Donald Trump has done it again.
He's said something totally stupid, then walked it back, then said something else totally stupid.
The trouble is, it's not stupid. It's Trump's deliberate, bait-and-switch trick to manipulate the national television media. Watch for it yourself in coming days and weeks.
Especially watch the timing. He always makes these jaw-dropping dumb comments, like "I would do stop and frisk" because it was successful in New York (it wasn't, and it's been ruled unconstitutional), just after really disturbing news about him is revealed.
Disturbing like the the big reveal of the fake Trump University. Really disturbing like the far-too-suggestive timing of his illegal campaign donation to Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi shortly after she announced she might be investigating Florida complaints about Trump University (she then decided not in investigate).
Disturbing like this week's Washington Post stories documenting that Trump illegally used more than a quarter-million dollars given by other people to his family's charitable foundation to settle business lawsuits and buy super-sized portraits of himself. It was this last news that prompted the "stop-and-frisk" headline roller.
Trump several times has said he likes using "other people's money," and the Trump family foundation is almost exclusively funded with other people's money - their donations, in fact, that they've given to the foundation to be used for charity. Incidentally, this foundation also provided the money for the campaign donation to Pam Bondi. That's why the donation was illegal. U.S. laws do not allow nonprofit leaders to use charity money for the benefit of themselves or their businesses, or for political campaigns.
The Washington Post also reported that tax records from New York City show that Trump has not donated to the family foundation since 2008 and, as recently as this year, received a property tax credit that is available only to families earning less than $500,000 a year.
Trump's campaign has said the credit was issued in error, but he has received the same credit in the past. It also appears that Trump paid little or no personal income taxes in some years in the early 1990s and late 1970s, according to news accounts based on documents from gambling regulators in New Jersey.
But what Trump news are you hearing on TV? Well, the latest dumb stuff, of course.