"It's the economy, stupid" was the slogan behind Bill Clinton's 1992 White House triumph; but, in Campaign 2016, it's becoming more about stupid - and his name is Donald Trump.
Consider: emerging from a disastrous week of self-inflicted wounds, this was to be a week in which Trump would reboot his careering campaign - you know, focus on policies; and get people talking about how he might make America great again.
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Trump: Obama, Clinton 'founders' of IS
Trump, in a new stretch of hyperbole, asserts that Obama and Clinton founded Islamic State.
It seemed his campaign team might have confined him to a padded cell for the weekend and that he had responded well to treatment, because when Trump spoke about economic policy in Detroit on Monday, he was a borderline model candidate - didn't engage hecklers, threatened no violence, and even read the teleprompter with some ease.
Aware that Hillary Clinton would be in Detroit on Thursday to speak on the same issues, Trump might have been expected to use his considerable command of free media to fill intervening news cycles with a full-throated exposition of his policies and his take on the flaws in Clinton's proposals.
But no - and that's why we have the very serious proposal that Trump is more stupid than he lets on.
Speaking in North Carolina on Tuesday, Trump triggered an avalanche of criticism and rebuke for one of his typical dog-whistle lines that was more a reckless suggestion for gun nuts to target Clinton than it was, as he later claimed, an innocent reference to the voting strength of supporters of the Second Amendment.
Speaking in Florida on Wednesday, Trump triggered another avalanche of criticism and rebuke, with his dumb insistence that President Barack Obama was a founder of the terrorist movement that calls itself Islamic State. And on Thursday he doubled down - when he was given an opportunity in a series of interviews, to reposition himself, maybe to argue something to the effect that Obama's policies had created a vacuum in which IS had thrived.
Nope … and recall, Trump likes to tell us how smart he is.
Here, conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt generously offers Trump the equivalent of a political lifeline:
HEWITT: Last night you said that the President was the founder of ISIS. I know what you meant, you meant that he created the vacuum, he lost the peace.
TRUMP: No, I meant that he's the founder of ISIS, I do. He was the most valuable player. I gave him the most valuable player award. I give her too, by the way.
HEWITT: But he's not sympathetic to them. He hates them; he's trying to kill them.
TRUMP: He was the found, his - the way he got out of Iraq was the founding of ISIS.
HEWITT: By using the term "founder", they're hitting you on this again. Mistake?
TRUMP: No, it's no mistake. Everyone's liking it. I think they're liking it.
Trump doesn't get that in moving into a general election campaign in which he is pitted one-on-one with Clinton, that the contest has changed dramatically; that it's no longer about competing with other Republicans for a share of the vote from the party's base. It doesn't seem to have occurred to him that the vast majority of those who turn out for his rallies are the base - and that a persistent pitch to their prejudices is not likely to win undecided or conservative Democrats in the numbers that he needs to win.
Interviewed on CNBC on Thursday, he refused to concede that he was making errors - claiming as proof that he had won the GOP primaries contests.
Challenged on his free-falling polls, Trump, whom fact checkers judge to be one of the greatest political liars to offer themselves to the American people, parried: "Whatever happens, happens. I'm giving it straight. I don't know that it'll work because I'm a non-political person and I'm proud of that. But I'm giving it straight."
Asked about defections in demographics he must hold to win, Trump insisted: "We'll see what happens. I have a whole group of people out there that people don't even know about. At the rally last night I had 10,000 people. If Hillary had that rally, she would have had 200 people if she was lucky. I don't know that translates to votes. In theory, it should. But I don't know it translates into votes."
And pressed on falling support in critical swing states, Trump went all Forrest Gump: 'I don't know. Whatever it is it is. Look, all I do is tell the truth. I'm a truth teller. All I do is tell the truth. If at the end of 90 days I fall in short because I'm somewhat politically correct even though I'm supposed to be the smart one and even though I'm supposed to have a lot of good ideas, it's OK.
"I go back to a very good way of life. It's not what I'm looking to do. I think we're going to have a victory, but we'll see."
It's hardly surprising that there's talk of new depths of despair in the Republican National Committee.
Officials have told Time magazine that chairman Reince Priebus has warned Trump the party might be driven to abandon him, because its internal polling says he's likely to lose in November.
Priebus, who has good reason to be tearing his hair out, reportedly told Trump that he'd be better placed had he retreated to his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida instead of hitting the campaign trail following the RNC's July convention.
Some candidates are honoured or mocked by the publication of books of their quotable quotes. But when this business is done, I expect to see a book of quotes on what people have said of Trump.
Sure to be included is this from John Noonan, a national security adviser to former Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney, who told US News & World Report:
"Trump is Trump. You can pull somebody out of the insane asylum and staff him with the best people in the business, and he's still going to be in the parking lot screaming about the book of Revelations [sic] and there's nothing you can do about it. Hillary's the place-kicker on the field. She's shanking every kick. And Trump's the guy pleasuring himself in the stands."
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