Countdown to meltdown
The felonious Republican presidential candidate with the overlong tie and the Cheez Whiz comb over was in Asheville, North Carolina on Wednesday. * His campaign team called it an economic address. The venue was too undersized for his vanity to label it a rally. (The press might report the crowd size.)
The 75-minute speech featured a litany of broad policy ideas and even grander promises to end inflation , bolster already record-level U.S. energy production and raise Americans’ standard of living. But those pronouncements were often lost in the former president’s typically freewheeling, grievance-laden style that has made it difficult for him to answer the enthusiasm of [Kamala} Harris’ nascent campaign.
Trump aired his frustration over Democrats swapping the vice president in place of Biden at the top of their presidential ticket. He repeatedly denigrated San Francisco, where Harris was once the district attorney, as “unlivable” and went after his rival in deeply personal terms, questioning her intelligence, saying she has “the laugh of a crazy person” and musing that Democrats were being “politically correct” in trying to elevate the first Black woman and person of South Asian descent to serve as vice president.
“You know why she hasn’t done an interview? She’s not smart. She’s not intelligent. And we’ve gone through enough of that with this guy, Crooked Joe,” Trump said, using the nickname he often uses for Biden.
Donald Trump hit a few of his prepared points before reverting to winging it with “gestures and hyperbole.” He dislikes policy, is uncomfortable speaking about it, and reverts to personal attacks. That’s Trump’s happy place.
CNN’s Stephen Collinson observes that after a couple of floundering weeks, Trump may be settling on a line of attack against Harris. Of course, it’s personal:
The new approach, if Trump ever musters the discipline to implement it in a concentrated way, is deeply personal and designed to destroy the idea that Harris, just the second woman to head a major party presidential ticket, is competent to serve. It involves blaming her for the scourge of inflation and high grocery prices that haunted Biden’s administration, under the new title of “Kamalanomics.”
With Harris expected to lay out her own economic plan on Friday, Trump’s team also wants to frustrate any effort by the vice president to bill her candidacy as a fresh start for economic policy. Trump also stepped up efforts to paint Harris as an extreme liberal – a strategy that has sometimes worked for Republican presidential campaigns in the past – at a time when conservative media is making comparisons between her and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders.
Trump is also portraying Harris as a flip flopper who backed away from past positions on energy and health care but who would return to what he says is her radical past if elected. It’s an attempt to shatter public trust in the new Democratic nominee and builds on his previous questioning of her identifying as a Black woman, as well as a South Asian American. In the words of Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance, Harris is a “chameleon” who changes her politics and racial identify to suit her quest for power.
Except Trump’s act has become something out of an old SNL sketch with Mike Meyers as Dieter. His stories have become tiresome.
Plus, Democrat’s efforts to hang Project 2025 around his neck like an albatross have been successful: 70-80 percent of voters have heard of it and don’t like what they’ve heard, Amanda Marcotte reminds Salon readers:
Just based on the name, 43% of Americans oppose the program, and only 11% say they favor it, with the rest saying they don’t know enough to decide. When respondents are asked about specific policy items in Project 2025, disapproval soars even higher….
The Project 2025 training videos leaked over the weekend won’t help.
Trump’s persistent denigration of the United States is a turn-off. He’s got only fear-mongering and racial slurs.
MSNBC contributor, Mike Barnicle, tells “Morning Joe” this morning, “The campaign is yesterday versus tomorrow. I mean, we just saw yesterday. We saw a man standing there on the stage saying we are literally a third world country. I don’t know anyone who believes we are literally a third world country.”
His campaign managers have lost control of him, Barnicle added, and when Trump stands on a debate stage with Kamala Harris, a smart, experienced prosecutor, he could lose control.
“And I think what’s going to happen is when that debate occurs, he’s in the ring with the vice president of the United States, a woman, a very sophisticated, very intelligent woman, and she hammers him like a prosecutor and doesn’t let him off the hook, he will go — I can’t say it — but something will snap in him and that will be it.”
One can hope. But don’t count on it. Get out there and volunteer for your local candidates. Direct voter contact is effective for boosting turnout. A friend registering voters at a concert last weekend called to report a 2008 vibe in the air. Another in a red state reported this week that her dental hygienist said that while the office was “Trump Country,” she’d changed after the fall of Roe.
“I have a daughter, for God’s sake.”
* No, I did not attend. I had a meeting a few block away with the campaign manager for a statewide, down-ballot race.
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