Donald Trump is not going to run a traditional campaign, even in the general election. He’s not going to poll every issue, canvas every home and saturate every TV market with ads. But his failure to fully and successfully strike Hillary Clinton this week when a bulls-eye was painted in Technicolor on her back fails even the Trump test for proper politics.

If Trump can’t even campaign like Trump, he’s not going to win the election. It’s that simple.

If Trump can’t even campaign like Trump, he’s not going to win the election. It’s that simple.

This should have been the week when the only story — the single thing in the news — was the incredible spectacle of the Obama administration refusing to charge the presumptive Democratic nominee with a crime and James Comey not recommending that it do so even after the FBI director himself presented clear evidence of wrongdoing. At the very least, Comey’s explanation for not moving forward with an indictment provided ample material about how Clinton lied, was unforgivably irresponsible with the nation’s security, and then covered her tracks.

The two things Trump did best during the campaign — the things that propelled him to victory in the Republican primaries — were his articulation of Americans’ anger about the power of the Establishment and his ability to pierce his opponents with arrows that penetrated deep into their inadequacies. With Hillary’s lies and crimes exposed — and then forgiven by the Washington Establishment, which placed her above the law — Trump had a huge opportunity to fully seize the initiative.

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Hillary was playing on Trump’s court. But the home team lost.

To be sure, during a speech in Raleigh, North Carolina, the day Comey made his announcement, Trump discussed the issue, devoting about a quarter of his speech to it. This, however, was the moment to cast aside other issues and devote an entire appearance to the Achilles’ heel beneath Hillary pantsuit armor — her untrustworthiness.

“Hillary Clinton put the entire country in danger. She put the entire country in danger,” he said. “Today is the best evidence ever that we’ve seen that our system is absolutely, totally rigged.”

Good stuff. But far too little of it.

Worse, Trump stepped in it by stepping on his message by complimenting Saddam Hussein on the late dictator’s  anti-terrorism strategy. Whatever Trump had said about Clinton, the press gleefully focused on what they interpreted as sly support for Saddam Hussein by a closet autocrat, even though it was in reality a commentary that Iraq would have been less of a problem if we left Hussein where he was.

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Trump followed this up with a rambling, hour-long speech the next day in Sharonville, Ohio, where he grudgingly spoke only briefly about Hillary’s email scandal. We know he did it grudgingly because he said so. “I’m doing it because I feel I have to do it, and it’s sort of boring to do it, to be honest with you,” he told the crowd.

Instead of hammering Hillary, Trump kept two stories that were hurting him in the news, defending yet again his use of a star in a tweet about Clinton and going on at length about criticism of his Saddam Hussein comments.

“On the tweet was a star, like a star, and when I looked at it, I didn’t think anything,” Trump said. “All of a sudden, it turned out to be in the minds of the press only, because it could have been a sheriff’s star, it could have been a regular star. My boy comes home from school — Barron, he draws stars all over the place. ‘Oh,’ I never said, ‘That’s the Star of David, Barron. Don’t!’ It’s [just] a star.”

The star story was already four days old. Now it was five days old.

With the coverage the next day of the Ohio speech merrily reporting his defense of the Saddam remarks and his attacks on the press that reported it, Trump ensured the media made a three-day story out of that one. And he gave the press something to write about other than what should have been a report on a speech (had Trump given it) picking Clinton to pieces.

Instead, after referring to notes he’d scrawled down about Clinton, he threw the paper in the air after 10 minutes and went on to topics like Hussein, the star, his endorsement by Jack Nicklaus, his talented children, the wall with Mexico, and the hotel he is building in Washington. “We’re a year ahead of schedule,” he boasted of the hotel project.

He threw the paper in the air after 10 minutes and went onto topics like Hussein, the star, his endorsement by Jack Nicklaus, his talented children, and the wall with Mexico.

Trump spent more time on an old grudge — the coverage of his June trip to Scotland — than he did on Clinton, bemoaning that the press had portrayed him as happy about the decline of the pound after Brexit because it would increase business at his new golf course.

Low-energy Jeb Bush, Lyin’ Ted Cruz, and Little Marco Rubio must have been scratching their heads, wondering why the man who had relentlessly deconstructed their personalities and cast them as card-carrying members of the Establishment wasn’t doing the same to Clinton.

Part of Trump’s appeal is that he is not smooth, that he says what he thinks, and that he slices through the political correctness that conservatives abhor. Nobody expects him to give finely crafted speeches, and, in fact, it would destroy his political brand if he did. But if he fails to relentlessly seize political openings and show at least modest discipline in defining the message of the day, Hillary Clinton will do it for him.

And he will watch the inaugural address on TV instead of giving it.