“There are almost too many Trump controversies for an average person to keep track of,” said Kyle Kondik, a political analyst at the University of Virginia Center for Politics. “So I don’t think these disclosures matter much right now. What matters is how the Clinton campaign weaponizes these controversies in the summer and fall.”
To be sure, the present opportunity is not lost on Priorities USA.
“We’re not going to make the same mistake that Republicans did by waiting for someone else to go against Trump until he was already winning,” Justin Barasky, spokesman for the super-PAC, said Monday.
The whirl of negative news stories around Trump has been so fierce in recent days that even the man tasked with attacking the presumptive Republican nominee struggled to keep track of them all.
“I forgot about the fake spokesperson thing,” Barasky joked. “It’s hard to keep up with all the nonsense.”
The Democrats’ barrage on Trump is meant to distract Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton from having to talk about economic issues, said Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a top conservative economist who has yet to endorse Trump.
“The left will never let a character debate die,” Holtz-Eakin said Monday. “But if the subject becomes quality policy versus Clinton’s commitment to a third Obama term, the silence will be deafening.”
If Trump continues to be inundated with negative revelations, he might not be able to make up his polling deficit, Kondik said. Despite a handful of positive polls in the last week or so, it seems clear that Trump starts this campaign at least a few points behind Clinton, even after he dominated the news for nearly a year, Kondik noted.
The New York Times on Saturday reported that interviews with dozens of Trump's coworkers and social acquaintances revealed recollections of “unwelcome romantic advances, unending commentary on the female form, a shrewd reliance on ambitious women, and unsettling workplace conduct.”
The devastating part of the Times story was that “nobody really seemed all that surprised by it,” Debbie Walsh, director of Rutgers University's Center for American Women and Politics, said.