Vox Sentences: 20% of Donald Trump’s campaign spending goes to Donald Trump

Donald Trump's pathetic campaign finances; Oakland just went through three police chiefs in nine days; explaining that credit you just got from Amazon.

Vox Sentences is written by Dylan Matthews and Dara Lind.

TOP NEWS

Sad!

Ralph Freso/Getty Images

• Donald Trump spent more money than he raised in the month of May, and ended the month with $1.3 million in the bank.

  [Washington Post / Chris Cillizza ]

• Those are extremely unpresidential numbers. Most Senate candidates in tight races have more than that. Some members of the House have more than that.

  [Jake Sherman via Twitter]

• Trump isn't making a mistake per se. He has a very particular theory of the campaign: that the media will give him so much attention that he has nothing he needs to spend money on.

  [Vox / Ezra Klein]

• This is certainly a novel way to run a campaign. Trump is running a brilliant experiment: If some political scientists say campaign tactics don't change election outcomes much, what happens when a candidate basically doesn't campaign at all?

  [Christian Science Monitor / Peter Grier]

• His apparent strategy is also a sock in the face to the Republican Party, which needs its presidential nominee to help raise money in down-ballot races.

  [Politico / Brianna Gurciullo]

• Alternatively, he could be running a scam. A lot of that money Donald Trump spent was paid out to entities owned by Donald Trump.

  [Vox / Libby Nelson]

Bad apples

Kelly Sullivan/Getty Images

• A sex scandal in the Oakland Police Department has pushed out three police chiefs in nine days and gotten the department placed under civilian control.

  [LA Times / James Queally]

• At the heart of the scandal are claims that several members of the OPD (and other law enforcement agencies) paid for sex with a local girl, including before she turned 18.

  [East Bay Express / Darwin BondGraham and Ali Winston]

• The question of who knew what when about the repeated solicitation and statutory rape has resulted in the ouster of the longtime OPD chief (despite the mayor's claim that he was leaving for "personal" reasons) and then of his two replacements.

  [LA Times / James Queally]

• The Oakland scandal is a reminder that stories of police misconduct are rarely about a "few bad apples." They're often about the cultures and institutions that allow bad actors to flourish.

  [Simple Justice / Scott Greenfield]

• Police are encouraged to support each other, and the institutions that are supposed to provide accountability often have too few resources (or their own agendas).

  [Vice / Jonathan Blanks]

• This affects law enforcement. In Oakland, at least one murder case might get dismissed because a homicide detective shared some evidence with his mistress.

  [ABC 7 / Melanie Woodrow]

• And it affects police legitimacy: It is not a good look when a department that brags about its efforts to stop sex trafficking turns out to be, in many cases, soliciting an underage girl for sex.

  [LA Times / Lee Ramsey]

Bad Apple

Screenshot by Dylan Matthews

• You might have received money from Amazon today, in the form of an account credit. But the money isn't really from Amazon — it's from Apple.

  [BuzzFeed News / Matthew Zeitlin]

• The account credits are the long-awaited payout in a class-action suit brought on behalf of Amazon e-book users against Apple in 2012, accusing Apple of violating antitrust law by forcing publishers to fix high e-book prices.

  [NYT / Brian X. Chen and Nicole Perlroth]

• Brian Fung wrote an extremely clear explanation of what Apple did and why.

  [The Atlantic / Brian Fung]

• Apple lost the case and was ordered to pay $450 million in damages in 2014, but had been trying to appeal. Then the Supreme Court refused to hear the case earlier this year, and Apple ran out of options.

  [Gizmodo / Kate Knibbs]

• Ironically, of course, from the perspective of the publishing industry in 2016, it's Amazon — not Apple — that is the real monopoly threatening publishing.

  [Fortune / Mathew Ingram]

MISCELLANEOUS

Jerry Lewis once wrote, directed, and starred in a "Holocaust drama about a German clown who leads Jewish children into the gas chambers during World War II" and then promptly attempted to bar anyone from seeing it. Thirty minutes from it have finally surfaced. [AV Club / Alex McCown]

• An oral herstory of Xena: Warrior Princess, the campy syndicated fantasy series turned lesbian cult classic.

  [Entertainment Weekly / Natalie Abrams]

• The share of drug clinical trials that succeed is growing. Is that good news, or a sign that regulations are too loose?

  [STAT / Ed Silverman]

• In the last decades of the Soviet Union, officials launched the OGAS project: an effort to build an internet-like network of civilian computers capable of planning the economy and achieving "electronic socialism."

  [Times Higher Education / John Gilbey]

• How one divisive Simpsons joke explains how you think about comedy.

  [NY Mag / Jesse David Fox]

VERBATIM

"On a recent early morning in the central town of Hastings, [Sen. Ben] Sasse stood in a middle school parking lot rubbing Vaseline on his nipples." [Washington Post / Ben Terris]

• "Our suggestion that the universe is filled with dead aliens might disappoint some, but the universe is under no obligation to prevent disappointment."

  [Aditya Chopra and Charley Lineweaver via Vocativ / Joshua Krisch]

• "James D. Zirin, a New York lawyer who later wrote about Cohn, recalled him as 'the strangest-looking man I ever met,' with a face 'contorted in a perpetual ugly sneer that seemed to project an air of unbridled malevolence.'"

  [Washington Post / Robert O'Harrow Jr. and Shawn Boburg]

• "I read the infamous xoJane essay 'My Former Friend’s Death Was a Blessing' with a different variety of stunned than most others probably did. You see, 'Leah' was my best friend. Not metaphorically. I’m not saying that there were similarities. The girl referred to as 'Leah' in the essay was actually my closest girlfriend for more than 20 years. "

  [Huffington Post / Holly Leber]

• "When Marston created Wonder Woman, in 1941, he drew on [Margaret] Sanger’s legacy and inspiration. But he was also determined to keep the influence of Sanger on Wonder Woman a secret."

  [Smithsonian / Jill Lepore]

WATCH THIS

Kim Kardashian's greatest talent [YouTube / Liz Scheltens]

Kim Kardashian

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