It's now time for your regularly-scheduled report on the ongoing collapse of the Republican Party, otherwise known as Donald Trump's presidential campaign.
The fallout of Trump's assurance to top Hispanic supporters that he intended to deal with undocumented migrants in a "humane" fashion—which may have mollified them but predictably caused alarm among the xenophobes who've been backing him—continues, thanks to the candidate's own bafflingly strange rhetoric on the issue. On Monday he told Fox News mouth-with-a-vestigial-body-attached Bill O'Reilly that he would be doing "the same thing" as Obama and Bush, but "perhaps with a lot more energy," and that "we're going to get rid of all the bad ones" first—"so fast your head will spin."
If there's a substantive or even identifiable policy tangled up in any of that gibberish, scientists have yet to discover it. In other news:
• Trump's rolled out his solution to urban violence and "the assault on law enforcement", of a sort: Hire an unidentified "very top" Chicago police figure who told allegedly told Trump he could stop that violence "in one week" if he was able to "use tough police tactics." No word on what those tough police tactics might be.
• According to CNN Trump analyst and ex-campaign chief Corey Lewandowski, Trump hasn't been giving his black "outreach" speeches to actual black Americans because it would be too dangerous.
• It turns out people who've done work on the Donald Trump campaign have publicly posted some mighty racist things on social media. Yes, we'll try to contain our shock.
• Trump's apparent plan for winning against Hillary Clinton: Say "pantsuit", complain about her voice, and grumble that she doesn't "look" presidential. "I look presidential." Clinton remains unimpressed.
• The Breitbartian conspiracy theory that Trump's opponent is deathly ill because reasons continues to get loonier by the day.
• No handouts for losers: Last month Donald Trump steeply raised the rent for his own presidential campaign, which is headquartered (of course) in his Trump Tower. Donors now shell out nearly $170,000 per month for the privilege, though the campaign has apparently been utilizing unfinished office space in the building with dangling wires and temporary walls.
• The Trump campaign still lags badly in the advertising race.
• After his visit to flood-ravaged Louisiana last week, the Trump campaign claimed Donald Trump was making a $100,000 donation to a Louisiana church (specifically, anti-LGBT hate group leader Tony Perkins' Louisiana church.) That donation hasn't happened yet, and his campaign is not specifying whether Donald Trump means he is personally making such a donation or is directing the Trump Foundation, which is funded primarily via other donors, to do it. Nor is the campaign confirming that Trump made any other donations to flood victims.
• Also waiting for checks: Trump's fellow Republicans. Trump's July fundraising has "provided the Republican National Committee with less than half as much as Mitt Romney's efforts four years ago."
• In a National Association for Business Economists survey of its members, Donald Trump came in third, just behind Libertarian Gary Johnson.
• Another defection: Founding director of the George W. Bush Institute says he'll be voting for Clinton.
• Why isn't the Clinton campaign attacking Donald Trump for his policy flip-flops? Because that would presume Trump has any legitimate "policy" coherent enough to even identify them as flip-flops. He doesn't.
• When staging a live press event to show how you get along with the common folk, letting the common folk know who you are would seem something you'd want to get out of the way before the cameras showed up.