| It's Early August. There's Time to Turn This Around, Right? Right? Ross Douthat observed that Donald Trump's post-convention bump came after not only the GOP convention, but the Dallas shootings, the Baton Rouge shooting, and the terrorist truck attack in Nice. In other words, events beyond the convention halls seemed to be affirming the argument that the Obama administration was helpless in the face of ISIS advances, and that the Black Lives Matter movement had enabled a toxic, murderous rage against police officers. The status quo looked like decay; rolling the dice on Trump looked palatable; at least he was angry about these problems. Since the Democratic convention, there haven't been any ambushes of police officers — or if there have, there hasn't been any major national coverage. It's been nine days since the last major ISIS attack, when they sliced the throat of the elderly priest in Normandy. Meanwhile, since the Democratic convention ended, Trump has entered an extended war of words with Khizr Khan and chosen to not endorse Paul Ryan in his primary. Yesterday he felt the need to re-argue controversies about Megyn Kelly and a disabled reporter. Yes, a lot the coverage of Trump now wildly overhypes even his more mundane exchanges about a crying baby or receiving a veteran's Purple Heart medal into major controversies. But the Republican nominee is reinforcing Hillary Clinton's argument from her convention speech: He's easily baited into fights. He seems to think that now is the time to stick it to Ryan, not caring that this will dominate the news until Ryan's primary next week. He can't let any perceived slight go, even if fighting it is against his long-term interests. Ace of Spades and I have had some major disagreements during this primary season, but I see his generally compelling point: If the electorate signs off on Hillary Clinton's bad behavior, it will ratify every dishonest, radical, anti-Constitutional and vindictive thing President Obama has ever done. The ballot box is the only way to hold the progressive aristocracy accountable or check their power, and thus opposing the Republican nominee hinders that make-us-or-break-us test of whether we're still a country with a rule of law. The problem is that Trump seems to grasp none of this, has no interest in strengthening our arguments and at times seems to take a gleeful pleasure in undermining them, as Ace observes: Here's the thing: A presidential candidate shouldn't need supporters to constantly work hard to bail him out of trouble. He should, as many anti-Trumpers point out, sort of try to keep out of trouble. He should be working for us -- not vice versa . . . Trump is immune from social pressure. He grew up a rich kid that routinely skated from trouble due to his wealth; he simply never had to learn, as most of us learned and internalized at an early age, that bad behavior, and upsetting conventional (even if dumb) social wisdom, has consequences and should be avoided. Note my point from earlier in the week that "normal" center-right Republican Senate candidates are running stronger than Trump is . . . This morning we find that in Pennsylvania, Pat Toomey is down by one point, while Trump is down by 11 points. In New Hampshire, Kelly Ayotte is down 10 points, while Trump is down 15 points (17 without the third-party candidates). But it's not all disastrous news for the Trump campaign: Trump and the RNC raised $64 million through a joint digital and mail effort in July, according to his campaign, the bulk of it from small donations. All told, Mr. Trump and his party brought in $82 million last month, only slightly behind Clinton's $90 million, and ended with $74 million on hand, suggesting he might now have the resources to compete with Mrs. Clinton in the closing stretch of the campaign. Turning to the World of Books for a Moment . . . Needing to read something cheerier than convention coverage, I recently finished two horror/thriller novels by Sarah Lotz, The Three and Day Four. I'd classify them as just good enough to be really disappointing. Great concepts, a nice atmosphere of strange, foreboding events that may or may not be linked to something supernatural or divine, some great scenes, but frustratingly open endings that, told twice over two stories, begins to feel like a cop-out. The Three is by far the better and more enjoyable book. The premise is simple and rife with possibility: Four planes crash in one day around the world. All crew and passengers are killed except for three children who survive without a scratch — prompting public questions about whether it's a modern miracle or omen. Perhaps Lotz's best achievement is creating a world that feels a lot like ours, with a twist of a bit more unexplained phenomenon and urban legends. There's a 24-7 news cycle and relentless click-bait Internet speculation shaping people's perceptions. The aspect that is most likely to infuriate readers of this newsletter is that Lotz appears to fervently detest Evangelical Christians, and a good chunk of the novel revolves around Christian sects concluding that the three surviving children, along with a missing fourth, are the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. I don't know whether this was a conscious narrative choice or a reflection of a willfully selective worldview, but in Lotz's fictional world, the only references to Islamist terrorism come when slow-witted Southern Americans wonder if "ragheads" blew up the planes. (Come on. You can't use the narrative trigger of "four planes crash at once", pressing a lot of traumatic memory buttons in readers' psyches, and then write up a scenario where any suspicions of terrorism reflect hair-trigger Islamophobia.) The rare references to the Muslim world come when imams conclude there's no reason to believe the children are religions signs and urge calm. Yes, in this world, it's the Muslims who are the reassuring voices of reason, while virtually the entire American South retreats to armed compounds and waits for imminent Rapture. Despite these gripes, Lotz succeeds in creating that desire to know what happens next, and she's to be saluted for the imaginative and ambitious scale of the story, from airline investigators to withdrawn Japanese teenagers to an English survivor's uncle turned into an overnight celebrity. Our narrator is an investigative journalist attempting to write the definitive account of the plane crashes and survivors and clearly explain just what caused these inexplicable events surrounding the surviving children. The book has an ominous but vague ending, which probably created high expectations for her next book, which was . . . sort-of, kind-of a sequel. Day Four is a first act of a horror novel with characters that, literally and figuratively, don't go anywhere. After three days of normality, a cut-rate Caribbean cruise ship suddenly stops in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico and the ship's captain and crew are maddeningly tight-lipped about what's wrong. The generally unhappy, drunken passengers find themselves beset by one failure after another: no contact with the outside world, the electricity is failing, the air conditioning dies, a woman is found murdered, and the toilets start overflowing. Lotz seems to have a deeply cynical worldview as a writer and doesn't like to give you a lot of protagonists to root for; that's probably what drove the generally negative reviews. Still, she's got those basic, compelling narrative questions going for her: Just what the heck happened to the ship? Why hasn't anyone come to rescue them? Why haven't they seen any other vessels on the horizon since they stopped? And had the story moved quicker to address those questions, the novel might not have felt like an interminable stay on another poop cruise. (Would this be bad time to make a sales pitch for the National Review Post-Election Cruise?) Looking at other reviews online, I get the feeling a lot of readers found the ending so vague and disjointed, they didn't know what the heck happened. It's discernable, but you have to connect a lot of dots . . . SPOILERS AHEAD In The Three, the fairly clever twist is that the apocalyptic Christians that our narrator relentlessly mocked and criticized were more or less right all along: Beings that are supernatural or not of this earth and malevolent are bringing about the end of human civilization. The kids were, if not the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, harbingers of doomsday after all. It appears these quasi-Godlike beings have done this many times, either creating a new parallel world each time they begin meddling in human behavior or tweaking and re-living the same (more or less modern-day) time periods over and over again — as some other review described it, Groundhog Day for all of humanity. The damnably brief wrap-up sections of Day Four give us one or two giant clues as to how things shook out after the ominous but unresolved ending of The Three. In the first novel, the mysterious events sweep an apocalyptic Christian Republican president into power and he promptly begins antagonizing the rest of the world. Meanwhile, the murder of one of the surviving Japanese children by a deranged American serviceman stirs a sudden wave of virulent anti-Western rage in that country. This wave leads to the election of a radical nationalist Japanese premier with an utterly insane wife, and he reaches out to form anti-American alliance between Japan, China, and the Koreas. (Look, you don't read a supernatural thriller for realistic geopolitical scenarios.) The few glimpses we get of the destroyed Miami in Day Four reveal that the apocalyptic Christianity succeeded in building a quasi-theocracy in America (complete with billboards for public identification of sinful teenagers) and then Japan attacked the United States with some sort of devastating bioweapon that killed everyone. The witnesses to destroyed Miami see so much complete devastation that they're convinced there are no survivors anywhere else. We know this is the same world as The Three because the Nook-like e-reader that one of the character grabs from an apartment in ruined Miami has all of the books that made up the story-within-a-story in The Three. On the one hand, these little subtle clues are clever. But I suspect they were too subtle, and created an appetite in readers for answers the author was never willing to serve. ADDENDA: Perfect: Back in the mid-'90s, Melania Trump appeared to do some modeling work on a tourist visa. Foreigners coming over here and taking away jobs from American models! | 
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