Welcome to our now-daily roundup of the slow-motion crackup of the Republican Party, as acted out in an ongoing series of skits and vignettes called the Donald Trump campaign. There have been many amazing days in the Republican presidential race. I'm not sure any of them can top the day Donald Trump announced that his cratering presidential ambitions would now be headed by Steve Bannon, aka That Guy Who Runs Breitbart.
For those who don't follow conservatism and what it has become, over the last two decades, it's a bit difficult to explain the full implications of this move. Breitbart "News" is, at heart, a conspiracy site, a seamless blend between the fact-leery headlines of Matt Drudge and the full-on false flag this, secret plots that of an Alex Jones. Its namesake stoked its content with faked videos and breathless word of plots against conservatives by government, media, and anyone else you can name; under Bannon it found a new voice as one of the most prominent sites for the so-called "alt-right", the collection of white nationalists and racist conspiracy peddlers who flit effortlessly between the site and Donald Trump's Twitter mentions.
When anti-Muslim conspiracy monger Frank Gaffney and company were barred from presenting at CPAC in 2013 over their claims that the Muslim Brotherhood had infiltrated CPAC through their agent, conservative anti-tax kingpin Grover Norquist, it was Steve Bannon who provided a panel room at the conference for Gaffney and Geller to spout those claims anyway. (Anti-Muslim conspiracy theories are a staple of Bannon's coverage to this day.) From birtherism to every other Trump-favored conspiracy theory of the racist right, nearly all were given voice on that site before Trump ever uttered them. This new move is roughly akin to making Alex Jones the campaign's primary spokesman; it is tailor-made to stroke Donald Trump's worst campaign instincts, most ridiculous claims, and most reckless behaviors.
It's small wonder that many conservatives are regarding the move as "utter doom" for the campaign, or even as an admission by Trump that his campaign is now over, to be followed now by an extended Trumpian screech meant to take out friends and foes alike, so long as Trump can imagine himself as vindicated at the sorry end.
Expect the campaign from here on in to get much meaner, to be much more aggressive in conspiracy-peddling, more hostile towards immigrants, and all the rest. Expect, most importantly, the howls of "election rigging", all of it done by plotting minorities seeking to thwart the will of legitimate white voters, to be the defining theme of Trump's last days. Trump is the candidate that the Breitbart wing of the party produced. His worst features are precisely what they value in him.
On to the rest of the day's campaign news. It is, as is appropriate on the day Trump abandoned all remaining pretense at becoming a more serious candidate, a car wreck.
• Trump's bizarre appointment of two new campaign heads may or may not be related to the unending stream of news about current campaign manager Paul Manafort's Ukrainian ties. The latest: Manafort's Ukrainian work included an "orchestrated a series of Anti-Nato, Anti-Kiev protests in Crimea" that forced the cancellation of NATO exercises there, and that Manafort helped a Ukrainian group evade U.S. laws against foreign lobbying. It's difficult to guess how this story could continue to get any worse for Manafort, short of him turning up tomorrow in Moscow asking for asylum himself. And if that happened, it still would't necessarily be the craziest thing to happen in the Donald Trump campaign on any given day.
• Bin Laden Determined To Strike In—Nope, Not Gonna Read This. Just before Trump received his first classified national security briefing, Trump said that if he becomes president he "won't use" U.S. intelligence agencies because "they've made such bad decisions." There is no word on what intelligence figures Trump will be using instead.
• On Tuesday Trump went to a nearly all-white Wisconsin suburb to deliver a teleprompter-assisted "outreach" speech to black Americans in front of a nearly all-white audience. It consisted mainly of condemnation of "rioters" and the "war on police" and the call for black neighborhoods to be policed more heavily. It was a speech identical to a hundred others given by Republican speakers from the 1960's until now, or as Rudy Giuliani opined today, the best Republican speech ever given.
• After a very late start, the Trump campaign will finally start rolling out television ads in key markets. We'll have to wait and see what a new Bannon-encouraged Trump considers appropriate fodder for later campaign ads, but it's safe to say they'll make Daisy look like Louis Armstrong singing What a Wonderful World while unicorns frolic over a double rainbow.
• It was once thought all but impossible that Republicans could be edged out of their House majority, a majority shored up by a spate of strategic gerrymandering across the nation. It's still not likely, but Trump's continued collapse is making it a possibility. To shore up Republican chances, House Speaker Paul Ryan is now planning an eight-state fundraising trip to help stop the bleeding.
• On the Senate side, things look worse, with Trump-depressed turnout making Republican prospects for keeping their majority "slim."
• Four out of five Texas Trump voters say their state should secede from the United States if Hillary Clinton becomes president.
• The Republican speechwriter who wrote the Republican convention speech for Patricia Smith, mother of a Benghazi victim, now says he cannot vote for Donald Trump and "may yet have to vote for" Hillary Clinton.
• Scientific American's editorial board has penned an editorial condemning Donald Trump's "disregard, if not outright contempt, for science," noting that while it generally stays out of political endorsements, Trump "takes antiscience to a previously unexplored terrain."
• Add "torture memo" author John Yoo to the list of conservative voices who believe a Trump presidency would be too damaging to support, regardless of Clinton's possible Supreme Court picks.
• Donald Trump Jr. says he "can't even watch" CNN anymore because of the network's anti-Trump bias. CNN picks "a panel of 8 professional, liberal but professional, people on a panel, and they find like one Trump supporter from the street, who has no real political knowledge, and they just happen to be supporter, and they put that person up against 8 people who do this for a living and try to make it seem like that’s a fair fight." Among the people he seems to be referring to: The Trump campaign's stable of in-house CNN voices, including Jeffrey Lord, spokeswoman Katrina Pierson and former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski.
• Donald Trump says the New York Times is biased against him because it is "owned by Mexico."
• Not saying much:
• Sinking ship looking for fresh rats. Tiny fingers a plus.
• How much influence does Mike Pence yield in the campaign? Well, at least he’s not fetching the candidate’s meals.
• Yikes.