“You do know you just attacked a Gold Star family?” one adviser warned Trump.
“What’s that?” he asked. https://t.co/WRXKlRfbqH

— Michael Tackett (@tackettdc) October 29, 2016

In recent weeks, I spoke with more than two dozen current and former Trump advisers, friends, and senior Republicans officials, many of whom would speak only off the record given that the campaign is not yet over. What they described was an unmanageable candidate who still does not fully understand the power of the movement he has tapped into, who can’t see that it is larger than himself.

“I got really mad at him the other day,” Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway told me. “He said, ‘I think we’ll win, and if not, that’s okay too. And I said, ‘It’s not okay! You can’t say that! Your dry-cleaning bill is like the annual salaries of the people who came to your rallies, and they believe in you!’ ”

snip

Trump got a post-convention bounce and was ahead of Clinton by a point. “What he needs to do,” Newt Gingrich told me, “is focus on the big issues.” Instead he got sidetracked on something any political operative could have told him was a losing battle: feuding with the bereaved Muslim-American parents of a soldier who had died in Iraq.

“You do know you just attacked a Gold Star family?” one adviser warned Trump.

Trump didn’t know what a Gold Star family was: “What’s that?” he asked.

To Trump, Khizr Khan and his wife, Ghazala, were enemies who had said something mean about him, just like Rosie O’Donnell and any number of people who had gotten under his skin over the years. Wasn’t it his right to respond?

“ ’The election is about the American people, it’s not about you,’ ” Manafort told Trump, according to a person briefed on the conversation. Trump countered with Breitbart’s report on Khan’s purported belief in Sharia. “ ’He’s not running for president,’ ” Manafort shot back. “ ’The Clintons did this to us to waste our time getting off message.’ ”