Trump’s no good, very bad weekend

Where to even start? The Trump campaign’s apparent strategy of overloading the media with gaffes and scandals reached a stunning crescendo over the weekend, spearheaded by none other than Trump himself on Friday with a bizarre early-morning tweet broadside fired against ISIS, err no, I mean a former beauty queen.

Because nothing shouts “presidential temperament” like a bar-time twitter storm calling a woman disgusting and telling America to go watch a sex tape that doesn’t actually exist.

{mosads}But while Trump’s renewed attacks against Alicia Machado grabbed most of the headlines over the weekend, several other big stories either fell by the wayside or never got the sort of traction the deserved. So, let’s take a moment to zoom out to a 30,000ft view of the weekend’s discoveries. Since Friday morning, Trump’s bad news has included:

• Rekindling a feud with Miss Universe 1995 and pushing a disproven sex tape. This of course after having spent the rest of the week fat-shaming her, going so far as to say he’d done her a favor by humiliating her about her weight gain, echoing similar statements he’s made about doing President Obama a “great service” by continuing to fan the flames of the Birther movement years after the conspiracy theory had been soundly refuted.

• Revealed to having appeared in a softcore porno film for Playboy. If only he’d gone for hardcore, we could’ve put the whole “tiny hands” issue to bed before it ever came up in the primary debates.
  

• Violated the decades long embargo against American corporations doing business in Cuba. Not two weeks after he threatened to roll back the Obama Administration’s normalizing of diplomatic and economic relations with the former Soviet ally.
  

• Rented office space in New York to an Iranian bank tied to terrorism. Apparently he knows more about terrorism than our generals because he’s been hosting them.
  

• Had a lawsuit refiled in New York over the alleged rape of a 13 yr old girl. This time with a new witness and additional lawyer.
  

• Lost nearly a Billion dollars in 1995, and likely hasn’t paid income taxes since. While running casinos. Where the motto is literally, “The house always wins.”
  

• His charitable foundation was ordered to cease taking donations in New York. While not directly tied to the state investigation into illegal use of charitable donations for personal gain, the news that the Trump Foundation was not properly certified as a charity in New York state further erodes its image.
  

• Suicide-shamed war veterans. Yes, the five-time draft deferment candidate who doesn’t think POW’s are heroes and had to be cajoled into actually donating telethon money to veterans’ charities months after the fact has just now said that our vets coming back from deployment who succumb to PTSD just weren’t strong enough to deal with what they’d seen. How does this guy enjoy majority support from our warfighters again?
  

That’s eight major scandals, or gaffes, since Friday. Donald Trump is averaging two scandals per day of sufficient scale and impact to sink any normal candidate’s campaign. They’re coming so fast and furious that the national media has only really managed to give two of them, the Alicia Machado feud and the 1995 tax revelations, any real exposure to the public.

What I find most incredible is, knowing all of this, Donald Trump still chose to run in the first place. What kind of a man spends a lifetime packing every walk-in closet in every gaudy, gold-leaf penthouse he owns with skeletons only to figure no one but the maids will ever see them?

Did he think he was so beloved that no one was going to look? Did he think his power so vast and unopposed that he could threaten, blackmail, or intimidate the entire national media, not to mention everyone he’s ever stepped on along the way, into cowering silence? Or did he believe that his supporters simply wouldn’t care?

Well, on that last score, it truly appears that he was correct. His boast months ago that he could shoot someone on 5 th Avenue and not lose any voters was perhaps prophetic. Not proof of corporate maleficence, pay-to- play, bribes, potential treason, sexual assault, attacks on veterans, or straight up porn is enough to pierce the bubble of the alternate reality they’ve chosen to inhabit.

However, as we’ve now seen on more than half a dozen occasions in tracking polls, those supporters cap out around forty-five percent of the electorate. That’s his hard ceiling, he’s never been able to sustain support beyond that threshold for more than a day or so. And that simply won’t be enough to deliver him to the White House.

Especially now that the media has finally woken up to the dangers of the monster they created and nurtured for the last sixteen months.

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

The views expressed by Contributors are their own and are not the views of The Hill.