Welcome to your daily roundup of the Donald Trump campaign. Yesterday evening saw what could credibly be called the second act climax of Donald Trump's presidential efforts. It came as a speech, hot on the heels of a hastily scheduled trip to Mexico City to meet with the more-than-symbolic target of twelve months of campaign wrath, a speech devoted to mounting the campaign's flag atop all the worst excesses of its past rhetoric, a rancid speech devoted to burying the earlier humiliations of the day with a greatest hits parade of anti-immigrant spite and shrieking nationalism.
I'm going to go out on a thin limb indeed here and predict that it was also the beginning of something else. It was the last day even the most credulous of reporters and pundits could take Donald Trump seriously.
Whatever premise even his supporters once harbored of Donald Trump being the voice of American resentment who would truly stick it to them damn foreigners once and for all crumbled when Trump stood next to the Mexican president and delivered a meek quarter-pound nothingburger of a speech. It was almost assuredly the most polite Donald Trump has ever been to anyone during his entire race—whether politician, interviewer, reporter, random person on Twitter, American, foreigner, or dog—and while wags tried at least to make something of the fact that he could refrain from chewing the scenery in public, when he really really wanted to, the overall impression left on anyone watching is that Donald Trump, master negotiator and savior of the White Race, choked.
But maybe it wasn't a deer-in-the-headlight moment for a candidate whose yearlong Twitter tirade against the Mexican government and Mexican population appeared to vanish into the ether when confronting the demonic southern power face-to-face? Perhaps it was—gasp—statemanship? The all-important "softening", come to life? Proof that the candidate was abandoning the wave of xenophobic nonsense that carried him through the Republican primaries, and was at long last pretending at being the sort of person who even non-racists could get behind?
It could have been salvaged as such, if the candidate had only kept his mouth shut. He didn't. He had a speech to give that evening, the much-anticipated immigration policy speech that he and his newest campaign hires had worked on so very long, and delayed for a week, and which this-time-for-sure was going to reboot his campaign to a new level of serious presidentialness and policy-having.
Only there wasn't any policy. There was rhetoric, and demonization, and dire warnings, and every lowlight of Trump's past racist rantings repeated with a line under it and an exclamation point behind it and sparklers jammed up its nether-regions just to make sure nobody could accuse him of soft-peddling it. All the talk of pivots and softening and moderation were just so many pretty corpses, by the end of that speech. That goose is cooked.
So let's recap. Donald Trump visited Mexico, and doused all premise of being a master-negotiator statesman. Donald Trump visited Phoenix, and doused all pretense of having any "policy" at all.
There's nothing left. If he's not a master statesman who can brilliantly bend other nations to American will where other "stupid, loser" politicians have always whiffed, then he's just a wealthy narcissist with a big mouth. If he can't moderate his worst instincts and bullying rhetoric even in order to gain the single most powerful office in the elected world, then he's not going to pivot ever, and you'd have to be a special kind of gullible to still be riding that particular merry-go-round.
The man would be a fascist—if only he were clever enough to know what that is. But he's not. He's just an oaf.
On to the day's news.
• We would be remiss in not repeating the central result of Donald Trump visiting with the president of Mexico: That president's assertion afterwards that Donald Trump had lied about the content of their meeting. President Peña Nieto said that he explicitly told the candidate Mexico would not be paying for a "wall" at the opening of their meeting. Trump, on the other hand, claimed it wasn't "discussed."
• James Hohmann:
Republicans facing four more years in the wilderness will long recall the raucous rally in Phoenix as a low point of the Trump campaign, perhaps even as the moment that he definitively extinguished his hopes of becoming president.
That feeling will be particularly pronounced because it came at the end of a whirlwind day that might otherwise have been remembered as a triumph.
• Republican operative Matt Mackowiak: "The Hispanic vote is gone."
• "The takeaway by American Hispanics, especially the vast majority that are of Mexican origin, is that Trump is spineless."
• USA Today: Phoenix speech was "nothing short of a full-throated rant."
• "Once [Trump's] supporters have accepted that a slackening trickle of people looking to improve their lives is actually a swelling horde of murderous inhumans … all bets are off. Along with all decency."
• Members of Trump's Hispanic own advisory council are abandoning the candidate today, with one member saying members "feel misled" and another calling the council "a scam" run "simply for optics."
• For a more quantitive measure, polls show that an unpivoted Trump is now locked into a disadvantageous position indeed.
• "Conservatives cheer Trump immigration reset", goes the Politico headline. It quotes Ann Coulter and a passel of hard-hard-right anti-immigration groups, which is a bit like titling a story about bears tearing apart a grade school child "Local parents disappointed by zoo outing."
• The most lavish praise for Trump, however, was reserved for suspects whose endorsement campaigns generally attempt to steer clear from: White supremacists David Duke, Jared Taylor, and the editors of VDARE all praised the "excellent", "almost perfect" speech.
• Also pleased with Trump's performance: Donald Trump Jr., who weighed in on Fox with the rough equivalent of "we meant to do that." Brietbart, the Trump-supporting "alt-right" site that launched Steve Bannon to the head of Trump's own campaign, chose a similar approach
• On NBC, Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Kaine called the speech "amateur hour": "[T]he important thing about leadership is you got to be consistent. You can't say different things to different audiences."
• Trump has paid a $2,500 penalty to the IRS after it was determined that his charitable foundation violated tax laws by contributing $25,000 to the reelection efforts of Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi. Because the Trump Foundation is a nonprofit group, such political gifts are illegal. Furthermore, the Foundation had (unintentionally, they say) concealed the donation by reporting it as being a gift to a similarly named Kansas group.
Bondi had solicited the contribution from Trump during the same time period as her office was deciding whether or not to investigate charges against Trump University. She decided not to.
• The Southern Poverty Law Center notes that Trump advisor Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn will be attending the annual conference of anti-Muslim hate group ACT For America next week.
• Our previous supposition that the combination of Mexico City trip and Phoenix hate rally may have finally extinguished any serious journalistic effort to prop Trump up as a credible choice for the presidency is severely tested by the efforts of the New York Times, whose evening writeup on the day's events appeared to have been prewritten in anticipation of a different speech.
• Also prewritten: The Times has obtained an "eight-page draft script" of the campaign-approved questions Bishop Wayne T. Jackson will be asking Trump during Trump's visit to Jackson's television program, along with "the responses Mr. Trump is being advised to give." While it's not unheard of for campaigns to demand interviewers submit questions in advance, preparing a full script of the "interview" is ... odd.
• That's a long time: Trump phone bank volunteers are required to first sign a 2,271 word nondisclosure agreement promising that they will not say anything bad about Trump, his family, his company or his products ... forever.
• Total Trump campaign offices in the state of Florida: One.
• Profiles in Republican courage, Rep. Cresent Hardy edition.
• A new Trump hire: Trump tells the Washington Post that serial Clinton muckraker David Bossie, of Citizens United, has been brought aboard. He will "work on crafting attacks against Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, mining past controversies involving her and former president Bill Clinton, and cultivating Trump’s bond with conservative activists."