Politico’s Annie Karni has a smart piece exploring the Clinton team’s struggles to nail Trump, despite having an embarrassment of riches to work with. In fact, that may be the problem: Trump has so many flaws that Team Clinton can’t decide which one to build a narrative around. So far, Hillary herself has favored depicting him as a “loose cannon,” but that really doesn’t seem to encompass his awfulness. “Our problem is a target-rich environment,” one Clintonista told Karni.
The news media is familiar with this dilemma. In single 24-hour cycle, Trump can run into trouble in five different ways that would individually sink other candidates. The Times’s Trip Gabriel captured how the Trump juggernaut smashes through one controversy after another:
The Trump tax rate story buried the fake spox, who eclipsed the racist butler who overtook the tax hike gaffe. Thus does Trump win the news.
— Trip Gabriel (@tripgabriel) May 13, 2016
What looks like a big fat target, in other words, could be something else entirely: a force that only gets bigger and fatter as more stories swirl around it.