The surest sign yet that Donald Trump knows he’s losing
Having worked as a political analyst for nearly a decade, I’ve had to spend a good amount of time trying to get inside Donald Trump’s head. Suffice it to say that it’s not a pretty place. And after all these years, it’s still not an entirely comprehensible place. I look forward to the day when he’s politically irrelevant and I don’t have to try to get inside his head anymore. But for now, there are still some dead giveaways when it comes to his thinking and behavior.
For instance, when Trump was slightly ahead in the polls (he was never more than a point or two ahead of Biden in the polling averages), Trump insisted that he was way ahead in the polls and heading for a landslide. When Kamala Harris entered the race and Trump began to fall slightly behind in most polls, he then began clinging to the junk polls that still had him ahead. For Trump, it’s all about convincing himself that neutral or good news is amazing news. When it’s mostly bad news, he’s only interested in the slivers of good news.
And then there’s what happens to Trump when the news is all bad. At this point Trump is clearly losing the 2024 election by any possible polling measure. He’s losing by varying degrees in all the major national polls. He’s losing in the swing states he needs to win. And he’s losing in crowd size in a way that narcissistically prevents him from being able to just ignore the polls.
As such, Trump is now having to accept the fact that he’s behind in the polls. So what’s he doing about it? He’s decided to attack the polls. He’s now claiming that the New York Times / Siena poll, which has seen one of the largest swings from Trump to Harris, is purposely over-sampling people who hate him, in order to make him look bad.
The kicker is that the polls are indeed often wrong. And even some of the major polls do seem to resort to over-sampling certain groups these days in order to deliver a headline-friendly result. But when the polls do engage in this kind of behavior, it’s generally in Trump’s favor. And the poll he’s attacking doesn’t currently seem to be over-sampling anyone.
The story here isn’t that Trump is attacking the polls. It’s that by attacking the polls, Trump is giving away that he’s well aware that he’s behind in the polls. He’s no longer able to keep the delusion intact that the polls have him ahead. So now he has to admit to himself that the polls have him behind, while pretending that the polls are merely rigged against him.
It’s yet another stage in Donald Trump’s narcissistic collapse. As things get worse for him, he’s running out of things to cling to. The 2024 election is now the Kamala Harris show, both in terms of attention and in terms of winning, and Trump knows it. He could try accepting that he’s losing, and hit the road to try to win over some persuadable voters in swing states. But it’s not in his nature. He’d rather just pretend he’s winning. Meanwhile the Kamala Harris 2024 campaign is looking for more volunteers.
