Hillary Clinton's election campaign and the news-entertainment complex are suddenly laying down a witheringly intense field of fire to destroy Donald Trump before the Nov. 8 presidential election.

They've moved up into top gear now that October has arrived, in apparent hope of crushing the unpredictable Republican nominee, who has defied pundits and naysayers since the campaign began last year.

Clinton, the Democratic nominee, with massive supporting salvos from Hollywood and news outlets, is targeting Trump's business practices and acumen, his relations with women, and what they say is his temperamental unsuitability for the Oval Office.

The news-entertainment industry is amplifying Clinton's campaign message to top volume.

This weekend, the New York Times published a story about his tax returns, which he has hitherto declined to make public. On the same evening, liberal actor Alec Baldwin joined the cast of "Saturday Night Live" to depict Trump as a ludicrous figure whose poor debate performance last week makes him unworthy of serious consideration for high office.

Trump complicated matters by meeting and dwelling on these challenges rather than dismissing them, counterpunching, or changing the subject. The thin-skinned GOP leader dwelt on Clinton's attacks and media investigations, ensuring that they received extra scrutiny from voters just as absentee and early voting began and gathered momentum in the homestretch to Election Day.

"It's unclear whether [his base cares] if Trump has temperamental and erratic behavior, or are they just so angry at Washington they are willing to ignore the negatives and elect a disruptor-in-chief to the Oval Office," Ron Bonjean, a Republican communications adviser, said.

Trump surged in September, wiping out the comfortable lead Clinton built in August. His recovery was due in part to a more disciplined campaign and to greater media coverage of Clinton's controversial secret email system and seeming pay-for-play triangulation between her family charity, her tenure as secretary of state, and big donors who supported her and her husband.

Trump's gains are now either gone or in profound peril.

Clinton clearly beat him last Monday in the first presidential debate and then he spent much of last week trying to fix and explain his failures rather than moving on and focusing on what voters by large margins find unattractive about Clinton.

By trying to counter rather than ignore or deflect Clinton's attacks, notably about his treatment of a beauty pageant contestant, Trump allowed a 24-hour story to dominate the entire week.

The new revelations that Trump took a nearly $1 billion loss and might have paid no income taxes for 18 years threaten to dominate the next several days leading up the second debate, this Sunday.

The race, tied a week ago, has turned into a modest Clinton lead.

Although Clinton has been under pressure to offer voters a positive policy message to support, some Democratic insiders believe the past week shows the advantage in staying negative and focusing on undermining Trump.

"As much as you would like to spend more time outlining a more positive message, I think that is crucial that they continue to point out how unqualified Trump is to be commander in chief," Democratic operative Jim Manley said. "They need to make him radioactive."

Clinton has stepped up her months of attacks on Trump's personal and professional background, using the first debate as a launching pad.

She sliced the Republican for declining to release his tax returns, breaking decades of bipartisan precedent, and went so far in last week's debate as to suggest he was hiding something. This is despite the fact that one of the principal public opinions of Clinton herself is that she is dishonest and unforthcoming. When she accused Trump of hiding something, he did not respond by pointing out that it was she not he who operated a secret email server and had its contents destroyed by special shredding software to make it unrecoverable.

Clinton then bludgeoned her opponent, accusing him of saying unsavory things for years about women. Her prime example was the case of Alicia Machado, a Miss Universe contestant, whom Trump allegedly called "Miss Piggy" and "Miss Housekeeping."

Most of the media followed suit, picking up Clinton's attack and not mentioning their co-ordination with Team Clinton in preparing the story, and largely ignoring unsavory details about Trump's accuser, such as her links to a South American drug criminal.

Within days, Machado was a featured guest on the news network morning-show circuit, telling and re-telling the story of how Trump humiliated her and caused her deep emotional distress. The topic dominated interviews with top Trump surrogates.

Nearly a week following Clinton's charge that Trump might be trying to hide that he's never paid taxes, the New York Times published an investigation into his 1995 tax return that made exactly the same point. The story led the Washington Post's Sunday edition, even though the news outlet had to rely on its competitor for the news.

The media pile-on contrasts sharply with how Trump was treated during the GOP primary, when he faced little scrutiny and was given an estimated $2 billion of earned airtime.

Most investigations into Trump's background were there to be looked into back then, but there was less appetite for them. This could be due partly to the fact that Trump's Republican opponents did not take him seriously until too late, so they did not become an issue of debate.

What hasn't changed is Trump's response under fire. As during the primary, he has responded to attacks by defending himself and lashing out at opponents, Clinton and the media.

During a Saturday evening campaign rally in Pennsylvania, Trump mocked Clinton's recent health problems, and also suggested that she hasn't been faithful to her husband, President Bill Clinton, and he speculated that she is mentally unbalanced.

Asked how the Trump campaign plans to fight the developing media narrative, campaign manager Kellyanne Conway argued in an interview with Fox News' Howard Kurtz that it wouldn't affect voters' perceptions.

"It's amazing Donald Trump does as well as he does, Howie, and is still standing given the onslaught," she said. "I actually think that voters look right through it, there's not a lot of evidence that the way the campaign is being covered is the way that voters see it."