Welcome back to our roundup of Donald J. Trump campaign news. I like to imagine our little get-togethers here as the equivalent of NASA reporting on the status of a very large, very orange asteroid hurtling towards Earth. The odds say it's going to miss us, but that doesn't mean the world isn't staying up late at night with a hot cocoa in one hand and a gin bottle in the other, waiting to hear the latest reports on whether those odds are getting just one percent better or one percent worse.
It might help if everyone from Fox News to the FBI wasn't weighing in on the side of the asteroid, though.
Today was Family Day on the Trump campaign trail. Most prominent was spouse Melania Trump, whose (oddly familiar?) speech today focused on the coarseness of our modern discourse.
“It is never OK when a 12-year-old girl or boy is mocked, bullied, or attacked. It is terrible when that happens on the playground, and it is absolutely unacceptable when it’s done by someone with no name hiding on the internet,” Melania Trump said to cheers on Thursday.
“We have to find a better way to talk to each other, to disagree with each other, to respect each other,” she said, adding it will be one of her “main focuses” if she is first lady.
Presented without comment:
CNN chief political correspondent Dana Bash reacted by saying, “I kept thinking, ‘Have you met Donald Trump?’"
Also on the campaign trail today: Son Eric Trump, who agreed in a radio interview that the loudly Trump-supporting former Klan leader David Duke deserves "a bullet." This family decorates their political opinions like they decorate their apartments—without nuance.
There is unfortunately plenty more "news" where that came from, so here we go.
• After a week of apparent electioneering by the FBI, insider fingers are being pointedly pointed at pro-Trump staffers in the New York FBI offices. Reuters cited "two law enforcement sources" to say a faction of investigators there are "known to be hostile to Hillary Clinton", while an anonymous agent told the Guardian that the agency was "Trumpland". Names were named in a report put forth by reporter Wayne Barrett, who traced the Trump-FBI connection through two of its most loudest and most prominent links, New York's Rudy Giuliani and Jim Kallstrom. Kallstrom's USMC charity was the recipient of a $1 million donation from Trump earlier this year.
• The FBI will be investigating a series of seemingly anti-Clinton tweets from an FBI-controlled Twitter account.
• The Fox News report alleging indictable offenses within the Clinton Foundation, in the meantime, is being roundly panned by other reporters based on their own sources. A Fox News anchor clarified today that when he reported Clinton would "likely" be indicted based on that information, he was being more aspirational than accurate.
• Also more aspirational than accurate: Trump's claims of his own wealth, according to the New York Times.
• Trump will be holding a campaign event at the Arizona-Mexican border tomorrow. Also attending: Sen. Jeff Sessions and former Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer. Conspicuously not attending: Sen. John McCain, the Trump-supporting Sheriff Joe Arpaio, and Trump himself.
• The RNC argued in court that their members should not be held to the consent decree barring the party from intimidating or otherwise interfering with voters at the polls if those officials are not doing so in their capacity as RNC members. Not even the RNC's own lawyer buys that one.
• The news that Eric Trump now believes former Klan leader David Duke deserves "a bullet" comes one day after Duke vowed during a Louisiana debate that he would be Trump's "most loyal advocate" in the Senate. Duke's presence at the debate was marked by angry protests at the historically black college hosting it.
• Mississippi's secretary of state told the press that based on his contact with "authorities in Greenville", initial findings indicate the burning of a black church and a "Vote Trump" slogan spray-painted on its walls is "not of a political nature."
• Republican Sen. Pat Toomey still refuses to say whether he'll be voting for his party's nominee. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell broke his own Trump silence to speak kindly of Trump, saying if Trump was elected, "we'll be fine."
• Latino Americans are projected to turn out in record numbers for this presidential election.
• In March, Donald Trump told the press the Chicago Cubs were doing "a rotten job." He was feuding with the team's conservative owners at the time.
• Toronto's Trump International Hotel went into receivership this week, just four years after it opened. Trump is neither developer or investor in the project, but rented his name to the project Because Money.
• At a fundraiser, former Daily Show host Jon Stewart recounted Trump's inexplicable Twitter war against him.
• New casting notices are out for positions at an unidentified "up-and-coming conservative media network." Trump continues to deny his interest in such a project, so we can be absolutely, positively sure it doesn't involve him.
• Macedonia has become a hub for pro-Trump "news" sites. The reason? Advertising dollars. "Several teens and young men who run these sites told BuzzFeed News that they learned the best way to generate traffic is to get their politics stories to spread on Facebook — and the best way to generate shares on Facebook is to publish sensationalist and often false content that caters to Trump supporters."