Welcome back to our daily roundup of Donald Trump campaign news, otherwise known as the slow-motion end of either the Republican party or the republic itself. We're still awaiting judgment on that one.
This weekend's coordinated Republican presidential campaign effort was an attempt to bury Donald Trump's admission that our sitting president is, in fact, an American citizen under a new avalanche of misinformation (misinformation is a two-dollar word meaning "lies") about how Donald Trump wasn't really too into that whole birther thing after all, it was just your collective imaginations.
In reality, said no less than four Trumpian visitors to the Sunday shows, (1) it was all Hillary Clinton's fault (it provably wasn't), and (2) Donald Trump had considered the matter settled once the president released his "long-form" birth certificate (Donald Trump provably didn't consider it settled), and (3) that Donald Trump was just doing America a bang-up favor by heroically taking it upon himself to "resolve" all those other racist voters' concerns about Obama's legitimacy for office for once and for all (it provably did no such thing, according to even the most recent polls of actual Republican partisans.)
It was a tour de force, which is a five-dollar phrase meaning three ring circus under a burning tent, clowns running everywhere. Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler on Gov. Chris Christie's blatant, repeated lies on the subject: "This is why Americans hate politics. A sitting governor goes on national television and when he is called out for an obvious falsehood, he simply repeats the inaccurate talking points over and over."
Yes, well, that is what Gov. Chris Christie is known for.
As for the rest of today's news, it's been a tour de force all right. It’s been a tour de force and then some.
• In response to crude "pressure cooker"-style bombs being set off in New York and New Jersey, Donald Trump opined that "we're going to have to do something extremely tough over there" and that we need to "knock the hell out of them."
• Trump today railed against the press for magazines that allegedly "tell you how to make the same bombs" as used in terrorist acts. While he was unspecific about which magazines were supposedly publishing such instructions, he demanded that the responsible media figures "be arrested immediately."
• Trump also complained, of the now-captured bombing suspect: "Now we will give him amazing hospitalization. [...] He'll probably even have room service, knowing the way our country is. And on top of that, he will be represented by an outstanding lawyer. [...] [H]is punishment will not be what it once could have been. What a sad situation." He went on to demand "foreign enemy combatants" are "treated as such". The man arrested for the bombings, Ahmad Rahami, is a naturalized American citizen who immigrated with his family from Afghanistan to the United States at age 7.
• Fox News proctological orator Sean Hannity, an avid Trump backer, called the New York bombing a "direct result" of failing to embrace Trump's "extreme vetting" policies. See above, with emphasis on age 7.
• While Donald Trump has declared that he no longer believes his long-championed theory that President Barack Obama is not necessarily a citizen of the United States, he has not similarly renounced the laundry list of other racist far-right conspiracy theories he has also unapologetically peddled. Among them: That Obama's memoir Dreams from My Father was secretly penned by movement boogieman Bill Ayers, that Obama was "a terrible student" who did not deserve to go to Harvard but who was let in anyway, and/or that perhaps Obama didn't really even go there at all.
It's uncanny how every one of Trump's adopted theories about Obama was culled from racist roots. Go figure.
• This is also why Americans hate politics: In a piece about claims being made by Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway and RNC head Reince Priebus that "birther" conspiracy theories "started with Hillary Clinton's campaign", Politico spent six paragraphs on relaying those assertions before finally informing readers that those claims are, in fact, false.
• More than 50 former government officials have signed on to an "open letter" to Trump asking him to disclose his overseas business investments, calling his failure to disclose those relationships "unprecedented for a candidate for the nation's highest office."
• In an interview with Bill O'Reilly, Trump also railed against U.S.-led forces in Syria for a bombing raid that mistakenly killed Syrian troops instead of ISIS fighters. "I guess we killed more than 80 troops and now Russia is absolutely furious at us, but we bombed the wrong people. I mean, we're like the gang that couldn't shoot straight. Our country, with this leader is the gang that couldn't shoot straight."
• Trump's campaign is preparing a "First Day Project" in which a new President Trump "spends several hours signing papers—and erases the Obama Presidency."
Stephen Moore, an official campaign adviser who is a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, explained, “We want to identify maybe twenty-five executive orders that Trump could sign literally the first day in office.”
Among the likely candidates: Renouncing the Paris Agreement on climate change.
• Fox News analyst Juan Williams pens an editorial for The Hill excoriating overt racism in Trump's base. "Clinton should not have apologized."
These are racist views. If they do not count as “deplorable,” then the word “deplorable” no longer has any meaning. By the way, a Washington Post/ABC News poll has 60 percent of Americans agreeing that Trump is personally “biased against women and minorities.” [...]
As she prepares for her first debate with Trump next week, Clinton needs to unapologetically remind voters — especially traditional Republicans who are uncomfortable with seeing their party overrun by extremists — of the racist, paranoid fringes that Trump has invited into the nation’s politics under the banner of the Republican Party.
• MSNBC Morning Joe co-hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski met with Donald Trump at Trump Tower last week in an attempt to patch up the once-fawning, now-bitter relationship between them. No word on whether the surgery was a success.
• The Dallas Morning News is facing intense reader backlash for their endorsement of Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump. It is the first time the paper endorsed a Democratic presidential nominee in 75 years.
• Donald Trump is said to be considering oil company founder and "outspoken opponent of animal rights" Forrest Lucas as a "leading contender" for his Secretary of the Interior. Also lobbying for the position: Donald Trump Jr.
• An analysis by the conservative Tax Foundation estimates Trump's newest tax plan could cost nearly $6 trillion over 10 years.
• Pro-Trump PAC Liberty Action Group, previously in the news for allegedly illegal robocalling and for being tied to a similar group soliciting funds for opposing causes, has responded to an FEC inquiry into required donor information by admitting that it was not aware such information needed to be collected.