Whenever a potentially damaging story for Hillary Clinton has emerged, she has usually been able to rely on Donald Trump to step on it. PHOTOGRAPH BY CHARLES MOSTOLLER / REUTERS

Another day, another blown opportunity for Donald Trump. Speaking in Youngstown, Ohio, on Monday afternoon, the embattled Republican nominee sought to reboot his Presidential campaign for the umpteenth time, in this case by calling for a Cold War-style effort to confront radical Islam. Expanding upon his call to ban entry to the United States to people from countries affected by terrorism, he attacked Hillary Clinton, saying she lacked the "mental and physical stamina" to defeat ISIS.

As usual where the Trump campaign is concerned, things didn't work out as planned. On the eve of the Ohio speech, the New York Times published a story datelined Kiev that focussed on the business dealings of Trump's campaign manager, Paul Manafort, a veteran political consultant whose client list includes Viktor Yanukovych, the former President of Ukraine, who was widely seen as an ally of the Kremlin. "Handwritten ledgers show $12.7 million in undisclosed cash payments designated for Mr. Manafort from Mr. Yanukovych’s pro-Russian political party from 2007 to 2012, according to Ukraine’s newly formed National Anti-Corruption Bureau," the Times article said.

Let us set aside, for the moment, the substance of the Times story, which Manafort has denied. ("I have never received a single ‘off-the-books cash payment’ as falsely ‘reported’ by The New York Times, nor have I ever done work for the governments of Ukraine or Russia," he wrote on Monday.) From a political perspective, the Manafort story afforded the Clinton campaign another opportunity to shift public attention away from Republican attacks on Clinton's record. It is a pattern we have seen repeatedly in the past few weeks, as Trump has demonstrated that he is uniquely ill-equipped to prosecute the case against his Democratic opponent. For Hillary Clinton, Trump is the gift that keeps on giving.

Just last week, Judicial Watch, a conservative group, released a batch of hitherto undisclosed e-mails from Huma Abedin, Clinton's close associate, dating back to 2009, when Clinton had just taken over as Secretary of State and Abedin was her deputy chief of staff. In one exchange, Doug Band, a longtime aide to Bill Clinton who was then helping to oversee the Clinton Global Initiative, asked Abedin to connect Gilbert Chagoury, a Lebanese-Nigerian billionaire who had contributed millions of dollars to Clinton-run charities, with the State Department's "substance person" on Lebanon. Abedin said that she'd talk to Jeffrey Feltman, who had recently served as the American Ambassador to Lebanon, and who would go on to become the Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs.

Feltman has since said that he never did speak with Chagoury, a controversial figure who had ties to General Sani Abacha, the former dictator of Nigeria. Nonetheless, the Abedin-Band conversation highlighted the sometimes murky connections between the Clinton State Department and donors to the Clinton Foundation. "The emails paint a picture of top Clinton aides at State eager to do favors for Clinton Foundation donors," the anti-Clinton editorial board of the _Wall Street Journal _declared. "At the heart of these documents is the glaring conflict of interest that Mrs. Clinton carried into the State Department—and then spread to those around her."

How did Trump exploit this opportunity to tar his opponent? Did he clear his schedule and bone up on previous stories that have raised questions about how the State Department treated Clinton Foundation donors during Clinton's tenure, such as the Times report from earlier this year about a Russian takeover of a Canadian uranium producer, or the ABC News report about how a Chicago securities trader with little foreign-policy experience got appointed to a government-intelligence advisory board? He did not.

Instead, in an offhand comment at a rally in Wilmington, North Carolina, Trump suggested that angry gun owners could take violent action against a future President Clinton.* A grateful Clinton campaign quickly seized on Trump's comment, making sure nobody missed it. "This is simple—what Trump is saying is dangerous. A person seeking to be the President of the United States should not suggest violence in any way," Robby Mook, Clinton's campaign manager, said in a statement. Tim Kaine, Clinton's running mate, said something very similar, adding that Trump's comment had provided "a window into the soul of a person who is just temperamentally not suited to the task.” The result: Trump's moment of indiscipline dominated the news for days, while the State Department e-mail story got relegated to the inside pages.

To repeat, this was not an isolated incident. Whenever a potentially damaging story for Clinton has emerged, she has usually been able to rely on Trump to step on it—or, in some cases, to ignore it because it could raise equally problematic, or more problematic, issues for him.

Take the Clintons' tax returns, which they slipped out to the public last Friday afternoon, and which show that they earned $10.6 million in 2015. This figure was down from $27.9 million in 2014, but it was enough to get the Clintons easily into the top 0.1 per cent of American households, a bracket that starts at about $2.2 million. Indeed, if you average the Clintons' income over the past eight years, they almost certainly made it into an even more exclusive group: the top 0.01 per cent.

Between 2007 and 2014, according to an analysis by National Journal, the Clintons earned about a hundred and forty-one million dollars, mostly from speaking fees and book-related payments. Add last year’s earnings, and the figure comes to more than a hundred and fifty million dollars. The Clintons' average annual income over the period was about $16.8 million. In 2014, the threshold for getting into the top 0.01 per cent was $12.1 million.

Some voters will say good luck to them: the country prospered under Bill, and Hillary was a hardworking U.S. senator and Secretary of State. Other voters may wonder about how a multimillionaire who reportedly helped her daughter buy a $9.3 million Manhattan apartment can position herself as someone who understands the concerns of struggling middle-class families.

Trump, however, was in no position to press this point. He claims to be worth at least ten billion dollars. But he's still refusing to release his own tax returns, and, from what we know of his previous filings, decades ago, it seems likely that he has paid very little federal tax, if any at all. (In a crackerjack column in the Times a few days ago, James Stewart suggested that Trump's federal tax rate might well be zero.) In stark contrast, the Clintons paid about thirty-four per cent of their income to the federal government last year. Between 2007 and 2014, their federal tax rate was around thirty-one per cent.

So Trump didn't bring up the Clinton's tax returns over the weekend and instead spent his time complaining about his treatment at the hands of the media. Now his campaign has to deal with the Manafort story, a time bomb that has been ticking ever since March, when Trump hired the sixty-seven-year-old consultant.

Generally speaking, political consultants are a mercenary lot, and if you examine their client lists you will sometimes find some unsavory characters. But Manafort's ties to Yanukovych and other Russia-friendly interests appear to have gone well beyond the normal client-adviser relationship. According to the Times investigation, Manafort helped create an offshore fund to invest money in Ukrainian companies, which was backed by Oleg Deripaska, a Russian oligarch who is widely regarded as a close ally of Vladimir Putin.

Did Trump know about any of this when he brought in Manafort? That's not clear yet. What is incontestable is that the Times story overshadowed Trump's terrorism speech and provided the Clinton campaign with another opportunity to issue an outraged statement. "This is a serious matter and there are real concerns about the pro-Kremlin interests engaged with the Trump team," the statement said. "As someone running to lead American policy and national security, Donald Trump owes the American public answers."

He also owes an explanation to his fellow-Republicans, some of whom now suspect that he may be trying to lose. As for Clinton, as a Methodist she may be driven to consider John Wesley's lengthy sermon on divine providence. To be sure, Wesley's view that God takes an active role in determining what happens to the Christian faithful is a bit old-fashioned. But, if a higher authority had anointed Clinton as the forty-fifth President of the United States, that authority could scarcely have taken a more effective step than insuring Trump was her opponent.

*An earlier version of this sentence misidentified the rally's location.