Trump tells crowd how Mike Pence had to ask his permission to endorse Paul Ryan.

When I saw Fox News come out with its poll yesterday with Hillary Clinton opening up a 10 point lead over Donald Trump nationwide, I couldn't help wonder whether some top Republicans might have gotten a heads up the day before, thus contributing to what we might call the 'Reince Apoplectic' freakout. Would they do that? Who knows. But c'mon, it's Fox. Today we have three new state polls each showing big leads for Clinton. Michigan (Clinton +9), Pennsylvania (Clinton +11), New Hampshire (Clinton +15).

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I cringed this morning when I read this story in Politico which pretty clearly demonstrated that Melania Trump was an undocumented worker for years when she began her modeling career in the US in the mid-90s. I say I cringed not because there's anything wrong with the piece but because we too were working on it back in February and March and had it pretty well nailed. The hold up was that there was at least one theoretically possible way she could have been legal that we couldn't definitively rule out since the Trumps' of course were not going to answer any questions or provide any of her immigrants papers. The irony in all of this is that the evidence against Trump comes almost entirely from her own mouth, specifically a January interview she gave to Harper's Bazaar and a subsequent TV interview with Mika Brzezinski in which she explained that she was nothing like those awful 'illegals' her husband wants to expel en masse.

Days before the Cleveland convention, Donald Trump's top advisor on Europe and Russia, went to Moscow to deliver a speech blasting US policy in the region.

Yes, this is the guy I mentioned in my post from a couple weeks ago.

Let me reiterate a point I made this morning. For all the talk about "interventions", 'en masse' defections from the Trump campaign, major GOP leaders renouncing their support, let's not kid ourselves about what's driving this. It's the polls.

Polls, polls, polls.