Is the Trump campaign falling apart?
“Maybe this is how it ends for Donald Trump,” said Dana Milbank in The Washington Post: “not with a bang but with a child’s whimper.” After insulting just about every other group in America, it was “perhaps just a matter of time” before the Republican presidential nominee got round to attacking a mother and baby. He finally managed it during a speech the other day, telling a woman with a crying infant to “get the baby out of here”. It was just one of a series of recent missteps and outrages by Trump. He also claimed that Russia wouldn’t invade Ukraine, though it already has; accused the Obama administration of knowingly letting thousands of terrorists into the US; called Hillary Clinton “the devil”; and repeatedly attacked the Muslim parents of a fallen American serviceman.
This last case is particularly egregious, said Bret Stephens in The Wall Street Journal. Trump took a woman “too heartbroken and anxious to speak of her dead son before an audience of millions” at the Democratic convention and “painted a target on her”. He suggested that the reason she stayed silent as her husband spoke on stage next to her was perhaps because she wasn’t allowed to speak. This smear betrayed Trump’s lack of “basic human decency”. The absence of empathy is bad enough, said Robert Kagan in The Washington Post. But it’s the sheer irrationality of Trump’s feud with the bereaved parents that is most shocking. Basic common sense should have told him that this was a battle he could never win. But he can’t let things lie. He is compulsively driven to attack anyone who criticises him in any way, even when it’s manifestly against his interests to do so. There really is “something wrong with the man”.
A number of commentators are now genuinely questioning Trump’s “mental well-being”, said Sean Illing on Salon. Morale in the Trump camp, meanwhile, is said to be low. His campaign manager, Paul Manafort, has reportedly given up trying to control him and is just going through the motions. The chaos around the Trump campaign is not in itself new, said Alex Shephard on the New Republic. But with higher-profile Republicans starting to break from Trump, one gets a sense that this may be a “turning point”; that Trump may finally have tested to destruction the theory that all publicity is good publicity.
Don’t write him off yet, said The New York Times. Sure, the polls don’t look good for Trump, but Clinton can’t afford to sit back and wait for her rival to self- destruct. Last month, Trump raised nearly as much money as Clinton’s “big-donor juggernaut”, most of it in small contributions. His rallies continue to draw thousands of people. The idea that he might give up seems like “wishful thinking. A look at his business record suggests that as long as the money keeps coming in, Mr Trump will fight, and if he loses, he’ll litigate.”
Trump is already talking about November’s election being rigged against him, said Jamelle Bouie on Slate. It seems that, in order to save face, he’s willing to cross “one of the brightest lines in American politics, the one that deals directly with our tradition of peaceful transfer of power”. There’s every reason to believe that Trump would respond gracelessly to defeat, said Ruth Marcus in The Washington Post. Just look at how he responded to Obama’s victory in 2012. The president “lost the popular vote by a lot and won the election”, tweeted Trump (erroneously – Obama in fact won both the popular vote and the electoral college): “we should have a revolution in this country”. If that’s how Trump responded then, just imagine what he might do if he’s the loser. “Trump is dangerous, and the threat he poses might not be extinguished by a loss at the polls.”