Trump Had the Worst Week in Presidential Campaign History

[Libertine]

Trump May Have Had the Worst Week in Presidential Campaign History

Trump even refused to check off a box on his tax forms to donate to a veterans' memorial fund.

October didn't wait 24 hours before delivering a surprise. It came in an envelope delivered to the New York Times containing portions of Donald Trump's tax returns, which he has been refusing to release.

Political attacks are only really damaging when they confirm an already existing narrative. Mike Dukakis was seen as too weak to be commander-in-chief when he rode in a tank with an oversized helmet, Dan Quayle was thought to be slow-witted when he misspelled "potato," and Mitt Romney was painted as a cartoon Monopoly Man before the "47 percent" tape dropped.

In what must rank among the worst weeks of any recent presidential campaign, Donald Trump managed to play into almost every one of Democrats' talking points about him.

The New York Times story alone, which both reported that Trump declared he had lost a staggering $916 million in 1995 tax forms, and that experts believe that loss allowed him to pay no federal income taxes for up to 18 years, fed into three lines of attack that Hillary Clinton had used to needle him in Monday's debate.

One: That his refusal to release his taxes suggested he was concealing something important. Two: That his returns might show his business acumen was overstated. Three: That he paid little or no taxes despite his vast wealth.

And it lent credence to her larger argument that Trump is a heartless scrooge who left a trail of financial destruction on his path to wealth, and who according to the New York Times Trump even refused to check off a box on his tax form to donate to a veterans' memorial fund.

As if that wasn't enough, Trump has a long history of both bragging about his efforts to avoid paying taxes while shaming others for paying too little.

But Trump didn't need an outside story to damage his campaign. He was busy having a live meltdown onstage in Pennsylvania at the very moment the news dropped Saturday night. Already behaving erratically since his debate on Monday, Trump imitated Clinton's pneumonia-induced collapse from last month and fired off the most grotesque, personal, and fact-free attack at the nominee yet.

"Hillary Clinton's only loyalty is to her financial contributors and to herself," Trump said of the first female major party nominee. "I don't even think she's loyal to Bill, you wanna know the truth. And really folks really, why should she be, right? Why should she be?"

The combination of multiple damaging stories, all made dramatically worse by the candidate's impulsive response, may be without precedent. It's as if Dukakis were photographed riding in the tank, saw the mocking news coverage, then climbed back into the tank and drove cross-country with Willie Horton riding shotgun as his own staff begged him to pull over.

Almost every day, Trump did something that would send a typical presidential campaign into a tailspin.

The most dramatic self-inflicted wounds concerned his response to Clinton's accusation in the debate that he humiliated a former Miss Universe, Alicia Machado, for gaining weight.

On Tuesday, Trump called into Fox News to essentially repeat the behavior Clinton had raised: He said Machado "gained a massive amount of weight and it was a real problem."

On Wednesday, Trump went back on Fox to tell Bill O'Reilly that Machado should thank him for demanding she lose a few pounds: "I saved her job," he said.

On Thursday, Trump's own campaign manager Kellyanne Conway told "The View" that she had personally reprimanded him for his language regarding women, even as she defended him over the Alicia Machado story. Even some of Trump's surrogates seemed unwilling to defend his comments last week.

Then came Friday, where Trump issued a series of rage-filled tweets against Alicia Machado in the wee hours of the morning, in which he called on his 12 million followers to "check out a sex tape" of the former Miss Universe winner.

The sex tape of Alicia Machado did not exist. But Buzzfeed that day found a pornographic video by Playboy featuring a brief cameo by Trump.

But even setting aside the vulgarity of the tweets, Trump's vengeful response affirmed — almost to the point of parody — Clinton's core charge that he was temperamentally unfit to manage the world's most powerful military.

"You can't tweet at 3 o'clock in the morning. Period. There's no excuse. Ever. Not if you're going to be president of the United States," former Speaker Newt Gingrich, another of Trump's most prominent supporters, said on Fox News.

The Alicia Machado story has been so dominant that it overshadowed any number of stories that would be potential extinction-level events for virtually every other major party nominee in history.

If Trump loses in November, it's hard to imagine this week won't be seen as a turning point.


NBC News
10-2-16

http://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2016...istory-n658071