> It’s one thing for staffers to fear the candidate would lose a second debate. It’s unprecedented for them to assume he’ll lose. But that’s what they think of his mental state.

> Then there are Trump’s travel plans. In a typical campaign, the candidate would be crisscrossing swing states from now to Election Day. But Trump — who is on pace to hold fewer than a third of the rallies he held in 2016 — is visiting states he has no chance of winning, such as Illinois and California.

They are trying to raise as much money as possible in the last weeks, and to keep the voters who really matter - the swing state voters, from seeing how senile he has become.

> It’s also hard to believe that Trump’s increasingly violent, racist rhetoric lines up with the message from his campaign strategists. Immigration has been central to Trump’s pitch to voters since he first ran for president. But it’s never been this central, even as Trump loses ground on voters’ top issue, the economy. His bigotry — saying Latino immigrants disproportionately have “bad genes” — is more blatant than ever. And his enthusiasm for authoritarian solutions — invoking the Alien Enemies Act, which was the legal basis for Japanese Americans’ incarceration during World War II — is less guarded than ever.