The more Hillary Clinton tries to moderate her message and reach out to all voters, the more Donald Trump doubles down on his hateful rhetoric and further narrows his already narrow appeal. A consequence of these dueling visions is that Clinton is cruising to a landslide victory despite her substantial negatives while Trump keeps finding new ways to enhance his chances of losing badly.
The latest twist in this self-destructive saga is yet another shake-up in Trump’s struggling campaign organization — the second rearranging in two months of the deck chairs on his personal Titanic — that effectively closes the door to efforts to get him to abandon what is prissily referred to by some scribes as his “combative populism.” You know, like dissing a Gold Star family that happens to be Muslim or suggesting that his supporters shoot his opponent if she is elected.
You’ll recall that Thug One, who was Trump’s first campaign chairman, was fired not because of but after he roughly grabbed a reporter from a right-wing website that is Trump’s Pravda. (It never happened even though it was captured on videotape. Oh, never mind.)
Thug One was replaced with Thug Two, a guy who made his dime propping up despots named Seko, Marcos and Yanukovych and had a direct line to the Kremlin, but then it was revealed that the direct line was filled with Russian dollars.
Now that guy has been demoted and replaced by Thug Three, who has no experience running a campaign and is the bare-knuckled major domo of the same website for which the roughly grabbed reporter worked and was forced out by Thug Three when he refused to back her up because of his drooling admiration for Trump.
Trump, of course, is congenitally unable to take responsibility for his campaign collapsing around him. And even at this late date, it still beggars belief what an utterly vile and soulless person he is. That he is incapable of changing is the least of it.