2016 July 7^th

Mr. Trump has, once again, allowed his ego to overwhelm what little good sense he has, and it is, indeed, very little good sense. Prior to his Cincinnati speech yesterday, the FBI head, James Comey, had given Trump a gift never before given to any candidate for the Presidency. While Comey did not find grounds to prosecute Secretary Clinton he did spend a considerable amount of time verbally lacerating her for failure to properly guard state secrets on her private email server. Ever alert to politically opportunities, Speaker of the House, Paul Ryan, rose to suggest that Secretary Clinton should not be given the usual security briefings offered to Presidential candidates because she couldn’t be trusted to keep that information secure. Hey, a little political posturing will help Ryan improve his creds with the Tea Party types.

With this scathing report in hand, what did Donald J. Trump emphasize in his Cincinnati speech? He did talk about “Crooked” Hillary’s difficulties, but for just a very few minutes. He reserved most of his time to focus on the personal slights he had endured from Chuck Todd who is now “sleepy” Chuck Todd. No one seems to know why Trump was calling him “sleepy.” I thought Trump’s low energy slot was adequately filled by Dr. Ben Carson, the superbly relaxed neurosurgeon,…at least until Carson came around to being a Trump fan. Perhaps Trump is responding to Chuck Todd’s edict that Meet the Press will not accept Trump’s tweets, phone calls or other freebee appearances. Whatever the reason Trump felt challenged by Chuck Todd, Trump felt compelled to spend a considerable amount of time at his rally ignoring Secretary Clinton’s peccadilloes and lambasting a TV commentator with whom he was unhappy.

Trump just riffs at most of his rallies; this one included. He prides himself on his refusal to use a teleprompter. Most of his utterances at these rallies do not consist of diagramable sentences;, perhaps he sees conventional English as  just too politically correct.

He did return to another issue best left for dead, the Star of David in one of his bits trying to trash Clinton. The star had been replaced by a simple circle and most political pundits had decided to move on…but no, Trump wanted to talk about it some more. He claimed to be upset that the star had been removed because it wasn’t a Star of David at all and he would have been delighted to defend its use.

When he had this gift from the FBI with which to hammer Hillary Clinton, why would any sane candidate spend time defending the indefensible? The answer is, of course, that no sane candidate would do that.

To add to this line of chat, Trump has now suggested that even if he wins the Presidency he might not be willing to serve. He claims he’ll have to wait and see how he feels about it after he wins. What a candidate!