There are just over 100 days until the election, and Donald Trump is in a bad place.
Opinion The world has changed, and Trump needs a mulligan
The former president is back to firing off random, late-night rage posts from his social media account.
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Republican
presidential nominee Donald Trump and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance
of Ohio, at a campaign rally in Grand Rapids, Mich., on July 20. (Evan
Vucci/AP)
By Dana Milbank
July 26, 2024
Were those North Pole numbers or South Pole numbers? The brilliant young man didn’t say.
Two hours earlier, Trump reposted back-to-back messages from supporters invoking the QAnon slogan for when members of the “deep state” will be rounded up in mass arrests: “Nothing can stop what is coming.”
He pined for his former opponent. “It’s not over! Tomorrow Crooked Joe Biden’s going to wake up and forget that he dropped out of the race,” he posted, and then, the next day, “It’s a new day and Joe Biden doesn’t remember quitting the race.”
He fumed about the turncoats at Fox News making him “fight battles that I shouldn’t have to fight” by allowing on its airwaves Democrats Tim Walz, the Minnesota governor, and “total sleazebag” Rep. Eric Swalwell (Calif.).
From the Very Stable Genius’s jumbled mind tumbled conspiratorial thoughts (“Biden never had Covid”), vengeful thoughts (he will sue the Justice Department!), bizarre thoughts (it was his “GREAT HONOR” to “take a bullet for Democracy”) and aggrieved thoughts (Democrats caused the GOP “to waste a great deal of time and money” campaigning against Biden). Maybe he should sue them, too.
A week earlier, after the failed assassination attempt, Trump was supposedly a “changed” man, uniting the country. But now, he poured on the insults: Rep. Jim Clyburn (S.C.), a long-tenured Black Democrat, is “not the brightest bulb”; ABC News, host of the next debate, is “such a joke” and “the home of George Slopadopolus”; Biden is crooked and sleepy; Harris is “Dumb as a Rock.”
And he promoted a lengthy video of himself playing a round with golf pro Bryson DeChambeau. Trump could be heard breathing heavily after hitting his drives, even though he was using a golf cart. “You think Biden can do that?” he asked after landing his ball on the green.
You think we care?
The world has changed overnight, and Trump is going to need a mulligan.
As Trump has been swinging, his new running mate has been swigging — with similarly awkward results. “Democrats,” Sen. JD Vance said at a rally in his Ohio hometown, “say it’s racist to do anything. I had a Diet Mountain Dew yesterday, and one today. I’m sure they’re going to call that racist, too.”
The room was quiet, with some weak laughter.
“It’s good,” Vance said. More weak laughter.
In the quiet, Vance himself laughed, then said: “I love you guys.”
It’s unclear why Vance anticipated that his opponents would find racism in his choice of soft drink. What they do tend to find racist is stuff that is racist. Such as:
“The media propped up this president, lied to the American people for three years, and then dumped him for our DEI vice president,” Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.) tweeted. He elaborated to CNN’s Manu Raju. Biden “said he’s going to hire a Black female for vice president,” Burchett falsely claimed. “When you go down that route, you take mediocrity. And that’s what they have right now as vice president.”
“You’re suggesting she was a DEI hire?” Raju asked.
“One hundred percent she was a DEI hire,” Burchett confirmed.
Right. Vance, who has served 19 months in the Senate after writing a book and briefly dabbling as a venture capitalist, was picked by Trump on the merits. But Harris, who spent decades as a prosecutor, district attorney, attorney general and senator, became vice president because of diversity, equity and inclusion.
It sure didn’t take Republicans long to go low. Rep. Harriet Hageman (Wyo.) told an interviewer that Harris is “intellectually, just really kind of bottom of the barrel. ... I think she was a DEI hire.”
Rep. Burgess Owens (Utah), who is Black, joined in, telling Punchbowl News that Harris is “the greatest example of DEI.”
Republican leaders have urged colleagues to resist their base instincts. But they don’t run the party. Fox News does. On Fox Business Network, host Larry Kudlow declared that Harris’s “whole history is DEI: diversity, uh, exclusion and, uh, equity, I mean, inclusion and equity.”
And on Fox News, host Jesse Watters added the fiction that “the only reason Kamala is in The White House is because of the DEI deal Biden cut.”
Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), talking to HuffPost’s Igor Bobic, scolded the offenders. “Are they just going to say if you’re not a White male, it’s a DEI candidate?”
Apparently so.
When campaigning for the Senate, Vance called Harris one of “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives” who were running the country. “The entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children,” Vance said. (Harris has two stepchildren.) “And how does it make any sense that we’ve turned our country over to people who don’t really have a direct stake in it?”
Other Republicans are testing alternatives to attacking Harris for being a cat woman of color.
There’s the option of threatening violence. GOP state Sen. George Lang, a warm-up speaker at Vance’s Ohio rally, told the audience that “if we lose this one, it’s going to take a civil war to save the country.” He later apologized.
They could make fun of Harris’s laugh, as the Republican National Committee has been doing, when it isn’t alleging a “coup” (against Biden) or a “coverup” (of his supposed dementia). “Kamala Harris brought her cackle to Milwaukee: ‘Good afternoon, Wisconsin! Ha ha ha ha!’” the party posted on X.
They could attack her for being Biden’s “border czar,” even though she holds no such title and was tasked with addressing the root causes of migration, not border security. House Republicans this week used emergency procedures to pass a resolution “strongly condemning the Biden Administration and its Border Czar, Kamala Harris’s, failure to secure the United States border.” At the Rules Committee hearing on the bill, Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.) requested that the resolution’s lead defender, Rep. Michael Guest (R-Miss.), tell him when Biden called Harris the “border czar.”
“I didn’t draft the resolution,” Guest pleaded, and “I don’t know that I could point to a particular time that he’s used that phrase.”
They could just make up other random things. Trump adviser Jason Miller posted on X that he was “hearing from Democrat insiders” — no doubt many of them speak candidly with Miller — that Harris will float Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) for defense secretary. Even this was plausible compared with Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) saying Harris “supports Hamas” and with Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), who speculated about a government “conspiracy to kill President Trump.”
They could try to impeach Harris for high crimes and misdemeanors. Rep. Andy Ogles (R-Tenn.) introduced such a resolution this week. On Fox Business, Ogles suggested that Harris would be weak on Russia and China, which “want to displace us as the world’s dominant predator.” (Trump, by contrast, would never be displaced as dominant predator.)
They could echo Chinese government propaganda. “Chinese state media is reportedly slamming Vice President Kamala Harris’s performance in the White House as mediocre, saying she lacks the achievements and experience to serve as president,” Fox Business’s Maria Bartiromo told Rep. Mark Green (R-Tenn.) on air.
“For once, I guess, I’m agreeing with China,” Green replied.
Or they could just keep campaigning against Biden, as the RNC has been doing (“Biden shuffles out of his motorcade, mumbles incoherently...”). “Why haven’t the American people seen or heard from the president?” demanded Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.). “Where’s Biden?”
Here he is: Addressing the nation from the Oval Office. “Nothing — nothing — can come in the way of saving our democracy,” the president said in his brief address. “That includes personal ambition.”
It was a somber moment of patriotic sacrifice. And Trump shouted at the TV some more. “Crooked Joe Biden’s Oval Office speech was barely understandable, and sooo bad!” he posted.
Vance is new at this. In his rallies, he laughs awkwardly at remarks from the crowd that can’t be heard by most in the room, or any on TV. “These people were telling jokes up in the front row,” he explained after his Diet Mountain Dew embarrassment. “You guys might not be able to hear it, but I’m getting caught up in it.”
He’s very skilled at the most important part of the job, which is worshiping the boss. That’s how he got picked in the first place. “He probably does have an IQ of 210, but don’t tell him that,” Vance told a crowd this week. He even attested that Trump is “a good husband.”
But Vance hasn’t quite found his voice when it comes to Harris. He tried suggesting that she’s been on the dole: “I don’t know, Kamala. I served in the United States Marine Corps and I built a business. What the hell have you done other than to collect a government check for the past 20 years?”
Thus did Vance insult not just Harris but all public school teachers, cops and members of the military, who also “collect a government check.”
He did better with his joke about Harris rising to the top of the ticket. “To the Democrats who are watching, please find some way to make Kamala vice president,” he said. “I was promised a debate with Kamala Harris, and that’s what I plan to get.”
There’s probably more truth in that lament than Vance would like to admit. For months, Trump had gotten a pass because Biden, never a gifted orator, struggled to make a forceful case against Trump. But now, Trump faces a Democratic nominee who can make that case powerfully and succinctly.
Harris did it twice this week, at Biden headquarters in Delaware and at a rally in Milwaukee. A 12-minute riff in her stump speech contains everything that needs to be said about Trump.
Describing her years as a prosecutor, Harris says she “took on perpetrators of all kinds: Predators who abused women, fraudsters who ripped off consumers, cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain. So hear me when I say: I know Donald Trump's type.”
She goes on: “As attorney general of California, I took on one of our country’s largest for-profit colleges that was scamming students. Donald Trump ran a for-profit college that scammed students. As a prosecutor, I specialized in cases involving sexual abuse. Well, Trump was found liable for committing sexual abuse. As attorney general of California, I took on the big Wall Street banks and held them accountable for fraud. Donald Trump was just found guilty of fraud on 34 counts.”
She lays out the Democratic agenda, then contrasts it with Trump advisers’ Project 2025 agenda — “I can’t believe they put that thing in writing” — which, she charges, includes cuts to Social Security and Medicare, tax breaks for billionaires and ending the Affordable Care Act. “We who believe that every person in our nation should have the freedom to live safe from the terror of gun violence, we’ll finally pass red flag laws, universal background checks, and an assault weapons ban,” she says. “And we who believe in reproductive freedom, we’ll stop Donald Trump’s extreme abortion bans because we trust women to make decisions about their own body and not have their government tell them what to do.”
As Harris delivers this speech, the crowd responds with something not seen in a long time at Democratic events: jubilation.
Trump must recognize trouble, for he is backpedaling ever more furiously from Project 2025. “I have nothing to do with, and know nothing about, Project 25,” he protested of the effort by dozens of top Trump lieutenants to craft an agenda for his return to the White House.
At a rally in Charlotte on Wednesday — his first since Biden bowed out — Trump responded to Harris’s tight indictment with a desultory sampling of potential attacks, as though he hadn’t yet found one that would stick. “So now we have a new victim to defeat, Lyin’ Kamala Harris,” he said, mispronouncing her name. “She is a radical left lunatic,” Trump proposed, also calling her a “a dopey stiff, the worst,” a “Marxist” and incompetent. He declared that Harris, who is married to a Jew, is “totally against the Jewish people.” He said she supports “the execution of a baby.” He proposed that, under Harris, “every week will bring a never-ending stream of illegal alien rapists, bloodthirsty killers, and child predators to go after our sons and our daughters.” What’s more, he said, she “couldn’t pass her bar exams.”
The scattershot attack on Harris was interspersed with even stranger musings. He recalled that “I was supposed to be nice” after the assassination attempt, but “if you don’t mind, I’m not going to be nice.” He announced his intention to “form a massive dragnet to scour the nation for the monsters who are murdering and raping children all over the world.”
He revisited the story of the shooting and claimed “record” ratings for the GOP convention. (They were actually low.) He repeated his tired nonsense about the 2020 election being rigged and called the FBI director, whom he appointed, “sick” for testifying that Biden does not seem cognitively impaired. (The director said also that it wasn’t clear whether Trump’s ear was struck by a bullet or shrapnel.)
Trump again garbled words and at one point said he needed to be “getting back to a subject called Kamala” — but then went on for several more minutes about Biden. One moment he was talking about the Islamic State, the next he was claiming Democrats are trying to change the name of the Washington Monument.
When he eventually did arrive back at his intended “victim,” he was no more coherent. “She’s got a new line,” Trump told the crowd — then repeated it. “Their campaign says, ‘I’m the prosecutor and he is the convicted felon.’ That’s their campaign. I don’t think people are going to buy it.”
Because of Harris’s record on the border, “she shouldn’t even be allowed to run for president, what she’s done. She’s committing crimes,” said Trump.
And we certainly can’t elect a president who commits crimes. Trump is due to be sentenced in New York on Sept. 18.
Trump left the arena — and returned to his rage posting.
He assailed the FBI chief some more and insisted that it was “a bullet that hit my ear, and hit it hard.” He complained about the polls Fox News was using (apparently they were favorable for “RADICAL LEFT MARXIST” Harris) and protested that the media was treating Biden like “the Late, Great Winston Churchill.” His campaign sent out a statement withdrawing his commitment to debate Harris.
In need of a friend, he called in to “Fox & Friends” to inform them that, with Harris, “I’m dealing against real garbage,” and that he’s doing so well “we don’t need the votes, I have so many votes.”
Yet there appeared to be some doubt, even among friends. Host Steve Doocy asked Trump “whether or not you feel you made the right pick” with Vance. Brian Kilmeade asked if Harris calling him a convicted felon “gets under your skin.”
Trump kept on raging. “Disgusting!” “Weaponized!” “Third World country!” “Banana republic!”
Evidently, he can’t come up with anything else.