Welcome back to your regularly scheduled update on the state of the Donald Trump presidential campaign. I apologize in advance.
Today was a big day in the Donald Trump campaign, as Hair Furor repeated his new idea for police to stop-and-frisk Americans on the streets in order to take their guns away. This would be precisely the sort of thing that the NRA and other American militia groups have been sending panicked newsletters about for the last forty years, but everyone appears to be in agreement that Donald Trump meant only black Americans so, as of yet, there is no panic in sight.
There’s more news, of course. Let’s get on with it.
• $8.2 million: That's the new estimate of how much money the Donald Trump campaign has paid Donald Trump's various businesses so far during this presidential bid. The figure includes everything from venue rental fees at Trump properties to Trump Tower office space to Trump-branded bottled water.
• Straying from his prepared(?) Pittsburgh remarks to address events in Charlotte, Donald Trump stated that "drugs are a very, very big factor in what you're watching on television at night." His campaign manager later Trumpsplained that Trump was not referring to protests and violence in Charlotte "specifically."
• Asked about police violence and the Charlotte protests, Trump said it "just seems that there's a lack of spirit between the white and the black." Campaign surrogate Newt Gingrich blamed the "tragic failure of leadership" of "our first African-American president."
• Vice presidential appendage Mike Pence says we "ought to set aside this talk about institutional racism and institutional bias" when talking about police shootings of black Americans.
• When asked by a reporter why he acknowledged President Obama's American birth after famously disputing it for years, Trump said it was because "We want to get on with the campaign." He gave no signal that he would apologize for casting similar doubts about Obama's religion or college accomplishments, none of which he has similarly reversed himself on.
• A Trump county campaign chair in Ohio resigned from her post today after telling an interviewer that "I don't think there was any racism until Obama got elected. We never had problems like this."
• Donald Trump Jr. continues to defend his "Skittles" tweet, calling it "a statistical thing. We have to be careful about who we let into this country." He did not address critics who noted that his statistical thing misrepresented the actual dangers posed by refugees by a factor of tens of millions-ish.
• 75 retired ambassadors and other senior diplomats signed an endorsement of Hillary Clinton for the presidency, calling Donald Trump "entirely unqualified to serve as President and Commander-in-chief."
• An op-ed by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar excoriates Trump for his "paranoid, nativist rhetoric" against Muslims, black Americans, and refugees.
• As the first presidential debate nears, watchers of the press and punditry are wondering whether that press can avoid grading Trump's debate performance on a curve.
• Trump told Fox & Friends this morning that the debate's moderator should not "fact-check" the candidates' statements, but leave it two the two candidates themselves.
• Trump has a long history of claiming elections are rigged when they don't go his way.
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