TRUMP'S GREATEST ENEMY

Presidential hopeful Donald Trump has had a bad couple of weeks. He's losing ground to Hillary in the polls, especially in battleground states.

Plus, a lot of Republicans in the national security business have labeled Trump unfit to be Commander-in-Chief.

And a bunch of other negative stuff:

Trump made a public plea to Russia to reveal the thirty thousand emails Hillary deleted from her server--on the theory they might have already grabbed them up before the controversy arose (and back while the server was available; right now it's probably locked up in the basement of the FBI building, unplugged and disconnected from the world, impossible to hack).

Some critics suggested Trump was attempting to enlist Russia in a new cyber crime, but this hack--if it happened--would have occurred way in the past. And, unfortunately for Trump, there's never been convincing evidence Hillary's server was actually hacked by anyone.

Later, Trump repeated his favorite lie (that Hillary plans to destroy the Second Amendment), and reminded his audience if she appointed new Supreme Court Justices they could do her bidding and there would be nothing anybody could do to stop her. Well, maybe the "Second Amendment people" could do something about it.

"I don't know," Trump mumbles, moving on.

After some uproar, he explained this was no semi-veiled threat of assassination, merely a reference to the gun-lobby's legendary ability to get stuff done in support of its cause--by organizing and rallying the troops, and so forth.

(I suppose a reformulated Supreme Court could deliver a new interpretation of the Second Amendment, but getting rid of it entirely would require a national vote and a substantial majority of state legislatures to agree. Not much chance the NRA would let that happen.)

Next, Trump announced President Obama and Hillary Clinton as co-founders of ISIS, a claim he repeated several times with a straight face before revealing it was just a joke.

Good to know the man's got a healthy sense of humor.

Now that Hillary has released copies of her most recent tax forms, Trump continues to say his hands are tied. Seems there's a "routine" audit under way. The IRS says that's no impediment to releasing the information, but it seems clear Trump will refuse to act until after the election, after which he may well continue to refuse on the grounds he is no longer a candidate for President and his taxes are none of your effing business.

Following all this campaign upheaval, Trump has announced he has a new "greatest enemy." He'll set Hillary aside for the moment to fight the press.

Yes, those bastards of the press!

Always in his face, always reporting what he says about stuff, forever asking him to explain what he means by the words he uses!

Always giving him opportunities to walk back his outrageous statements so he can sound more like a level-headed individual and less like a raving loon.

Those bastards!

Implying Trump doesn't say what he means and mean what he says, like the man he is. A man with a perfectly fine penis, okay? About which nothing more need be said.

Trump says he's thinking of revoking a bunch of press credentials. God knows he doesn't need the publicity. He could spend billions of his own money putting his message before the American people.

And he'd probably be better off, too. Short, tightly-edited commercials might keep him out of trouble. Or at least they might if it was just a matter of getting tangled up in his own words when he's facing the cameras.

The fact is, most of what Trump says is perfectly clear and unambiguous. And out of this world.

Which is why Trump himself will always be his greatest enemy.

What he needs is to have somebody else control the content of his sound bites, somebody more responsible, more serious--perhaps a grownup of some sort.

If everything Trump said was vetted by the Republican Party, he might have a chance against Hillary.

But that's a risk, for Republicans.

If they carved out a respectable, even presidential, version of Trump and successfully fed it to America--and then loosed the result on the country, unable to control him in office--the Republicans would have committed a fraud upon the American people that might prevent the party from getting another candidate elected for a hundred years.

But why take the long view? Nobody does, right?

It's not like there's going to be a future.