There’s a new movie about the Obamas’ first date, and not once does the Barack character use the words “radical Islamic terrorism.” Paul LePage apologized for calling someone a “son-of-a-bitch socialist cocksucker” and Al Baldasaro said he regretted “the way” he said Hillary Clinton should be shot by a firing squad, so civility is still alive in our politics. And the Trump campaign hired a guy Chris Christie fired for the Bridgegate scandal, which means America can expect a hell of a traffic jam on its way home from Hillary Clinton’s inauguration. This is HUFFPOST HILL for Friday, August 26th, 2016:

HOW DONALD TRUMP HANDLES STRESS - This old Trump quote from 2004, a response to a Larry King Live caller asking how he handles stress, made the rounds today: “I try and tell myself it doesn’t matter. Nothing matters. If you tell yourself it doesn’t matter, like you do shows, you do this, you do that and then you have earthquakes in India where 400,000 people get killed. Honestly, it doesn’t matter. That’s how I handle stress.” [CNN]

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NOBODY WANTS TO DEFEND TRUMP - Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell would totally comment on Clinton’s anti-Trump speech, but their DVRs are broken and they missed it. Philip Bump: “[T]he day after Hillary Clinton delivered a stinging indictment of Donald Trump, the Republican Party’s ostensible leader, on the same subject, other Republican leaders haven’t risen to his defense. The Republican Party has tweeted repeatedly since Clinton’s speech, praising the National Park Service, hitting Clinton on her foundation and pledging to return to the Constitution. It offered no press release in defense of its nominee, issuing one only about Clinton having not held a press conference since last year. ... MSNBC’s Benjy Sarlin (who noticed the GOP’s silence early) points out that his network asked party spokesman Sean Spicer about the lack of a coordinated rebuttal to Clinton. ‘I don’t know,’ Spicer said. ‘I think Congress is in recess.’” [WaPo]

@frankthorp: Recap: Asked for response to Clinton’s ‘alt-right’ speech:

Ryan spox: “Doubt he saw it.”

McConnell spox: “I don’t think he saw the speech.”

TRUMP HIRES POLITICAL REVENGE EXPERT - Maggie Haberman and Kate Zernike: “Donald J. Trump’s campaign has hired Bill Stepien, a former top aide to Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, whose role in the Bridgegate scandal led to his firing and denied him the central role he was expected to play in the governor’s presidential run.” [NYT]

Hear Arthur Delaney declare a HYPOCRISY ALERT with Elise Foley and Jason Linkins on the latest HuffPost Politics podcast.

WHY TRUMP IS RUNNING FOR PRESIDENT - Andrew Kaczynski: “Eric Trump, listing off reasons his father is running for president, said in an interview this week that one of the motivations was the renaming of the White House Christmas tree to ‘holiday tree.’ The tree placed on the White House lawn during the holiday season is still called the ‘National Christmas Tree.’ ‘He opens up the paper each morning and sees our nation’s leaders giving a hundred billion dollars to Iran, or he opens the paper and some new school district has just eliminated the ability for its students to say the pledge of allegiance, or some fire department in some town is ordered by the mayor to no longer fly the American flag on the back of a fire truck,’ Trump told James Robison in an interview posted this week. ‘Or he sees the tree on the White House lawn has been renamed ‘Holiday tree’ instead of ‘Christmas tree,’’ continued Trump.” [BuzzFeed]

Ben Carson thinks Donald Trump should stop calling Hillary Clinton a bigot.

TRUMP WASN’T ALWAYS SO UNPOPULAR WITH BLACK PEOPLE - Sam Stein: “When Trump explored a presidential bid back in 2000, his appeal to minority groups seemed to be a big selling point. A Fortune article from that time cited a 800-person survey conducted by Democratic pollster Rob Schroth. In it, Trump had a 67 percent favorable rating among blacks (21 percent unfavorable) as well as a 62 percent favorable rating among Hispanics. ... General Steele, who is half of the hip-hop duo Smif-N-Wessun, more or less echoed Stone’s theory in explaining why they recorded the song ‘Black Trump’ nearly two decades ago. Trump, to him, was a ‘shark’ ― a bigger-than-life, money-focused hustler who made it in his city ... If he had to record ‘Black Trump’ today, Steele said, it would ‘probably come out differently.’ ‘I think he is crazy, man,’ Steele said.” [HuffPost]

TRUMP OK WITH GUY WHO DOESN’T SEEM OK - In July, Al Baldasaro, a Republican state representative in New Hampshire, said Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton “should be put in the firing line and shot for treason.” And now Donald Trump says he is unfamiliar with the remarks. “I didn’t know that but I will tell you he’s a very fine person,” Trump told a New Hampshire TV station on Thursday. “He is a person that loves the military and loves the veterans.” Baldasaro is an advisor to the Trump campaign who has spoken at Trump events, and he was a delegate to the Republican National Convention. His widely-reported call for Clinton’s execution prompted an investigation by the Secret Service, not to mention lots of condemnation. And Trump didn’t know that? The reporter asked again if Trump condoned Baldasaro’s call for Clinton’s execution. “I don’t know what he said,” Trump insisted. “You’d have to show me what he said.” [HuffPost]

Trump’s new chief of staff was charged with domestic violence in the 1990s.

JOHN MCCAIN’S OPPONENT PLAYING THE ‘MY OPPONENT MIGHT DIE’ CARD - Burgess Everett in Phoenix: “John McCain’s underdog opponent in next week’s primary election is going there: Should he win, Kelli Ward told POLITICO flatly on Thursday, the soon-to-be 80-year-old senator may not live to finish out his six-year term. ‘I’m a doctor. The life expectancy of the American male is not 86. It’s less,’ Ward said in an interview here.” [Politico]

WHAT WE TALK ABOUT WHEN WE TALK ABOUT THE UNTIMELY DEMISE OF OUR POLITICAL OPPONENTS - Baldasaro told BuzzFeed today said regrets saying Hillary should be shot “the way I did.” Once again, Hillary Clinton demonstrated the more professional way to riff about an opponent’s death when in 2008 she brought up RFK’s assassination to justify staying in the Dem primary. She also very tactfully apologized, unlike these creeps.

NEW OBAMA FAN FIC OUT IN THEATERS AND ELISE FOLEY REVIEWS THE PREVIEW: The movie “Southside with You” is out this weekend, based on Barack and Michelle Obama’s first date. I haven’t seen it, but I did watch the trailer and saw it has a high score on Rotten Tomatoes. The Michelle Obama character seems like a badass lady who won’t put up with nonsense, and says things like “this is not a date” a lot. They seem to do a lot on their date but it stays light outside for most of it ― what time did the date start? I don’t know how it ends but I hope they get together. Thanks, Elise!

Trump has a new app called America First, which allows you to earn points for answering Trump trivia (hint: his middle name is John), buying anti-Hillary apparel and spamming your friends.

SHOCK POLLS: VOTERS LESS RACIST THAN TRUMP - With Ariel Edwards-Levy: “[T]he fact that he was willing to backpedal at all shows his campaign might be aware of another reality: that most voters aren’t as hardline on deportations as he was. ... Trump’s backers are more prone than the rest of the nation to anti-immigration sentiment, but even they have never been an entirely solid bloc. According to a March poll, about three-quarters of all voters, including 47 percent of Trump’s primary supporters believed that undocumented immigrants should be allowed to stay in the country legally. While the 42 percent of Trump’s supporters who supported a national law enforcement effort to deport all undocumented immigrants was far higher than the 19 percent of all voters who favored that proposal, it still represented less than half of the businessman’s core supporters. Currently, a 51 percent majority of Trump’s general election backers consider creating a pathway to citizenship at least as much as a priority as amping up border security and law enforcement, although if pressed to pick one approach, they overwhelmingly lean toward protecting the borders.” [HuffPost]

BECAUSE YOU’VE READ THIS FAR - This kid is pumped about going back to school.

CRAZY DAY CAPS CRAZY WEEK FOR PAUL LEPAGE - First, the day after he reveals he keeps a binder of mugshots to prove he’s not racist, we discovered he said this on a Democratic lawmaker’s voicemail: “I want to talk to you. I want you to prove that I’m a racist. I’ve spent my life helping black people and you little son-of-a-bitch, socialist cocksucker.” Then he apologized. Then he said this: “You shoot at the enemy. You try to identify the enemy. And the enemy right now, the overwhelming majority right now coming in are people of color or people of Hispanic origin. I can’t help that. I just can’t help it. Those are the facts.” Whew. Too much LePage this week.

FREEDOM CAUCUS EXTENDING ITS TENTACLES - Rachel Bade: “Lawmakers and political operatives aligned with House GOP leadership are growing increasingly concerned that the powerful conservative outside group Club for Growth is taking marching orders from their arch-nemesis: The House Freedom Caucus. The Club’s super PAC has spent more than $3.7 million to boost a half-dozen Republican primary candidates who’ve pledged publicly or privately to join the Freedom Caucus, plus several of their current members in tough races. Some of the candidates’ policy positions are at odds with the Club’s positions, raising eyebrows among its detractors. The group’s latest endorsee, Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.), surprised many: The group spent more than $600,000 against him four years ago after Gosar earned a middling 63 percent on its internal scorecard, in part because of his votes on spending bills.” [Politico]

COMFORT FOOD

- Cats being jerks.

- The most frightening scared-of-heights video ever.

- This Hillary Clinton feats of strength video is kinda funny.

- A deep dive into the legend of the Choco Taco.

- A woman explains her vagenda for the day.

TWITTERAMA

@Jamie1947: media sitting on some “Gary Johnson has no eyebrows” bombshells, but they won’t release until after Labor Day. this is how they manipulate

@ErikWemple: I saw a man in National Park Service uniform today and said “Happy 100th anniversary!” He said, “Same to you.”

@diopter: tfw you sit down in a conference room & it looks like someone vigorously scratched their scalp everywhere for 10 mins

@ashleyfeinberg: i’m finally watching the buzzfeed pee-drinking video

Got something to add? Send tips/quotes/stories/photos/events/fundraisers/job movement/juicy miscellanea to Eliot Nelson (eliot@huffingtonpost.com) or Arthur Delaney (arthur@huffingtonpost.com).











