WASHINGTON — It was supposed to be the week that Donald Trump stepped up his game as the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, honed his attacks on presumed general election foe Hillary Clinton, and showed the world he was up to the job of U.S. commander-in-chief. Instead, self-inflicted wounds and a blistering barrage from Clinton left him on the defensive.
The days ahead may be even tougher, with Clinton likely to get a bounce by all-but-securing the Democratic nomination on Tuesday, and a drumbeat of negative headlines continuing from the weekend for the billionaire political novice. Some Republican stalwarts, including a potential running mate, have started to express dismay.
Trump started the week berating journalists at length during a press conference on May 31, this time for looking into his fundraising for veterans and whether millions of dollars in contributions promised in January had been delivered. “I’m not changing,” he declared at the event in New York.
His assurance that a pivot to the general election wasn’t imminent came days after securing enough delegates to be anointed the Republican nominee-in-waiting. He reshuffled his campaign staff, but did little to comfort skeptical members of his own party, to say nothing of the independent voters he must attract if he wants to win in November.
By continuing to attack the media for asking questions about the amount the billionaire had raised for veterans organizations, and railing against the coverage of a lawsuit brought against his Trump University real estate program, the billionaire came off less as a man making a pivot to the middle than one returning to the playbook that had brought him such success in the Republican primaries.
Clinton wasted little time taking advantage of Trump’s return to form, which seemed to accentuate the points she made in a speech in San Diego on Thursday focused on foreign policy. Clinton blasted Trump as “temperamentally unfit” for the Oval Office.
“This is not someone who should ever have the nuclear codes, because it’s not hard to imagine Donald Trump leading us into a war just because somebody got under his very thin skin,” Clinton said.
The speech, and a wave of positive publicity that followed, gave her much-needed distance from damaging headlines brought on by the release of the State Department inspector general’s report on May 25, which concluded that Clinton had violated policies on email use and record keeping as secretary of state.
Trump, 69, gifted Clinton, 68, another such opportunity on Thursday night, telling the Wall Street Journal that U.S. District Court Judge Gonzalo Curiel, the presiding justice in a lawsuit brought against Trump University, could not be impartial because of his Mexican heritage.
“I’m building a wall. It’s an inherent conflict of interest,” Trump said, adding that Curiel’s ancestry was “an absolute conflict.” Curiel was born in East Chicago, Indiana, and studied at Indiana University.
Clinton seized on the comments, incorporating Trump’s words into her stump speech and releasing a series of biting web ads. “Judge Curiel is as much of an American as I am. And he’s as much of an American as Donald Trump is,” Clinton said on Saturday.
Even some of Trump’s most ardent supporters found themselves unable to brush away the comments.
“This is one of the worst mistakes Trump has made. I think it’s inexcusable,” former House Speaker Newt Gingrich told “Fox News Sunday.” Gingrich is said to be under consideration as Trump’s running mate. “He has every right to criticize a judge. He has every right to say certain decisions aren’t right and his attorneys can file to move the venue from the judge. But first of all this judge was born in Indiana. He is an American. Period,” said Gingrich.
As the week wrapped up, Trump doubling down on his assertions, which, in addition to keeping the billionaire’s views on race front and center, also served to remind voters of the class action lawsuit against his eponymous real estate seminar — one that New York Attorney General Eric Schneidermann on June 2 called a “scam from beginning to end.”
The remarks also served to extinguish a short-lived detente between Trump and House Speaker Paul Ryan. On Thursday, Ryan finally endorsed Trump in his hometown newspaper. The declaration looked more like resignation than an affectionate embrace.
On Friday, however, Ryan returned to criticizing Trump after the Curiel remarks made the rounds. “I completely disagree with the thinking behind that,” Ryan said Friday in a radio interview of the remarks on Curiel, according to Politico.
While Trump’s supporters continued to believe he would rebound after the lackluster week, there was also tacit acknowledgement that the candidate’s message had gone off the tracks.
“Hillary’s vulnerabilities are more damaging than Trump’s,” Roger Stone told Bloomberg Politics. “He needs to get back to exploiting them which he has done in the past with devastating effect.”
Facing doubts about the discipline of his organization, over the weekend, Trump hired Jim Murphy as his campaign’s new national political director, the New York Times reported. Murphy, who worked for Bob Dole during his presidential campaigns in 1998 and 1996, replaces Rick Wiley, who was fired from that role a week ago.
The renewed unease with Trump comes as the Republican National Committee agreed to perform many of the functions traditional presidential campaigns do for themselves. While Trump, who routinely criticized big donors during the primaries and bragged that he was self-funding, has agreed to help raise funds for Republicans, the RNC will conduct much of the voter outreach, targeting, media buying and production, opposition research and linking with down-ballot candidates for the Trump campaign.
Clinton’s campaign, meanwhile, will formally begin raising money for the general election on Wednesday, after six Democratic contests on Tuesday are almost certain to give her enough delegates to clinch her party’s nomination.
The campaign started June with $40 million in the bank, and any primary money not spent to capture the nomination rolls over to her fall account. But it is her forceful attacks on Trump that have really given her campaign a boost. A two-minute clip from her foreign policy speech blasting Trump posted on Clinton’s Facebook page had drawn more than 3.3 million views as of Sunday.
Clinton spokesman Jesse Ferguson summed up the Republican’s week in an email to Bloomberg Politics: “Donald Trump faced questions about scamming veterans and Americans looking to better their economic futures, and faced widespread criticism, even from his own party, for comments attacking a judge on the basis of his ethnicity.” He added, “The choice for voters couldn’t be any more clear.”
The presumptive Republican nominee looks like he’ll be giving Clinton fresh ammunition in the days ahead.
Asked Sunday on CBS’ “Face the Nation” if a hypothetical Muslim judge would be biased against Trump because of his proposed ban of allowing Muslim immigrants into the country, Trump said, “it’s possible, yes.”
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