Washington: Just when Donald Trump thought it was safe to go back into the electorate after a bleak week of presidential campaigning, he took a clobbering from all sides – and even from himself (…again).
In a sense, the Republican candidate was a sitting duck. That he made no attempt to deny a sensational weekend report on his taxes was widely taken as confirmation that The New York Times was correct.
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Trump vows to end 'political correctness' in military
Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump says he will let commanders decide the role women and transgender people will play in the US military.
The gist of it was that by transferring close to $US1 billion ($1.3 billion) in losses from his corporate books to his personal income tax assessment in 1995, Trump had probably freed himself from paying any income tax for as many as 18 years.
But even before Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton could take a crack at him, Trump was doing what he's been doing so well in recent days – committing his own gaffe, which then puts his campaign on a back foot as it crams to explain what the candidate really meant to say.
The subject was the delicate issue of military veterans and their mental health.
What Trump meant to say at a "town hall" meeting in Herndon, Virginia, was that those who had not been to war had no comprehension of the horror, and of how it impacted some servicemen and women.
What he said was: "When you talk about the mental health problems, when people come back from war and combat, they see things that maybe a lot of the folks in this room have seen many times over. And you're strong and you can handle it, but a lot of people can't handle it."
In that, Trump played to the stigmas, particularly in the military, around depression and post-traumatic stress disorder. Mental health experts have fought for years to combat notions that the strong and the brave can handle the stress – and by cruel implication, that only the weak and the fearful succumb.
Trump then bolted for Colorado – and while he was in the air, New York legal authorities effectively shuttered his controversial charitable foundation, in the wake of a report by The Washington Post that the foundation was not properly registered for the business of fundraising.
New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman had already launched an investigation into questionable use of the foundation's funds – including hundreds of thousands of dollars to settle some of Trump's corporate legal cases and the purchase of portraits of a certain Donald J. Trump.
Clinton meanwhile was headed to Ohio. Reporters noted a spring in her step – presumably because the story on Trump's taxes was such a gift, particularly in Ohio where she struggles to connect with white working-class voters who seem to be splitting Trump's way in response to his pitch that global trade deals are robbing Americans of jobs.
All Clinton had to do at a rally in Toledo, Ohio, was open her mouth and the zingers poured out. Like …
- "Toledo is the kind of place where people work hard, look after one another and, yes, pay their taxes."
- Conjuring with a claim by Trump surrogates that the tax story was proof of his "genius", she quipped: "What kind of a genius loses a billion dollars in a single year?"
- "While millions of American families, including mine and yours, were working hard and paying their fair share, it seems he was contributing nothing to our nation."
Trump by then was on the ground in Colorado – telling a rally at Pueblo that he had used the tax code "brilliantly".
And in an attempt to distract from his own ill-gotten gains, he put a spotlight on Clinton's – "Hillary Clinton hasn't made an honest dollar in her entire life – [she] left the White House dead broke [and] now she and her husband have made more than $US200 million without building a company or creating a single thing".
But taking Trump's implication that his income consisted of "honest dollars", The Washington Post did a bit of digging into Trump's business affairs at the time of the billion-dollar loss – and came up with a couple of intriguing questions:
- The year of the great loss was 1995, so how did Trump fund a spending spree in the same year that included a 727 jet for his personal use, a new skyscraper in his Manhattan property portfolio, and other properties in Telluride, Colorado, and Palm Beach, Florida?
- Given that Trump has always distanced himself from the Trump Organisation's first four bankruptcies at the Trump casino operation in Atlantic City, claiming they had nothing to do with him, what were we to make of the indication in the documents underpinning The New York Times' report, that he might have used the losses stemming from those bankruptcies to benefit his personal fortune?
On limited polling since the September 26 debate, Clinton is slowly pulling away from Trump – she's up just more than three points in the Real Clear Politics average of national polls. On September 19, less than one point separated them.
And as an uncertain gloom settles on the GOP, there are more signs that the sinking ship is deserting the rat. The latest remarkable declaration that a prominent Republican will vote for Clinton really is a "hell has frozen over" moment.
Those with long memories will recall accounts of the Clinton "enemies list", on which they kept the names of those who had crossed them – and who would be punished forever.
Michael Chertoff is a case in point. Back in the days when investigating purported Clinton scandals was a new sport in Washington, Chertoff was the lead Republican counsel on the Senate committee that investigated what was dubbed the Whitewater Affair.
Clinton didn't forget. When Chertoff was nominated for a senior post in the Justice Department in 2001, Clinton's was the lone vote opposing his confirmation by the Senate. Two years later, when he was nominated to the US Court of Appeal – she again was the lone holdout when his confirmation came to the Senate.
But as Bloomberg reported on Monday: "All that was before the Republican Party nominated Trump as its presidential candidate. This has shaken up the parity of Reagan. Chertoff, a lifelong Republican, will now be voting Democrat in November."
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