This should have been the best week of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. On Tuesday, the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), James Comey, presented him with a gift that any other Republican nominee would recognise as Christmas, Hanukkah and Eid rolled into one. Trump, too busy squabbling with the other children, barely unwrapped it.

In declining to charge Hillary Clinton with a crime, on the basis that “no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case,” Comey disappointed wearers of ‘Hillary For Prison’ badges and Bernie Sanders diehards, but he was unsparing in his criticism of the Democratic nominee. There was no way for her supporters to put a positive spin on his remarks.

Clinton and her subordinates at the State Department were “extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information,” Comey said, adding that “we assess it is possible that hostile actors gained access to Secretary Clinton’s personal e-mail account.”

This directly undermines one of Clinton’s most important campaign themes: that she is a responsible, experienced executive, a former Secretary of State who can be relied upon to keep the United States of America safe, in contrast to her “reckless” and “temperamentally unfit” opponent Donald J Trump.

Comey’s statement that she “should have known that an unclassified system was no place” for state secrets calls her judgment into question. The FBI concluded that more than a hundred emails contained information marked for restricted distribution when they were sent or received.

This exposes Clinton as a liar, hardly a revelation in a political campaign - Trump disregards facts and lies as a matter of course - but it is damaging nonetheless. For months, she has insisted that she never used her private server to send classified information. Comey stated baldly that she did.

On Wednesday, Trump released a Facebook ad juxtaposing Clinton’s dodges with Comey’s press conference. It has already been viewed more than ten million times. But there was no parade of Republicans with State Department experience on cable news, talking knowledgeably about how her actions endangered the USA. The calibre of Trump’s surrogates is notably low.

Trump has got this far thanks to his mastery of the news cycle and his canny use of social media, but in a general election campaign, facing a sophisticated, well-funded adversary, his barbs need to do more than pierce Clinton’s skin. His immediate response to Comey’s press conference was a tweet: “The system is rigged. General Petraeus got in trouble for far less. Very very unfair! As usual, bad judgment.”

Rather than take the opportunity to fault Clinton’s temperament and readiness to be the USA’s Commander-In-Chief, he is folding the email scandal into his broader narrative. In Trump's telling, Comey, who served as Deputy Attorney General under President George W. Bush and who has a reputation for being scrupulous and even-handed, is a stooge of the Obama administration.

“Bill Clinton didn’t accidentally run into the Attorney General on the airport tarmac last week in Phoenix. Hillary Clinton didn’t accidentally sneak into the FBI during one of the country’s biggest holiday weekends to testify on her illegal activities,” read a statement released by the Trump campaign. “It was no accident that charges were not recommended against Hillary the exact same day as President Obama campaigns with her for the first time.”

Bill Clinton’s meeting with Attorney General Loretta Lynch certainly looks bad, and has been denounced as political interference across the media spectrum, but lacking any hard evidence of a conspiracy, Trump is advancing a theory that will only resonate with his core supporters when he should be focusing on a line of attack - the emails - that will hurt Clinton with undecided voters.

He is also bogged down defending himself against charges of anti-semitism, prolonging a controversy that would otherwise have faded. Whether the image he sent out branding Clinton the ‘Most Corrupt Candidate Ever’ alongside a Star of David and a giant pile of cash was a mistake or a nod to his Neo-Nazi supporters, he does himself no favours by continuing to talk about it.

The campaign initially dismissed the post as carelessness, then deleted the post and replaced it with a new version, in which a circle obscured the star. It featured the hashtag #americafirst - a slogan popularised by notorious anti-semite Charles Lindbergh, who argued that the USA should stay out of World War Two.

When Trump’s supporters suggested it was a sheriff’s star, indicating that Clinton should be arrested, none other than David Duke, former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, called them out: “The tweet shows Clinton, it shows a Star of David. Of course later the campaign made the excuse, ‘Well, no, that’s like a sheriff’s badge,’” he said. “Well, no way, folks… it’s all true.”

Matthew Heimbach, a prominent white nationalist who founded the far right Traditionalist Worker Party, told the New Yorker: “Donald Trump is not one of us, which is why we’re not officially endorsing him, but he’s introducing these ideas to the public sphere.”

Trump then took the row to the level of absurdity by tweeting an image of a sticker book for the Disney film Frozen in which the words 'with 50 stickers' are seen in a six pointed star, and asking: "Where is the outrage for this Disney book? Is this the 'Star of David' also? Dishonest media! #Frozen".

Hillary Clinton, though, won that round with a neatly put tweet, punning on one of the most famous songs from the movie, saying: " Do you want to build a strawman?"

Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, has been his highest-profile defender. In the pages of the New York Observer, which he owns, he pointed out that Trump's daughter Ivanka converted to Judaism to marry him, and that they are raising their children as observant Jews..

“The fact is that my father-in-law is an incredibly loving and tolerant person who has embraced my family and our Judaism since I began dating my wife. His support has been unwavering and from the heart,” Kushner wrote. He noted that his own grandparents were Holocaust survivors, adding “this is not idle philosophy to me.”

Trump could have left it at that. A more disciplined candidate certainly would have. Instead, at a rally in Cincinnati, Ohio, he devoted a large chunk of his hour long stump speech to the controversy, directly contradicting Kushner’s assertion that the star was tweeted in error. “‘You shouldn’t have taken it down,’” he recalled telling campaign staff. “‘You should have left it up.’ I would have rather defended it.”

During the Republican primaries, campaign manager Corey Lewandowski argued that it was important to “let Trump be Trump.” On June 20, he was fired. Paul Manafort, the experienced Republican strategist brought in to ensure that Trump would have the support of the delegates he needs at the party convention is now the man charged with running a professional presidential campaign.

Trump raised just $3.1 million in May, a sum described by NBC News as “weak for a congressional campaign, let alone a run at the White House.” The same month, Clinton’s campaign took in $27 million.

On May 26, Trump held his first official fundraiser with the Republican National Committee. In June, he sent out his first email asking for donations. His campaign announced that 400,000 people had contributed to June’s total haul of $51 million - an impressive turnaround, but still far short of the $68 million raised by Clinton.

“You have a campaign that has been largely operating by the seat of its pants—hasn’t had to do systematic fundraising, hasn’t done methodical grassroots outreach and mobilisation, and has been relying on free media, not paid media, to foster name recognition and ID,” George Washington University politics professor Lara Brown said.

Since June 8, the day after she became the Democratic party’s presumptive nominee, Clinton’s official campaign has aired 20,000 TV adverts, according to the Centre For Public Integrity. Her shadow campaign group, Priorities USA Action, has paid for a further 11,500. Over the same period, Trump’s campaign has not broadcast a single ad.

During the nomination contest, Trump benefited from an estimated $3.8 billion in free airtime. Cable news still cannot turn away, but when Trump is expressing admiration for Saddam Hussein - “You know what he did well? He killed terrorists. He did that so good” - it’s safe to say that there is such a thing as bad publicity.

Earlier this month, Politico published the results of an anonymous survey of Republican activists. The magazine asked insiders in the ten most important swing states to assess the quality of Trump’s local operation.

“There is exactly zero staff, zero campaign offices, and zero official campaign presence for Trump in Colorado, aside from a handful of red hats that individual supporters of the New York real estate developer have bought for themselves online,” said one respondent.

“Having worked in GOP grassroots politics for more than twenty years I can honestly say I have never seen a Republican presidential campaign with this weak of a field presence,” said another from Florida.

In Pennsylvania, another state that Trump absolutely has to win, the Republican Chairman of Westmoreland County, commented that “the resources at our disposal are by far the worst I’ve ever seen in any campaign.”

The day after the Leave campaign’s victory in the EU referendum, Trump stated that British voters had “exercised the sacred right of all free peoples,” and looked forward to the day in November when “American people will have the chance to re-declare their independence.”

It is an imperfect comparison, but it would be foolish to disregard it entirely. Leave won by appealing to anti-immigrant resentment and by positioning itself as a democratic alternative to elites, experts and bureaucrats. It found a willing constituency in communities that have been hard hit by globalisation and cuts to public services. Substitute Washington for Brussels, and Leave’s pitch to voters in Sunderland would resonate in post-industrial Ohio.

Trump presents Clinton as the embodiment of a “rigged” system that enriches people with connections at the expense of everyone else. In a recent speech at Trump Soho Hotel in New York outlining his case against her, he claimed that she owes favours to Wall Street banks, dictatorial regimes, the Saudis, the Chinese, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman and the Sultan of Brunei.

“They totally own her, and that will never, ever change, including if she ever became President, God help us,” he concluded. “She gets rich making you poor.”

This is pretty rich, coming from a billionaire elitist born into inherited wealth, but it could well prove to be an effective line. As the ultimate insider, Clinton is a vulnerable candidate in this year of anti-establishment eruptions. The question is whether Trump can be disciplined enough and organised enough to take advantage.