The New York Times says that it’s probably not possible for the GOP to replace Trump as the nominee unless he resigns, dies or becomes incapacitated. And I don’t think he’s going to resign. He’s still got evangelicals, and he’s still got the mega-donors.

Elsewhere, though, it’s every Republican for her- or himself. I predict the RNC will leave Trump to his own devices and focus on congressional and state races. The Media Narrative at this point is that Trump may still be standing, but his campaign is toast. And then this ridiculous campaign season will finally lurch to its end.

A lot happened over the past several hours. Along with the release of the infamous Donald Lecherous Scumbag Trump video, apparently excerpts from Hillary Clinton infamous Goldman Sachs speeches have also been leaked, and as suspected she said things she is going to be pressured to disavow.

But I want to focus on Trump first. The current party line from the GOP is that Trump used bad language. Nobody should use bad language like that, especially about (sotto voce: white) women. We must denounce such use of language. But he’s still our candidate.

Will Trump be pressured to drop out? And would he? At this point, it doesn’t look like it. It’s way too late to replace Trump on the ballots. It probably would be possible for the GOP to announce that even though Trump is on the ballot his electors are free to vote for somebody else, but I’m not sure about that. I don’t think Trump would go quietly unless they paid him billions of dollars. Maybe not even then.

It’s fascinating, though, that a posse of “family values” evangelicals is standing by Trump. Here are Ralph Reed, Tony Perkins and Gary Bauer:

“Voters of faith are voting on issues like who will protect unborn life, defend religious freedom, create jobs, and oppose the Iran nuclear deal,” Faith and Freedom Coalition president Ralph Reed said in an email to BuzzFeed News. “Ten-year-old tapes of private conversation with a television talk show host rank very low on their hierarchy of concerns.”

Asked if he had any comment on the tape itself and if he was definitely standing by Trump, Reed said, “I think the statement is self explanatory.”

Tony Perkins, who leads the Family Research Council, also did not reject Trump in the wake of the revelations, but indicated that he doesn’t share Trump’s values.

“My personal support for Donald Trump has never been based upon shared values, it is based upon shared concerns about issues such as: justices on the Supreme Court that ignore the constitution, America’s continued vulnerability to Islamic terrorists and the systematic attack on religious liberty that we’ve seen in the last 7 1/2 years,” Perkins said in an email to BuzzFeed News.

“The comments are obviously disgusting and unfortunate,” Bauer said in an interview with BuzzFeed News. “But Donald Trump did not run as a evangelical or as somebody who ran the kind of campaign that a Pat Robertson would run.”

“We’ll still support him, still work hard for him,” Bauer said. “His policies are 100% better than Hillary Clinton’s for the country.”

“I don’t see how any values voter that is sensible would take a tape from 11 years ago with totally inappropriate language and says somehow that leads me as a voter to stay home or vote for Hillary Clinton or throw your vote away on a third party candidate,” Bauer said.

It’s beyond obvious that Donald Trump is a walking moral cesspool. Even Jonah Goldberg, who is a known idiot, realizes this. You cannot say you take the Ten Commandments — any of ’em — seriously and support Donald Trump. What’s wrong with these people?

I can think of two explanations. One, they think somehow they will maintain more influence in a Trump administration than in a Clinton administration. And maybe they would. Trump obviously doesn’t give a hoo-haw about religion, except when it can be made to reflect well on him somehow. He might very well support their anti-LGBT and anti-women agenda if they flatter him enough, because it’s obvious he doesn’t give a shit either way.

The other explanation is that these people have become so twisted that oppressing women and LGBT people is the only “morality” they care about any more, and all the stuff about lying, stealing, coveting, adultery , etc., are just details that can be sacrificed for their “greater good.”

There is talk Trump will be pressured to drop out of the race. I don’t think he will do it. Well, not unless the RNC offers to pay him tons and tons of money. What do you think?

I understand Hurricane Matthew is about to reach Jacksonville and is expected to make landfall in Charleston, so everybody hang in there.

Back to the Clown Show — Sunday is the next debate, and it appears Donald isn’t prepping for that one, either. I guess this is what one can expect from a man who has never had to work for anything. He doesn’t know how to work.

However, he does know how to bullshit. He’s telling people the “feds” are encouraging undocumented immigrants with criminal records to vote in November.

“I’m sure you’re not going to write it,” Trump told reporters covering the meeting, according to a transcript posted by NBC’s Ali Vitali. “To me that’s— they’re letting people pour into the country so they can go vote.”

Trump was responding to a statement from Art Del Cueto, the vice president of the National Border Patrol Council, a union representing border patrol agents that has endorsed Trump, according to the Los Angeles Times.

Cueto said that “they’re checking the records, they’re noticing that they have criminal records but they’re setting them aside because at this point, they’re saying immigration is so tied up with trying to get people that are on the waiting list — hurry up and get them, their immigration status corrected, make them citizens,” according to Vitali.

Trump asked why that was the case, and Del Cueto answered, “So they can go ahead and vote in this election.”

Nate Silver has the Clinton-Trump chances of winning at about 80 percent to 20 percent, respectively, this morning, with less than a month to go. Barring an unforeseen calamity of some sort, Clinton will win. Will Trump concede, or will he throw a tantrum and claim he was cheated? He could be setting the country up for some long-term domestic upheaval.

Here’s the new Clinton ad flaming Pence for denying stuff he and Trump really said.

The staffs of both the New York Times and the Washington Post are working overtime to dig deeper into Donald Trump’s business affairs. And it’s getting juicier and juicier, mostly because the known facts are not adding up. WaPo explains:

In 1995, Donald Trump was in the midst of a spending spree. He had recently bought a 727 jet for personal use, added a skyscraper to his Manhattan real estate portfolio and snapped up properties in Telluride, Colo., and Palm Beach, Fla., financial records show.

That same year, he said he had negative $916 million in “federal adjusted gross income,” a claim that gave him the prospect of avoiding federal income taxes for years to come.

So how could he be thriving and avoiding taxes at the same time?

That’s the central mystery behind the state tax documents filed in New York by Trump for 1995 and disclosed this weekend by the New York Times.

Hmm. Well, another WaPo story says this:

Trump’s bid for the White House relies heavily on his ability to sell himself as a master businessman, a standout performer in real estate and reality TV.

But interviews with former shareholders and analysts as well as years of financial filings reveal a striking characteristic of his business record: Even when his endeavors failed and other people lost money, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee found a way to make money for himself, to market his Trump-branded products and to pay for his expensive lifestyle. …

… Trump’s campaign did not make him available to respond to specific questions about the company, but in a recent Washington Post interview, Trump said he “made a lot of money in Atlantic City,” adding, “I make great deals for myself.”

Josh Marshall explains:

He avoided personal ruin in part by getting the banks who backed him to forgive a lot of the debt. But he also tricked members of the public into taking over his failed businesses….

… the gist is that Trump set up his first major public company Trump Hotels and Casino Resorts. It was listed on the NYSE and members of the public, including quite a few individual investors, bought the stock. It was an IPO of a mature, indeed already failing company. But Trump used the allure of the Trump name to entice people in.

Over the next several years the businesses swirled down the drain and Trump was able to sell his other distressed casinos to the public company. In other words, he was both the buyer and the seller. So he sold the deeply indebted and already failing Trump Taj Mahal and Trump Castle to the company at a price of his choosing. While he was doing this he continued to pay himself tens of millions of dollars a year as the company’s CEO in addition to using the company to help out his other businesses. By all these machinations he managed to have the company’s major expenditures be paying off or at least servicing the debts he had racked up before the public company came into existence. At the end of the day basically everyone who invested in Trump company lost everything.

The company launched in 1995, the same year Trump claimed almost a $1 billion in losses on his tax return. Clearly these two things were related. Indeed, the Casino business was the essence of Trump’s business empire at that point. We just don’t know precisely how it all fits together because unlike the public company which had to make all the filings every public does, Trump’s personal finances are private and remain that way because he’s refused to release his tax returns.

The Times has more details about Trump’s bad investments. At one point, when he was about to go belly up, his father gave him a “loan” by sending “a lawyer to the Castle casino to buy $3.3 million in chips and leave without cashing them.”

Now, I don’t know if any of this is illegal, but it certainly isn’t good.

Oh, and Julian Assange’s big announcement was a bust. He had nothin’. I’m guessing Vladimir decided Trump was a lost cause and stopped feeding him leaks.

Update: From September, but related — Trump’s Riches and the Real-Estate Tax Racket.

Update: Fortune magazine says that Trump’s presidential campaign is destroying his “brand.”

Over the past 12 months Trump has almost certainly been devaluing his brand among the customers who are most important to his businesses – high-income individuals plus the corporations that rent space in his office buildings and hold conferences and meetings in his hotels or hotels that have licensed his name.

Trump’s supporters in the election tend to be less educated and poorer than voters overall; they’re not his customers. By contrast, he’s losing heavily among college-educated voters, a group that includes most of his individual customers. Corporate customers find it increasingly difficult to associate themselves with Trump-branded real estate because of his astonishing ability to offend assorted groups – Latinos, Muslims, women, the disabled. No mainstream corporation wants to offend those groups by occupying space with Trump’s name in shiny gold capital letters on the front.

There’s evidence that Trump’s brand devaluation is happening. Bloomberg cites research showing that among consumers earning over $150,000 a year, the Trump brand’s value had plummeted by the end of last year. Other research finds that the market share of Trump casinos, hotels, and golf course plunged 14% from July 2015 to July 2016.