I don’t know what Donald Trump is doing anymore – and neither does he
You never want to let your guard down in politics, for obvious reasons. This leads to the paradoxical tendency to believe that your opponent’s actions, no matter how confusing or incoherent, must be part of some kind of secret evil genius master plan that has to be pieced together.
Sometimes this is actually the case, such as for instance Mitch McConnell in his evil heyday. He was super smart and savvy, so if you didn’t understand what he was doing at any given time, you needed to look closer and figure it out before he could get the upper hand.
But when it comes to Donald Trump these days, his behavior and actions have become so astoundingly incoherent and self defeating and stupid, it boggles the mind. He spends many of his rally speeches talking about sharks and cannibals – and those are his least bad speeches. Of late he’s taken to attacking Detroit while speaking to a Detroit group, and insulting Reno while speaking in Reno. Michigan and Nevada are key swing states, and he’s actively costing himself votes by campaigning there. It’s presumably why his handlers are cautious about letting him go to swing states too often.
Now Trump is holding a rally in the California desert, where he at least can’t hurt himself when he inevitably alienates the audience, because he wasn’t going to get any electoral votes in the state anyway. This has echoes of when Trump had an absolutely brutal swing state stretch last month, leading his handlers to park him at a college football game in Alabama – a state where he was sure to get a warm reception that would lift his sinking spirits – even though he obviously already has the state’s electoral votes locked down.
The very notion that a presidential campaign would have to send its losing candidate to an electorally useless state with just four weeks to go, so that he can’t further hurt himself, is nothing short of astounding. It’s unprecedented. For one thing there’s never been a modern presidential nominee who was even close to being this far gone cognitively. Nor is there any precedent for a campaign hiding a candidate down the stretch who’s behind in every poll. Trump desperately needs to gain more votes, because all he has going for him at this point is the faint hope that the polls might be way off – and that’s possible but it’s not enough to hang his hat on. Hope is a strategy in the sense that optimism is contagious and leads to activism which leads to more votes. But hoping the polls are wrong is not a strategy. Yet that’s what Trump’s prospects are now reduced to, because each time he goes to a swing state and tries to get himself more votes, he leaves with fewer votes instead.
Of course this brings us back to the paranoid belief in politics that we’re not being “vigilant” unless we assign some kind of secret evil genius strategy to even the weakest and most incoherent behavior from the other side. And so the more dementia-riddled Trump’s behavior gets, the more his babysitters try to hide him, and the more clear it becomes that they’re not trying to help him win so much as keep him out of his own way on his way down, the more we have to hear contrarian hot takes about how this is the plan.
We’re already seeing theories about how Trump’s handlers are parking him in safe states until the election so the Republicans can remove him from office and replace him with JD Vance. But for that to happen, Trump would first have to win – and there’s no strategy for that. Even when Vance goes to swing states and tries to campaign in Trump’s place, Vance makes just as much of a mess of things. There’s no strategy on the Trump side to campaign and win.
This leads us to the part where we’re told that the Trump side isn’t bothering to try to campaign effectively or run a competent operation in any way because they already know that they’re going to be able to magically steal the election anyway. But as always, this presupposes that they have an election rigging magic wand and are simply going to wave it. This a laughably simplistic notion. In reality all they have are the same kinds of voter suppression tactics and legal challenges that they tried in 2020 – and none of that worked for them last time. If we win by a larger margin this time, those antics will be even less effective in 2024.
That all brings us back to the fact that Donald Trump and his campaign desperately need to find more votes than they currently have, if they want to have even the faintest chance of being able to win, rig, or steal the 2024 election. Trump needs to be out there scrapping for more votes in swing states. But he can’t pull it off. Vance needs to scrapping for more votes in Trump’s place. But he can’t pull it off either.
Donald Trump is both too senile to know what’s going on anymore, and too mentally ill to be able to follow the instructions that his babysitters are giving him. He’s an albatross around his own neck, and his campaign has no idea how to even try to win with him. Don’t fall for the know-it-all nonsense about how Trump and/or his people must surely have a secret evil genius master plan and that everything you’re seeing from them is somehow part of it. That’s laughable. What we’re seeing is simply a losing effort from a mentally incompetent candidate and his functionally incompetent campaign.
This doesn’t mean the election is over. Far from it. The fact that Trump has a greater than zero chance of winning means the odds are too high. We have to keep fighting. We have to keep putting in the work. We have to run up the score. Unlike the other side, we’re going to spend these final four weeks scrapping for more votes.
