Commentary: Donald Trump squanders yet another opportunity

There's incompetence, and then there's whatever's going on over at Trump Tower. The presumptive Republican nominee has spent the last week lambasting President Obama for playing too nice with the terrorists. And on Sunday, Attorney General Loretta Lynch gave him a huge opening when she announced that the FBI would, absurdly, redact references to Islamist militant groups from the transcripts of Orlando shooter Omar Mateen's conversations with law enforcement.

And what does Trump do in response? Does he hold a press conference? Does he dispatch his numerous surrogates to talk about the decision to redact? Does he focus all his energy on making that the biggest story in the country, and attempt to get Hillary Clinton to either denounce or defend the redactions?

Of course not. Instead, he fired Corey Lewandowski, his erstwhile campaign manager, one day after Lynch's announcement. The news of the next few days are likely to be dominated by tales of infighting in Trumpworld, helping define the campaign as a misbegotten effort by deluded amateurs and shady, past-their-prime operators like Paul Manafort.

As a result, the redactions, which buttress Trump's point that the White House simply doesn't see terrorism as a big a threat as it should, received far less attention than they would have. In fact, by Monday afternoon, the FBI had reversed its decision on redactions - a move that, ordinarily, Trump would have taken credit for.

Let's put aside whether Lewandowski should have been fired a long time ago. Monday morning is not when you announce that you've sacked your campaign manager. Friday afternoon is when news dumps typically occur because everyone, reporters included, are by and large looking to start their weekends - as a result, news released then tends to receive far less attention.

To do something like this at the very start of the work week, and to make it look as vicious as a mob hit via a series of presumably sanctioned leaks, is incomprehensible in its own right. To do it in such a way that that it stomps all over a grand strategic miscalculation by your opponents makes you wonder if Trump even wants to win.

So let's take that as the first theory of the case: that Trump doesn't want to win, an idea that's been bandied about plenty this cycle. That, on some level, the presidency is a job he understands might not be a great fit for, or that he just did this to boost his brand and got caught off-guard by the groundswell of support his candidacy provoked. This is, of course, unlikely, but Trump does have these moments where you think it's possible. Remember when he said he was surprised that the Muslim ban proposal didn't sink him?

More convincing, at least to me, is that Trump simply needs to be the center of attention at all times. There's some pro-Trump spin out there to this effect - look at him go, we're all talking about Trump because he's smart like that! - but, yikes, if that was really the motive, then we're talking about something pathological here. How self-defeating can a candidate be?

This addiction to press attention, both good and bad, is perhaps Trump's single biggest weakness. Talking about the redactions would have been smart strategically for Trump, sure, but it would have been hard to make it all about him, which seems to be Trump's guiding principle as a candidate. It's what is quickly turning this election into, as Mickey Kaus and Dan Balz have noted, a referendum about Donald Trump.

After two terms of a Democratic president, and faced with a profoundly disliked opponent, you'd think the Republican nominee would want to make the election about the other team. Not Trump. It's got to be about him, at all times, for good or ill. Perhaps we should have anticipated Trump not taking advantage of the redactions. After all, this is the candidate, after all, who, rather than slashing at his opponent over a blistering State Department report on her email server, instead spent all week attacking a federal judge over his ethnicity.

Trump exhaustion is already setting in. A year in, the rallies, the insults, the stream-of-conscious rants -- it's not new anymore. It's routine, and tired. At the very least you'd think Trump would act like a candidate who was somewhat serious about winning. Instead, right now, the GOP appears to have a candidate who can't figure out why he's running anymore because he's stopped having fun. All that's left is his childlike need for attention, which we will all continue to give him until Election Day is finally, blessedly upon us.

In:
• Donald Trump
• Loretta Lynch
• 2016 Election
• Omar Mateen
• Barack Obama