Every few entries in this series, I have mentioned that Donald Trump has departed from past norms by refusing to release either his tax returns, as all nominees since Richard Nixon have done, or a plausible medical report, an expectation that goes back even further than Nixon.

The tax return matters for Trump because it matters for everyone, let alone someone with his complex financial history. The medical report matters because, if elected, Trump would be the oldest person ever to assume the presidency; because his supporters have been recklessly suggesting that Hillary Clinton is ailing or impaired; and because Trump’s own bearing and behavior raise legitimate questions about whether he is perfectly well.  And the health report matters because the only information Trump has put out so far on the subject has been an utter farce.

The “medical” report Trump offered late last year was a one-page letter, devoid of details, and written with Trump’s favored “win so much you’ll get tired of winning!” approach to nuance. Its memorable conclusion was: “Mr. Trump, I can state unequivocally, will be the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency.”  

Over the months I’ve speculated about who its real author might be. The North Korean News Agency? The Onion? The ghost of Mobutu Sese Seko? Trump himself? You get the idea. The asserted real author is a New York doctor named Harold Bornstein. Last week a doctor named Jen Gunter wrote about the many signs that made his letter simply impossible to believe.

Yesterday NBC News managed to interview Harold Bornstein in his office about the circumstances in which he wrote the letter.  You will not do better in capturing the spirit of Campaign 2016 than to watch the brief NBC video below:

Bornstein tells NBC that he took his guidance on language from Trump himself, which comes as no surprise. My favorite part is the end of the clip, when Bornstein says “I got rushed, and I get anxious when I get rushed, so I tried to get four or five lines done as fast as possible.” More from NBC is here. Other angles here and here.

***

Every so often I think: later on, people will not believe that things actually happened this way—the way they are happening around us, in real time, in late August of 2016. But thus it stands, with 72 days until the election, and neither tax information nor a plausible medical report forthcoming from one of the two people who could become the 45^th president.

The sample ballots recently sent out by the Minnesota Secretary of State included, as presidential candidates: Hillary Clinton of the Democrats, Gary Johnson of the Libertarians, Jill Stein of the Greens, Dan Vacek of the Legal Marijuana Now Party, and a variety of others. But neither Donald Trump nor any other Republican candidate was listed.

Why? The GOP had apparently missed the deadlines and procedures for getting on the ballot—deadlines that the Legal Marijuana Now Party, to name one, had been able to meet. The story from City Pages is here.

Presumably the Republican party will figure out a last-minute workaround. And anyway, Minnesota has a modest total of 10 electoral votes, which have gone Democratic in every single election for the past 40 years. (The estimable Walter Mondale carried two states when running against Ronald Reagan in 1984: the District of Columbia, and his own home state of Minnesota.) So maybe it wouldn’t make a difference one way or the other.

But once again, I’m not aware of anything like this having happened with a major party before. Managerial excellence is of course central to Donald Trump’s promises of what he would do in office. What he’s managing now is his campaign.

Early this month, a group of 50 national-security officials who had served in Republican administrations—Nixon, Ford, Reagan, Bush I, Bush II—released a statement opposing Donald Trump and saying that he would be “the most reckless President in American history.”

A few days before that, a former head of the CIA formally endorsed Hillary Clinton, saying that Trump had become “an unwitting agent of the Russian Federation.” That was a day after President Obama declared Trump “unfit” for the presidency, and a former prime minister of Sweden said Trump was “a serious threat to the security of the West.”

Today Ben Leubsdorf, Eric Morath, and Josh Zumbrun of the WSJ published the results of a survey of all living former members of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers, with service dating back to the time of Richard Nixon. Not one of them expressed support for Donald Trump. All of the Republicans who expressed a preference opposed him.

The story quoted a post by Gregory Mankiw, chairman of the CEA under George W. Bush:

“I have Republican friends who think that things couldn’t be worse than doubling down on Obama policies under Hillary Clinton. And, like them, I am no fan of the left’s agenda of large government and high taxes,” Mr. Mankiw wrote. “But they are wrong: Things could be worse. And I fear they would be under Mr. Trump.”

I’m not aware of anything like this having happened before. Noted for the record, with 74 days to go until the election, and with no tax returns or plausible health report yet on public offer.

The video below is not by Donald Trump or from the Trump campaign. That’s why I put an asterisk in the title line. To be clear, he has no known official involvement with it whatsoever.

But in a chronicle of what America is like, 75 days before the electorate decides whether Trump will be president, this is worth noting as an artifact. In previous campaigns—Obama-Romney, all the way back to, say, Carter-Reagan—I’m not aware of anything this blunt coming as close to “mainstream” respectability as the “alt-right” has done in informal alliance with the Trump campaign.

***

Some readers have complained or wondered about the title of yesterday’s installment #83, “Rent Is Too Damn High.” I guess I should have spelled out that it was an allusion to a colorful figure named Jimmy McMillan, who ran for mayor of New York in the Bloomberg era on a platform of “The Rent Is Too Damn High.” It wasn’t that long ago, but evidently some people didn’t know about it.

In the same err-on-the-side-of-clarity spirit, let me point out that this new video is meant as a take-off of Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire,” which after all came out nearly 30 years ago and is about the milestones of his (and my) much-deplored Baby Boomer generation.

Bonus surprise explanation: a main figure in the new video and in the movement behind it is a man named Jared Taylor. You see him briefly, with a red necktie, at time 0:40 of the video and again at time 1:00. I am pretty sure it is him in the shades, straw hat, and blue Hawaiian shirt that you see in the static shot above and playing the saxophone from time 3:00 onward.

Jared Taylor and I were good friends in the 1980s and 1990s, based on shared interest in Japan. He grew up there as the child of missionaries; went to Japanese public school and had native-speaker command of the language; and wrote an outstanding book about the strengths and weaknesses of Japan called Shadows of the Rising Sun.

We stayed in touch in the U.S. in the 1990s and I still think of him in friendly terms. But our views have diverged.

Taylor has become an organizational and intellectual leader of the “American Renaissance” movement, progenitor of what is now called the alt-right. The Washington Post’s David Weigel, from whom I learned about the video, wrote about Taylor and his movement last week. That will give you background on the ideas and people behind a video like this.

I am pivoting toward a sanity-protecting, time-preserving policy of simply noting “norm-changing” activities from the Trump campaign. That is, words or actions for which there is no known precedent from other nominees. Two from today:

1) S.V. Date’s story in Huffington Post on how the Trump campaign raised the rent (for space in Trump’s own buildings) once donors started picking up the tab. Sample:

Trump nearly quintupled the monthly rent his presidential campaign pays for its headquarters at Trump Tower to $169,758 in July, when he was raising funds from donors, compared with March, when he was self-funding his campaign, according to a Huffington Post review of Federal Election Commission filings. The rent jumped even though he was paying fewer staff in July than he did in March.

When “profiteering” or “self-dealing” complaints have arisen in past campaigns, they’ve usually involved consultants or pollsters who might, say, coordinate big TV-ad buys and then take a commission on all the purchases. I’m not aware of any that have involved the candidate’s own businesses before.

2) Roger Stone, one of Trump’s most ferocious advocates, says that Trump should release his tax returns “immediately.” The norm-changing aspect here is Trump’s ongoing refusal to release his tax information, an obligation that even Stone recognizes. Fred Goldberg, who served as commissioner of the IRS under the first President Bush, writes to underscore the fatuousness of Trump’s “they’re under audit” excuse for not releasing his returns.

Both noted for the record, with 76 days to go.

Reminder: The original idea behind this Time Capsule series was to record, in real time, what the American public knows and learns about Donald Trump while it is deciding whether he should become president. Mainly I’ve tried to stick with norm-changing events, those for which there is no obvious precedent. Here are four recent items that, to the best of my knowledge, differ from what we’ve ever seen from major-party nominees or their campaigns.

1) “Hillary Clinton is sick.” In stump speeches Donald Trump has been saying that Hillary Clinton looks bad and has to sleep a lot. His campaign representatives Rudy Giuliani and Katrina Pierson have been much more direct, implying that Clinton either has a serious disease or is suffering cognitive damage. You can read about it in David Graham’s new item here, and also here, here, here, and here. On CNN, Amy Kremer of Women Vote Trump likened the aftereffects of Clinton’s concussion several years ago to traumatic brain damage for NFL players.

On the merits of such claims, Clinton’s doctor, Lisa Bardack, has released a statement denying these reports and affirming her “excellent health.” (As a reminder, the only health information Trump has released is the Onion-style report from last year, which states “unequivocally he will be  the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency.”)

As for the norms of campaigning: Health questions obviously have a long history in presidential politics. Franklin Roosevelt was gravely ill when he ran for a fourth term in 1944 but did his best to conceal that—as he had (with press connivance) minimized awareness of his paralysis throughout his time as president. There were whispering campaigns about Ronald Reagan’s age and mental condition when he ran for re-election in 1984, about John Kennedy’s ailments including Addison’s disease in 1960, and of course about Thomas Eagleton’s history of mental illness, which drove him from the Democratic ticket in 1972. But I’m not aware of a previous case in which senior campaign representatives came right out with public suggestions of ill health, as Trump’s are doing now.

***

2. Deportation? Maybe not. Reports over the weekend suggest that Trump might be reconsidering his promise to find people without legal immigration papers and send them back home.

“Adaptability” has always been part of politics. FDR ran as a fiscal conservative in 1932 but then launched the New Deal. Woodrow Wilson ran for re-election in 1916 as the president who “kept us out of war” and then took us into war. Mike Pence and Tim Kaine, both previously in favor of the TPP trade deal, now are both against it—the same is of course true of Hillary Clinton. There are examples from almost every president or nominee.

But again I’m not aware of another case of a nominee suggesting a change on so fundamental a premise of his campaign. It is as if Abraham Lincoln, in 1860, had indicated that he was open-minded about secession, or like George McGovern in 1972 saying that maybe the Vietnam War wasn’t so bad. (And to spell this out: Lincoln and McGovern were right in the views they had and stuck with. Trump’s deportation plan, in my view, is wrong, but it’s been the heart of his campaign.)

***

3. A new season of The Apprentice? A report by Sarah Ellison of Vanity Fair indicates that Trump talked with NBC officials, before he ran, about possibly hosting new seasons of the show from the White House. Obviously nothing like this has occurred before. Closest imaginable counterpart: if Ronald Reagan, after becoming president, had revived General Electric Theater, a TV series that he hosted in the 1950s and early 1960s.

***

4. Insecure. An actual tweet this morning from Trump.

Every president ends up resenting the press. While in office Harry Truman got so mad about a hostile Washington Post review of his daughter’s piano concert that he sent a personal letter to the reviewer, Paul Hume, threatening to beat him up. (The letter is here, and it is amazing. For instance: “Some day I hope to meet you. When that happens you'll need a new nose, a lot of beefsteak for black eyes, and perhaps a supporter below!”) But the Truman episode is famous because it’s so unusual.

The main other illustration: During the 2000 campaign, then-nominee George W. Bush stood at a podium with running mate Dick Cheney and, not realizing the microphone was on, referred to a certain New York Times reporter as “a major league asshole.” Cheney replied, “Yeah, big time.” This is like what Trump keeps doing with his tweets, except that Bush and Cheney didn’t think they were doing it in public, whereas Trump is deliberately sending the message to millions of followers.

It’s now 77 days until the election: no tax returns or plausible health report forthcoming; official GOP leadership still standing firm with the nominee.

No larger point for now (still on the road, out all days on interviews in Erie), but here we note for the record the second major change in Trump campaign leadership within roughly two months.

In June, Corey Lewandowski was out, soon to join CNN, and Paul Manafort was in. Today, Manafort is out, and Kellyanne Conway and Steve Bannon are in.

To say something you might have seen before in this space: This level of churn and chaos very rarely occurs in a major-party presidential campaign. To the best of my knowledge, it has never occurred in a winning campaign.

Now perhaps we’ll never know who was telling the truth about the change in the GOP platform, made at the convention, that favored Russia and Manafort’s pro-Russian former client, Viktor Yanukovych (as noted here two weeks ago). Members of the platform committee say that the Manafort-led Trump campaign asked for this change, and only this change, in the party’s platform. Manafort flatly and categorically denied that Team Trump had anything whatsoever to do with the change. “It absolutely did not come from the campaign,” he told George Stephanopoulos. “No one, zero” from the campaign was involved.

The members of the platform committee had no reason to misrepresent what happened. Manafort did, and had a long record of Baghdad Bob-like flat denials of reality when speaking for the campaign. Thus I’ve assumed that he was the one dissembling. But presumably the press spotlight will for now move away from him and resolving this issue. Legal proceedings could be another matter.

Eighty days to go until the election; still no tax returns or plausible medical report on offer from the Trump campaign; but it’s a new team with a new start. On to new reports tomorrow.

I’ve innocently spent a few days offline, in the same city (Erie, Pa.) where Donald Trump spoke this weekend but seeing a completely different prospect from the one he described. And I log back to on to see—whoa!

In order, and for the record:

1. Medical records. While Trump’s refusal to release his tax records has gotten more attention, his failure to provide a plausible medical report is in a way more shocking (as I’ve noted over the months).
   
   The only report he has put out is a preposterous North Korean News Service-style farce last year, from a doctor who certified him as “unequivocally the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency.” Also, the very oldest. Ronald Reagan was not quite 70 when he began his first term. Donald Trump would be 70 ½.
   
   In an item called “I’m a doctor. These are the things I find most concerning about Trump’s medical letter” Dr. Jen Gunter explains why this aspect of Trump’s stonewalling deserves much more attention.
                                                                              

2. Meanwhile, tax returns. This past weekend in the NYT, Rep. Mark Sanford of South Carolina wrote an op-ed called “I Support You, Donald Trump. Now, Release Your Tax Returns.” Sanford, a former governor, is no one’s idea of a liberal. He makes a powerful case, from a stance of supporting Trump, that Trump should respect the expectation of all nominees since Richard Nixon and release his taxes. Sample:

   I ran twice for governor of South Carolina, and I released my tax returns both times. To be frank, it felt a bit like a colonoscopy: I didn’t like it, but it was our tradition in South Carolina. The power of staying true to the precedent that had been set prevailed. If presidential candidates won’t release their tax returns, you can expect the same in the states. If a presidential nominee doesn’t do it, why should a candidate for governor?

                                                                     

3. Paul Manafort, we hardly knew ye. On the day that Manafort gets competition for his leadership of the Trump campaign, yet another story about the complications of his involvement in Ukraine.  Sample, from the AP:

   Donald Trump’s campaign chairman helped a pro-Russian governing party in Ukraine secretly route at least $2.2 million in payments to two prominent Washington lobbying firms in 2012, and did so in a way that effectively obscured the foreign political party's efforts to influence U.S. policy.

   The revelation, provided to The Associated Press by people directly knowledgeable about the effort, comes at a time when Trump has faced criticism for his friendly overtures to Russian President Vladimir Putin. It also casts new light on the business practices of campaign chairman Paul Manafort.

   It’s worth noting that Manafort still has not addressed what appears to be an important and very public flat-out lie: his claim that no one from the Trump campaign had anything whatsoever to do with a change in the GOP platform to favor Russia and weaken support for Ukraine.

4. Team Breitbart. Oh lord. Please read this wonderful story by my former Atlantic colleague Joshua Green, in Bloomberg Businessweek, about the new talent Trump has brought onto his team. A clue comes from the headline: “This Man is the Most Dangerous Political Operative in America.” And that was before he took charge of the GOP campaign!

5. These intel people, what do they know? As he gets his first classified briefing, Donald Trump says he “doesn’t trust” the official U.S. government intel agencies. Good! Maybe they won’t have to give him subsequent briefings.

On the cusp of 81 days until the election, with neither tax returns nor a plausible medical report released, I’ll stop with this for the moment, and get back to the things actually going in a positive direction in the country. Despite the “to infinity” billing in this item’s headline, there are sure to be more installments to come.

This is a breaking-news placeholder, for “what we knew, when” purposes:

• One month ago, the Republican platform was altered to soften any commitment to supporting Ukraine in its struggles against Russia (which seized Crimea from Ukraine two years ago). This was the only significant change in the foreign-policy aspects of the platform at the convention.
                                                                                                    
• Two weeks ago, Donald Trump’s campaign manager Paul Manafort, whose former PR clients included Victor Yanukovich, the now-deposed, pro-Russian President of Ukraine, categorically denied that he or anyone from the Trump campaign had anything whatsoever to do with this change.
                                                                                                    
• One week ago, several members of the platform committee began emerging to say: No, that’s not true, the only reason for the change was pressure from the Trump campaign. That is, that Paul Manafort’s categorical denials had to be false. The Trump campaign has not addressed the contradictions.
                                                                                               
• This evening, the New York Times has a big investigative piece by Andrew Kramer, Mike McIntire, and Barry Meier on Paul Manafort’s involvement in Ukraine. It says, among other things, that secret ledgers “show $12.7 million in undisclosed cash payments designated for Mr. Manafort from Mr. Yanukovych’s pro-Russian political party from 2007 to 2012, according to Ukraine’s newly formed National Anti-Corruption Bureau. Investigators assert that the disbursements were part of an illegal off-the-books system whose recipients also included election officials.” A delicious note is that Corey Lewandowski, the ousted pre-Manafort Trump campaign manager, tweeted out a link to the NYT story.

What does this add up to? At the moment I don’t know. I will say one more time: nothing quite like this has happened before. And with 84 days until the election, there is all the more reason to expect Donald Trump to do what all other post-Nixon nominees have done, and release his tax returns.