A very limited number of people like Donald Trump, and his handlers have finally come to terms with that. Yet their answer—to drag Vice President Kamala Harris into the muck with him—only works if he focuses his attention on her.
Instead, he can’t get past me, me, me.
This is hardly an original thought. Our own Mark Sumner wrote about it Tuesday, saying, “[Trump is] caught in a trap of reacting to Harris, and when he tries to struggle out, he and his arrogant campaign staff make things all the worse.” But the notion is certainly worth exploring even more.
There is an old political adage, “When you’re explaining, you’re losing.” No one wants to hear excuses, and by responding to an attack, it inherently both restates it once again, and validates it.” A smart politician knows when to ignore an attack and when to engage it.
By ignoring the question about race and asking CNN’s Dana Bash to move on, she not only starved Trump’s sad attempt at an attack line of oxygen, but she made Bash look the fool for even asking it.
There was no way for the media to even talk about it without being utterly scorched, as Politico found out to its chagrin, when it changed the headline to a corresponding story three times to avoid being dragged by commenters. Here is White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre giving Fox News’ Steve Doocy the same treatment.
For all the legitimate attacks Trump faces such as on his illegal Arlington National Cemetery campaign video stunt, his flailing on abortion rights, his pledge to be a dictator on Day One, or his claims that this is the last election anyone has to vote, he also faces a ton of stupid, niggling ones. A smart politician would ignore all that noise and focus on salient attack lines. The old Trump was able to do that.
But today’s Trump, haunted by his litany of grievances, cannot escape the gravitational pull of even the slightest criticism. Rather than entertain his base with his old formula of crass bigotry and childish schoolyard taunts, he now bores people to tears responding to slights they have no clue even existed.
For example, it’s becoming increasingly clear that Trump is incapable of holding a coherent thought in his brain, and more and more people are discussing whether he is suffering from cognitive decline. Trump could ignore those attacks. Instead … “I do the weave,” Trump responded at a rally, likely confusing attendees and leaving them wondering what he was prattling about. “You know what the weave is? I’ll talk about, like, nine different things, and they all come back brilliantly together ... and friends of mine that are, like, English professors, they say it's the most brilliant thing I've ever seen.”
Democrats have been getting a lot of traction calling the Republican ticket weird. "[Gov. Tim Walz] is weird, right? He's weird. I'm not weird. No, he's a weird guy, a weird dude, you know?” Trump said at a Wisconsin town hall. “They always come up with sound bites, and one of the things they say is that JD [Vance] and I are weird. But wouldn't that guy, who's so straight, say that? JD is doing a great job—he's smart, a top student, a great guy, and he's not weird. And I'm not weird either. I mean, we're a lot of things, but we're not weird, I will tell you. But that guy is weird. Don't you think?"
Trump can’t handle Michelle and Barack Obama criticizing him at the Democratic National Convention, complaining about it here, here, and here. The former president’s joke about Trump’s manhood broke him.
He can’t even get over President Joe Biden passing the baton over to Harris. As recently as last week, on Aug. 26, he whined about Biden while visiting a campaign office in Michigan.
“They basically take away his nomination,” he said. “No one has ever seen anything like that before.”
You can feel the lack of energy in the room.
No one cares about his thoughts on Biden’s campaign exit or Obama’s convention dick joke, but by repeatedly bringing up those and other items, he gives new life to the attacks. Frankly, it makes them even funnier.
But his campaign isn’t laughing. “Americans’ views of the Republican nominee have barely budged over the past nine years, spanning three White House bids, two impeachments, an insurrection, four indictments and an assassination attempt. He remains deeply divisive, with enthusiastic support and intense opposition,” The Washington Post reported Monday. “With little chance of improving Trump’s standing, Trump’s advisers see the only option as damaging hers.”
CNN had its own version of that story. “Donald Trump is trying to crush Democratic nominee Kamala Harris’ persona as a force of change and to destroy her personal credibility as a potential president as their still-fresh competition careens into the final nine weeks before Election Day,” the network reported. “In recent days, the ex-president has unveiled a broad assault using the insult-driven politics with which he won power in 2016, even as his advisers have been pleading with him to focus his attention on top voter concerns including high prices and immigration.”
There are 61 days until Election Day. These Trump advisers are right—Trump needs to drag Harris down in order to win the race. So far it hasn’t happened. Every single day that Trump is fixated on responding to Democratic attacks, big and small, is one day less that Republicans have to hurt Harris.
And yet Trump can’t focus. Even when he does, screeching about Harris being a “communist” is so patently absurd, it doesn’t land with anyone outside the MAGA bubble.
The consequences of Trump’s inability to focus speak for themselves. In the 538 polling aggregate, Harris had a favorability rating of 37.8 favorable, 52.4 unfavorable on July 21, when Biden dropped out, or a net negative 14.6 percentage points.
Today? She’s at 46.3% favorable, 46.8% unfavorable, a net improvement of almost 14 percentage points despite the combined mighty efforts of the entire right-wing noise machine. The last seven polls all have Harris either in net positive territory except one, which has it even. The trend is unmistakable.
Trump is at 43% favorable, 52.5% unfavorable. That is far better than he deserves, but still well underwater. That disparity in the candidates’ favorabilities will cost Trump the election unless they are reversed.
Yet no one can convince him to focus on Harris. He still has feelings about Biden’s exit he needs to process … and he’s doing so very publicly.
So it seems they’re doomed to watching their nominee waste valuable days by focusing on the most trivial, irrelevant topics, like arguing how attractive he is in response to jokes about his appearance (especially compared to Harris). “I was sort of like a hot guy,” he said to his confused audience. “I was hot as a pistol. I think I was hotter than I am now and I became president. Okay. I don't know. I said to somebody, was I hotter before or hotter now? I don't know.”
In any case, tired old Trump isn’t campaigning much these days. His next campaign rally isn’t until Saturday, after having just seven campaign events last month. His people will point to all the media he’s doing, but it’s a combination of Fox News, right-wing podcasts, and other assorted MAGA media hanger-ons.
Those audiences already hate Harris. He’s not damaging her where Republicans need to kneecap her, among the broader mainstream.
