Member Newsletter
Given that there’s been a lot of encouraging news about the Harris campaign, there’s an understandable and salutary resistance to any commentary that looks like counting chickens before they are hatched. We have more than two months to go before Election Day. A lot can happen. But there’s something going on with Donald Trump.
In the first week or two after Harris’ campaign launched, it was perhaps understandable that his campaign had a hard time knowing how to respond. Not entirely understandable, of course. His campaign hoodwinked the Times into running a whole story about how it was locked and loaded with ads, oppo and messaging, ready to annihilate Harris and her campaign on the launch pad the moment Biden stepped aside. But when it happened the very next day, they were caught flatfooted. That was odd since the possibility of Biden stepping aside had been very real for six weeks. Still, it’s hard to prepare for something of such magnitude.
Since then, Trump’s campaign has gone from one line of attack to the next without any of them seeming to gain traction. As with everything else about Donald Trump, he is the campaign. It is an immediate emanation of him in a way that simply applies to no other major presidential candidate. A friend asked me over the weekend why there is still this cottage industry of reporting about Trump’s frustrations, enthusiasms, pet peeves and more, staffers’ efforts to get him to focus, to not lash out, as though he were an entitled billionaire’s preschooler in the care of a troop of overwhelmed nannies or governesses. Nothing like this exists, she noted, for any other politician or presidential candidate. And she is absolutely right about that. It’s part of the laziness of much of the national political press and the reality distortion vortex that surrounds Trump.
But this kind of reporting isn’t entirely off base or without utility. We don’t know what Kamala Harris’ personal feeling or mood is at the moment. We assume that she and her campaign have a strategy and they’re working to execute it. We assume that, like most adults would, she’s going to work at that regardless of whether she’s feeling up or down or angry or hurt on a particular day. Similarly, the very few people who have some real read on her mood or what’s going on in her head at the moment are not going to be discussing that with reporters, except perhaps obliquely and rarely.
But it’s not just that Trump has crazy moods and an incredibly leaky campaign. It matters more because Trump’s campaigns are, and his presidency was, entirely an expression of him. When Joe Biden’s age, stamina and focus were a topic of constant conversation and speculation, his defenders would point out that a presidency isn’t the work of a single individual. There’s a huge array of people just in the White House, let alone throughout the administration. They operate under the broad guidance of the President and a small subset of questions and tasks come directly to the President. But it’s not a Tom Cruise movie. It’s not some endless series of feats of strength. If the President needs to take a nap, that’s actually fine. Vladimir Putin isn’t waiting for him to nod off in order to launch some secret attack. With Donald Trump, though, in his presidency and especially in his campaigns, it really is all him. His momentary moods, changes of focus, attention really do matter quite a lot if you’re trying to understand what’s happening.
Trump’s 2016 campaign originally was almost entirely him, until the final months, with a few flunkies and third-string campaign hands mostly carrying out orders at his direction. His 2020 campaign was far more amply staffed. But the same basic dynamic remained. His 2024 effort had been much more stable, with two campaign co-chairs with little personal drama who seemed to keep Trump mostly focused through the campaign. But nothing’s been the same since July 21st. On Saturday, the Post published a story on his current funk. The title tells the tale: Trump allies try to energize him as he struggles to adapt to Harris. The article describes Trump’s apparent unwillingness to campaign hard in a campaign in which he is now at least a bit behind. He’s impatient with staffers who are trying to keep him focused on a small set of policy issues which move the public in his favor — mainly inflation and immigration. He’s mainly focused on a series of weird complaints and huffy denials that his campaign is going poorly. He’s still doing a very limited number of campaign events and, according to the Post article, he’s leaning into August as the time of the year he hangs out with family and focuses on golfing everyday. His handlers can clearly see what he apparently can’t, which is that with all this chatter taken together he is painting a picture of himself as lost and weak — still complaining about money spent on Joe Biden, repeatedly trying to get out of debates, insisting he’s not weird. It’s all very defensive, unfocused and, more than anything else, tired.
Yesterday’s apparent move to lay the groundwork to pull out of the September 10th debate for the second time was a case in point. It was a classic Donald Trump social media outburst. A wave of vague and nonsensical complaints about bias against him, all leading up to a strong suggestion that he’s pulling out of the ABC debate, rounded out with a “stay tuned.” It’s the old razzmatazz, throwing out a bombshell, putting everyone else back on their heels and then intuiting in the resulting chaos the best way to shuffle the deck for Donald Trump. But in this case, nobody cares. Many factors figured into the burst of momentum Harris got right out of the gate on July 21st. But I don’t think most people have grasped the importance of Trump’s immediate decision to drop out of the already scheduled debate. It showed from him directly that he was unprepared for her elevation and at a minimum worried about facing her in a debate. He basically told on himself. It was a message to her potential supporters, from — paradoxically — the most credible of sources, that she was for real. It was a big deal.
Now he’s doing the same thing again. But nobody’s back on their heels. This makes him look weak, like most things have over the last month. Harris isn’t going to beg him to debate. Her campaign is probably as happy with a renewed spectacle of his fear of facing her as it would be with the debate happening itself. He already made a big show of this and caved. Everyone knows he’s got a losing hand in any fight over debates. The “stay tuned” tells the story: the old Trump mode, wait anxiously for my next move. But no one’s waiting. No one’s anxious. Really, he has no next move on the debate front.
It’s important to remember the truest axiom of electoral politics: that it’s very, very hard to look good or smart when you’re losing. But there’s something more going on with Trump. He lacks his old energy and focus. He doesn’t seem to have the malign cunning that would allow him to force a second act. Trumpism is about a never-ending series of performances of dominance. Now he’s stuck in outbursts of weakness. Some of this is certainly age, a clear enough fact that was obscured by Joe Biden’s frailty and the simple fact that Trump was ahead, if only by a small and durable margin. Some of it is the energy and reach into the popular culture of the Harris campaign, which he seems unable to understand or grapple with. A normal campaign could deal with the candidate being in a funk or even an extended depression. But Trump’s isn’t a normal campaign. And at least for the moment the campaign itself seems to be stuck in neutral because Trump himself lacks the energy and focus to reclaim dominance over the attention economy, if not the lead in the campaign itself.