When historians look back on the week of August 15, 2016 they will do so not just because it highlighted Donald Trump’s campaign pivot from the GOP convention to the general election, but the overwhelming suddenness by which it occurred. It will come to be seen as if the entire conventional wisdom of the masses got turned upside down; as if the canoe known as the Hillary Clinton campaign were a canoe suddenly upended by events they should have been able to anticipate but never did. Or perhaps couldn’t.

The week started with the first of four big speeches before the Detroit Economic Club followed by an unprecedented (at least for the GOP) reach-out to the African American community, and ended with Trump shaming both President Obama and Hillary Clinton into disrupting their respective summer vacations on hoity-toity Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket, respectively, by visiting the flood-stricken folks in Louisiana and preparing the stage for his formal proposals on immigration reform.

We’re talking all this in the span of one week, folks. Talk about a pivot!

Of course, if all you followed was the mainstream and traditional media, you would have thought Trump’s campaign was imploding, reeling from Hillary Clinton’s DNC bounce, and sinking so far in the polls that some were actually predicting Trump’s withdrawal from the presidential race. Not to mention their repeating ad nauseum the supposed “softening” of Trump’s position on illegal immigration.

A few thoughts:
1. The reach-out to African-American voters has been long overdue in the GOP, and only someone like Trump could do it. Not because of any character flaw in recent GOP candidates, but because Trump doesn’t talk, act, or think like the Bushes, Romneys and McCains of the world. As politicians, they’re surrounded by political operatives cautioning them to play it safe, let they make a mistake and the whole thing blows up on them and their careers as political consultants. Trump, frankly, doesn’t care about that, and he also has shown a remarkable ability to see people not as Beltway politicians do (i.e., identity politics), but simply as Americans. This is going to serve him well in the general election, bank on it.

2. Trump’s “pivot” on illegal immigration away from from mass deportation – implied or not – to instead enforcing existing immigration laws and providing a step-by step immigration strategy…

1. Close the border
2. Start building wall
3. Enforce all existing immigration laws
4. Deport the bad guys

…is just a total win/win that paints the Democrats and Hillary Clinton especially in a deep, dark corner. Anytime Trump can contrast enforcing existing law against the daily drip-drip-drip of corruption, lying, and pay-for-play going on with the Clinton Foundation is winner-winner-chicken-dinner. After all, what can Hillary possibly come back with? How could she be trusted to enforce existing immigration law when couldn’t even be trusted to follow the law while Secretary of State. Which is why the Trump campaign has escalated the pounding of this fact over the past week. A big punch is being telegraphed, and the mainstream media is (as usual) missing it completely. What this also does is make it a little easier for the GOP establishment squishes to hop on board the Trump campaign come September and the final weeks of the campaign. Once Trump’s speech is made they can all say something like, “well, now that mass deportation is off the board I’m willing to give Trump the benefit of the doubt” and hop on board.

3. The polls are a joke. First of all, any pollster worth his or her salt understands the difference between a presidential campaign where there is an incumbent and where there is not, as in 2016. So why are all the pollsters using a 2012 model in their polls? Does anyone out there really think that Hillary Clinton’s campaign will have the same Democratic voter loyalty as Barack Obama’s did? Does anyone really think that African-Americans will go to the polls in support of Hillary as they did for Obama? And finally, given that the Gallop organization earlier found party affiliation between Democrats and Republicans even this year (I believe it was 28% each, could have been a little higher) why are all the pollsters favoring Democrats anywhere from +5 to +15 in their polls? Especially given the fact that, even with all the Bernie Sanders enthusiasm on the Democratic side, the total primary vote came out as R+1? And that doesn’t even take into account the number of Democrats who won’t vote for Hillary under any circumstances. I’m telling you folks – Trump is going to win in November, and it won’t even be close.