Mother Jones: “This spring, as Donald Trump battled Ted Cruz in the heated Republican primary campaign, the mogul was also tending to his day job, with his business empire staking a claim to some new corporate territory. On April 11—a day when media reports noted Trump had been oddly silent and out of sight following his recent defeat in the Wisconsin primary—a Trump-owned company applied for a trademark on a brand new hotel concept. It was dubbed ‘American Idea.'”

“According to the trademark filing made by DTTM Operations LLC, a Delaware-based company Trump set up in January to manage his trademarks, the GOP nominee was reserving ‘American Idea’ for use in an unspecified hotel services, spa, and/or personal concierge business. Could it be that the candidate running under the banner of ‘Make America Great Again’ was devising a plan to capitalize on Trump-style patriotism for a new hotel or chain of hotels with some sort of America theme? Was this Plan B? A way to convert his campaign into a commercial success, if voters fail to elect him the nation’s next CEO?”

“Donald Trump, as a builder in New York and Atlantic City decades ago, sometimes dealt with people who had ties to organized crime,” the Wall Street Journal reports.

“They included a man law enforcement called an agent of the Philadelphia mob; a gambler convicted of tax fraud; a union leader found guilty of racketeering; and a real-estate developer convicted in a stock scheme that involved Mafiosi.”

Trump said he either had only cursory relationships with them or wasn’t aware of their ties at the time, calling himself “the cleanest guy there is.”

Rick Klein: “Welcome to the most important day of Donald Trump’s campaign, at least going back to his convention. Twenty-four hours from now, Trump will (presumably) have a revised and revamped immigration policy. He will also have made a foreign trip to visit the government he’s tangled most with publicly. He’s seeking to look and act presidential, to signal that he’s listening, trying, and evolving.”

“At least in theory, it’s a sort of real-time display of the management approach he’s looking to bring to the nation’s highest office. It all comes at a moment of vulnerability for Hillary Clinton – see those new poll numbers that show trust in her eroding – that she’s chosen to spend almost exclusively with donors. If Trump needs a reset race before Labor Day, he’s doing what he can to get it. The master of optics and television imagery is getting some potentially valuable takeaways from the last day of August.”

“At the beginning of this week, the Trump campaign announced – to great fanfare – that it was launching a $10 million ad buy from Aug. 30 through Sept. 6,” NBC News reports.

“The problem: Two days later, half of that ad buy still hasn’t been purchased.”

Donald Trump is out with a new 30-second spot that will run in Ohio, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Florida, New Hampshire, Iowa, Nevada, Virginia and Colorado.

Playbook: “Mitt Romney lost eight of nine of these states where the $10 million campaign is running, but the Trump campaign says they are aiming to change that — despite the gap with Clinton in most statewide polls.”