The GOP Have a Candidate in Trump Who Can’t Figure Out Why He is Running

                                                                       

 This man is running for president, from Scotland

There's incompetence, and then there's whatever's going on over at Trump Tower. The presumptive Republican nominee has spent the last week lambasting President Obama for playing too nice with the terrorists. And a week ago Sunday, Attorney General Loretta Lynch gave him a huge opening when she announced that the FBI would, absurdly, redact references to Islamist militant groups from the transcripts of Orlando shooter Omar Mateen’s conversations with law enforcement (FBI has changed its minds since then).

And what does Trump do in response? Does he hold a press conference? Does he dispatch his numerous surrogates to talk about the decision to redact? Does he focus all his energy on making that the biggest story in the country, and attempt to get Hillary Clinton to either denounce or defend the redactions?

  

As a result, the redactions, which buttress Trump's point that the White House simply doesn't see terrorism as a big a threat as it should, received far less attention than they would have. In fact, by Monday afternoon, the FBI had reversed its decision on redactions - a move that, ordinarily, Trump would have taken credit for.

Let's put aside whether Lewandowski should have been fired a long time ago. Monday morning is not when you announce that you've sacked your campaign manager. Friday afternoon is when news dumps typically occur because everyone, reporters included, are by and large looking to start their weekends - as a result, news released then tends to receive far less attention. 

This weekend he ignored protocols that call for a politician not to speak ill of your country or its government when in foreign soil(he probably hasn’t even heard of that one). He tried to compared the Brexit to his own campaign. He has a point in that in the UK the older more uneducated voters decided to go for the unknown like he is asking for the US to do here and so far the same type of voter, older (25-55) with a HS diploma or less is buying this message. Also if the markets keep falling and people keep asking to have another vote (they have over a million signatures over the weekend asking for another referendum), its not going to do him any good that he stepped on that on that unknown puddle of unknown matter.

The news in the US is going to be the same news as in the UK and that is the markets fell on friday after the vote and about the recession that is expected to hit England now that the pound is going to be worth only ounces. Trump will be the subject not in a savvy political way but in a mundane “there he goes again.” There is also on unknown today because the leaving of the Uk of the EU has so many implications among so many nations.

 Dragging a popular President through the mud and talking about Clinton in a sexist way have become part of his stomp but only partly because his stomp is really Trump!  These seems to be  grand strategic miscalculations which makes people wonder if Trump even wants to win. We already heard of people that know him he never intended to be President because he didn’t think he could win. The people egging him to run never thought he would do any better than second in the Primaries. But what happened did happened and he took the opportunity to be ‘Trumped’.

So let's take that as the first theory of the case: that Trump doesn't want to win, an idea that's been bandied about plenty this cycle. That, on some level, the presidency is a job he understands might not be a great fit for, or that he just did this to boost his brand and got caught off-guard by the groundswell of support his candidacy provoked. Is this unlikely? But Trump does have these moments where you think it’s possible. Remember when he said he was surprised that the Muslim ban proposal didn't sink him?

More convincing is that Trump simply needs to be the center of attention at all times. There's some pro-Trump spin out there to this effect - look at him go, we're all talking about Trump because he's smart like that! - but, yikes, if that was really the motive, then we're talking about something pathological here. How self-defeating can a candidate be?

What's behind departure of Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski?

This addiction to press attention, both good and bad, is perhaps Trump's single biggest weakness. Talking about the redactions would have been smart strategically for Trump, sure, but it would have been hard to make it all about him, which seems to be Trump's guiding principle as a candidate. It's what is quickly turning this election into, as Mickey Kaus and Dan Balz have noted, a referendum about Donald Trump.

After two terms of a Democratic president, and faced with a disliked opponent, you'd think the Republican nominee would want to make the election about the other team. Not Trump. It's got to be about him, at all times, for good or ill. Perhaps we should have anticipated Trump not taking advantage of so many issue he could be talking about. After all, this is the candidate, after all, who, rather than slashing at his opponent over a blistering State Department report on her email server, instead spent all week attacking a federal judge over his ethnicity.

Trump exhaustion is already setting in. A year in, the rallies, the insults, the stream-of-conscious rants -- it's not new anymore. It's routine, and tired. At the very least you'd think Trump would act like a candidate who was somewhat serious about winning. Instead, right now, the GOP appears to have a candidate who can't figure out why he's running anymore because he's stopped having fun. All that’s left is his childlike need for attention, which we will all continue to give him until Election Day is finally, blessedly upon us.

Commentary using past Will Rahm comments at CBS News as source and this weekends news events. Edited and incorporated to todays news and editorial comments by adamfoxie blog