As most Americans enjoyed Labor Day, Donald Trump found himself staring into the political abyss.
Imagine his surprise and disappointment. The new Donald was pivoting! He had a message -- Hillary Clinton is bad. His new campaign manager gave him new words to read from a Teleprompter. He was the candidate of change -- any change. He was reaching out to black people to impress white people. He might even allow a few undocumented immigrants to linger -- though maybe not. And after 14 months of lying, some polls even said that he was still more "trusted"than Clinton -- though not so much.
Why am I still behind, Trump must wonder, when those emails are sticking to Hillary's shoes like chewing gum. Sometimes she even stepped in it herself. What did she think Colin Powell was going to say -- that he begged her to use a private server? And so what if none of the emails actually show political corruption? Millions of Americans believed him when he called the Clinton Foundation "the most corrupt enterprise in political history" -- especially the ones who have never heard of Richard Nixon. And who the hell cares about Caligula -- whoever he was.
Plus, The Donald had a great new team to help him appeal to women -- Steve Bannon, Roger Ailes, and Julian Assange. After all, those domestic violence charges against Steve were 20 years old. No one had actually accused Roger of rape, just being a tough negotiator. And those rape charges against Julian are entirely unproven, just like his connection to those helpful hackers in Russian intelligence who keep siphoning him Hillary's emails.
World-class recruits, one imagines Trump thinking. And that Kellyanne Conway is tougher than any man, or even Rachel Maddow...
But enough. Sorry, readers, I just can't keep this up -- trying to think like Donald Trump is too exhausting. So instead I will try to explore why, come November, none of these changes will save him from himself.
True, the seemingly infinite supply of emails will dog Hillary Clinton until election day, and some of her wounds are self-inflicted. But despite all the media piety about the "appearance of impropriety" with respect to the Clinton Foundation, the substance of these emails contains a paucity of the improper. One strains to find a flyspeck of wrongdoing in the dunghill of reportage.
And whenever things get bad, Clinton -- or Trump himself -- have proven adroit at shifting the subject to Trump's biggest weakness: Trump himself. That is why her linkage of Trump with the bigoted "alt-right" was so devastating and persuasive -- Trump himself has seeded the ground.
Take his early record of housing discrimination. Or his noxious comments about African-American employees. Or his central role in fostering the cynical racism of the birther movement. Or his toxic comments about Mexicans or Muslims. Or his "outreach" to blacks by stereotyping blacks and characterizing black communities as cesspools of violence, drugs and murder. Or his grotesque tweet exploiting the death of Dwayne Wade's cousin by gunfire in Chicago as confirming his portrait of black lives. Or his designation of the head of Breitbart.com, an " alt-right" website awash in racism, as his campaign's CEO.
In contrast, his clumsy labeling of Clinton as a "bigot" fell flat. If he was trying to characterize Democratic policies toward African-Americans as cynical and self-serving, he is too ignorant to make the point. And tarring Clinton as a racist, bereft of evidence, serves only as a reminder of who Trump is -- a racist prone to groundless accusations.
Of little help was his drive-by photo op in an African-American neighborhood in Detroit, accompanied by the extraterrestrial Ben Carson. Its essence was foreshadowed by a comedic prelude: the revelation of a script for a taped interview wherein Trump would be queried by a black pastor. Not only did the Trump campaign provide the questions -- it had written out answers to be memorized by their clueless candidate.
This drove home a devastating truth -- without help, Trump has nothing to say to black Americans. Events confirmed this. Briefly visiting Carson's childhood home, Trump resembled a tourist entering a foreign country. And when he appeared at a black church, he read a few scripted sentiments so obviously alien to his thinking that every word must have come as a surprise -- to Trump himself.
Nowhere did he acknowledge any words or actions -- in this campaign, or ever -- which might have offended his audience. But given that he did not know his audience, save as interchangeable props in his dystopian view of black America, perhaps he had no language for this. To imagine Bill Clinton in his place, joyfully immersed in the spiritual life of the parishioners, is to capture the shallowness of Trump's performance. It did not last long.
Equally hollow was his recitation of "policy speeches" meant to dress him up in substance.
His prescriptions for the economy combined the worst of two worlds. First, he caved in completely to the GOP's hoary economic dogma: a budget-busting combination of tax cuts for the rich and corporations, with a special tip for the donor class -- a total repeal of the estate tax which would benefit the wealthiest .02 percent of Americans. Reversing course, he then doubled down on his potentially ruinous economic populism, pledging to kill trade deals and slap tariffs on the Chinese. One cringes to think what this schizoid Donald would do our economy.
Never did Trump concede that he cannot exhume jobs killed by automation and the global economy. Nowhere did he promise struggling Americans the one thing that could help -- retraining, education, and help in relocation for those displaced by the new economy. Instead of substance, the whole thing smacked of fraud.
Similarly, his speech on fighting ISIS interspersed new absurdities among the old ones. He would bar immigration from countries which breed terrorism. Who? Germany, France, Belgium -- or all three? He promised "extreme vetting" of immigrants -- including probing inquiries as to whether the applicant believed in things like honor killings, presumably prompting a wave of confessions from guilt-stricken would-be terrorists. He pledged to evaluate other countries based solely on their help against ISIS, ignoring a host of areas -- such as global warming and nuclear proliferation -- where we need the assistance of governments with interests of their own.
To this he added a few incendiary old favorites -- like approving torture and seizing oil fields in the Middle East. All in all, Trump succeeded only in reducing counter-terrorism to a video game, proving that nonsense is not improved merely by reading it from a Teleprompter.
But nothing captured Trump's intellectual and emotional twitchiness better than his multiple feints on his core issue, immigration.
In the primaries, that was how he made his bones -- as a wall-building, Mexican-deporting, America First hardliner. And he loved it -- so much that he conjured a "deportation force" to perform the impossible task of kicking out all 11 million undocumented immigrants. And anytime a rally became too decorous to sate his need for adoration, he would put up the wall again and demand to know who would pay for it, provoking his rapturous fans to feed the beast by shouting "Mexico!"
But that, sadly for Trump, was then. In recent weeks his new campaign team broke the news that a lot of voters thought his policies more than a bit inhumane -- not simply Hispanics and other minorities, but the suburban whites he would need to have a prayer of becoming president. Maybe, just maybe, he ought to soft-pedal the stuff about shipping out every last grandmother, wife, and kid.
For Trump, this must have been hard to take. He'd only been having fun, after all -- and it was lots of fun! Still, the idea of getting slaughtered was surely painful. So what was an egotist to do?
No one seemed to know -- not Trump, not his team. In one semi-incoherent day Trump suggested that he was "softening" on mass deportations, then appeared to reverse himself. At length it was announced that Trump would clarify all in a speech to be given in Phoenix.
For the next few days, his surrogates implied that he would focus on expelling criminals instead of the entire undocumented population. The TV commentariat exhausted itself -- and the rest of us -- in wondering whether this newly empathic Trump would mollify white suburbanites or alienate his hard-core base. Breathlessly, we awaited his debut.
Abruptly, on the day of his speech Trump flew to Mexico to meet with President Pena Nieto who, to the mystification of all, had agreed to serve as a prop for Trump's campaign. In the joint appearance which followed, Trump excited awe and wonder by reading from a Teleprompter in a normal tone of voice. Even more striking, in the view of many, was his diplomatic avoidance -- at least by his own account -- of raising with Pena Nieto who would pay for his wall. And so for the next several hours, cable news proclaimed the advent of a statesmanlike Donald on the world stage, authoring a masterstroke of geopolitical theater.
As often, the effect was tarnished by a Twitter war -- precipitated, in this case, by the Mexican president's insistence that he had told Trump that his country would never pay for the wall. This was accompanied by bitter tweets from all quarters of Mexico, condemning the hapless Pena Nieto for meeting with Trump at all. By the time Trump landed in Phoenix, theater was descending to farce, and the diplomat had morphed into a demagogue hungry to whip up a crowd.
And so the red meat flew. Trump was building that wall, and Mexico was paying for it. Mexican immigrants were murdering Americans and taking their jobs. His deportation force was going after the hordes of Mexican criminals first, but no one was safe from deportation, and any hope of legal status was out the window. The only nuance, if it was one, was his failure to address the subject of purposeful mass deportations -- in the hope that voters for or against would see Trump as their champion.
Thus, after all of the confusion, obfuscation and hints of a new direction, nothing much had changed -- not the tone, or the appeals to racial resentment, or the insatiable craving to foment mass anger and frenzy. The GOP's die was cast: their candidate was unwilling, or unable, to kick the hard line which had won him the primaries and which, in all likelihood, would precipitate his defeat in November -- killing off other Republicans in the bargain.
This was hardly a shock. Some in the party remained pathetically grateful whenever he stuck to a script. But the less anesthetized had long since comprehended that they were stuck with a nightmare nominee: a content-free narcissist whose erratic behaviors disqualified him for the presidency and, far worse in their eyes, made him less a threat to Hillary Clinton than to his nominal party, about which -- surprise -- he cared not at all.
Their conundrum grows ever more excruciating -- and embarrassing. Party leaders like Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan remain determined to ride out the hurricane by patching up Trump's leaky boat, hoping to reach dry land after he drowned in November. The price has been a series of verbal contortions in which they distance themselves from his most offensive effusions, while invoking the horrors of Clinton as a reason to support him. They might look small now, the reasoning went, but their party would be grateful to those who steered the boat to safety.
This, too, is the plight of Reince Priebus. The usual nominee for president supplies his own campaign apparatus fueled by boatloads of money raised from his own donor base. Far from a source of funding, Trump has turned out to be a freeloader, sponging off the party's overtaxed resources, while straining his relationship with an RNC already dismayed by his disorganization and indiscipline. And so Priebus struggles to save his House and Senate candidates by buttressing the man who threatens to bring them down, all the while pretending that Trump is fit to be president -- at least until it becomes exigent to ditch him in all but name.
Such are the burdens of collective responsibility. Sustained by the rationale that preserving their fractious party served the larger good, these men have put political courage and even decency on hold. This has earned them the widespread scorn of commentators. But perhaps more should have noticed that many Republicans who disowned Trump, however sincerely, had little but their own interests to think of, and even less to lose.
Take the Republican senators who have disowned or explicitly distanced themselves from Trump. Susan Collins, Ben Sasse, Jeff Flake, Lindsey Graham and the inimitable Ted Cruz are not up for reelection. And Mark Kirk is so endangered that rejecting Trump can only help. Still, their collective critique is a telling reminder to white-collar Republican voters that Trump is not a normal nominee.
The same is true of the 50 Republican national security experts, including top advisers to George W. Bush, who declared that Trump "would put at risk our country's national security and well- being." Or the 100 past or present GOP officials who implored Priebus to stop supporting Trump, reflecting widespread defections among longtime party loyalists. Or the conservative intellectuals who, by rejecting Trump, hope to advance a new agenda which addresses the struggling middle class and poor.
Too granular, to be sure, for most voters to take specific note of. But, together, these voices become part of the background noise of the campaign, helping to leach support where Trump needs it most -- his own party.
Another problem is Trump's serial sackings of his campaign team. Disruptive in themselves, these purges further undermined his managerial pretensions. The aversion of Republican pros left him dependent on a scurvy sequence of deputies. Corey Lewandowski proved thuggish and abrasive. Paul Manafort, it transpired, had raked in millions from a pro-Russian ex-president of the Ukraine, casting a dubious light on Trump's passion for Vladimir Putin.
Not to mention Trump's disinterest in character and indifference to vetting. His advisor Roger Stone is a sleazy lunatic who threatens violence in the street should Trump lose.Trump's new political director, a former aide to Chris Christie, was cashiered for his role in the Bridgegate scandal.
Fresh from departing Fox News after multiple charges of sexual harassment, Roger Ailes signed on as an advisor. Trump's new Campaign CEO, Steve Bannon, comes trailing charges of domestic violence and falsely claiming residence in Florida. Only his latest campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway, is capable and experienced, evoking rapture from the media desperate for a familiar face.
For those delving the murky recesses of Trump's mind, Bannon rewards particular attention.
His website, Breitbart.com, is financed by another dubious character, Robert Mercer. Mercer is not exactly a man of the people: an ultra-conservative billionaire and alleged tax cheat, he was last seen conducting his war against the IRS by supporting Ted Cruz. Now a fanatic Trump supporter -- a fact no doubt related to Trump's tax cuts for the rich -- Mercer commended Bannon as just the man to sharpen the candidate's message.
Indeed. Breitbart.com is home to what a writer for the conservative National Review called "the racist, moral rot at the heart of the alt-right," including white supremacist rhetoric and articles like those recently cited by Hillary Clinton: 'Birth Control Makes Women Unattractive And Crazy'; 'Would You Rather Your Child Had Feminism Or Cancer?'; and 'Hoist It High And Proud: The Confederate Flag Proclaims A Glorious Heritage.' Not to mention this gem -- 'Gabby Giffords: The Gun Control Movement's Human Shield.' For Bannon, as for Trump, words don't matter -- venom does.
Which makes Bannon the perfect enabler. Under his auspices, we can safely expect Donald Trump to achieve new lows in what is already the most vile campaign in modern history.
Hillary Clinton will not simply be untrustworthy, unwise, ethically challenged and wrong on the issues -- she will be traitorous, corrupt, immoral, criminal, bigoted, sickly and brain-damaged. As a grace note, every now and then Trump will recite -- as he did recently -- a few phrases scripted by Kellyanne Conway, vamping on immigration or professing regret if some unspecified words wounded some unspecified someone's sensitive soul. And then he will resume slandering Clinton to rally the base in a low turnout election so repugnant that millions of potential voters will recoil in disgust.
There resides Trump's sole hope of victory -- degrading the country he proposes to lead.
Here's the only good news -- it's too late. Because too many Americans already know Donald Trump too well.
If anything, the demographic fundamentals have gotten a bit worse. Except for white males, where his support is eroding, Trump is losing in virtually every key demographic.
Clinton is slaughtering him by potentially historic margins among nonwhites, whose loathing he has so richly earned. She is beating Trump among women as a whole, and gaining ground with Republican women. Unlike Romney, Trump is losing the Catholic vote decisively -- suggesting, perhaps, that feuding with the Pope was not a brilliant notion.
Among college graduates, traditionally helpful to the GOP, Clinton has opened a lead. Her margin among young voters is close to 3 to 1. And the bulk of Sanders voters are now Clinton voters. For all the talk that Trump would change the demographic map, it seems more likely that Clinton can challenge him in states like Georgia and Arizona.
Trump's dilemma is that his base -- modestly educated whites -- is shrinking, the groups he repels expanding. And Republicans are losing their fight to defend the voter suppression laws through which they hoped to diminish non-white turnout.
Unlike Trump, Clinton is running a steady campaign, and she has largely succeeded in making him the issue. Most voters harbor deep-seated doubts about his temperament, not to mention his fitness to be commander-in-chief. What keeps him in the game is that roughly as many voters doubt that Clinton has been transparent or even candid in addressing her personal conduct -- a serious weakness reinforced by the constant drip of emails which, if nothing else, resurrect her bad decision to use a private server.
Still, Trump has the bigger weakness -- himself. Whatever her problems with trust, a great many voters trust Clinton to be competent and prepared. For many voters, this is the ultimate test -- who can they imagine as president -- and only Clinton passes it. In this environment, a greater proportion of Republicans than Democrats may cross over or simply stay home.
Nor is the vaunted Black Swan event -- some transformational occurrence -- likely. Terrorism? Voters question Trump's judgment. Some terrible email? We haven't seen one yet, nor do we have a reason to believe that such a phantasm exists. Trump trouncing Clinton in debate? Really? Obama couldn't do it in 2008, and he actually knows his stuff.
I don't foresee a rout. Chances are that dislike for Clinton will combine with political polarization to close the margin in the popular vote. But there are simply not enough angry white folks who have never before voted Republican -- or voted all -- to reverse basic demographics.
So what does all this mean? Here we repair to the map of the electoral college.
As I outlined in May, the Democrats have a daunting structural advantage. In the last six elections, 19 states and the District of Columbia have given the Democratic candidate 242 electoral votes - only 28 short of the 270 needed to win. By comparison, the 13 states which voted Republican in the last six elections contain but 102 electoral votes.
So how did this work out in 2012? Obama added 90 electoral votes for a total of 332, while Romney's addition of 104 gave him a mere 206 -- pretty much an electoral college rout.
The key to Obama's victory is that he carried every state which, in recent elections, has been classified as a swing state: Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire, Ohio and Virginia.
So far in 2016, polls show Clinton leading in each one of these states. And her leads in Colorado and Virginia appear to be substantial and durable, leaving her but six votes short of victory.
True, states like Ohio, Nevada and Florida are likely to be close -- as they have been in the past. But it seems unlikely that Clinton will lose any of them, especially given the growing Hispanic population in Florida and Nevada, and the significant minority electorate in Ohio -- whose popular Republican governor, John Kasich, is at odds with Trump. And it is highly improbable that Clinton would lose them all. Should she win but one, game over.
But even should she not, she still wins by winning Iowa. And even if she loses Iowa, there's always North Carolina -- a purple state with a changing demographic where polls show Clinton enjoying a significant lead.
So let's reverse the picture. Under this model, Trump would have to win Ohio, Nevada, Florida, Iowa and North Carolina -- plus every state that Romney won. And polling shows Clinton contending in such traditional Republican strongholds as Georgia, Arizona and even Utah, where he has managed to offend large chunks of its majority Mormon population.
That's the essence of Trump's challenge. Not only is the electoral map stacked against him, but he has gone to war with the demographic map of a changing America. In combination, this creates an almost insuperable barrier.
Despite this, the Trump campaign is floating the myth that he will redraw the map by winning white blue-collar voters in Michigan and Pennsylvania. A credulous media notwithstanding, this never made much sense -- the margins of victory in those states for America's first black president were formidable, and there are simply not enough new Republican voters among disgruntled whites to portend such a dramatic reversal. Polls show Clinton taking both states comfortably.
Indeed, if anyone will be redrawing the electoral map, it's Hillary Clinton. But I'm sticking with my forecast in May -- Clinton takes all the swing states plus North Carolina, for a total of 347 electoral votes. Leaving Trump with the dregs -- 191.
He will have earned every one of them -- and a great many of the votes for Clinton, as well.