There is no plan

| 9:09 am EDT September 19, 2024
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After having largely disappeared from the campaign trail for awhile, Donald Trump is reemerging in order to hold a campaign rally in the key swing state of… wait for it… New York. No wait, that can’t be right. Turns out it is. Trump is now wasting his time holding a rally in Long Island, a place where he certainly has some supporters, but he’s guaranteed to gain zero electoral votes from it.

So what’s he doing? As I’ve said before, it’s long past time we stop trying to assign any sort of logic or strategy or plan to what Trump is doing. It’s becoming more and more plainly obvious that – to quote The Office – there is no plan. At best this is a matter of Trump’s babysitters trying to cheer him up by letting him hold a rally in his home state of New York so he can tell himself that he’s popular there. And that’s not a strategy. It’s surrender.

It doesn’t mean the election is over. Presidential elections are a wacky thing, and have a way of remaining semi-competitive and somewhat unpredictable even when the losing candidate is indeed giving up trying. So we keep putting in the work, phone banking, knocking on doors, sending postcards, registering voters, even as Trump buries his head in the sand in Long Island as a way of coping with how much New York City hates him. But let’s not pretend for one minute that Trump has any sort of plan. He simply doesn’t.