Sunday Roundup

This week marked the beginning of the Olympic Games in Rio, but closer to home, Donald Trump gave us daily reminders of what a truly disastrous performance looks like. Trump opened the week by continuing his bizarre and appalling war against the Khan family, and then claimed to have seen a "top secret" video of U.S. officials unloading $400 million off a plane in Iran -- a claim refuted even by Trump's own communications director. On Wednesday, Joe Scarborough related a truly chilling anecdote told to him by a foreign policy expert: that during a briefing, Trump asked three times, since we have nuclear weapons, "Why can't we use them?" And Trump's unhinged and depraved performance is being judged accordingly. By week's end, one national poll showed him trailing Hillary Clinton by nine points, another by 15 points. And it's not just voters who are abandoning Trump's sinking ship. Three Republican congressmen came out against Trump, with one, outgoing Rep. Richard Hanna from New York, endorsing Clinton. Also endorsing Clinton were Hewlett Packard CEO Meg Whitman and former CIA acting director Michael Morell, who wrote that Trump's character is "already damaging national security," and suggested that Trump has become an "unwitting agent of the Russian Federation." Meanwhile, pressure is increasing on Republican leaders who are remaining silent or hiding behind tacit endorsements. For those who may be waiting anxiously for Trump to "pivot," here's a news flash: There will be no pivot -- to pivot you have to have a moral core to pivot to. We know who Trump is and what he represents, and those leaders still backing him, like Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell, own more and more of it each day. Sitting on the Trump fence is as untenable as building the Trump wall.