Trump finally rolls snake eyes in election bid

It took sixteen months, but the moment pundits and pollsters have been predicting since the very beginning seems to have come at long last. Finally, Donald Trump’s candidacy has entered the freefall it was always destined to end in. He’s down by anywhere between six to twelve points in national polls. 

The rest of his party is busy tearing its own hair out trying to decide just how much moral courage is too much, with several members revoking their support and calling for him to step aside, only to reverse their positions again a few days later. Arizona and Iowa have flipped from red to blue as of this writing. Clinton’s blue wall has shifted all the way to two-hundred and sixty electoral votes, only ten shy of what she’ll need to win.

The last two and a half weeks of the campaign couldn’t have gone better for the Clinton camp if Aaron Sorkin had scripted them himself. But scripted is exactly what they appear to have been. Since the first Presidential debate and straight through until today, Clinton’s campaign has successfully lead Trump around as if they’d grabbed him by the, well, you know.

What appeared at first to be a rather ham-handed attempt to dredge up an obscure feud with a former Miss Universe at the tail end of the first debate, Clinton instead knocked Trump completely off balance, sending him into a bizarre tirade against the former beauty queen and, for some reason, Rosie O’Donnell, who appears to be living rent free somewhere deep in Trump’s subconscious. By the time the debate ended, Clinton’s people already had an attack ad featuring Alicia Machado. The story went on to dominate the rest of the week’s news cycle, culminating in Trump’s now infamous 3 a.m. Twitter meltdown. 

Did Crooked Hillary help disgusting (check out sex tape and past) Alicia M become a U.S. citizen so she could use her in the debate?

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 30, 2016

Clinton also made a point of talking about Trump’s refusal to release his tax returns, and very strongly hinted that the reason is he doesn’t pay income taxes. Then, low and behold, just as the Machado story is losing steam in the press, an anonymous source dumps partial copies of Trump’s taxes into a reporter’s mailbox, all but confirming everything Clinton said and sending the GOP nominee back into the bunker for days.

Then came the Vice Presidential Debate, which nobody watched. Seriously, it was like oatmeal and grits fighting over the title of blandest breakfast staple for ninety minutes. But while many pundits believed Kaine came off as aggressive and shrill to Mike Pence’s cool composure, Kaine did his assigned job and maneuvered Pence into making several false denials. Again, within an hour, a new attack ad was making the rounds in front of a far greater number of eyeballs than had watched the debate, contrasting Pence’s vigorous denials against video footage of Trump, and in some cases even Pence saying exactly what Kaine had accused them of saying.

And finally, a few days later, the biggest hit of the campaign landed last Friday with recordings of Donald Trump openly bragging about sexually assaulting who knows how many women in the most disgustingly entitled and cavalier manner imaginable, sending his party scurrying and dominating yet another weekend of news coverage in the run up to the second debate on Sunday night. And again, an attack ad was ready and waiting to twist the knife. How are they getting them ready so fast absent advanced knowledge of a release? And one has to ask, where was this tape during the primaries? Did Billy Bush just forget about it while his cousin Jeb was fighting for his political life against the melting traffic cone? Thanksgiving is going to be awkward this year.

No, what all this suggests to me is the Clinton campaign’s opposition research files have finally been opened, with the most damning pieces distributed to “anonymous” person for releases timed in such a way as to dominate the news cycle, set the narrative, and keep Trump on permanently defensive footing for the rest of the campaign. Not only that, but the counter-attack was launched with early voting already underway in some states and the deadline to change the ballots already past.

If my guess is accurate, the patience and discipline this strategy required was immense. Clinton’s people sat on these bombshells through the email scandals, through the Republican National Convention, through the pneumonia scare, and through a half dozen different times the polls closed to within the margin of error. They held their fire until Trump’s crazy, improbable charge was so close, they could see the bloodshot of his eyes, before pulling the trigger when it would not only do the very maximum damage, but without enough time left on the clock for any chance of recovery.

{mosads}Now, mortally wounded and adrift, Trump is lashing out like a cornered animal, attacking friend and foe alike. That’s the difference between a disciplined, professionally-run campaign focused on the finish line, and a campaign made up of bumbling amateurs fixated on grabbing today’s new cycle. Political science students will study the coming massacre for decades. I expect one more great big whopper is being held in reserve, possibly for release ahead of the final debate, just in case anything funny happens between now and then.

Seriously, with this level of competent, focused, calculated viciousness, I can’t wait to see what Clinton and her team can do with the Presidency and the Supreme Court. And who knows, maybe both houses of Congress, too.

Tomlinson is an author and comedian. Follow him @stealthygeek.

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