Trump’s blunders start to catch up to him
While Clinton basks in a very good week, Trump’s campaign is in disarray.
by Nick Gass, Politico
Donald Trump has been the presumptive Republican nominee for 37 days.
It is not going well.
His bundlers are struggling to raise money. His field organization is a joke; his communications shop is massively outgunned. His aides are squabbling and leaking to the press. Top Republicans are denouncing him daily on national TV. And the latest big national poll — taken after he began attacking a federal judge for being “Mexican” — suggests that his early mistakes are already doing damage.
Meanwhile, Democrats are rallying behind his all-but-certain rival, Hillary Clinton. On Wednesday and Thursday, her campaign orchestrated a dazzling media blitz, booking interviews with 12 news organizations and choreographing the rollout of major endorsements while gently nudging aside Bernie Sanders.
Trump responded with a few tweets.
When Clinton announced her endorsement from President Barack Obama on Thursday afternoon, Trump fired off a relatively tepid message: "Obama just endorsed Crooked Hillary. He wants four more years of Obama—but nobody else does!"
Clinton's team responded within minutes: "Delete your account." A few hours later, Trump offered his rejoinder: "How long did it take your staff of 823 people to think that up--and where are your 33,000 emails that you deleted?" Trump has bristled at comparisons between his staff size and that of Clinton's, using it as another point to argue that his spartan team has been more efficient and lower-cost, suggesting that he would do more with less as president.
The most tangible sign of Trump's floundering, however, came in a Fox News national poll released Thursday night. While recent surveys have shown Trump either closing the gap with or surpassing Clinton, the Fox poll showed Trump's three-point lead in the previous survey against Clinton had turned into a three-point deficit.
The week began with the co-hosts of MSNBC's "Morning Joe" laying into Trump on Monday for his comments about Judge Gonzalo Curiel not being able to effectively preside over the cases against Trump University because of an "inherent conflict of interest" due to his stated call to build a wall on the United States' southern border and Curiel's Mexican heritage.
"It's absolutely racist," Joe Scarborough declared, a sentiment shared by the entire panel. The MSNBC program had regularly featured Trump as a guest, often by telephone, but his last call to the show came on May 20. Since then, radio silence. On June 3, Trump said the show had "lost its way," adding that he hears co-host Mika Brzezinski has "gone wild with hate" and "Joe is Joe."
And then on Tuesday, Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) appeared on the same show to beseech Trump to change course, and quickly, after the attacks on Curiel.
"He has, no doubt, missed an incredible opportunity. He still has time to pivot. He does. Time is running short. But he has time to do that," Corker said, while later adding, "But he has time, and I just encourage him because of the negative trajectory that our country is on today to take advantage and know that there are people everywhere that would come to his aid if he would do that. And I'm hoping he's going to do that and I'm going to continue to encourage it until it's too late."
Hours later, House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) called Trump's words about Curiel "the textbook definition of a racist comment," while reiterating that he would still support his party's nominee against Clinton, who hours earlier had crossed the threshold of delegates necessary to clinch the Democratic nomination.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) sounded a similar note later Tuesday, telling a group of reporters that it is time for Trump to "to quit attacking various people you competed with or various minority groups in the country and get on message."
By Wednesday, the day after Trump swept up the final contests on the GOP primary calendar, Scarborough was lacing into the presumptive nominee in a lengthy segment at the top of the show, demanding that Trump prove to him personally that he is not a bigot.
“Donald, guess what, I’m not going to support you until you get your act together. You’re acting like a bush-league loser, you’re acting like a racist, you’re acting like a bigot,” Scarborough remarked. “This is called art of the deal. I’m taking my deal off the table. Until you come to the table and get on the other side of the table and prove to me you’re not a bigot and you don’t take my party down in the ditch, you don’t have my endorsement.”
Trump answered Scarborough's latest scathing critique with two tweets. "Nobody is watching @Morning_Joe anymore. Gone off the deep end - bad ratings. You won't believe what I am watching now!" Trump wrote. (A spokeswoman for Trump did not respond to a request for comment on what he was watching instead.)
Later the same day, the leader of an influential group of conservative House Republicans said he would like to see "more vision and less trash talk" from his party's presumptive nominee.
"Mr. Trump needs to show how he will address the critical issues on the minds of Americans: national security and economic opportunity for hardworking American families," Rep. Bill Flores (R-Texas), chairman of the Republican Study Committee, said in a statement. "Americans need to see more vision and less trash talk. I was incredibly angry to see Mr. Trump question a judge's motives because of his ethnicity."
Throughout the tumultuous week, prominent Republicans were continuing to attempt to square their support of Trump as their party's nominee against Clinton with his past comments by which they clearly could not abide.
"I stand by everything I said during the campaign," Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) told The Weekly Standard on Thursday, including his declaration that the U.S. cannot give "the nuclear codes of the United States to an erratic individual."
Ryan, speaking to MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell on Thursday, said that while he is glad Trump walked back his comments on Curiel, he still has "some work to do" in order to build a campaign that everyone "can all be proud of." Even so, the Wisconsin Republican remarked to both Mitchell and ABC's George Stephanpoulos in an interview set to air in full on Sunday that Trump has the appropriate temperament to be president.
“I think his stage presence is something different than, say, what I would do," Ryan told Mitchell. "But in my personal interactions, I find him to have a very even-handed temperament.”
Ryan gave this answer to Stephanpoulos: "I can't speak for his stage presence but in private, it's much better than what you see on stage."
For all his warts, Trump is "certainly better than Hillary Clinton," Ryan said in the same interview, adding that his policies and principles have a better chance of becoming law with the presumptive Republican nominee in the White House.
"Even if that president then espouses values that you don't share?" Stephanopoulos asked.
"I don't know that he believes that in his heart," Ryan responded. "He don't know what's in his heart but I do think, hope, and believe that he's going to improve the tenor of the campaign, the tone and the kind of campaign that he's going to run. I believe we need to be inspirational, aspirational and inclusive and that to me is what the country is hungry for."
Stephanopoulos shot back: "But that's not the campaign that Donald Trump has been running."
"It's not," Ryan said, "and I hope that it gets there."
Trump's own surrogates, meanwhile, are in damage control mode, with Ben Carson telling POLITICO on Thursday that Trump has conceded that his racially charged comments against Judge Curiel were a mistake. “He fully recognizes that that was not the right thing to say,” Carson said in an interview, noting he’s heard Trump say so himself during a private meeting this week at Trump Tower.
But that isn't stopping Trump from pursuing racially loaded attacks.
"Pocahontas is at it again! Goofy Elizabeth Warren, one of the least productive U.S. Senators, has a nasty mouth. Hope she is V.P. choice," Trump tweeted Friday morning.
Warren immediately fired back. "No, seriously -- Delete your account," she tweeted.
Trump's blunders catching up to him
