It is a day of the week, which means there's a good chance things are going poorly in the Donald Trump campaign. As always, we are obliged to watch.
Most of the day was spent precisely where we left off last evening, with the collected punditry raising their collected punditry eyebrows over vice presidential nominee Mike Pence's apparent unfamiliarity with his own running mate. Indeed, Mr. Pence, Donald Trump did in fact say those various things you assured the viewers he never would have said. You might want to watch his rallies, just to get a feel for the fellow?
Aside from that, let's all just take a moment again to marvel at the Trump campaign's apparent instruction to Mike Pence to repeatedly insist that 'twas the Clinton campaign, not Donald Trump, that has been sailing through the election season on a boat made of insults. And that Mike Pence actually gave it a go.
Other than that? Yeah, there’s more news. Let’s do this thing.
• Within hours of Mike Pence complaining that Tim Kaine "whipped out that Mexican thing again"—referring to Kaine bringing up the things Donald Trump has actually said in public about immigrants—the phrase had become both a website to register Latino voters and an anti-Trump hashtag.
• The most overt issue-based lie of the debate was probably Pence's insistence that he would "never support legislation that punished women" who had an abortion. Why do we know it's a lie? Because Mike Pence personally signed Indiana laws designed to do precisely that.
• The most baffling segment, however, was the astonishing disconnect between Pence's comments on Russia and what Trump himself has been saying.
• The International Civil Rights Center and Museum has been facing backlash (of course) from Trump supporters for supposedly refusing to allow Trump to visit. The museum's CEO, however, says that the Trump campaign demanded they close the museum to all other visitors for the planned five hours of Trump's visit, a demand the museum declined to meet. (In other news, somebody on the Trump campaign staff imagined they could keep Donald Trump focused on a single topic for five full hours.)
• The NRA is purchasing $6.5 million worth of ad time to support of Donald Trump.
• The Atlantic is issuing their third presidential endorsement in their 160 year history. The first was for Abraham Lincoln. The second was for Lyndon B. Johnson, against opponent Barry Goldwater. The third is for Hillary Clinton, who is competing against "the most ostentatiously unqualified major-party candidate in the 227-year history of the American presidency."
• The deplorables continue make their voices heard: A 7-year-old disabled girl and her mother were escorted safely out of a Trump rally by the Secret Service after the mother was heckled by Trump supporters for … attempting to leave the rally early.
• More pornographic videos featuring Donald Trump have been uncovered. One presumes the tapes are only being re-discovered now because all of America bleached them from national memory the first time around.
• Trump surrogate Rudy Giuliani did the campaign a solid last week with his on-air insistence that Trump's past infidelity to his wife/wives was a non-issue because "everyone" does it. While this might certainly seem true in a campaign that includes Rudy Giuliani, Newt Gingrich, Roger Ailes, Steve Bannon, and Trump himself, it's unclear if such statements are bold enough to get Giuliani his preferred administration position, attorney general.
• The Wall Street Journal reports Trump "often" made donations to state attorneys general who were reviewing his businesses.
• Trump's poor showing among non-white Americans continues, this time with a survey showing Trump trailing Clinton among Asian Americans by a gigantic 41 points. Possibly because of reasons.
• Another group ditching Trump: Young Jewish voters shocked by open anti-Semitism of Trump's many "alt-right" supporters. “This feels like the closest thing to the type of anti-Semitism that my grandparents talk about experiencing in Poland.”
• Sen. John McCain is dismissing criticism of Trump's PSTD comments, calling it media "bias."
• Due to lackluster Trump fundraising and the (related) shift of Republican megadonor money to downticket Republican races, 2016 will be the first year spending on Senate races will top spending on the presidential race.
• A look inside Trump's Chinese tie factories.