Trump’s Terrible Week

A series of misfires and self-owns have defined Trump’s response to the Harris threat.

Photo courtesy of Synergia

It’s Schadenfriday, so let’s review and enjoy the truly terrible week Trump is having.

It began Sunday when Biden suddenly withdrew from the race. The Trump Campaign had no coherent response prepared, apparently caught off-guard by the announcement. Trump went on social media for the next 24 hours to rail about Biden, while Harris basked in the press coverage and adoration from Democrats.

Then there was a slew of bad press around Trump’s VP pick, JD Vance, and poll numbers showing him as the least appealing running mate in recent history. As I’ll discuss below, it’s all very weird and creepy, but it did generate some amazing memes in this first ever TikTok election.

Then came a bunch of polls, none of which carried good news for Trump. The results lifted spirits among Democrats, many of whom had already written off the race as unwinnable. The new reality is that it’s now a dead heat, and Harris has the momentum.

Unforced Trumpian errors began to pile up. He called Harris “dumb as a rock,” but then spelled the word “poll” wrong. He called into Fox & Friends and insisted everyone wanted Roe v. Wade gone. He tried to back out of debating Harris, signaling fear and weakness. Then his nephew Fred Trump came out with a tell-all, and hoo boy.

Meanwhile Harris raised hundreds of millions in small donations, blew up on TikTok, broke the internet on zoom calls, and is generating enthusiasm not seen since the Obama campaign.

Today, I’ll drill down on how painfully bad all this has been for Trump. Then I’ll zoom out and ask an important bigger question about the state of the election.

So get out your napkins! The tea is hot, and the buffet of Trump fails is quite delicious.

Trump got caught flat-footed. Maybe it was the bone spurs?

Whatever people think about Joe Biden’s departure from the race, one thing is clear: Trump wasn’t ready for it when Biden announced it on social media this past Sunday.

As the Bulwark reported, the Trump Campaign had been on cruise control since the GOP convention, overconfident in Trump’s popularity following his brush with death and near giddy at the prospect of a certain return to the White House. “We’re measuring the drapes,” one Trump operative privately confessed. “It’s just too good right now. We’re jinxing ourselves.” 

It’s almost as if Trump and his close advisors could never imagine a leader, under pressure from his own party, voluntarily giving up power for the good of the country. Who does that? After all, Trump is a convicted felon and adjudicated rapist, and he’s not going anywhere. In fact, the last time they elected his replacement, Trump incited a riot at the Capitol and tried to launch a coup.

Trump spent the first 24 hours railing about Biden, while Harris basked in the glow of excitement and possibility, working the phones to earn the overwhelming support of Democratic leaders and delegates. Even though the Trump Campaign had gamed out how a Harris candidacy would fare, they had wrongly assumed that it would take weeks to achieve consensus, if ever. As the Bulwark noted, one Trump confidant confessed the campaign was counting on a “bloodbath” of an open Democratic primary if Biden stepped aside.

The lack of any coherent response to Harris meant that for days and days, Trump got nearly zero attention in the press. That must have irked him badly. And it was a far cry from the heady days post-assassination attempt, which occurred just the week before but now seemed a political eternity.

Not all press is good press

The public quickly forgot about the shooting and the GOP convention. But they did learn some troubling things about Trump’s VP pick, JD Vance, who is polling negatively on approval even after his best moment at the convention. The Ohio senator is the least-liked vice presidential candidate since 1980, according to a CNN polling analysis. 

Business Insider wrote,

Since 2000, vice-presidential nominees typically have had a net-positive rating immediately following the convention, at plus 19 points. Vance, however, is polling at minus 6 points just one week after accepting the vice-presidential nomination and officially embarking on the campaign trail….

What accounts for this low approval?

Perhaps Trump should have listened to his gut and gone with Gov. Doug Burgum of North Dakota instead of listening to his two genius sons, who pressed the case for JD Vance. If they had vetted Vance better, they would have unearthed interviews like the one he gave to Tucker Carlson in 2021, in which he blamed Kamala Harris and other “childless cat ladies” for the nation’s ills:

It’s a terrible look for a campaign seeking to appeal to suburban women and Millennial voters, many of whom are in their 30s but have yet to have children or are struggling to become parents. 

And there’s a particularly popular cultural icon who is herself a childless cat lady, and her rather ardent and multitudinous fans are not amused.

If that wasn’t bad enough, a 2022 recording has leaked in which Vance says he thinks federal authorities should stop women from traveling for abortions. His exact words were even worse:

“Let’s say Roe vs. Wade is overruled. Ohio bans abortion in you know 2022, let’s say 2024, and every day, George Soros sends a 747 to Columbus to load up disproportionately Black women to go have abortions in California...

If that happens, do you need some federal response to prevent it from happening? Because it’s really creepy. And you know I’m pretty sympathetic to that actually.”

Then to top it all off, there’s a fake but hilarious internet rumor flying around that JD Vance had sex with a couch and wrote about it in his memoir. The campaign should have just ignored this, but the denial spawned hilarious headlines that only made things funnier.

Pro-tip: If you’re busy denying it, you’re already losing.

I’ll be including some of the best memes about this false rumor in my collection of the week’s funnies tomorrow.

Then came the polls

Pollsters moved quickly to survey voter sentiment in the days following Biden’s announcement and Harris’s rapid ascent. They all tended to show Harris with better numbers, in some cases much better numbers, than Biden, with many undecided voters now leaning her way.

The race has returned to levels right before Biden’s debate debacle, meaning it remains a statistical tie. Some polls like the widely followed Morning Consult poll even showed Harris leading Trump:

Even the GOP-leaning New York Times / Siena poll showed a tie, with Harris even leading Trump by a point among likely voters once Kennedy was factored in.

My second favorite part of this is the instruction to interviewers on how to pronounce Harris’s first name.

We shouldn’t fixate too much on polls, other than to understand that there has been a discernible shift toward Harris and the race is very much winnable. For purposes of this discussion, however, it’s fun to remember how obsessed Trump is with polling. The fact that the polls now say he is dead even or losing to Harris has got to sting.

Dumber than a Rock

When Trump finally got around to talking about Harris, he failed to land any punches. It started with him sneering in a post that she was “dumb as a rock.” That got little traction because no one outside of MAGA actually believes it. Trump then promptly went on to belittle her “pole” numbers, apparently confirming that he is even dumber than a rock.

Harris is going to skewer Trump on ending abortion rights in America. But Trump being Trump, he is digging in on this question. On Thursday, he called into Fox & Friends and, in a long rant, insisted that the “people” wanted all along to return the abortion issue to the states, where in places like Ohio and Kansas they could and did vote to protect it. Trump seems not to understand that forcing women to work hard to pass constitutional amendments at the state level in order to secure a once basic and protected right is no favor to women at all. And leaving millions of women across the South without any federal protection of abortion rights is cruel and inhumane.

On Thursday evening, after Harris made it clear she’s ready to debate Trump as scheduled on September 10, Trump began to make excuses and has tried to back out of the debate.

First came this statement, which blamed a lack of a formal nominee and no endorsement yet from “Barack Hussein Obama” for Trump’s equivocation on debating Harris.

Harris shot back, “What happened to ‘any time, any place’?”

This morning, the Obamas called Harris to let her know of the former president’s formal endorsement, and there remains no significant challenger to Harris for the nomination. Trump’s refusal to confirm his willingness to debate Harris on September 10 smacks of fear and weakness.

And to cap things off, Trump’s nephew Fred Trump is out with a book about his family, and it includes some damning portrayals of Uncle Donald. Per reporting by the New York Times,

Fred Trump’s son was born with a rare medical condition that led to developmental and intellectual disabilities. His care had been paid for in part with help from the family. After Mr. Trump was elected, Fred Trump wanted to use his connection to the White House for good. With the help of Ivanka Trump, his cousin, and Ben Carson, at the time the housing and urban development secretary, he was able to convene a group of advocates for a meeting with his uncle. The president “seemed engaged, especially when several people in our group spoke about the heart-wrenching and expensive efforts they’d made to care for their profoundly disabled family members,” he writes.

After the meeting, Fred Trump claims, his uncle pulled him aside and said, “maybe those kinds of people should just die,” given “the shape they’re in, all the expenses.”

“Maybe those kinds of people should just die” are the words of a genocidal fascist. But this wasn’t some one-off thing. According to the memoir, he called Donald Trump two years later for help when the medical fund to pay for his son’s care was running low. Donald Trump said in response, “I don’t know. He doesn’t recognize you. Maybe you should just let him die and move down to Florida.”

“Maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised to hear Donald say that,” Fred Trump wrote. “It wasn’t far off from what he’d said that day in the Oval Office after our meeting with the advocates. Only that time, it was other people’s children who should die. This time, it was my son.”

Harris is soaring

While Trump has been floundering, Harris has broken records. 

As reported in Open Secrets, which tracks money in politics, 

Within 36 hours of Biden’s announcement on July 21, Harris raised more than $100 million, according to her campaign, including $81 million in the first 24 hours. The $100 million cash infusion would more than double the $96 million the Biden-Harris campaign had in cash on hand at the end of June. 

As the Washington Post reported, Harris also has become the subject of user-created content across popular platforms like TikTok, creating an “online army” that is “supercharging” her campaign. “A grassroots network of TikTok creators, energized by the new likely Democratic nominee, are using their skill at playful video collages to build Harris a viral political powerhouse from scratch,” a team of writers from the Post wrote in rather uncharacteristically breathless style.

The Zoom app became the center of political organizing around Harris as well, with over 40,000 Black women on a single call, followed by as many on a call for Black men, 20,000 on a call for the LGBTQ+ community (one that I helped organize and attended), and one on Thursday night with a whopping record 150,000 white women in attendance. These have raised millions of dollars and are turning out volunteers by the thousands.

Meanwhile, vote.org recorded a 700 percent increase in voter registrations in the first 48 hours of Harris’s campaign, with some 40,000 new voters registered through the site.

You in Danger, Donald

Many political observers have noted that these heady initial days of the Harris campaign remind them of the energy and enthusiasm of the Obama Campaign in 2008. That campaign became more than an election; it was a cultural moment for the country and the world.

The possibility of the nation’s first Black woman winning the presidency (Harris is half Jamaican, half Indian in heritage), along with the urgent need to defeat MAGA fascism at the polls, have supercharged her campaign. Indeed, with social media as its rocket fuel, Harris is rapidly becoming a cultural phenomenon. Her speeches and image are set to music, and her quirks are fast becoming her brand. 

Trump may not have grasped it yet, but Harris’s meteoric rise not just in politics but as a pop culture icon will soon rival or even eclipse his own, especially with him stuck in the same grinding, rambling and grievance-laden speeches. Harris, by contrast, presents a forward looking and optimistic vision, with policies that are far nearer to the political center than Trump’s. 

The Trump campaign will have to move quickly to blunt her ascent and redefine her in a way that sticks, but it’s hard to catch a rocket by its tail wings. There are just over 100 days to go until November 5th, but early voting actually begins in just over 50 days in many key states. Harris has got the momentum, politically and culturally, and will dominate the near term headlines as speculation about her VP pick and the upcoming Democratic National Convention gets underway.

I’ve said for some time that, given the fundamentals of a strong economy and the tailwinds of the midterms and the special elections, I would much rather be on our side than theirs. With the spectacular jolt that Harris’s entry into the race has provided, coupled with her seamless taking of the reins from Biden, that feeling is now deeper than ever.

Trump’s terrible week could become Trump’s terrible month, and even terrible performance come November. Let’s all work extra hard to make it so.