Trump Losing . . . And Losing It
He's not taking his change in fortunes very well.
The replacement of President Biden with Vice President Harris atop the Democratic ticket has radically changed the momentum of the race and undermined the years-long campaign strategy of former President Trump. He’s not taking it well.
Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei take us “Behind the Curtain: Inside Trump’s slump.”
Don’t buy the public bravado. Former President Trump’s advisers are deeply rattled by his meandering, mean and often middling public performances since the failed assassination attempt. They’re pleading with him to adopt a new “hard-hitting” stump speech to define Vice President Harris as liberal and weak, advisers tell us. And praying he’ll stop the recidivistic pull to simply improvise haphazardly.
Why it matters: Trump, who looked and felt like a clear front-runner heading into last month’s Republican convention, has fumed, stewed and stumbled in private and public ever since. Advisers are telling him Harris will grow her lead coming out of the Democratic convention, which begins a week from tomorrow — especially if they don’t define her better, faster. Then just a week after the convention, it’s already Labor Day.
What we’re hearing: Republican sources close to Trump tell us he realizes he needs to bring new focus to a message that can be meandering and self-indulgent. But it’s Trump. So a new script is often fictional wishfulness. Trump “is struggling to get past his anger,” a top Republican source tells us. Trump’s aides know he won’t change. So they’re focusing “not on the need for him to change but on the need to adapt his message to win,” the source said. “But he has to convince himself to leave the other garbage behind.”
“President Trump knows he’s the only one who can end the media’s honeymoon with Kamala Harris,” a top Trump ally tells us, “and he sees a significant opening to do so with Harris’ inability to defend her record on inflation and the border.” “To get past the media force field protecting Harris, however, he knows he needs to be very specific with his policy contrasts and is planning on debuting a hard-hitting stump speech very soon.”
The Atlantic‘s Peter Wehner (“Trump Can’t Deal With Harris’s Success“):
Biden’s abrupt departure deeply unsettled Trump. His entire campaign was built to defeat Biden. Trump survived an assassination attempt, then met a rapturous reception at the Republican National Convention, and concluded that the race was won. And it was, until Biden stepped aside and Harris stepped up.
Trump, enraged and rattled, is reverting to his feral ways. We see it in his preposterous claim that Harris’s crowds, which are both noticeably larger and far more enthusiastic than his own, are AI-generated; in his resentful attacks against the popular Republican governor of Georgia, Brian Kemp, and his wife, because Kemp didn’t aid Trump in his effort to overthrow the election; and in his attack on Harris’s racial identity.
At precisely the moment when Trump needs to elevate his performance, to the degree that such a thing is even possible, he’s gone back to his most natural state: erratic, crazed, transgressive, self-indulgent, and enraged. One by-product of this is that Trump has provided no coherent or focused line of attack on Harris. His criticisms are not just vile, but witless. The prospect of not just being beaten, but being beaten by a woman of color, has sent Trump into a frenzy in a way almost nothing else could.
[…]
Something else, and something quite important, has changed. The whole landscape of the campaign has been transformed. The rise of Harris instantly cast Trump in a new light. He formerly seemed more ominous and threatening, which, whatever its political drawbacks, signaled strength; now he seems not just old but low-energy, stale, even pathetic. He has become the political version of Fat Elvis.
Trump is much better equipped psychologically to withstand ferocious criticisms than he is equipped to withstand mockery. Malignant narcissists go to great lengths to hide their fears and display a false or idealized self. Criticism targets the persona. Mockery, by contrast, can tap very deep fears of being exposed as flawed or weak. When the mask is the target, people with Trump’s psychological profile know how to fight back. Mockery, though, can cause them to unravel.
His colleague Brian Stelter continues in the same vein with “Trump’s Latest Falsehood Is a Huge Tell.“
When Donald Trump is at his most vulnerable, when he feels most threatened, he tells fans not to believe their own eyes and ears.
After the January 6 attack on the Capitol, he called the event a “love fest,” denying the video evidence of the violence. After the writer E. Jean Carroll accused him of sexual assault, he said he had “never met” her, despite a photo showing them together.
And yesterday, after Kamala Harris finished a week of arena-size rallies, he claimed that images of her crowds were “fake” and AI-generated. Specifically, Trump embraced a conspiracy theory—touted by pro-Trump social-media accounts known for peddling nonsense—that the Harris campaign had posted a fake crowd photo from her August 7 event in Romulus, Michigan.
“Has anyone noticed that Kamala CHEATED at the airport?” he wrote. “There was nobody at the plane, and she ‘A.I.’d’ it, and showed a massive ‘crowd’ of so-called followers, BUT THEY DIDN’T EXIST!”
The turnout at Harris events is entirely real, and political analysts suspect that the crowds she has attracted are making Trump jealous and nervous. But the AI lie is about more than Trump’s size anxiety—it portends a dark and desperate chapter in this already distressing presidential-election season.
[…]
Vulnerability seems to be the through line here—whether Trump is at risk of trivial embarrassment, criminal exposure, or being caught in lies. A public figure with truth on their side would say Roll the tape to show they’re right. Trump, instead, says, Don’t believe the tape. Just believe me instead.
While it’s possible that this is all evidence of further cognitive decline, it strikes me as part of a longstanding pattern: Trump throws tantrums when things don’t go his way. His instinct when COVID hit was not that he needed to do everything in his power to prevent catastrophe for the 330 million people for whom he was responsible but rather that it was unfair that it was happening to him.
I see the same thing happening here. He had Joe Biden beaten. He’d spent months telling us that Sleepy Joe was unfit for the job and one debate (and some follow-up interviews) cemented that image in the public mind. His own instinctive defiance in the immediate aftermath of an assassination attempt provided a stark contrast that was likely to last through the election.
Then, suddenly, Biden quit the race and handed the campaign over to a considerably younger, more energetic candidate. That’s just unfair! And Trump is melting down over it.
We’re inside three months to the election. Given how many plot twists there have been, it’s a bit premature to declare this thing over. But Trump seems to have no answers to the new reality he’s faced with.
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