donald ventures bit the dust he did not go bankrupt but you did... and he kept the cash... Lovely. 

“We get a traitor, a no-good, rotten traitor like Bergdahl,” said Donald Trump, the current frontrunner of the GOP primary pack. “And they get five killers that they most wanted in the whole world, who are right now back on the battlefield, trying to kill everybody, including us. Okay? What kind of a deal is this?”

The case of Bowe Bergdahl, the Army sergeant retrieved in a prisoner exchange with the Taliban last year and subsequently brought up on desertion charges, has never lacked for heated rhetoric, but the coincidence of his case’s progress with the 2016 primary season has dramatically raised the volume. While Jack Nicholson’s character in the film “A Few Good Men” may have shouted “You can’t handle the truth!” the question in the Berghdahl case is whether anyone will be able to hear the truth over the noise.

Contrary to Trump’s declarations, Bergdahl has not yet been convicted of anything, much less treason, and the five prisoners (at least four of whom were political, moderate Taliban never accused of direct violence) swapped for him back in June are still on travel restriction and nowhere near “the battlefield.” Nevertheless, Trump knows such red meat, spoiled as it may be, is the coin of the realm with grassroots audiences.

Read more: http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/will-politics-bury-bowe-bergdahl/

Donald Trump axed from event over Megyn Kelly blood comment

• A major US conservative forum has dropped Donald Trump as a speaker, saying it was unacceptable for him to suggest that a journalist was tough on him because she was menstruating.

Mr Trump said Megyn Kelly of Fox News "had blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever".

Ms Kelly had challenged him on remarks he made about women during a TV debate.

Amid the controversy it emerged that Mr Trump's top political adviser had left his campaign.

Mr Trump said he had sacked Roger Stone. But Mr Stone later tweeted that the Republican contender "didn't fire me - I fired Trump", adding that he disagreed with the "diversion" created by the comments about Ms Kelly.

Mr Trump was one of 10 Republican presidential candidates in a TV debate co-hosted by Ms Kelly on Thursday, which was watched by a record 24 million people.

Early on in the debate, Ms Kelly asked him why voters should elect a man who has called women "fat pigs, dogs, slobs and disgusting animals".

Mr Trump joked that he only said that about TV personality Rosie O'Donnell before adding: "I don't have time for total political correctness."

After the debate, he took to Twitter to say Ms Kelly had "really bombed" and that she hadn't been "very good or professional".

Speaking on CNN, he said Ms Kelly was "a lightweight" and that he "couldn't care less about her", before making the comment about blood.

Conservative group RedState said Mr Trump was implying she was hormonal. Mr Trump later denied this in a tweet.

"Re Megyn Kelly quote: 'you could see there was blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever' (NOSE)," he wrote.

A later statement from his campaign said "only a deviant" would think Mr Trump meant anything else.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-33833516 

watch: http://www.motherjones.com/contributor/2015/08/is-true-love-real

Controversial U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump is a clickbait distraction from an uncomfortable discussion about what ails the western world, writes American in Sweden Professor Christian Christensen (via Common Dreams).

Spray-tanned face and white teeth exploding through the front pages of newspapers and magazines. Implausible hair mesmerising on Twitter and Facebook. Comments on female journalists and illegal Mexican immigrants echoing across the ether. It is likely that Donald Trump will be nothing more than an ephemeral political phenomenon, but he is still a phenomenon.

Politically divisive at home, Trump unifies internationally. My utterly subjective sense is that he is the American many global citizens have been waiting for since the end of the George W. Bush presidency: an American the world can look at and ridicule, a symbol of U.S. arrogance and anti-intellectualism.

Paul Thomas of the New Zealand Herald put this view best when he wrote that:

'Trump personifies everything the rest of the world despises about America: casual racism, crass materialism, relentless self-aggrandisement, vulgarity on an epic scale. He is the Ugly American in excelsis.'

Bashing the U.S. is a favorite pastime of portions of the international press because we Americans have made it so damn easy. We trumpet the fact that our nation is created and protected by God. We parade our guns as evidence of freedom. We revel in a military power we are unafraid to use. We laugh in the face of facts and science. We elected George W. Bush. Twice.

And yet Trump is not the only phenomenon on the U.S. political scene. Another presidential hopeful, also unlikely to get the final nomination, is receiving far less ink internationally than his casino-owning counterpart. As Bernie Sanders mounts an unlikely challenge to Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination, the media give him short shrift in favor of yet more Trumpisms.

In Sanders, we have a candidate who espouses many of the political values supposedly held dear to Europeans: an opposition to economic inequality, a belief in the need for a liveable wage and promotion of universal healthcare. Sanders is even willing to out himself as a fan of Scandinavian welfare state politics. He’s getting huge numbers at his speeches and rallies. On top of this, he is smart, articulate and passionate.

Given these facts, there is more than a little irony in this international media obsession with Trump. This isn’t to say that the international media are rooting for U.S. failure or embarrassment  –  the global love affair with Obama in 2008 puts that argument to bed  –  but rather that when a Trump-esque figure emerges in the U.S. (think: Sarah Palin), a certain measure of schadenfreude becomes palpable.

This is not a uniquely American trait. Europe and the U.S. often hold mirrors up to each other, sometimes revelling in the reflected misfortune. The collapse of the Greek economy, for example, was met with glee by portions of the right-wing U.S. media, who used the crisis to score points about the weakness of the EU and the failure of “socialist” policies.

What Trump does for Europe, for example, is to make it feel better about itself: "Things might be bad here, but at least we don’t have…that."

The problem, of course, is that many of the policies espoused by Trump are not far off what major political parties propose in Europe. The bluster and bombast of people like Trump and Palin make it easy to dismiss a European slide into American-style politics, yet if we strip away the fake tan and hairspray, things can get uncomfortably close.

A recent (albeit contested) poll in Sweden, for example, put the anti-immigration Sweden Democrats as the most popular party in the country. France’s Front National scored a huge result in the 2014 EU elections. Despite concerns over the privatisation of the National Health Service, David Cameron defied all predictions and was re-elected in the UK. The list goes on. In the relationship between Europe and the U.S., Europe has considered itself to hold the monopoly on social democratic values. The treatment received by Labour leadership hopeful Jeremy Corbyn by substantial portions of the UK press and political establishment, however, is a reminder that politics once considered part of the European mainstream 20 years ago are now openly ridiculed as pie-in-the-sky radicalism.

read more: https://independentaustralia.net/politics/politics-display/donald-trump-is-global-journalisms-american-junk-food,8097

See also:

http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/18626

http://yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/17048