Trump Takes a Beating for Off-Hand Comments

After several weeks during which Hillary Clinton suffered from a wave of negative publicity, it's now Donald Trump's turn to be engulfed. He has made himself a big target for his opponents, and Clinton has been escalating her use of his own words to deride Trump as never before.

Several new or recycled story lines about Trump emerged this week, some of them fueled by Trump speeches or interviews and others by his incendiary appearance at a national security forum carried by NBC on Wednesday night.

The fact that Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, is at the center of various firestorms isn't new. He has been there before, many times. And Clinton, the Democratic nominee, has gone through the same thing. But a pattern has settled in. Each candidate takes his or her turn at the center of controversy, and then the focus shifts to the other side, and then back again.

There will probably be more such cycles as Election Day approaches on November 8. And it's very possible that the candidate who gets the most negative publicity at the end will be the loser. Clinton leads the race in most major polls, although it remains competitive, and voters have unfavorable views of both candidates.

[READ: Donald Trump Touts Vladimir Putin, Hillary Clinton Plays Defense]

Here are the latest negative Trump story lines from this week:

Trump praised Russian President Vladimir Putin for being a strong leader and derided President Barack Obama for falling short. "Certainly, in that system, he's been a leader, far more than our president has been a leader," Trump said at the NBC forum. "We have a divided country." Trump said Putin has an "82 percent approval rating" but he didn't say where he got that information. Trump added: "I think when he calls me brilliant, I think I'll take the compliment, okay?....If he says great things about me, I'm going to say great things about him."

Despite a barrage of criticism from prominent Democrats and Republicans, Trump's campaign later reaffirmed his admiration for Putin, an authoritarian leader who has been antagonistic to the United States. Gov. Mike Pence of Indiana, Trump's vice presidential running mate, told CNN, "I think it's inarguable that Vladimir Putin has been a stronger leader in his country than Barack Obama has been in this country."

But on Thursday Clinton said Trump's comments were "not just unpatriotic and insulting to the people of our country, as well as to our commander in chief, it is scary." And House Speaker Paul Ryan, RWis., told reporters, "Vladimir Putin is an aggressor who does not share our interests." Ryan added that Putin has authorized "state-sponsored cyberattacks" on "our political system."

Trump harshly criticized U.S. military leaders. "The generals have been reduced to rubble," he said at the forum, suggesting that he would fire or demote some members of the brass who are now advising Obama or carrying out the president's policies against Islamic extremists.

He made questionable statements about what he learned from official and classified intelligence briefings given to him since be became the Republican presidential nominee. Trump said he "was very, very surprised" to learn that Obama has not done "what our experts said to do" around the world. Even though such briefings are kept under wraps and the briefers are told to be very discreet, Trump claimed that, "In almost every instance, and I could tell I'm pretty good with the body language I could tell, they were not happy. Our leaders did not follow what they were recommending."

Trump is under attack for an alleged "pay to play" arrangement involving Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi. He gave $25,000 to a group supporting her reelection in 2013. After the contribution, her office decided not to join a lawsuit alleging fraud at Trump University. Trump's aides said there was no pay-to-play aspect to his donation. But he did pay a $2,500 penalty to the Internal Revenue Service on a technicality, his spokeswoman told the New York Times. Democrats say the incident indicates corruption.

He alienated Hispanics again with his confusing stand on undocumented workers and how many of them he would deport if he became president.

Trump outraged some critics when he said one reason for the sexual assault problem in the military is that women are allowed to serve with men. At the forum, Trump defended a tweet he posted three years ago in which he said the number of unreported sexual assaults in the military had soared and added: "What did these geniuses expect when they put men & women together?" Asked to explain this comment, Trump said, "It is a correct tweet. There are many people that think that that's absolutely correct....It's happening, right? And, by the way, since then, it's gotten worse." Many critics said his remarks were wrongheaded and showed he doesn't support the advancement of women in the military.

In recent weeks, Clinton has been widely criticized for giving undue access as secretary of state to donors to her family's Clinton Foundation. She has also been attacked for using a private email server while she was secretary of state and being careless with classified information. And she has been criticized for voting for the Iraq war when she was a U.S. senator from New York. She now says the Iraq vote was a mistake and points out that Trump backed the war, too.

Overall, Clinton and her allies are trying to make the election a referendum on Trump. And Trump and his allies are trying the make the election a referendum on Clinton. The race has gotten overwhelmingly negative, and it's likely to stay that way.

Ken Walsh covers the White House and politics for U.S. News. He writes the daily blog "Ken Walsh's Washington," for usnews.com, and "The Presidency" column for the U.S. News Weekly. He is the author of the book "Celebrity in Chief: A History of the Presidents and the Culture of Stardom." He can be reached at kwalsh@usnews.com and followed on Facebook and Twitter.