For the nine years that Donald Trump has been running for president, his political superpower has been his savage talent for capturing media attention and baffling his opponents with insults, falsehoods and demagoguery.
Until this year, it worked normally.
But over the past five weeks, as Kamala Harris belatedly launched her presidential campaign, Trump has been the one who has seemed off-balance, seemingly unprepared to compete against someone younger than President Biden.
So, as Democrats gathered in Chicago, Trump fell back on his old playbook for regrouping. He abandoned the well-worn tradition of taking a break during the other party’s convention (what other rule can be broken?) and embarked on a cross-country tour aimed at cutting the surging Harris to size.
But Trump's attempt to regain attention – his most frenetic week of campaigning in months – did not work.
Harris's ratings at the convention were higher than his own. Worse, the crowds that attended Harris's rallies were larger than his own. Worst of all, his former nemesis, Barack Obama, mocked him for it.
Trump was furious even before the week began, when Time magazine put a formal portrait of Harris on its cover.
“I'm a more beautiful person than Kamala,” she complained.
He was still fuming as the week ended, when Fox News’ Martha MacCallum had the temerity to point out that Harris was “having some success” in appealing to young and minority voters.
“No, she is not succeeding,” Trump snapped. “I am succeeding.”
For those who missed it (because, after all, it didn't get much media coverage), here's a quick diary of Donald Trump's terrible, horrible, awful, very bad week of the Convention:/
Monday: York, Pennsylvania — Trump speaks to an audience of about 150 people in a small factory and questions Harris’s origins: “I wonder if they knew where she came from,” he muses. That evening, he watches Biden’s convention speech.[I] “I was shocked by his ANGER at being humiliated by Democrats,” he writes in a social media post. “I was glad I played a role in his demise.”
Tuesday: Howell, Michigan — Trump falsely accuses Harris and other Democrats of using violence to oust Biden from office. “That was a coup,” he says. “It was a brutal, violent overthrow of a president of the United States.” (“I think he has a problem,” Biden responds.)
That night, Trump watches former President Obama and his wife, Michelle Obama, as they ridicule his obsession with crowd sizes. “Very disgusting,” Trump says.
Wednesday: Asheboro, North Carolina — At a rally, Trump accuses the FBI of falsifying crime statistics and the Department of Labor of falsifying employment statistics (the numbers are often fallible, but there is no evidence that they are false).
And he goes back to talking about the Obamas' speeches. He simulates a dialogue with his campaign aides, who want him to stop insulting his opponents. “Do I have to stick to politics anymore?” he complains in a childish voice.
That night, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, a former high school football coach, accepts the Democrats’ nomination for vice president and is celebrated by former players. “He’s a total lightweight,” Trump scoffs. “They call him ‘coach.’ He’s a semi-coach.”
Thursday: Sierra Vista, Arizona — Trump begins the day on “Fox & Friends” by talking about one of his favorite topics: crime in California, which he blames on Harris’ tenure as district attorney in San Francisco more than a decade ago.
“Everything I touched turned bad,” he said. “You can hardly get into California anymore… There’s nothing. There are drugs everywhere. If you go to Los Angeles, you can’t walk the streets.”
That night, he watches Harris accept the presidential nomination and sparks a series of furious social media posts.
“THE WORST SPEECH IN HISTORY,” he writes.
“ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT ME?” (He was.)
“Say goodbye to the United States!”
If the Democratic convention won the ratings race, hatred of Trump may have been a small part of the problem.
Friday: Glendale, Ariz. — The Democratic convention is over, and Trump finally gets some good news: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is suspending his independent presidential campaign and endorsing him. “He’s a great guy,” Trump says, even though Kennedy once denounced him as “a terrible human being.” It’s unclear whether Kennedy’s endorsement will move many voters to Trump’s camp.
Trump was all over the place, both geographically and figuratively. He didn't focus on a single core message to appeal to undecided voters who aren't sure they really want a second Trump term.
Still, Trump can claim one solid achievement this week.
He appears to have picked a new nickname for Harris: “Comrade Kamala.”
Nicknames are a marker of Trump’s identity, a brand for his main line of attack. For months, he struggled to find one for Harris, with gaffes ranging from “Laffin’ Kamala” to the inscrutable “Kamabla.”
“Comrade Kamala,” of course, reflects his argument that Harris is not only too liberal for most voters, but — in his absurdly inaccurate charge — “a radical left-wing Marxist.”
Any true Marxist will tell you that Harris doesn’t come close to that. True Marxists believe that the government should own major industries; Harris doesn’t think so. Harris doesn’t even support Bernie Sanders-style “single-payer” health insurance, as she briefly did during her 2019 campaign.
But when Trump was a child in the 1950s and 1960s, almost any accusation of communist tendencies was enough to get a politician convicted. Back then, it was called McCarthyism, after the Republican senator from Wisconsin who made baseless accusations as recklessly as Trump.
Will the same technique work half a century later? That may depend on whether Harris continues to moderate her policies to make her liberal agenda sound like simple common sense, as she did in her acceptance speech. The test will unfold over the next ten weeks.
But as the week wore on, she seemed to have found her groove, and Trump was the one struggling to keep up.
