Welcome back to your daily roundup of the Donald Trump presidential campaign. We begin where we ended: with the Trump campaign having another bad day, nearly all of the damage self-inflicted.
• Donald Trump made changes to his immigration "policy" speech on Wednesday in response to getting a spanking from the Mexican president on Twitter, because that is how we in America do "policy" now. The line "They don't know it yet, but they're going to pay for the wall" was added after the president of Mexico tweeted that he had explicitly told Trump Mexico would not be doing that. So there you go; Donald Trump remains steadfast in the face of foreign adversity, so long as you give him four hours to work up to it. Oh, and the foreign adversity isn't actually in the room at the time.
• Trump's weekend trip to Detroit becomes less ambitious with each passing day. Yesterday a "script" of Trump's planned interview with Detroit televangelist Wayne T. Jackson was leaked from the campaign, revealing the twelve approved questions Jackson would be asking Trump and the campaign's preferred Trump responses. (In response, Jackson says he will now be asking different questions.)
• Today was an exceptionally bad day for Trump adviser and perhaps-someday Trump Network head Roger Ailes, as a long exposé of sexual harassment claims against him throughout his career. The most noteworthy detail: Fired Fox host Gretchen Carlson had recorded multiple instances of that harassment.
• Meanwhile, reports that Fox News under Roger Ailes' leadership worked to secretly obtain the phone records of a Media Matters reporter, an illegal act in the United States, has overtones of the phone hacking scandal which shuttered Murdoch's News of the World paper and resulted in multiple criminal convictions. The Trump round table certainly is making Nixon's team look like a bunch of pikers, I'll give them that. Especially when you ...
• … meet the newest member of the Trump campaign team, serial Clinton muckraker David Bossie, who will take a leave from the outfit he founded to take a position as deputy campaign manager. You may have heard of that other outfit: Citizens United. Before that, he was known as the guy who got canned for being too crooked for House Speaker Newt Gingrich; he was fired from his position as the House's top Clinton scandal-investigator after he was caught "leaking" doctored transcripts and interviews that he had re-edited in order to make his evidence look more damning than it was. That, too, should sound familiar, as it would later becomes the go-to model of conservative "journalism". Oh, and President George H.W. Bush was so incensed by fellow Republican Bossie's campaign tactics against Bill Clinton that he filed an FEC complaint against Bossie.
I presume the good people of the national media will point each of those things out, while obligingly regurgitating whatever new Clinton attacks Bossie has planned for us this next time around.
• The good news for Trump? News outlets continue to be unconcerned with his ethical lapses, with the revelation that Trump's charity foundation broke the law with a $25,000 political contribution to the Florida Attorney General then deciding whether or not her office would investigate Trump University for fraud. Despite a pointedly sarcastic Clinton press release slamming the "pay-to-play scandal" linked to a presidential candidate's charity foundation, it remained almost entirely unremarked on. Go figure.
• Republican strategist David Kochel sees Trump's hard-right "immigration" speech as outreach to his angry white base: “It has to be their calculation that they can drive up turnout in white working-class areas of battleground states to dizzying heights. Otherwise this move makes no sense 69 days from the election.”
• At least some white Americans were indeed cheered by the speech: White nationalists, who have flocked to Trump on social media.
• Trump says that as president, he'll require schools to teach "patriotism." "We will stop apologizing for America."
• Josh Marshall:
This isn't normal. It was normal in the Jim Crow South, as it was in Eastern Europe for centuries. It's not normal in America in the 21st century. And yet it's become normalized. It's a mammoth failure of our political press. But it's not just theirs, ours. It's a collective failure that we're all responsible for. By any reasonable standard, Donald Trump's speech on Wednesday night should have ended the campaign, as should numerous other rallies where Trump has done more or less the same thing for months. There's a reason why the worst of the worst, the organized and avowed racists, were thrilled and almost giddy watching the spectacle. But it has become normalized. We do not even see it for what it is.
• Son Eric Trump "expressed incredulity" that his father's Hispanic surrogates were pulling their support for the Trump campaign in the wake of Trump's far-right immigration speech. The speech "was actually very consistent and has been very consistent with his plan."
• In an apparent step to soften Trump's immigration proposals, Fox News host Eric Bolling proposed the U.S. set up embassy-like "Mexican deportation stations" within the U.S. that would function as "Mexican land", allowing undocumented residents to gain legal status by self-deporting to one of those "islands", then reentering the "United States" with the appropriate papers. (In other words, a "touchback"-style amnesty program in which Mexico was brought to residents, instead of residents having to return to Mexico.)
While this was apparently intended to show that there are theoretically "friendly", "nice" ways for Trump to legalize currently undocumented residents, there is no word on how Fox News would report the situation if an American president, Trump included, ceded numerous plots of United States land to Mexico in order to set up a scheme for amnesty-styled legalization of Mexican citizens—but I think we can all imagine how that would go, however. Co-host Juan Williams dryly remarked: "I don't hear this from the candidate." (Also, too: The Five continues to challenge Fox & Friends as the most remarkably dumb news show on television, which is saying something.)
• The Republican National Committee is stepping up efforts to assist Trump's still-microscopic "ground game" with 98 new offices and nearly 400 new hires.
• Vice presidential nominee Mike Pence has been a culture warrior throughout his career, lamenting in 1996 that the year's Republican Convention had become "an endless line of pro-choice women, AIDS activists, and proponents of Affirmative Action." I guess we now know why he was so eager to hop aboard the Donald Trump train.
• "The Republican nominee is acting in ways that make it far more likely that Hillary Clinton is elected president, while positioning himself to be the Citizen Kane of the alt-right media before the sun sets Clinton's first day in office."
• NBA star Dwyane Wade says Trump's tweet about his cousin, who was shot and killed last week, left a "bad taste in my mouth," saying his cousin's death was "used as a ploy for political gain."
• Trump has reportedly not yet paid some of his top staffers, including the now-departed Paul Manafort.
• The moderators for each of the planned presidential debates have now been announced. Donald Trump, however, has not yet committed to attending.
• On CNN, a founder of "Latinos for Trump" warned that "[Mexican] culture is a very dominant culture," and that if something isn't done about it "you're going to have taco trucks on every corner."