Welcome back to your daily tour of the tire fire known as the Donald Trump presidential campaign. On the agenda for today: Donald Trump being very, very mad that people are calling him racist. His alt-right supporters being very, very mad that people are calling them racist. And the opposing presidential candidate gives a 30 minute speech giving example after example of Donald Trump and his "alt-right" supporters promoting racism.
By plan or accident, Clinton's speech tying Donald Trump to the racist far-right couldn't have come at a worse time for the candidate. Trump is still reeling from his latest, largest screw-up, a supposed "softening" of his immigration position that doesn't seem to contain much actual softening but still has the far-right in an uproar over the thought that the candidate might.
This is the scene, then: Donald Trump, caught between an attempt to moderate his rhetoric in order to salvage his collapsing poll numbers and a base that selected him as being the farthest thing from moderate, muddling through another day trying to avoid spelling out just what his "policies" might actually be. If he chooses to moderate, he drives a wedge between himself and the far-right that they will likely see as abandonment, and dishonest, and the sign that this new candidate has been captured by the same forces that have "moderated" all the others. If he hugs them tight, he can kiss most of the rest of the American electorate goodbye for good.
This is the precise campaign moment Hillary Clinton chose to walk to a podium and give a speech tying Trump as tightly as possible to the racist far-right that so easily propelled him through the Republican primaries, making it front-page news across the country come tomorrow.
Politics ain't beanbag. On with the rest of it.
• An indication of just how much the Trump campaign didn't need this headache? An hour-plus blistering "prebuttal" speech by Trump blasting Clinton for describing himself and his “alt-right” base as purveyors of racism. Much of the speech ended up dedicated to more generic Trump themes, calling Clinton "crooked" and a "liar" and making allegations about the Clinton Foundation.
• Reaction after the speech was similarly indignant, as Trump supporters tried their best to declare that Donald Trump couldn't possibly be racist despite, you know, those things he's said. It was a tough sell.
• Fox News host Shepard Smith: "The problem with any attempt to rebut [Clinton] is that in this case she used Donald Trump's own words, was historically accurate on his policies, on all reviewed points."
• David Duke responds: "White people have to have an advocacy organization and that's what is at the core of the alt-right."
• Problems with the base continue: Protesters at Trump Tower today unfurled a banner reading "Trump = Always Racist."
They were quickly escorted out by security as they railed against Trump for “trying to pander to black and Latino leaders.”
“Nothing will change,” they yelled.
• Responding this morning to a web ad about Trump's alt-right support, the Trump campaign demanded Hillary Clinton disavow the video. Clinton responded by retweeting that same video from her official account.
• The media has been very, very eager to write stories about Trump "pivoting" to a more moderate stance for the general election, that being one of the standard, well-worn entries of any year's campaign coverage. This has led them to grasp at thin straws indeed; for example, claiming that Trumpian insults of Clinton "are almost gone in his speeches", the morning before Trump delivered a barn-burner of a speech plastering Clinton with as many claims of crookedness and lyingness and racism and kitchensinkism as he could fit in his mouth at one time. Tip: After you write your next columns about how Donald Trump seems to be moderating his rhetoric, put it aside for 12 hours or so without publishing, then come back and see if the change you wrote of lasted longer than a dose of long-acting cough medicine. You'll save yourself a heap of embarrassment.
• Another suggestion: One candidate pushing a conspiracy theory that his opponent is deathly ill based on clearly and obviously faked tape of Hillary Clinton having a so-called "seizure" is not the same as the other candidate pointing out that her opponent has multiple people on staff with documentable ties to pro-Putin leaders and groups. Surely, the grand allied forces of the Associated Press could parse out which of those things was true, that being the very definition of "news." A corollary: Not every news story has a "balance" on the other side. Nobody tries to balance a story of a tornado killing five people with a next-page story on how those people could possibly have died from from a bright sunny day.
• As perhaps the most consistent liar and certainly least informative denizen of the Donald Trump campaign, and that is truly saying something, we still cannot deduce what benefit the cable news programs gain from booking Trump spokesperson Katrina Pierson on any alleged news show. Nevertheless, there she is. She was tasked today with defending Trump's immigration policies, or at least maybe helping America grasp what they were on this particular morning; fear not, she says. Trump hasn't "changed his position on immigration, he's just changed the words he's saying."
• There's still little evidence Trump has given nearly the sort of money to charity that he's claimed he's given, but there's increasing evidence of just how much profit he's making off what he's billed as "charitable" efforts.
• Trump "isn't trying to win people of color, he's trying to convince white people he isn't racist."
• How bad has the polling gotten for Trump? Even Georgia might be in play.
• How bad have things gotten in the party itself? In Minnesota, state Republican officials nearly forgot to put Trump on the ballot.
• How many of the 17 past Republican members of the White House Council of Economic Advisers contacted by the Wall Street Journal are publicly supporting Donald Trump? Zero.
• House Oversight Chairman Jason Chaffetz: Donald Trump should "absolutely" show his tax returns.
• Support for Trump is going to be prime fodder for ads against Republican senators trying to survive Trump's own collapsing numbers. Current ad targets include Senators McCain, Ayotte, Kirk and others.
• Sen. Marco Rubio, meanwhile, is still pretty sure he'd rather have a man he called a "con man" in the Oval Office than someone from the opposing party. I don't care which side you're on, Marco Rubio campaigning for something is a painful sight to watch.