Trump can't stop his ugly, racist attacks. He doesn't know any other way.

While allies warn him he is going to blow the election, Trump is doubling down, hoping bigotry brings him to victory.

Donald Trump is back on the campaign trail again today in North Carolina, after bowing to pressure from Republicans who were flabbergasted by his plan to camp out in Mar-a-Lago for what would have been two weeks while Kamala Harris and Tim Walz were on a campaign blitz of battleground states.

Those same Republicans, from Fox Business’s Larry Kudlow and former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy to Nikki Haley and his former campaign aide Kellyanne Conway, are begging Trump to stop the personal attacks on Harris’ racial identity, intelligence, and crowd sizes—promoting conspiracies that no one is actually showing up (it’s all “AI-generated,” he ridiculously says), while thousands are filling stadiums.

The right-wing Wall Street Journal editorial page, clearly speaking the mind of Rupert Murdoch, last week asked, “Will Donald Trump Blow Another Election?” and its editor-at-large, Gerard Baker, formerly the editor-in-chief of the WSJ, wrote a column this week headlined, “Will Trump Be a Loser Again?”

People like the pathetic Haley must be getting buyers’ remorse, having warned Trump would lose during the primaries only to back him once he got the nomination, thinking he was sure to win. Now, Haley, Conway, and others, seeing the polling shift, are pleading with Trump to talk about issues and policies and to hit Harris on her past policies and on Biden administration policies.

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On Fox, Haley said Trump should “quit whining”:

Haley told Fox News chief political anchor Bret Baier on "Special Report" Republicans and former President Trump should focus on policy and messaging instead of crowd sizes at rallies, Harris' race, or attacks on her intellect.

"You can't win on those things. The American people are smart. Treat them like they're smart," she said. "It's not about her. It's about the American people. Talk to them and let them know you need their vote."

But this is laughable. Trump doesn’t know policy. He can’t articulate it. He’s using his 2016 playbook, which got him elected then, even if it failed in 2020. He realizes that though he lost in 2020 he did outperform the polls, and Biden was further ahead in the polls throughout that race than Harris is right now. So he’s not ready to give up the strategy. Plus, again, he knows nothing else.

In event after event recently, from his deranged press conference at Mar-a-Lago last week to his glitchy interview with very weird Elon Musk this week, he used the same tropes attacking Joe Biden (a “vegetable”) and Kamala Harris (a “radical San Francisco liberal”). This has only sent Republican politicians further into panic.

And when Trump sees people like Haley, of all people, telling him to stop “whining,” it will further enrage him.

But let's be clear: This doesn’t mean Trump is going to lose. We need to stay laser-focused on the fact that, while Harris has electrified Democrats and many independents and upended the election, her slight lead in polling averages is still within the margin of error in battleground states and in national polls. It’s no time for complacency.

And for all the handwringing from GOP politicians, even Trump’s campaign is escalating the racist attacks, believing they’ll be effective. So we need to take it seriously. On Trump’s official campaign feed yesterday, they sent out this vicious post on X:

This is pure desperation and fear, for sure. The campaign knows Harris has great momentum and is going to do anything they hope will turn it around.

None of us should underestimate the power of these racist attacks. They can’t be ignored, and it’s important for this to be exposed in the media and for Trump’s team to be lambasted, as Trump was in his attack on Harris’ racial identity.

This kind of bigoted messaging will only grow. The Trump team really has nothing else.

Today’s terrific report on inflation—that it dropped lower than expected, to 2.9%, the first time it went below 3% since 2021—dealt another blow to the GOP and Trump on using inflation and the economy against Harris and Democrats. The panic the GOP tried to whip up after the market sell-off last week completely faded when the market rebounded. We will certainly see rate cuts by the Fed in a few weeks, and that will cause mortgage rates and credit card interest rates to drop. American voters will surely feel it.

Meanwhile, a Financial Times poll shows Harris is more trusted on the economy than Trump. In other polls, she has higher numbers than Trump on crime, leadership, temperament, honesty, and discipline, and soars on issues such as abortion and health care. This underscores that, particularly on the economy, so many Americans were looking at the issue through the lens of Joe Biden’s age, because of the media’s intense, scurrilous focus on the issue.

Harris’ favorability has also jumped 10 points, coming in at over or near 50% (beaten only by her running mate, Governor Tim Walz) in the most recent polls, while Trump and JD Vance are underwater. It’s pretty astounding because her favorability had been as low as Biden’s for the past couple of years. Simply becoming the candidate, and connecting with millions of Americans, caused a jump.

All of this is great news. But be forewarned that the Trump campaign and Republicans will do more desperate things to stop the momentum. We have almost three months left in this campaign, and remember, the momentum is powerful, but right now this is still a tight race, in the margin-of-error. We’ve got to make sure the numbers continue to surge.

Racism, stoking the issue of immigration, will be front and center in the GOP effort to stall Harris’ momentum because they’ve run out of anything to run on. Harris has smartly gone on offense on immigration, pointing over and over to the border deal Trump killed. We’ve all got to pay attention, not let our guard down, and hit them hard as they escalate the racist assaults.