Donald Trump commits such frequent and regular atrocities that their disgrace is diminished by their proliferation.
It's brilliant. The media can't focus on any single outrage and voters become numbed.
Nearly every day Trump does something--or something is revealed about him--that would severely damage his presidential candidacy, any presidential candidacy, but for the fact that the latest villainy gets lumped fuzzily with his villainy of the day before, or the hour before.
Hillary Clinton is plagued by the conventionality of having only two main and visible controversies--emails and the Clinton Foundation. Having but two vulnerabilities invites reporters and voters to obsess on those two, day after day, month after month.
By the new Trump model, it is a political liability to endure only a couple of flaws or gaffes.
But it is political gold to represent an utter immersion in flaws and gaffes--to be a walking flaw and a walking gaffe.
The key to the Trump model is pervasive bad behavior, not a general competence and fitness punctuated by rare but common human frailty.
There may be sexism in that. Trump may represent the historically popular bad boy and Hillary the historically disadvantaged female. We'll begin the panel discussions on that early next year.
Consider merely the outrages of Trump of the last few days.
First, David Fahrenthold of the Washington Post has been wearing Trump out with Pulitzer Prize-worthy reporting that reveals that the real foundation scandal is Trump's, not the Clintons'.
What passes for a Clinton scandal is that a former president became a world leader and raised large sums of money to do good, and, on a few occasions, officials of his foundation asked a State Department headed by his wife to take a meeting with one of his donors. And sometimes the meetings didn't happen.
What Fahrenthold has reported about the Trump Foundation is that Trump hasn't given any money to it since 2008 (the Clintons donated a million dollars to their family foundation last year), but merely collected money from others, and that he has used the foundation to:
• Make an illegal political contribution to the Florida attorney general who declined to investigate yet another of his scandals, meaning Trump University. The Trump Foundation was fined. The Trump campaign says it was an honest error, as are all $25,000 nonprofit checks written to politicians in positions to investigate politicians.
• Buy at an auction a 6-foot portrait of himself, for $20,000, then possibly break the law by not reusing the portrait for charitable purpose but displaying it in the boardroom of one of his private properties. I say "possibly" because, while several sources say Melania indeed dispatched the portrait to a private room of a Trump golf club, the campaign won't respond to further queries about the Post's scoops on the transgressions of the foundation.
• Take a $150,000 donation in two parts from the Evans Foundation that was then passed through directly to the Palm Beach Police Foundation, which then thanked Trump by throwing a $276,463 event at Trump's Mar-a-Lago, thus providing that Trump actually made money on the deal.
Meanwhile, Trump, after years leading the racist parade otherwise, admitted the sane truth that Barack Obama is an American. Beyond the outrage of not apologizing, he defamed Clinton by saying he was only putting to rest the evil rumor she started.
Here's the "evidence" of that, all from 2008 when Hillary and Obama were rivals for the Democratic presidential nomination: A journalist once tweeted that Hillary pal Sidney Blumenthal had suggested the journalist look into Obama's origins; a volunteer county coordinator for Hillary in Iowa had spread such an Obama rumor and was dismissed, and Clinton consultant Mark Penn had written an internal memo suggesting Hillary might find a way to make something of Obama's roots.
Hillary herself never made so much as a peep about Obama's birth, so far as the record shows.
Oh, and Trump continues to keep secret his tax returns--which probably show him paying little to no taxes and making no charitable contributions--while spreading the smear that Hillary is a lot sicker than one pneumonia bout.
Meanwhile Trump shows Dr. Oz only enough of his recent blood-test results to get the celebrity doctor to declare the one thing Trump wanted everyone to know, which is that his testosterone levels are manly.
Oh, and Trump said the other day that we ought to think about what would happen to Clinton if she didn't have the gun protection of the Secret Service. Invoking his opponent's assassination was merely par for a course in which Trump previously said people could exercise a Second Amendment option to keep her from appointing judges.
There's much more, but to lengthen the list of outrages is to play Trump's game.
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John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame in 2014. Email him at [email protected]. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial on 09/20/2016