Trump holds the aces

Last week, the New York Times ran the page one headline ‘Pence Supports Ryan, Showing GOP Turmoil.’ There was turmoil in the Republican party because Mike Pence, its vice-presidential nominee, had endorsed the candidacy of Paul Ryan, its most powerful congressman. One wonders what the Times would have called it had the two men actually disagreed about something. The Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump had waited days before endorsing Ryan, a signal that he had not forgotten Ryan’s slowness to back him in the spring. And the whole press is now in a frenzy of negative reporting about the Trump campaign. These have been ‘weeks of self-inflicted controversies and plummeting poll numbers’ among Trump’s Republicans. It has been a ‘meltdown’, a ‘cascade of blunders’, a ‘panic’.To judge from the headlines, Trump cannot win, because he is disrespecting the families of America’s war dead, bullying babies and helping Vladimir Putin spy.

But there was no meltdown. Democrats got a polling ‘bounce’ after their convention that pushed Hillary Clinton back to the seven–point lead she had enjoyed at the start of summer. Trump has taken a few pratfalls, but it is well to remember that he is not
the worse off for the many he took earlier in the campaign.

Fights with the parents of Humayun Khan, a Muslim US army captain killed in Iraq, started the idea of a Trump collapse. The father, Khizr Khan, a Pakistani-born US citizen, appeared at the Democratic convention to attack Trump’s call for a temporary ban on Muslim immigration and berated him for his understanding of the constitution. Trump wondered aloud why Khizr Khan’s wife, Ghazala, who had stood silently beside him in a headscarf, hadn’t herself been allowed to speak.