It’s become a thing this week, where the mainstream political press has suddenly decided that it’s okay to write about how Donald Trump is flailing around and Republicans don’t know what to do. Maybe it started with Trump’s racist tirade at the NABJ conference last week, when he claimed that Kamala Harris “turned Black” all of a sudden for a political advantage (??). Maybe it was the fact that Trump spent ten days in a blind, pants-sh-tting panic in Mar-a-Lago instead of campaigning with less than 100 days until the election. Maybe it was Trump test-driving childish new nicknames for Harris on his Nazi social media. Whatever it is, there are suddenly so many articles devoted to “wow, Republicans wish Donald Trump would get it together and stop being such a deranged weirdo.” Some highlights from a NYT piece:
It’s almost as if the Times is providing Trump with a roadmap: The way Republicans see it, it should not be hard for Mr. Trump to pivot from President Biden to this new Democratic ticket. All he has to do is hammer Ms. Harris and Mr. Walz for things they have said and done, to paint them as out-of-step from most Americans, on everything including policing, immigration and transgender policies. But lately Mr. Trump keeps getting tangled up in distractions of his own making. He has gone on tangents about Ms. Harris’s biracial identity. He has picked fights with fellow Republicans. He has fantasized that Mr. Biden might somehow snatch back the nomination. Many in Mr. Trump’s party find this all to be counterproductive, to say the least.
LMAO: “The Harris-Walz ticket is the furthest left ticket in American history. They are a target-rich environment,” said Ben Shapiro, the right-wing media warrior. “All he has to do is focus the attack, to dump the war chest he’s accrued on this extremist ticket, to stick to a simple point: You were better off in 2019 than you are in 2024.”
Trump can’t move on from Biden: At times, it seems as though Mr. Trump has not even accepted his new political reality — that he is no longer in a race against Mr. Biden. On Tuesday, Mr. Trump wondered aloud in a post on Truth Social if there were any chance that Mr. Biden “CRASHES the Democrat National Convention and tries to take back the Nomination.” “He spent four years preparing for a run against Joe Biden,” Mr. Newhouse said, “and it’s naturally tough to regain your footing.” He said that Mr. Trump was now trying to do so “on the fly, with less than a hundred days left, and that’s an extraordinarily challenging effort.”
The nickname: Adding to the sense that Mr. Trump is flailing about, this week he has been testing out a new mocking nickname for his opponent, referring to Ms. Harris as “Kamabla.” It is a departure from the previous epithet he had chosen (“Laffin’ Kamala”), and nobody seems quite sure how to decipher it. Asked if he understood what Mr. Trump meant by “Kamabla,” Mr. Kingston replied, “No.” As for the attacks on her racial identity? “I would stick to the price of groceries,” he said.
Ann Coulter speaks: “All Trump has to do is talk about his positions, like he did in 2016,” said Ann Coulter, the conservative commentator who broke with Mr. Trump some years back, largely because of his inability to focus on the issues she cared about. “But, no, he’s going to spend the first 20 minutes of every rally attacking the popular Republican governor of Georgia or trying out stupid nicknames for Kamala.” Ms. Coulter added that “Republicans who expected Trump to run a smart, disciplined campaign are going to be sorely disappointed.”
Trump is doing so poorly that the New York Times is basically giving him a list and blatantly telling him: just repeat all of this and we’ll amplify for the next three months, don’t worry, hang in there, Nazi kitten! Anyway, I don’t really care what part of this is performative pearl-clutching from the face-eating leopard party and what part of this is a streak of genuine panic from Republicans. I find it notable that all of the party elders have been culled by Trump and his supporters – there’s no John Boehner to step in and clean up Trump’s mess. There’s no George W. Bush to remind everyone that they’re all loyal Republicans. There is Mitch McConnell, but he keeps having mini-strokes whenever he’s on camera. So… it’s the party of Trump. I hope they all go down with the ship.
Speaking of, Trump was seen yesterday at MAL. He threw a deranged press conference at Mar-a-Lago on Thursday, his first in weeks, timed specifically for 8/8 (you know what that means). He ranted and raved about Kamala Harris, he said he agreed to three debates, he said he’s more than open to banning mifepristone, he said the everyone wanted to see Roe overturned, he refused to say whether or not he would peacefully concede the election if he lost, and of course, he ranted about crowd size. He claimed that his crowd sizes were bigger than Martin Luther King Jr.’s crowds.
Trump claims his crowds are larger than Martin Luther King Jr.’s pic.twitter.com/fuGPWZW66P
— Kamala HQ (@KamalaHQ) August 8, 2024
Screengrabs courtesy of MSNBC, The Times.