‘Trump campaign’ is a misnomer

Its candidate likely would rise in the polls if he let the press focus on Clinton

In an interview-with the Detroit Free Press, Ivanka Trump said that the people who oppose her father are “scared.” Well, that’s exactly right.

Ivanka Trump knows what the pollsters are already telling us: 63 percent of Americans are “uneasy” about Donald Trump’s ability to responsibly manage America’s nuclear weapons, according to an Economist-You-Gov poll. It’s one thing for a candidate to have high negatives; it is another for the candidate to evoke outright fear.

I would love to know if the Trump campaign has a plan to make fewer people afraid of Mr. Trump. It doesn’t appear that it does. Just this week, Mr. Trump went out of his way to enhance the fear factor by suggesting that “Second Amendment people” could do something about Hillary Clinton. Taken at face value, those words are frightening enough, but of course the Trump campaign went on to make the situation worse.

The Trump campaign decided to respond by denying the obvious inference, making the story and the distraction even worse.

I say the Trump campaign, but there really isn’t a Trump campaign in the classical sense. No proper campaign would ever decide it was a good idea to taunt the opponent with thinly veiled threats of armed attack. There was certainly no campaign meeting that produced the plan to doubledown with that message. This is not a plan at work. Team Trump did not have a plan to get into trouble, it doesn’t have a plan to get out of trouble, and it appears to have no plan to avoid trouble in the future.

All this is happening while Ms. Clinton is facing one problem after another. Incredibly, the latest email disclosure reveals more lies and possible collusion between the State Department and the Clinton Foundation. And this was disclosed the day after the colossally creepy photo surfaced of the Orlando terrorist’s father front and center at a campaign rally just feet from Ms. Clinton.

Yet all of these stories have been buried by Mr. Trump’s self-inflicted disasters. One wonders: If Mr. Trump had done nothing since the convention, would he have been better off? Who knows, if he suddenly got a severe case of laryngitis and the flu and said nothing and did nothing for a week, he could take the lead.