Hillary Clinton has become the first woman presidential nominee, but the historic feat is being overshadowed by a colossal Donald Trump blunder, requiring him to address the resultant breach in his badly shaken Republican ranks.
His petty attack on a federal judge of "Mexican heritage" presiding over a civil suit involving defunct Trump University has not only elevated that case, which alleges fraud against its students, as a campaign issue. It also calls into question his claim to be a master deal-maker whose skill qualifies him to run the country.
Furthermore, the whole saga provides voters with a sharp contrast between Ms. Clinton's central theme of bringing the country together and Mr. Trump's politics of ethnic, religious and racial division. Under the phony rubric of "making America great again," he seems determined to tear it further apart.
This outcome is particularly telling within the party whose nomination is now in Mr. Trump's grasp. Leading Republican leaders who have reluctantly endorsed him, starting with House Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, have now denounced his contention that the judge, born in Indiana of Mexican immigrants, could not for that reason give him a fair trial.
Mr. Ryan has called Mr. Trump's remark "the textbook definition of a racist comment," and Illinois Republican Sen. Mark Kirk has withdrawn his endorsement, leading Mr. Trump to argue lamely that his words were "misconstrued as a categorical attack on the people of Mexican heritage." He has now said he will not to comment further on the matter. But with Mr. Trump, who knows?
On the final big primary night, Mr. Trump in a rare use of a teleprompter delivered a scripted speech thanking the voters who gave him victories in all of Tuesday's primaries and vowing to continue to be a "fighter." The only allusion he offered then to the controversy swirling around his remarks was to say, "I will never ever back down, and our country will ever back down."
Mr. Trump swept all the Republican contests and Ms. Clinton won four of the six Democratic races, including California, New Jersey, South Dakota and New Mexico, with rival Sen.Bernie Sanders salvaging Montana and North Dakota.
Mr. Trump pointedly noted as the campaign moved into general-election mode that he would continue to target not only Hillary Clinton but also her husband the former president. At one point, he accused her, as President Obama's secretary of state, of turning the Department of State "into a personal hedge fund," presumably for the benefit of their charitable Clinton Foundation.
Meanwhile, Ms. Clinton congratulated Mr. Sanders on his surprisingly effective campaign and said she would be conferring with him on ways they could achieve mutually desirable progressive goals, including the defeat of Mr. Trump in November.
Mr. Sanders, however, said he will continue in the Democratic race into the July party convention in Philadelphia, arguing that the contest remains open with super-delegates who now heavily favor Ms. Clinton not formally committed. But his pitch that they should follow the results in their states if he carried them in this year's primaries and caucuses did not seem to get much encouragement from Tuesday's results.
"I'm pretty good at arithmetic, and I know that the fight in front of us is a very, very steep fight," he said in Santa Monica before leaving California for the East and an essentially meaningless primary in theDistrict of Columbia next Tuesday.
Amid much pressure now to join forces with Hillary Clinton as she takes on the stop-Trump effort that failed so conspicuously in the hands of Mr. Trump's Republican primary opponents, Mr. Sanders will be adhering to the wishes of his diehard faithful for at least one more week.
But after the California defeat, which denied him a final toehold in the race, what is left for him now is to gain Democratic platform objectives and the good will of the party he so recently joined, in what is now a heightened goal of barring any prospect of a Trump election in November. Thanks to the celebrity billionaire's self-destructing mouth, that ominous peril seems much less likely now to occur by the end of this bizarre political campaign.
Jules Witcover is a syndicated columnist and former long-time writer for The Baltimore Sun. His latest book is "The American Vice Presidency: From Irrelevance to Power" (Smithsonian Books). His email is juleswitcover@comcast.net.