OVER the past week, one had the impression that grim reality was setting in among Republicans.
Both from outward signs and the Trump team's behaviour, one could sense this was a campaign going down the tubes.
For starters, there is no good polling news for Donald Trump. No battlefield states look promising.
No progress has been made even in consolidating GOP support (which hovers at about 80 percent – dreadful by historic standards).
Because Trump obsesses on crowd size we would be amiss if we didn't note that he is not filling up huge arenas as he used to. He now plays to half-empty venues.
(Remember Trumpkins love winners, not the guy who they can see is heading for an embarrassing loss.) His fund-raising has not materialised and there is no sign of a ground game. Even more telling is the Trump campaign's behaviour. Trump cannot get a fraction of the free media he had hoped for because he won't venture beyond the cosy confines of Fox night-time shows.
His campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway, is perpetually on the air – a bad sign for someone who is supposed to be running the whole campaign, not acting like a surrogate. Multiple GOP consultants, who think highly of her, tell me this is to be expected of a mid-level operative thrust into the limelight that goes with heading up a presidential campaign; she's intoxicated by the attention.
Unfortunately, Conway's spin is hilariously awful. There are “undercover” Trump voters we are told, unknown numbers in unknown states, lurking in the shadows until election day when they'll materialise and lift Trump to victory. So he's ahead! The tragedy has now become a farce.
Conway surely knows this talk about being ahead and having secret pockets of support is nonsense.
Meanwhile, Trump's newfound desire to prove he is not a racist should be the stuff of a broad comedy; this campaign is much funnier and weirder than fiction.
The more he insists to African-Americans and Hispanics that he cares about them, the more evident it is that he has no understanding, no “feel” for the voters he is chasing down.
Then we have the mystery surrounding his immigration plan, which may or may not change, which may or may not be humane, which may or may not be just like his primary opponents' plans.
He has reached new levels of incoherence; one day sounding like he has adopted Jeb Bush’s legalisation plan and later deploring the media for pushing “amnesty”.
The potential for alienating his base and fooling no other voters is all too real. Trump is reduced to pretending he’s “way up” in the polls with minority voters while telling voters, whose lives he imagines are pathetic: “What have you got to lose?” Plenty it seems.
Even Trump's “regret” gambit, a vague line or two he read off a Teleprompter, crumbled.
Asked what he regretted he responded last Thursday: “I don’t want to talk about that… A lot of people like my statements… frankly a lot of people said: ‘Oh don’t even say that. We love your statements'.”
Sorry Team Trump, Humble Trump was never going to fly.
Meanwhile, Trump's big new scandal lost salience when the Associated Press story documenting foundation donors who got face time with Hillary Clinton as secretary of state proved to be statistically flawed. Even worse for the Trumpkins, many of the identified donors (a tiny fraction of the thousands who gave her money) were people she should have been talking to or people she had known for years.
In any event, Trump has a water pistol not a missile on this one.
All he could holler in Mississippi last week was that “Clinton is a bigot” – something many of his voters don't even believe.
Taken collectively, these developments create a picture of frenzied but useless activity.
No one in Trump's campaign, including the candidate, is behaving as though he or she is serious about winning the race. There is no deliberate plan to get from here (a landslide for Clinton) to there (winning).
The candidate flails away, seemingly confused about his own position. When Republican national committee chairman Reince Priebus implausibly suggested that Trump would be ahead or tied in polls by Labor Day, maybe he was issuing a warning not trying to console voters: if this thing keeps circling the drain, forget it.