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http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/39018-how-donald-trump-lost-his-mojo
By Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone
07 September 16
Flailing on race and immigration, his campaign in chaos, the candidate who made a brilliant farce of the election is now finding the joke is on him
"At first, it looks like the same old act. What could be more natural than a coiffed and bellicose Donald Trump, addressing a raucous crowd on a Friday afternoon in Manchester, New Hampshire, that great white-frustration campaign Mecca he blew through like a hurricane nine months ago during primary season?
"It is terrific to be back in New Hampshire!" he begins.
"TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP!" shouts the virtually all-white, mostly male crowd of fifty- and sixty- and seventysomethings. Trump's speeches increasingly look like VFW raffle nights.
"It's really a very special place for me," Trump goes on. "This is where I won my first victory!"
The prepared remarks handed out by the campaign indicate that Trump's next line will begin with the antiseptic phrase "Over the next 74 days, we are all going to work very hard to win this state...."
But this is Donald Trump, sworn enemy of the prepared remark.
He immediately jumps off-script to stay on his favorite subject: himself.
"If I didn't win here, who knows where I'd be," he says, mugging and humble-bragging for the crowd. "Maybe I'd be building buildings or something."
The audience roars. This is the Trump they fell in love with. It's the same über-confident, self-congratulating gasbag who bulldozed to the Republican nomination on the strength of long, unscripted rants that were glorious tributes to every teenager everywhere who has ever taken a test without studying. Now the scriptless wonder is back. Or is he?
"Hillary Clinton believes only in government of, by and for the powerful!" he booms, beginning a long rant on "Crooked Hillary." He speaks in harsh bursts of invective that sound at first like the same stream-of-consciousness turd clouds Trump spat out in great volumes during primary season.
But within a minute or two, he's muddling through a list of Clinton controversies in suspiciously grammatical language, and the air starts to leave the room.
He rails against the speaking fees paid to Bill Clinton by companies like the Swedish telecom giant Ericsson while it had business before Hillary's State Department, even using the phrase "the exemption of telecom giant Ericsson."
He denounces moves to give foundation donors suspicious reconstruction contracts in Haiti and a seat on an intelligence advisory board. Then, saying Clinton ran the State Department "like a personal hedge fund" (a phrase that makes no sense, even to people who hate hedge-fund managers), Trump mentions another controversy involving a Russian uranium company. Then, still another, involving the Swiss bank UBS.
It's a dead giveaway. The primary-season Donald Trump would never have been able to remember five things. Even more revealing is his rhetorical dismount: "But these examples," he shouts, "are only the tip of the Clinton-corruption iceberg!"
The real Donald Trump does not speak in metaphors, let alone un-mixed ones. The man who once famously pronounced "I know words, I have the best words" scorched through the primaries using the vocabulary of a signing gorilla ("China – money – bad!")..."
(read on...it only gets better)
