Now, if this were the campaign strategy, the last two weeks would have been an absolute gift from the electoral gods. A sober and well-documented report linked Hillary to the failings and deaths in Libya. It showed how she had made the bombing and destabilization of Libya central to her State Department tenure, making her unable to follow other international groups who protected their workers there by removing them. Suggesting she didn’t want to admit defeat of something her advisors planned to make a centerpiece of her upcoming presidential campaign, she resisted repeated recommendations to pull Americans from Benghazi.

As for corrupt email practices, recent days saw Bill Clinton secretly meeting with Attorney General Loretta Lynch on a tarmac, Hillary suggesting she’d keep Lynch as AG after her election, Hillary meeting with FBI agents investigating the scandal, leaks to CNN just hours after that meeting saying she’d get away with everything, and a 10-minute denunciation by the FBI director of everything Hillary had claimed about the email scandal. It reeked to high heaven of corruption.

Trump had a few tweets and comments about it, but nothing particularly remarkable.

On Wednesday night, Trump gave a stump speech that was typically meandering — a far more effective style than his Beltway critics would like to admit — but overwhelmingly defensive.