ANALYSIS/OPINION:

The clock is ticking, and Donald Trump still hasn’t figured out what time it is. It’s clear, and has been for months, that America is eager to vote for anybody but Hillary Clinton, but the Donald seems determined to make sure that “anybody” is not him. Many voters are on the verge of deciding, however reluctantly, to hold their noses and cast their ballots. It’s beginning to look like a run on clothespins.

The first job of every presidential candidate is to persuade voters that he (or she) can be trusted with the enormous power of the office, and Mr. Trump has not even attempted to do that. He can’t focus on the interests and concerns of the voters for distracting himself with issues that don’t matter to anyone but himself, whether it’s the bias of a judge of Mexican ancestry presiding over a law suit involving his business interests, or the father of a heroic Muslim soldier who was put up by the Clinton campaign to attack him as a man with a black soul in prime time at the Democratic National Convention. Even if he’s right about whether the judge can be fair to him, or that the Muslim father was a partisan put-up, he won’t change a single vote by proving it.

The clock keeps ticking. He still has time get back into the race, because Hillary is still who she is, a cold and calculating Cruella de Vil who disdains ordinary Americans and their values. The people who “love” Hillary are the Wall Street fat cats with whom she shares an insatiable love for money. She and her party are wrong on most of the issues. She’s a clunker on the stump, easily frightened when forced off script, flustered by the unexpected and given to coughing fits that raise lingering concerns about her health. All she has going for her is Donald Trump.

That gives the Donald both responsibility and opportunity. The election, one of the most crucial in decades, is his to lose, and so far he seems more than up to doing that. Not many voters are likely to cast a vote for Hillary except for blind partisanship and the miserable lack of a credible alternative. If he can focus on the many problems of the nation and how a Trump administration would deal with them, he could give voters the assurance they need to see him as the alternative they’re looking for. He is obviously a keen and focused businessman, a success in a game that rewards only winners and quickly discards the losers that Mr. Trump is so contemptuous of. He should put some of the powers of concentration that earned him success in business to work in the business of politics.

The Donald doesn’t understand that a campaign for the highest office in the land is a lengthy job interview, and he should know from personal experience that a job applicant who spends the interview attacking others and ranting about the irrelevant will be told before he’s hired that, “You’re fired!”

Mr. Trump won a clear shot at the White House, and he’s wasting the opportunity that few Americans get. If he won’t or can’t get his act together, he won’t get the job. His prospective employers are beginning to lose interest in him because he wants to talk only about himself and petty distractions of interest only to himself. He’s wasting time, his and ours. Tick, tock.

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