WASHINGTON -- A notoriously ardent media booster of the Republican nominee made a bold prediction just last week: "Get used to it -- President Donald J. Trump."
That was then.
A distinct odour is wafting from the Trump campaign, closer to the scent of summer roadkill than that of an autumn champion. New polls show him getting clobbered nationally and in battleground states; high-profile Republicans are abandoning ship; and the same pundit who predicted a Trump presidency, back in those heady days of late July, is suddenly identifying the culprits to be blamed for defeat.
Sean Hannity of Fox News now says a Trump failure will be the fault of the party establishment -- because it chided, distanced itself from and grumbled about its nominee instead of focusing its energy on defeating Democrats.
"I am pointing the finger directly at people like Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham and John McCain and John Kasich and Ted Cruz if he won't endorse -- and Jeb Bush and everybody else," Hannity told his radio show.
"Ridiculous. I'm sick of all of them."
Consider it a mere prelude to the internal warfare that would follow a Republican loss on Nov. 8. Within the party, others blame people like Hannity for tossing conservative principles overboard and, out of self-interest and the pursuit of ratings, enabling a conspiracy-spouting, reality-TV star to take over a storied political party.
High-ranking officials have made media aware of their own frustrations with the campaign -- like the erratic candidate who's perpetually distracted by petty personal feuds, clubbing rivals in every direction and sometimes forgetting to swing at Democrats.
Now a Fox News poll shows Hillary Clinton with a 10-per-cent lead.
A chief reason is Republican voters are reluctant to back Trump. Only 73 per cent said they'd support him. Trump didn't help himself after the conventions. Only 19 per cent of respondents approved of the way Trump got into a tit-for-tat dispute with the family of a Muslim-American soldier killed in action; 69 per cent disapproved of his jabs at the Khan family.
Things get even uglier in key states.
A new survey in New Hampshire shows Clinton up 14 per cent. A Pennsylvania one shows her up 11 points. In a Florida poll, she's leading by six per cent. In Michigan, she's up nine.
The aroma of political death has begun drifting down-ticket. Republicans are wrestling to retain the Senate and the state surveys show the party incumbent down a shocking 11 percentage points in New Hampshire and struggling in a tight race in Pennsylvania. A lone down-ticket bright spot is Marco Rubio -- who according to the Florida survey has a comfortable lead in his re-election bid.
Richard Czuba, the pollster who conducted the Michigan poll for the Detroit News, told the newspaper he found the results shocking: "(Trump's) sitting in the cellar right now and they're going to have to do something to dramatically turn this around. ... If I were a Republican running on this ticket right now, I'd be beyond nervous."
Some Republicans have mentally checked out.
This week, a party congressman said he'd vote for Clinton. On Thursday, a Pennsylvania colleague became the latest to confirm he won't vote for Trump. Charlie Dent said he may write someone else's name on the ballot.
He called some of Trump's comments inexplicable, like those involving the Khan family, his jabs at fellow Republicans Paul Ryan and John McCain and his apparent indifference over whether Russia invades its neighbours: "It just makes no sense," Dent told MSNBC.
"I'm not prepared to endorse our nominee."
For some Republicans, what set them off was Trump refusing to support Ryan in his primary challenge next week. The youthful House Speaker is viewed as a potential presidential candidate and bright star within the party.
Ryan, for his part, has maintained his half-hearted support for Trump. He told a Wisconsin radio station Thursday that this support doesn't preclude him from criticizing the nominee in cases like the Khan affair: "None of these (endorsements) are blank checks."
Trump's broad challenge was illustrated in the Pennsylvania poll.
It showed him winning with male voters, white voters and voters who didn't attend college. But not by enough. Because it also showed him being utterly demolished among every other category -- by 28 percentage points among women, 30 points among people with a college degree and by 69 points among non-white voters.
Thursday offered another sign that the formula for winning a primary isn't the same as for winning a general election. The campaign of a man who became a Republican celebrity questioning Barack Obama's origins was forced to do something novel: apologize for saying something false about the president.
Trump's campaign co-chair publicly corrected his spokeswoman Katrina Pierson for blaming Capt. Humayun Khan's death in Iraq on Obama and Clinton. Khan was killed in 2004, years before Obama took office. The co-chair, speaking on CNN, promised that Pierson would never make that kind of mistake again.
