Surrender Donald
Kamala Harris spent Labor Day on the campaign trail. Tim Walz spent Labor day on the campaign trail. Doug Emhoff spent Labor Day on the campaign trail. Numerous Democratic candidates and surrogates spent Labor Day on the campaign trail. Donald Trump spent the day on the couch. And JD Vance? Also on the couch. There were also no meaningful Trump surrogates to be seen.
It was a bizarre scenario to put it mildly. There are barely sixty days left until the election. Early voting starts twice that soon. Labor Day is a prime opportunity to not only court pro-labor voters, but also get favorable national media coverage on what is an otherwise slow political news day. No candidate or campaign can afford to take Labor Day off. Donald Trump, who’s now behind in nearly every national poll, is particularly in no position to take Labor Day off. Yet he did.
No reason was given for Trump’s Labor Day absence from the campaign trail. But it’s not like it came as a surprise. Trump increasingly just… isn’t trying to win. He rarely visits swing states anymore. He’s not trying to reach the undecided and moderate voters he needs to win over. He’s been sitting home and saying offensive things about Kamala Harris and posting pictures of her with mustaches drawn on them. For awhile he was sending Vance out there to do his campaigning for him, but now he doesn’t even have Vance on the road anymore.
Trump may think that sitting home and screwing around on social media counts as effective campaigning, but it certainly does not. In terms of trying to win the election, Trump isn’t doing anything. He’s sitting home running out the clock, which is a bizarre thing to do when you’re losing. It’s even more bizarre when you remember that if Trump loses this election he’ll end up in prison for his various crimes. You’d think he’d be motivated to try to win. But then you remember how badly his perception of the real world has deteriorated.
This is a guy who thinks Nikki Haley and Nancy Pelosi are the same person. He thinks the Speaker of the House and his doctor are the same person. At times Trump seems to think Obama is the current President. At other times he appears to think the current decade is the 1990s. He’s obsessed with whether he’s going to get eaten by a shark, electrocuted, or eaten by a cannibal. This is not a mentally competent man. Not even close. So it stands to reason that 1) he really believes it when his babysitters tell him he’s ahead in imaginary polls, and 2) he really does think that drawing mustaches on people is an effective campaign strategy. After all, he’s at a point of cognitive decline where he’s probably spending his day using crayons anyway.
So yeah, Donald Trump is not trying to win this election. He may believe, in his cognitively impaired imagination, that he’s trying to win. But that’s nothing more than the oddball fantasy of a man who’s too senile to understand what’s going on around him. Trump has, wittingly or unwittingly, surrendered. This doesn’t mean we’ve won. Not at all. But it opens an opportunity for us to dive in and run up the score, right now, while he’s asleep on the couch. Sign up to volunteer for the Kamala Harris campaign and let’s try to double her lead before Trump wakes up from his slumber.
