Can you smell the garbage burning? Photo: Spencer Platt/Getty Images

If Donald Trump were an otherwise normal candidate — with a reasonable knowledge of public policy and no pronounced affection for authoritarian rulers or habit of blurting out overtly misogynistic and racist comments — the Republican Party Establishment would still be in complete meltdown right now over his campaign’s political incompetence. Recent reports have uncovered a slew of hair-raising details about the campaign’s amateur/quasi-nonexistent status. Trump is raising nowhere close to the level of money required to run a modern presidential campaign. His campaign staff is skeletal and lacks the ability to coordinate a message, leading to chaotic setpieces where the entire Democratic Party message apparatus is being countered only by Trump’s personal Twitter account. (Sad!) Trump is wedded to bizarre strategic notions like competing in heavily blue states. He is devoting what few resources he does have to hopeless projects like hiring a pollster to help him win New York, where Republican presidential candidates have failed to reach even 40 percent of the vote in decades.

Trump’s ally and state campaign co-chair Carl Paladino reveals his two-prong plan to overcome their massive party registration deficit:

They will also rely on conventional get-out-the-vote efforts and blanketing the upstate region with signs and bumper stickers. “Upstate will give us a wave in this election, and my instruction from HQ is really simple. It’s one word: Win,” he said. “And that’s what we intend to do.”

So, prong one: bumper stickers and signs — thousands of them, maybe even millions, so many you cannot walk anywhere in upstate New York without having a Trump sticker get stuck to the bottom of your shoe. The sheer psychological force of this effort will apparently overwhelm the people. And then, prong two: “win.” Previous Republican candidates, Paladino included, have failed badly in statewide elections, a result Paladino apparently attributes to their failures to implement his strategy of trying to win.