Welcome back to your evening summary of the collapse of the Republican Party, as performed in skit, spoof, and/or vignette form by Donald J. Trump and whichever human barnacles are clinging to his campaign on any particular day.
Questions about the details of Donald Trump's alleged immigration policies continue, fed primarily by a fountain of contradictory gibberish from the candidate himself. Will there be a wall? Yes. Will we be deporting 11 million people? Absolutely. Will we then be letting many of them right back in? Um, maybe. Will there be a "deportation force" created to round up 11 million residents and ship them somewhere else? He hasn't decided yet.
Even the hint of "softening" his anti-immigrant rhetoric is having repercussions, however. The rabidly xenophobic Rep. Steve King took to CNN to both downplay talk of Trump's softening while warning that any actual deviation from his past promises would be a "mistake." And Ann Coulter, having just hastily scrawled a characteristically unsubtle Trump-humping book, is muttering that she would cancel her book tour if Trump wavered on the anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim stances that have made him so dear to her fans. (For the record, this is implausible. Ann Coulter, still desperate to reclaim a fraction of her previous conservative popularity in a world that now has similarly toxic race-baiters and xenophobes on every Republican corner, would not cancel a book tour even if she was on fire.)
Elsewhere in the World O' Trump:
• “We’ve beaten Elton John and he has pianos, right? I don’t have a piano. No piano but we’ve beaten four times Elton John’s record at arenas. Together we’re going to restore ethics and honesty to our government.”
• In the wake of numerous media stories and columns on how none of Donald Trump's new "black outreach" efforts have been directed at Actual Black People, the Trump campaign is now contemplating trips to "urban areas" where Actual Black People might live. Possibly with Dr. Ben Carson in tow. (This follows ex-campaign chief Corey Lewandowski opining that Trump couldn't do that because those places are just too dangerous.)
• New Trump Whisperer Kellyanne Conway is unskewing the polls: She says polls can't properly capture the nation's pro-Trump voters because it's not "socially desirable" to admit you might vote for him. Trump voters being notoriously shy and sensitive souls, after all.
• Earlier this week Donald Trump claimed he had met with a "very top" Chicago police figure who said he could stop all violence in the city "in one week" if he was able to use "tough" police tactics. As implausible as that seemed at the time, it's going to seem even more implausible now that Chicago police are denying Trump ever met with any "top" police leaders at all. Our theory: Donald Trump fell asleep watching television again. We’re just lucky he didn’t wake up thinking he was a transforming robot.
• The biggest Republican contributors are still contributing to Republicans this cycle, but they're conspicuously avoiding the top of the ticket, choosing instead to use their funds to shore up House Republicans.
• Strategists, meanwhile, complain that Trump has failed to "define" Clinton. While the Clinton campaign has already spent $68 million in general election advertising, Trump has spent just $4 million.
• Trump has allegedly directed his campaign to spend resources in New York as part of what can only be called a vanity run for his home state. Trump is about twenty points behind in New York ... possibly because people there already know him.
• Another vanity purchase? FEC filings indicate the Trump campaign spent over $55,000 in May on several thousand copies of Trump's new book, Crippled America. While that's legal, it only remains legal if Trump himself forgoes royalties for the sale. Otherwise it's a no-no.
• Sen. Marco Rubio refuses to say if he believes Donald Trump is qualified to be president.
• Fox News host Sean Hannity has devoted over 22 hours of airtime to Donald Trump interviews during his campaign, the free equivalent of roughly $31 million dollars worth of advertising.
• Dr. Ben Carson opines that both Hillary Clinton and the "elderly" Trump should disclose their medical histories.
• Eric Trump is against the idea of his father releasing tax returns as is traditional for presidential candidates, arguing that the public wouldn't understand them anyway. Well why didn't you just say so before?
• A map of "documented instances where Donald Trump, his supporters, or his staff harassed or attacked Latinos and immigrants."