Donald Trump and His "Ghost" Video --- also, Trump's Curious Endorsements

I. The "Top Secret" Ransom Payment
On August 3rd, Donald Trump told rally attendees in Daytona Beach, Florida a story of getting up in the morning, reading a  newspaper and then turning on the television. He saw a "top secret" video of Iranian officials unloading $400 million from an unmarked plane. The following day, he told the same story in a campaign stop in Portland, Maine. Trump further said that Iran provided all of the footage.

Trump described the video as being very clear and taken at a good angle to reveal what was taking place. Subsequently, media outlets scrambled to find the video that Trump had seen and came up empty. The New York Daily News reported that Trump was either leaking classified information -- Trump had described what he saw as a "top secret" government video -- while his campaign and security officials were trying to cover it up; or he was confusing cable news footage for top secret security footage; or he was just spouting outright lies.

The day after the Portland stop, Donald Trump tweeted: "The plane I saw on television was the hostage plane in Geneva, Switzerland, not the plane carrying $400 million in cash going to Iran."

The story that Trump told had the ring of a fairy tale from the beginning, as why would a television station be running a film of an event that happened in January 2016 on a recent day when  he turned on his set? It is most likely that the Trump campaign staff came upon a story that seemed to be a ransom being paid for the release of hostages held by Iran, and Trump made up a story of having stumbled on a video of the transaction. It would be interesting to learn the general reaction of rally attendees to the news that they had been hoodwinked by a falsified story.

II. A Most Curious Set of Endorsements
It was only a few days ago that Donald Trump made big news when he announced that he was not endorsing House Speaker Paul Ryan, Senator John McCain and Senator Kelly Ayotte. He played on Ryan's earlier statement that he was "no quite there yet" in regard to endorsing Ryan by using the same language. He cited McCain's bad treatment of veterans as the reason for not endorsing McCain.

Instead of speaking off the cuff as he usually does at rallies, Trump read from a paper that he was holding to the left of the lectern. My take on this was that Trump had been advised to read from a script, because of a fear that left to his own devices, he would ad lib something that would destroy the impact of his endorsements.

The curiousness of the endorsements is not only due to Trump reading from a script, but more significantly, nothing had happened during the few days between not endorsing and endorsing to change Trump's position. There had been no meeting between Ryan and Trump, nor any exchange of conciliatory statements between the two. McCain had not indicated any change in his position on veterans -- McCain, as I understand it, didn't like the idea that veterans could use private doctors for their care -- creating the potential that veterans might feel that they had been thrown under the bus by Trump for not getting any concession from McCain for the endorsement. As for Kelly Ayotte, she immediately released a statement that she had no plans for joint appearances with Donald Trump.

I question if the endorsements will have much impact, because the hopeful words of working together were at such odds with what Trump had said only a few days before. It is also the case that any indication of working with the Republican establishment is not the message that Trump's most devoted followers want to hear.

ADDENDUM:
When Donald Trump said in his acceptance speech that: "Only I can fix it.", I wrote in my writer's notebook that this was a huge mistake on his part. It left Congress out in the cold; it eviscerated the GOP assault on Obama for legislating through executive orders; and it utterly destroyed a key tenet of movement conservatives that government should be as small and weak as can be. Trump was proposing a government that would be a leviathan.

I felt vindicated in my judgment when I read a poll taken of movement conservatives after the Republican convention. Only 64 percent of respondents said they would vote for Trump, versus about twenty points higher for other Republican presidential candidates over the last three or four decades. Most surprisingly, 21 percent replied that they would vote for Hillary Clinton.