Day by day, the week seemed to get worse for Donald Trump’s campaign. But in a Friday interview with Fox News Radio, spokesman Jason Miller summarized the week by saying it’s been a “really good few days” on the trail.
“Donald Trump wants to win this election. I think Donald Trump knows what it takes to go in and win this election,” Miller told Brian Kilmeade. “he knows what he needs to do to win, he is doing that. We’ve had a really good few days on the campaign trail.”
That’s an overly rosy view of what proved to be an exceedingly rocky week for the campaign. A brief recap of the GOP nominee’s week:
Fighting with the family of a dead soldier
It’s not a good look to begin with, and Trump dug the hole deeper by saying he was only hitting back after the parents of U.S. Army Capt. Humayun Khan first launched “vicious” attacks on him at the Democratic National Convention. He didn’t improve the situation by accepting a Purple Heart from a veteran at a rally, remarking that the gift was “much easier” than earning it himself.
Tussling with GOP leadership
It’s safe to say that Trump was House Speaker Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) biggest headache this week. In a major breach of accepted protocol, Trump refused to endorse Ryan’s re-election campaign and went a step further by signal boosting the congressman’s long-shot primary challenger, who wants to have a “discussion” about potentially deporting all Muslims from the U.S.
Bragging about a “top secret” Iran video that doesn’t exist
In multiple campaign stops this week, Trump bragged about seeing a sleek, “top secret,” Iranian military-produced video showing pallets of foreign cash being unloaded off an unmarked plane as evidence that the $400 million payment to Iran was ransom for U.S. hostages. Secretary of State John Kerry denied any such video exists, and Trump later said the video he was hyping was actually news footage from Geneva.
Sinking poll numbers
The numbers coming in this week did not look good for Trump, avowed fan of polls. One found Clinton leading him nationally by 15 percentage points, with other polls showing the former secretary of state leading in Florida, Georgia, Michigan, New Hampshire and Pennsylvania.
Trump losing national security heavyweights
At this point, it’s difficult to find members of the national or foreign security communities who are publicly backing Trump. On Friday, ex-CIA acting director Michael Morell slammed Trump as an “unwitting agent” of Russian President Vladimir Putin. The GOP nominee was also roundly criticized when MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough reported on-air this week that Trump was a bit overzealous with questions about using nuclear weapons in a briefing with an unnamed security expert.
