The week the Potemkin campaign fell apart

Over the past few days, one gets the impression that grim reality is setting in among Republicans. Both from outward signs and the Trump team's behavior, they can sense this is a campaign going down the tubes.

For starters, there is no good polling news for Donald Trump. No battlefield states look promising. No progress has been made even in consolidating GOP support (which hovers around 80 percent, dreadful by historic standards). Because Trump obsesses on crowd size, we would be amiss if we didn't note that he's not filling up huge arenas as he used to. He now plays to half-empty venues. (Remember Trumpkins love winners, not the guy they can see is heading for an embarrassing loss.) His fundraising has not materialized, and there is no sign of a ground game. Any semi-objective onlooker can see there is no there there.

Even more telling is the Trump campaign's behavior. Trump cannot get a fraction of the free media he hoped for because he won't venture beyond the cozy confines of Fox night-time shows. His campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway, is perpetually on the air — a bad sign for someone who is supposed to be running the whole campaign, not acting like a surrogate. (Multiple GOP consultants who think highly of her tell me this is to be expected of a mid-level operative thrust into the limelight that goes with heading up a presidential campaign. Intoxicated by the attention, who wouldn't recognize the opportunity to get name ID up and post-campaign speaking fees boosted?)

Unfortunately, Conway's spin is hilariously awful. There are "undercover" Trump voters, we are told — unknown numbers in unknown states lurking in the shadows until Election Day when they'll materialize and lift Trump to victory. So he's ahead! The tragedy has now become a farce. Conway is a pollster, for goodness' sake; she surely knows this talk about being ahead and having secret pockets of support is nonsense designed to keep the Sean Hannitys from setting their hair on fire.

Meanwhile, Trump's newfound desire to prove he is not a racist should be the stuff of a broad comedy; this campaign is much funnier and weirder than fiction. The more he insists to African Americans (Your lives are a disaster!) and Hispanics (You shouldn't get shot!) that he cares about them, the more evident it is that he has no understanding, no "feel" for the voters he is chasing down.

Then we have the mystery surrounding his immigration plan, which may change or may not, which may or may not be humane, which may or may not be just like his primary opponents' plans. On Wednesday, he reached new levels of incoherence. On Sean Hannity's show — where else? — it sounded as though he has adopted Jeb Bush's legalization plan. Later in Mississippi, he deplored the media for pushing "amnesty." If you are baffled by his stance or wondering whether he has one, you are not alone.

It's legitimate to ask whether he even listens to what he is saying — or can remember his words a few hours later. Surely all but his most oblivious fans can see he believes in nothing but himself, a trait that becomes obvious under the pressure of a losing campaign. He's no longer able to fake coherence.

Does he really give up on Ann Coulter and the anti-immigrant set who imagined that he was serious about the wall and mass deportation, or try to convince more sober voters that he's not an extremist? The potential for alienating his base and fooling no other voters is all too real. Trump is reduced to pretending he's "way up" in the polls with minority voters while telling voters whose lives he imagines are pathetic "What have you got to lose?" Plenty, it seems.

Even Trump's "regret" gambit, a vague line or two he read off a teleprompter, crumbled. Asked what he regrets, he responded Thursday, "I don't want to talk about that. . . . A lot of people like my statements, frankly, a lot of people said, 'Oh, don't even say that. We love your statements.'" Sorry, Team Trump, Humble Trump was never going to fly.

Meanwhile, Trump still talks about winning New York and spends time in noncompetitive states, to the dismay of Republicans. And his big new scandal lost salience when the Associated Press story documenting foundation donors who got face time with Hillary Clinton as secretary of state proved to be statistically flawed. (Her chief strategist made a plausible argument: The AP "took a small sliver of her tenure as secretary of State, less than half the time, less than a fraction of the meetings she was in . . . . This is a woman who met with over 1,700 world leaders, countless other government officials, public officials in the United States. And they've looked at 185 meetings and tried to draw a conclusion from that.") Even worse for the Trumpkins, many of the identified donors (a tiny fraction of thousands who gave her money) were people she should have been talking to or people she has known for years. ("There's huge overlap here, since it turns out that many of the people who have faith in the Clintons as political leaders also believe in their nonprofit work.") In any event, Trump has a water pistol, not a missile, on this one.

He ended the day in deep-red Mississippi, a ridiculous scheduling choice for a Republican at this point in the campaign. All he could do was holler that Clinton is a "bigot"– something many of his voters don't even believe.

Taken collectively, these developments create a picture of frenzied but useless activity. No one in Trump's campaign, including the candidate, is behaving as though he or she is serious about winning the race. There is no deliberate plan to get from here (a landslide for Clinton) to there (winning). The candidate flails away, seemingly confused about his own positions.

When Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus implausibly suggested that Trump would be ahead or tied in polls by Labor Day, maybe he was issuing a warning, not trying to console voters: If this thing keeps circling the drain, forget it. We're all in it for down-ticket Republicans. At least that is what Republicans should hope was intimated. Otherwise a whole lot of time and resources that could go to saving Republican senators are going to be wasted on Trump.