Donald Trump just pulled the plug

| 10:14 pm EDT August 26, 2020
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Weeks ago, right around the time Donald Trump was changing campaign managers, he briefly pulled the plug on all of his TV advertising. At the time the move sort of made sense. Trump was losing badly, and he was changing course with a new manager, so it seemed reasonable to stop wasting money on ads until the campaign message could be retooled. Here’s the thing, though.

The Trump campaign has just pulled the plug on its TV advertising again, opting to go dark for at least two weeks, according to a new report tonight from the New York Times. What stands out is that there is no identifiable reason for it this time around. The campaign is merely offering silly platitudes by way of trying to explain why it’s going dark, which means that it doesn’t want to reveal the real reason.

At this point there are only 69 days left until the election. It’s far too late for Donald Trump to be saving up his ad budget for later, or retooling his message yet again. It’s go time, so to speak. Yet Trump is going dark anyway. Based on his consistently poor poll numbers, it’s clear that his current TV ads aren’t helping him any. But going dark creates the impression that he’s giving up, which can end up being a self fulfilling prophecy.

The fatalists and conspiracy theorists will insist that Donald Trump is merely going dark because he has some secret evil genius plan up his sleeve. But nothing works that way. He’s losing, he’s sputtering, and he clearly has no idea what message he wants to project or how to project it. If we double down on voter registration and turnout, we’ll win this. Let’s go make it happen.