Two weeks ago I noted that people might look back on that day as the time when fortune seemed to stop smiling on the Donald Trump presidential campaign:
As of now Donald Trump has enough pledged delegates to be declared the GOP nominee in Cleveland six weeks from now.
But if something else somehow happens, people might look back to this date, June 6, 2016, as a moment when things began to look different.
That could still be true, but I suspect that there will be a strong case for emphasizing June 20, 2016. That was the day on which:
- Trump unloaded his campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, four and a half months before the general election. (Hint: winning campaigns don’t do this.)
- Trump reports revealed that he had barely three dozen people working for his campaign nationwide, about the number you’d normally find in any swing-state capital-city headquarters for a real campaign.
- Trump’s required disclosures to the FEC were a comic treasure trove that will occupy the press for days to come. In short: Trump has raised hardly any money; and much of what he’s spent has gone to his own relatives, companies, or real-estate holdings, notably Mar-a-Lago (which received more in campaign payments than the entire salaried staff). In addition to fostering the reaction Trump probably most dreads—ridicule—the reports naturally heightened curiosity about what his still-unreleased tax returns might include.
Anything could still happen. But on this day, as the Japanese Showa emperor Hirohito once put it, the “situation has developed not necessarily to our advantage.”