The Weekly Sift

This week the Republican establishment continued consolidating behind Donald Trump: Paul Ryan and John McCain are the latest converts. But the endorsement that caught my eye came from Bernie Marcus, the billionaire Home Depot co-founder and former Jeb Bush donor. In this year when Trump sometimes seems to be the only thing to write about, Marcus managed to endorse Trump while saying almost nothing about him. He spent a little more time denouncing Hillary Clinton, but only in vague and rhetorical terms. (She is “hostile to free enterprise”, an idea that I think would shock her Bernie-supporting critics.)

But a lot more of Marcus’ time and feeling went into talking about Home Depot, and (by extension) himself. To me it sounded like a god complaining that we Democrats don’t worship him well enough, and threatening to unleash his wrath in the form of President Trump. That led me to a general explanation of why the Republican donor class must ultimately come around to supporting the party’s nominee, no matter what: Democrats must be punished because we are heretics. I’ll flesh that idea out in “Preserving the Cult of the Job Creator”, which should appear around 9 EDT.

The weekly summary is made up of several notes that could be separate articles: Muhammad Ali’s death has me reflecting on what it used to mean to be heavyweight champion of the world. In that amazing way he has of drawing attention, Donald Trump was in the middle of two stories I couldn’t ignore: his racist denunciation of the judge in the Trump U fraud lawsuit, and his diatribe against the press corps for daring to check his claims about donations to veterans groups. I also had to comment on the zoo gorilla who was killed in Cincinnati after a 3-year-old fell into his enclosure, and in particular on the storm of criticism unleashed on the kid’s mother. And I’ll close with the discovery that a viral photo might not mean what we all assumed it did.