What We Learned About Trump’s Supporters This Week

If Donald Trump loses the Presidential election, this week may be remembered as the point in the campaign when his defeat became obvious and inevitable. The number of controversies, reckless statements, and outright lies from Trump this week was dizzying. He toyed with the idea of political assassination, declaring that “Second Amendment people” could do something about Hillary Clinton or her judicial nominees if she were elected. He called Barack Obama “the founder” of ISIS. Trump kept the fact-checkers, the hardest-working journalists of 2016, busy. The Associated Press reported that Trump confused an expensive babysitting program for the children of guests at his exclusive hotels with a nonexistent company child-care program for workers. The Washington Post noted that a story, confirmed as true by the Trump campaign, about Trump ferrying stranded soldiers with his private plane in 1991, was untrue. And Trump once again refused to release his tax returns, a break with a tradition that goes back to the nineteen-seventies.