“Sometimes, in the heat of debate and speaking on a multitude of issues, you don’t say the right words or you say the wrong thing,” he said. “I have done that and I regret it, particularly where it may have caused personal pain.” If you were Megyn Kelly or Carly Fiorina, or Judge Gonzalo Curiel, or a member of the Khan family, would you have been satisfied with these weasel words? No, you wouldn’t.
.. Trump didn’t attack the Khans during “the heat of debate.” He belittled Ghazala Khan, the mother of a soldier killed in Iraq, in a telephone interview with Maureen Dowd, the Times columnist, on the day after the Democratic Convention ended. Then Trump extended his comments to the dead soldier’s father, Khizr Khan, who had criticized him at the Convention, and, despite protests by other Republicans, he kept up his attacks for days.
This wasn’t a verbal slip or an instant response.
.. Instead of fessing up properly, Trump continued to blame the media for highlighting what he says.
.. He claimed, “They will take words of mine out of context and spend a week obsessing over every single syllable, and then pretend to discover some hidden meaning in what I said.” It wasn’t clear which of his many utterances Trump was referring to here. Presumably, it was ambiguous statements like this one: “We have a very hostile judge. Now, he is Hispanic, I believe. He is a very hostile judge to me. I said it loud and clear.” Or perhaps it was this opaque statement: “isis is honoring President Obama. He is the founder of isis.”
.. Among the many things it ignores, however, are these: 1) Trump has just brought in a wealthy former Goldman Sachs investment banker, Steve Bannon, to run his campaign. 2) The person Bannon’s replacing, Manafort, is a prominent Washington lobbyist whose lucrative arrangements with a pro-Russian party in Ukraine had turned into an embarrassing distraction.
.. 3) Before making the personnel changes, Trump met with one of the richest and most reclusive hedge-fund managers in the country, Robert Mercer, who has a long record of supporting ultra-conservative causes, including Breitbart, the controversial news site that Bannon runs.
Trump’s Hollow ‘Regrets’
He says he has never even sought forgiveness from God, the divine author and inspiration of his favorite book, from which he struggled to name a favorite verse.
But Donald Trump actually expressed some “regret” last week,
.. Precisely what does Trump regret?
Does he regret his comments on Megyn Kelly and the issue of blood coming out of her “wherever”? Does he regret retweeting messages calling her a bimbo?
Does he regret attacking a Gold Star family?
Does he regret making fun of one of my colleagues with a disability?
Does he regret comparing Ben Carson’s temper to the incurable pathology of a child molester?
Does he regret suggesting that Ted Cruz’s father associated with John F. Kennedy’s assassin?
What, exactly, does he regret? There are so many things from which to choose.
I don’t believe, even for a nanosecond, that he regrets the personal impact of what he has said on anyone besides himself.
.. I believe that he only regrets that what he has said has not worked well for him in the general election portion of the campaign. That is the difference between regret as an act of public contrition and regret as an expression of personal disappointment in one’s own flagging fortunes.
.. This fragile narcissist, who is a sort of bottomless pit of emotional need and affirmation, is easily injured by even the slightest confrontation.
.. He is a man who has said of himself, “I have no friends, as far as I’m concerned,”
.. There is something rotten at the core of this man that no length of script or turn of phrase can ameliorate.
How Can America Recover From Donald Trump?
Anyone hoping to build a serious solution to immigration after this election will have to confront the unworkable ideas and vicious emotions that Mr. Trump, with many enablers, has dragged into the open.
.. Stephen Bannon, Breitbart’s chief purveyor of conspiracy theories and anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant venom, is the natural ally of a candidate who hints that President Obama is a secret Muslim and who insists that Muslims in New Jersey danced by the thousands as the towers fell on 9/11.
.. Trump supporters have now been promised a nation where non-natives, and their children, are locked outside the borders forever. They have been promised, inside a new wall, new factories where everyone will build things, speak only English and be rich. What will happen when they learn that none of this is real?
Why Trump Isn’t Tweeting About the Olympics
Why has Trump hit the mute button on the Olympics, while Clinton has pumped up the volume? There’s a good reason for that, and a surprising one. The spectacle of America vanquishing its global rivals is—ironically, amazingly—utterly terrible for the “America First” candidate.
A big part of his political message, the one you hear at his stump speeches, is that America has grown weak. America doesn’t win anymore, he says. “Crippled America” is the title of his most recent book.
.. Here’s a candidate whose message depends entirely on convincing Americans that they’re living in a failing nation overrun by criminal immigrants. And for the past two weeks, tens of millions of Americans have been glued to a multi-ethnic parade of athletes, winning easily.