First Read: “Maybe the most damaging part of last night’s debate for Trump was that it only extended the tax and birtherism stories, which are bound to come up again at the VP and second presidential debate over the next two weeks. On taxes, not only did Trump suggest that he’d release his taxes if Clinton releases her emails (so it’s not the audit after all?), he also seemed to admit that he indeed pays no taxes.”

“And on birtherism — Trump’s longstanding charge that President Obama wasn’t born in the United States and thus potentially illegitimate to be president — he (falsely) accused Clinton’s ’08 campaign of starting the issue. He also said he brought it to an end after getting Obama to produce his birth certificate. But he never apologized or explained what changed his mind (from 2011-2016 to two weeks ago) that Obama was indeed born in the U.S.”

“No chief executive at the nation’s 100 largest companies had donated to Republican Donald Trump’s presidential campaign through August, a sharp reversal from 2012, when nearly a third of the CEOs of Fortune 100 companies supported GOP nominee Mitt Romney,” the  Wall Street Journal reports.

A new SurveyMonkey poll finds that nearly half of all voters — 46 percent — think Donald Trump would use a nuclear weapon to attack ISIS or another foreign enemy.

Also interesting: “Sixty-five percent said that there would be race riots in major cities during a Trump administration, and 44 percent believe Trump would authorize internment camps for illegal immigrants.”

Jimmy Kimmel told random people that “Donald Trump released his taxes today” and then asked them specific questions about his fake tax returns.

Donald Trump was asked by WTTE why he suddenly changed his views on whether President Obama was born in the United States.

Said Trump: “Well, I just wanted to get on with, I wanted to get on with the campaign.”

Donald Trump “called for the broad use of the contentious stop-and-frisk policing strategy in America’s cities, embracing an aggressive tactic whose legality has been challenged and whose enforcement has been abandoned in New York,” the New York Times reports.

“His support for the polarizing crime-fighting policy — which involves officers’ questioning and searching pedestrians — collides with his highly visible courtship of African-Americans, who have been disproportionately singled out by the tactic, data show. It also came as police shootings were once again drawing scrutiny and protest.”

Politico: Trump’s puzzling pitch to black voters

Rick Klein: “It took until almost 10:30 pm last night for the Trump campaign to put out its statement on the latest Washington Post revelations about the Trump Foundation. This one accused the Post of ‘inaccuracies and omissions’ and ‘wrong’ facts – and proceeded to enumerate precisely zero items from any of those categories. It’s response by bluster, on paper, replacing actual answers to valid questions. (The paper trail in the latest report – documenting personal business legal settlements covered by Trump’s charitable foundation – is particularly solid, and has not been refuted by anyone in and around Trump.) Tuesday night, Mike Pence applauded his running mate for answering media questions ‘just about every day.’ But a summer storyline has flipped as we head into fall: Trump hasn’t held a full-fledged news conference since July.”

“His campaign’s scorching attacks on media organizations who dig in on his business or personal dealings are designed to obfuscate, not illuminate. A campaign that’s focused on ‘Crooked Hillary’ is going to have a harder time making that case without a straighter posture.”

Matt Latimer: “Time and again, Trump has survived what only a few years ago would have been considered career-ending gaffes… This defies all the rules of public life as we’ve come to understand them. For decades, a single spontaneous outburst (John Kerry’s ‘I was for it before I was against it’), a pompous proclamation (whatever Al Gore intended to say about his role in the Internet), a cuckoo pronouncement (George Romney’s claim to have been ‘brainwashed’ about the Vietnam War), or even an embarrassing misspelling (Dan Quayle’s infamous attempt to correctly write the word ‘potato’ on a blackboard), caused irreparable, often campaign-ending damage.”

“Trump has done all these things—some of them multiple times in the same day. The gaffe hasn’t destroyed Trump; it’s made him stronger. The reasons for this are instructive, and they will change the way politics is practiced forever.”

“Donald Trump spent more than a quarter-million dollars from his charitable foundation to settle lawsuits that involved the billionaire’s for-profit businesses,” the Washington Post reports.

“If the Internal Revenue Service were to find that Trump violated self-dealing rules, the agency could require him to pay penalty taxes or to reimburse the foundation for all the money it spent on his behalf. Trump is also facing scrutiny from the office of the New York attorney general, which is examining whether the foundation broke state charity laws.”

“An election forecast built by Vox and a team of political scientists projects that a generic Republican should win 50.9 percent of the two-party vote in 2016. But Donald Trump isn’t a generic Republican — and he is polling at 47.7 percent of the two-party vote, according to the Huffington Post Pollster. The difference between those numbers — 3.2 points, as of today — is what we’re calling the Trump Tax: the electoral penalty Republicans appear to be paying for nominating Trump.”

“What we appear to be seeing is a remarkable example of a major political party blowing a totally winnable national election.”