Donald Trump’s terrible secret? That Donald Trump has no terrible secret.
Oh, sure. He’s probably covering up a thousand failed business deals, completely lying about how much he makes, massively inflating his donations to charity, in debt up to his weasel-covered ears to the Russian mob, and keeping future wife No. 6 in an apartment along with a vest made from Harambe.
But those are minor issues compared to the one terrible thing we now know for sure: There is only one version of Trump. It’s not just that there is no pivot … this is the pivot. From jackass to mega-jackass. The only strategy that Trump knows: Be worse.
Even noting that Donald Trump called President Obama the “founder of ISIS” doesn’t begin to capture the real lunacy of his latest statement.
CNBC: Do you think it’s appropriate to call the sitting president of the United States the founder of a terrorist organization that wants to kill Americans?
Trump: He was the founder of ISIS. Absolutely. He was the founder, absolutely the founder. In fact, he gets … in sports they have awards … he gets the most valuable award. I mean. Him and Hillary. She gets it too. Is something wrong with saying that? What? Are people complaining that I’m saying that he was the founder of ISIS?
The RNC is begging Trump to change direction, calm down, or just shut the hell up.
Republican National Committee (RNC) Chairman Reince Priebus reportedly told GOP nominee Donald Trump last week if he didn't change the direction of his presidential campaign, the party would instead pivot to focus more on down-ballot races, Time reported.
The whole Republican Party is suddenly very much in favor of a wall. It’s just that they want to build it around Trump.
Priebus told Trump during a phone call that internal party polls show his campaign is going in the wrong direction, GOP officials told Time.
The RNC chairman reportedly told the Republican nominee that it would have been better if he had gone to his Mar-a-Lago Club in Florida in the days since the Republican convention.
The best thing that could happen to the Trump campaign would be for Trump to abandon it. Go home. Take a break. Go join Eric and Donald Jr. on their latest hunt for pandas.
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Trump denies that any such conversation took place, but then Trump often denies things he said earlier in the same sentence. At least this morning Trump is moving beyond rigged, rigged! to the idea that he might just plain lose.
“Look, all I do is tell the truth. I’m a truth-teller,” he said. “All I do is tell the truth, and if at the end of 90 days I fall in short because I’m somewhat politically correct [sic] even though I’m supposed to be the smart one and even though I’m supposed to have a lot of good ideas, it’s okay.”
Parsing this is no easier than any other block of Trumpese, but it appears to say that Trump might lose because he was too nice and too smart.
Sure. Whatever. But on this much we can all agree with Reince Priebus: Donald Trump should just go away.