Donald Trump is in a bad way. His campaign has completely lost its bearings with the withdrawal of Joe Biden and the ecstatic reception of the Kamala Harris-Tim Walz ticket among the Democratic faithful. He is so upset about losing Biden as his opponent that he’s even taken to posting freaky fan-fic on his Truth Social Platform, hopefully suggesting that Biden is going to storm the convention and take back the nomination:
Some of that is a classic “I know you are but what am I” Trump set-up to rationalize a loss in November. He’s going to say the Democrats staged a coup and usurped the Constitution by replacing Joe Biden on the ballot. It’s laughably absurd but it will soothe him to say it and give his followers something to hang on to.
But it’s also obvious that he just can’t wrap his mind around the fact that he has to run against Kamala Harris and Tim Walz. It’s so confusing to him that he can’t even leave Mar-a-lago anymore. While the Democratic nominees are barnstorming the country with Trump’s VP choice JD Vance trailing behind them with pathetic stunts, Trump himself is doing just one rally this week — in an irrelevant deep red state that he will certainly win.
Philip Bump of the Washington Post has the numbers showing how much he has slowed down:
Trump is holding far fewer rallies than he did in 2016 and has held far fewer public appearances than he did in 2020, the two previous times he sought the presidency.
A review of Trump’s activities in July and August of those previous years shows the difference. From July 1 to Aug. 10, 2016, Trump held 22 rallies, including six days on which he held multiple rallies. Over the rest of August, he added 15 more rallies. This year, he’s held seven rallies with another scheduled for Friday in Montana.
One might guess that he is still spooked from the assassination attempt and fears being back out there but he wasn’t campaigning much even before that. He just doesn’t seem to think he needs to do it because, as he tells his people, he believes that the votes are already there and the main job of the campaign is “election integrity” which translates to suppressing the Democratic vote and contesting the results if he loses.
Nonetheless, he’s obviously agitated over the Harris’s massive small donor fundraising haul over the past couple of weeks which he knows very well is indicative of tremendous enthusiasm for their ticket. (He’s drained his own small donors dry over the past eight years.) And polls showing her taking the lead are driving him to distraction.
According to his former communications director, Stephanie Grisham he’s decided to take matters into his own hands:
Re: Trump’s self-announced press conference today at 2 pm: He’s panicking. I’ve seen this play many times. He thinks his team is failing him & no one can speak better/“save” his campaign/defend him but him. He hates the coverage Harris is getting & thinks only he can fix it.
The questions at the presser couldn’t be heard because of the poor production at Mar-a-lago, but from what we could tell the reporters were extremely polite and demanded no follow-ups which was nice for him. Some of the questions sounded like they might have even been asked by members of his own staff.
For instance, when someone threw him a red meat question about whether former San Francisco mayor Willie Brown dating Harris back in the 1990s had helped her career, Trump told a wild tale about almost dying in a helicopter with him and that Brown had told him “terrible things” about Harris and was “not a fan.” (This is not the first time Trump has made these crude suggestions about her.)
Willie Brown told the New York Times he’s never been in a helicopter with Trump and that he never disparaged Harris to him. It seems that Trump had mistaken Willie Brown with former California Gov. Jerry Brown who did take a helicopter flight with him and Gov. Gavin Newsom to inspect fire damage a few years back. They didn’t speak of Kamala Harris and the helicopter was never in any danger but Newsom recalls Trump incessantly wondering if it might crash.
Oddly, no members of the media are angrily demanding to see Trump’s medical records despite the fact that he appears to be having major memory problems and possibly even delusions.
After declaring that reproductive rights are no longer an issue because he’d “sent it back to the states” which he insists was the desire of liberals and conservatives for 50 years (total nonsense) there was this straightforward question about whether Trump planned to have the FDA ban mifepristone. He answered with a bizarre mish-mash of words about “supplementing” with something “open and humane” and people voting on it that made no sense whatsoever.
Recall that he told Time Magazine he has “pretty strong views” about mifepristone and would be making an announcement “probably over the next week.” That was on April 30th. There’s been no announcement. This latest gibberish is all we have to go on.
And then there were the crowds. He simply could not stop talking about the size of his crowds, complaining that the press was undercounting them even declaring that his January 6th crowd was bigger than Martin Luther King’s March on Washington. Over and over again he kept bringing it up apropos of nothing as if on a loop. It is a long-standing obsession of his that seems to be getting worse.
He did make some news by saying that he had agreed to debate Harris on ABC from which he had earlier backed out. He also announced a debate on NBC and on Fox but he got the dates all mixed up and according to the Harris campaign they’ve only agreed to the original debate on ABC on September 10th anyway. Perhaps others will happen as well but despite Trump’s apparent desperation to have them, nothing has been set.
All in all, it was another Trump trainwreck, perhaps one of his worst but certainly not unprecedented. However, this time, the opposition is taking no prisoners. The Harris campaign put out a very sharp (and hilarious) response:
He was dour and angry and frankly is starting to look a whole lot older, just in the past few months. He’s not enjoying himself and it shows and compared to the excited crowds greeting Harris and Walz this week this sad, pathetic appearance seemed almost funereal. Donald Trump isn’t fun anymore.
I think he’s considering for the first time that he might lose again and he is not psychologically equipped to deal with that reality. Sure, he’ll fight it and tell his supporters that it was stolen and perhaps even incite more violence. But deep down he knows he might actually lose just as he knows deep down that he lost in 2020. There’s a look of panic in his eyes right now. If he fails this time he might just break apart at the seams.
Chris Hayes had a good take on it last night: