NY TIMES
With few exceptions, Donald J. Trump’s week in the news was a blur of unflattering reports.
His refusal to disclose his effective tax rate eclipsed an audiotape of him posing as his own spokesman. That, in turn, upstaged reports about his former butler saying racist, violent things about President Obama. Which had already overtaken Mr. Trump’s waffling over his own call for a ban on Muslims entering the country.
But Mr. Trump somehow seemed to win the news cycle anyway.
Mr. Trump, who by every measure has dominated campaign news for 11 months, was head-spinningly ubiquitous this week – calling into television morning shows, speaking to reporters from his office at Trump Tower,popping up on Capitol Hill and sustaining his steady stream of boasts and insults on Twitter.
Repeatedly, he had to do damage control, walking back, clarifying or re-clarifying comments about the Muslim ban, whether he wanted to raise taxes on the rich, or whether he would release his own tax returns before November.
Yet the sheer volume of incoming fire seemed to diminish the impact of any of it when it landed.
Just ask “John Miller.”
“I’ve never seen somebody that’s so immune” to bad press, said “Mr. Miller,” the name Mr. Trump evidently gave in identifying himself as a spokesman for Mr. Trump, not the genuine article, during an interview with a People magazine reporter in 1991.
The voice on the recording, published on Friday by The Washington Post, sounded undeniably like Mr. Trump’s, and spoke extensively and authoritatively about his romantic and business exploits, albeit in the third person. (Mr. Trump, asked about the recording on NBC’s “Today” show on Friday, nonetheless denied the voice was his.)
It hardly mattered, because the story was deprived of oxygen by another one: Mr. Trump’s telling George Stephanopoulos of ABC’s “Good Morning America” that it’s “none of your business” what tax rate he pays.
With Mr. Trump monopolizing so much of the coverage of the campaign, his likely Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, has been far less visible. Some Democrats fret that she is being harmed by the lack of exposure.
Others express confidence that Mr. Trump will lose support with almost every utterance. “There’s never too much of this,” said Bakari Sellers, a former South Carolina lawmaker and paid CNN commentator. “I don’t see how anyone can hear all of these things and still vote for him.”
As a candidate, it has become routine for Mr. Trump to get away with things that would sink a more conventional politician. On Wednesday, he told attendees at a Long Island fund-raiser that Mrs. Clinton “got her ass kicked” in the West Virginia primary. The crude mockery was barely reported.
On Thursday, his aides quickly repudiated a former butler, Anthony Senecal, [above] whose threats on social media to lynch Mr. Obama are being investigated by the Secret Service.
It ended up even less than a one-day story.