Trump can't stop hurting himself

Six weeks later he still hasn't figured out how to take on Kamala Harris, as he's mired in self-induced controversies, including blurting out that he actually lost in 2020.

Last night, Fox News aired a pre-taped “town hall” in Pennsylvania with Donald Trump, hosted by Sean Hannity. It was Trump’s first campaign appearance in days, even as we’re in the home stretch of the election.

While Kamala Harris and Tim Walz were campaigning in battleground states throughout Labor Day weekend—speaking to workers—Trump was golfing, and the only workers he saw were his own employees, waiting on him hand and foot at his resort.

In the Pennsylvania interview, even with Hannity trying to steer Trump to help himself, Trump threw out the same tired and ineffective personal attacks on Harris and Walz that he’s been flinging since Harris entered the race, as he viciously demeaned migrants.

As Harris told Dana Bash in the CNN interview, same old tired playbook.

We’re now less than two months before the election, and Harris has been the Democratic candidate for almost a month and a half.

Yet, Trump is still unable to change the way he campaigns. As has been said many times, he’s locked himself into the idea that he was running against Joe Biden, and he can’t break out of that. And he doesn’t seem to have the energy to campaign.

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Trump and his campaign have tried for weeks to “define” Harris but haven’t been able to do so because Trump just can’t talk policy, as I noted here almost four weeks ago. It’s amazing how nothing’s changed from when I wrote that column with regard to Trump’s actions and abilities.

The campaign now says, according to reports, that they’re going to go mega-MAGA negative because they realize the only way to win is to make Harris unpopular.

The idea is that Trump has high unfavorable numbers that cannot be changed and have remained the same for nine years. So he can only win by making voters disgusted with the other major candidate, causing them to throw their hands up and just decide to vote third party or not vote at all. Per the Washington Post:

With little chance of improving Trump’s standing, Trump’s advisers see the only option as damaging hers.

“This is a moment in the message arc of us seeking to define her, she’s seeking to define herself,” a Trump adviser said. “We have a defined candidate — everyone knows everything about the person. There’s lots of new information about Kamala Harris that people just don’t know.”

But this is a lot of wishful thinking and revisionist history. Harris has been the vice president for four years, very much on the national stage, and she was a U.S. senator for four years before that. While not as well known as President Biden or Trump himself, she’s hardly undefined.

And since she became the Democratic nominee, as she has been speaking to millions via speeches aired on television across America, she’s become much more popular. This is true even as the Trump campaign and Trump-promoting PACs are running dozens of ugly, negative television ads, many of them trying to tie Harris to Biden, counting on Biden being deeply unpopular with the public.

Harris has seen her favorable numbers jump since announcing her run and is no longer underwater, while Trump is, as always, drowning in disapproval.

When the choice was Trump and Biden, two presumably unpopular candidates running against one another, and with Joe Biden being attacked by the media on his age, Trump saw a possible path to victory by attacking Biden and his policies, specifically on the economy and inflation, in addition to tying it all to Biden’s mental capability.

But something else has happened beyond the scrambling of the presidential race since Biden stepped away, and it shows how the Trump campaign’s strategy is flawed. Harris assuming the candidacy has put a spotlight on how Biden’s policies—and thus the Biden-Harris administration policies—are actually not unpopular.

Since dropping out of the race, Biden’s approval has surged in polls, to the point where he’s no longer underwater either.

So, now both the incumbent president and the incumbent vice president—who is running for president—have comparatively high favorables while the tired old former president is where he has always been, loathed by most Americans.

This tells us that the odious media narrative around Biden’s age likely affected all of the other issues people said they were worried about. Plus, inflation has gone down, the economy is better, and that likely has lifted Biden and Harris too.

That’s a big problem for Trump because even if he could get out from personal attacks and actually criticize Harris on the policies of the Biden administration, he’s taking on an administration that is actually proving to be more popular than the corporate media claimed.

Even with a terrible media—and you all know I’ve been hitting hard on that in recent days, and certainly for a longer time than that—Trump hasn’t been able to gain traction.

For the first time in a while, a bad story is sticking to him, and he’s on the defensive. The fiasco of his photo-op at Arlington National Cemetery, using the graves of soldiers for his own campaign video, has not gone away almost two weeks later. He’s still defending himself, as stories surface about how he lied to Gold Star families about his record in Afghanistan.

That entire stunt was meant to drag down Harris—who eventually slammed him for his using “sacred ground” for political activity—but it has only gotten Trump mired in controversy, on the defensive.

John McCain’s son, Jimmy McCain, who at 17 enlisted in the Marine Corps and is currently an intelligence officer in the 158th Infantry Regiment, hit Trump hard this week on CNN for the “violation” of Arlington, as well as for Trump’s attacks on his father—a war hero who Trump called a “loser”—and announced he has become a Democrat and is voting for Kamala Harris. The story of Arlington just continues in the media, even as we’ve not gotten more details.

And the abortion flip-flops and other issues are causing Trump’s own base to erupt. The vast majority will not abandon him, but even a tiny depression of his base can cost him, as he needs every vote he can get. The latest self-inflicted controversy, which I think is another example of Trump’s cognitive decline, was his admitting to a right-wing podcaster this week that he lost in 2020—possibly incriminating himself, since it’s an admission that the Big Lie was just that.

Trump was asked a question about next week’s debate with Harris, and he answered by meandering back to Biden—and back to the 2020 election. Per NBC:

Trump initially answered, "I've done a lot of debating ... I've done well with debates," before embarking on a tangent about the number of votes he received in 2020, saying: "I became president. Then the second time I got millions more votes than I got the first time."

"I was told if I got 63 million, which is what I got the first time, 'You would win. You can't not win.' And I got millions more votes than that and lost by a whisker," Trump added.

Trump received about 74 million votes nationally in 2020, compared to 81 million for Joe Biden.

His admission is a departure from his usual rhetoric about the 2020 presidential election results, which he often claims were "rigged."

The response was anger among some on the right, including the white supremacist Nick Fuentes, whom Trump had dinner with at Mar-a-Lago, and who’s been souring on Trump for a while. RightWingWatch reported on it:

“He says, ‘Oh, I lost by a whisker,'” Fuentes griped during his Tuesday night livestream. “So what was the point? What’s the point of any of it? You lost in 2020? Seriously? What are we even doing anymore? Then you’re a loser. You just lost. Then you lost to Joe Biden.”

Fuentes noted that if Trump knows that he lost the 2020 election, then he “deserves to be charged” by special counsel Jack Smith for his efforts to overturn the results of the election.

None of this is meant to say Trump will lose. This race is dangerously close even as we see good, real numbers—such as voter registrations of young people and other groups soaring, and record fundraising by Harris and Democrats—beyond just positive polls. We have two months left and many things can and will happen, so, as I always say, it’s no time for complacency.

But with Republicans like Liz Cheney now publicly backing Harris—who’d have predicted that four years ago?—and reports that even some Republicans in Congress secretly want Trump to lose so they can get past Trumpism, it’s good to see the GOP in turmoil and divided as we move forward, while Democrats remain determined and unified.