,
11 tweets,
3 min read
Read on Twitter
Many roads of Donald Trump's political life and current environment lead back to the 2010 gubernatorial primary between Rick Lazio and Carl Paladino in NY. It was the year Ed Cox first was chairman, the year the RNC wanted to freeze out NY from victory fund programs ...
...because they didn't think they could trust Cox with the money. Cox that year tried recruiting a Democrat from Long Island, Steve Levy, to run for governor as a Republican. at the same time Cox's son was running in a GOP primary for the Zeldin seat in Suffolk Cty, LI...
...At the time Cox was trying to recruit Levy, the RGA had a fresh-faced exec director named Nick Ayers, who said favorable things about Levy despite him being a Dem. Both Levy and Chris Cox had a strategist in common. His name was @jwgop.
When Chris Cox's campaign crashed and burned, and Levy also unraveled after he was shut out of the primary, Ed Cox tilted toward Lazio over Paladino, a western NY businessman whose campaign of demagoguery was something of a proto-type for the Trump campaign...
...Paladino was advised by @MichaelRCaputo. Paladino crushed Lazio by something like 2-to-1 in the GOP primary in September, a sign of the tea party wave to come two months later and the same energy that Trump would tap into five years later. And Trump that year? ...
...he was preparing for a political campaign of his own, possibly. And he was advised by Roger Stone that his history of giving to Democrats was a problem. So he decided to host a fundraiser for the RGA, the same group where Nick Ayers was exec director...
...Ayers, of course, was recently the Pence aide and wished-for WH chief-of-staff who Trump wanted to succeed John Kelly. Here's an item about that Trump fundraiser for the RGA, posted that year on a little-read blog about NY politics. @LPDonovan politico.com/blogs/maggieha…
And I'm reminded that Trump gave money to the RGA a year earlier, in 2009, to help his friend, @GovChristie, in his campaign, establishing his record of GOP giving to that committee.
...annnd I’m also reminded that Roger Stone was part of the 2010 gubernatorial run, advising a third-party candidate whose main role was pulling votes from the Democrat. Recall that Stone helped Gary Johnson, third-party national candidate in 2012. Stone wasn’t w Johnson in ...
...2016. But it’s always worth remembering that the presence of Johnson and Jill Stein in 2016 allowed Trump plurality wins in some states.
...Also reminded by @NunbergSam that Paladino's major issue in the primary was objecting to a planned mosque a few blocks from the WTC site, still being rebuilt after 9/11. Less than a year later, Trump, a possible prez candidate, questioned Obama's legitimacy as a US citizen.
