The primary effect of the Democratic Party’s mid-campaign nomination switch from Joe Biden to Kamala Harris has been to unify and reenergize the party’s base. It’s also becoming apparent the move has set off a secondary effect of destabilizing the Republican campaign by rattling Donald Trump, leading him to ignore his advisers and indulge his most deranged instincts.
Through July, Trump was enjoying the longest stretch of success of his entire political career. During this time, he was largely heeding the advice of his campaign team and acting relatively — relatively — normal (which is to say far from normal but much closer to it than his usual performance). Trump was leading the polls, staying out of the news as much as he could, and more or less staying on message when he was in it.
Harris, of course, provided Democrats a surge of momentum. Trump’s advisers have a plan to reverse this momentum. They want to drive a message anchored in the progressive stances that Harris and her running mate, Tim Walz, have taken in the past to paint them as kooky liberals. It’s not a bad plan. They have plenty of material to work with from both Harris’s ill-fated 2020 campaign and Walz’s governorship.
Trump’s campaign brain trust is begging its candidate to focus on this message. “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,” Axios reports. “And praying he’ll stop the recidivistic pull to simply improvise haphazardly.”
But Trump doesn’t want to heed this advice. He has been consumed by a mix of envy at Harris’s popularity and grievance at his own displacement. He has been complaining at the unfairness of the Democratic Party choosing to nominate a candidate Democrats like instead of the one he prefers to run against and fantastizing openly that somehow Biden will take the nomination back.
Trump gave a rambling press conference, perhaps intended to drive the campaign’s message about Harris and Walz but predictably lacking any focus. When Trump was attempting to describe a Walz policy that turned the state into a refuge for teenagers seeking medical transition, a potentially dicey issue for democrats to defend, he managed only to blather incoherently that Walz was “heavy into the transgender world.” As National Review’s Philip Klein observed, to his dismay, “Anybody who isn’t already familiar with the Walz record is likely thinking, what the heck is he talking about?”
Over the weekend, Trump began claiming wildly that Harris’s large crowds have actually been an elaborate hoax concocted through artificial intelligence. Behold the full lunacy of this message:
Has anyone noticed that Kamala CHEATED at the airport? 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! She was turned in by a maintenance worker at the airport when he noticed the fake crowd picture, but there was nobody there, later confirmed by the reflection of the mirror like finish on the Vice Presidential Plane. She’s a CHEATER. She had NOBODY waiting, and the “crowd” looked like 10,000 people! Same thing is happening with her fake “crowds” at her speeches. This is the way the Democrats win Elections, by CHEATING - And they’re even worse at the Ballot Box. She should be disqualified because the creation of a fake image is ELECTION INTERFERENCE. Anyone who does that will cheat at ANYTHING!
Trump is literally claiming Harris spoke before an empty room, created a false impression of a large crowd, with the participation of the national media that reported on the event as it occurred. He then bootstraps this ludicrous assertion into the charge that Harris is stealing the election and “should be disqualified.”
The most important thing about this Trump claim is that it confirms once again that he is both completely demented — the fake-crowd theory is less plausible than the notion NASA faked the moon landings — and totally unwilling to abide by the democratic rules of the road. It has become tedious to say so, but supporting his candidacy, even if you prefer his policies on taxes or regulation, in any way is deeply irresponsible.
There is a long-standing pattern to Trump’s relationship with his political advisers. Sometimes they are able to wrangle him into presenting a quasi-normal face to the public. Eventually, he breaks from their constraints and reveals his derangement to the public. The advisers inevitably agonize over his failure to listen to reason but never seem to question their own underlying goal of handing the world’s most powerful job to a madman.
The old Trump strategy for defeating Biden seems to have depended on maintaining a lead. When Trump was ahead, he was capable of making rational choices that allowed him to maintain his lead. Now that his lead is gone, so is his willingness to do the things that enable him to win.
Losing campaigns often identify their failures and make a course correction. Trump’s campaign is instead spiraling into a mental breakdown.
