Feels like a lifetime but it was just last week when I last checked in on Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, and it was a bit of a mess.
Thankfully, things don’t look any better for them now.
President Joe Biden dropped his reelection bid on July 21, and even though two and half weeks have passed, Donald Trump refuses to accept the reality that he will now face Vice President Kamala Harris in November. Instead, Trump’s clinging to bizarre fantasies like this one:
“What are the chances that Crooked Joe Biden … CRASHES the Democrat National Convention and tries to take back the Nomination, beginning with challenging me to another DEBATE,” he wrote Tuesday on Truth Social.
While everyone else has moved on, Trump can’t let go, whining to everyone who’ll listen.
“It’s unfair that I beat [Biden] and now I have to beat her, too,” Trump groused in a phone call to an ally last weekend, according to The Washington Post.
Every day that he’s mentally battling Biden is a day he’s not focused on running against the real Democratic nominee. And it shows in his most recent efforts to attack Harris, including calling her “Kamabla” for some reason. “Kamabla” is—what? Is it supposed to sound foreign and scary, like the way he writes “Barack HUSSEIN Obama”? The last thing Trump should want to do is remind a major swing demographic—suburban college-educated white women—of his racism and sexism, and yet he’s going all-in on both.
Donald Trump at Trump National Golf Club in Virginia on Nov. 26, 2020.
But really, everything about Trump now seems old and tired. He looks old and tired, and he sounds old and tired. He’s basically just an old man yelling at a cloud now. His insults, once effective, lack punch.
He can’t even manage to hit the campaign trail much these days. In the six weeks since his infamous June 27 debate with Biden, Trump has held just eight campaign rallies, not including the Republican National Convention, according to The Washington Post. Those rallies include ones held in Florida, Minnesota, and Virginia—none of those battleground states. At best, he’s held just five electorally significant rallies in six weeks. And he’s got only one rally scheduled for the week ahead—in Montana, which he won in 2020 by 16 percentage points. So, not a battleground.
Of course, to Trump, his low-energy campaign is everyone else’s fault. Here’s The Washington Post again:
We’ll tackle Trump’s ground game in a bit, but this was a particularly sage line from that same story: “‘It’s easy to live in Donald Trump’s head,’ one Harris aide wrote, suggesting a story about crowd size now that Harris draws a crowd as big or larger than Trump’s rallies.”
On Wednesday, Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, drew 15,000 at a rally in Detroit, and her campaign is trolling Trump—on his own Truth Social site, no less—by comparing Harris’ and Trump’s crowd sizes at the same Philadelphia venue: Tuesday’s Harris-Walz rally drew 14,000, while Trump’s June 22 rally drew a paltry 4,000.
The Harris campaign posted this on Truth Social, Trump’s own social media site.
And it’s clearly getting to Trump.
“If Kamala has 1,000 people at a Rally, the Press goes ‘crazy,’ and talks about how ‘big’ it was - And she pays for her ‘Crowd.’ When I have a Rally, and 100,000 people show up, the Fake News doesn’t talk about it, THEY REFUSE TO MENTION CROWD SIZE. The Fake News is the Enemy of the People!” he wrote Thursday morning on Truth Social, tossing in a few lies for good measure.
Crowd sizes aren’t the be-all, end-all of campaigns, but for Trump, they hold mythical status. At a recent rally in Georgia, seeing the empty seats in the audience, he blamed the “very liberal school” (Georgia State University) for undermining his rally by allegedly not allowing more people into the venue.
That Georgia rally was a disaster for Trump for another reason too. Rather than treat the audience to an uplifting, motivating experience, Trump used his speech to attack the state’s very popular Republican governor, Brian Kemp.
“He’s a bad guy. He’s a disloyal guy,” Trump said of Kemp. He also referred to him as “Little Brian Kemp” and claimed Georgia had “gone to hell” under his leadership.
Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp and his wife, Marty Kemp, in the city of Marietta on Nov. 3, 2022.
“Atlanta is like a killing field, and your governor ought to get off his ass and do something about it,” he said at one point. He even attacked Kemp’s wife, Marty Kemp, who said she isn’t planning to vote for Trump.
Remember those swing voters in the suburbs? They’re the reason Kemp won this newly minted battleground state—which elected a Democratic president and two Democratic senators—by a relatively comfortable 53-46 margin in 2022. And Georgia Republicans are understandably livid about Trump’s speech.
Let’s talk about Trump’s ground game.
Over the past several cycles, Democrats have refined their get-out-the-vote game. And while there is always room to grow—young voters don’t turn out at high enough rates, for one—Democrats have a well-oiled machine, a collaboration between the party and key advocacy groups to maximize effectiveness.
Republicans, on the other hand … it’s always been a bit of a mess. Some of you may remember Project ORCA from 2012, and how this tech-heavy GOTV effort collapsed on Election Day. Still, they haven’t needed GOTV programs as much. They largely rely on older, whiter voters, who are among the most likely to turn out. And Republican voter-suppression efforts have always made it much harder to vote in urban areas, with nefarious officials doing things like closing polling places and limiting ballot drop boxes.
But Trump takes Republicans’ GOTV dysfunction to new levels. For instance, after he installed his preferred leaders at the Republican National Committee earlier this year, they slashed staffers … including much of their planned GOTV operation.
“The RNC had been planning an extensive field program,” The Washington Post reported recently. “Those now-discarded plans included 88 staff members and 12 offices, and goals to knock on 3 million doors and make 2.4 million phone calls, in Pennsylvania. In Arizona, the RNC’s plan called for 62 staffers and seven offices, aiming for 558,000 voter contacts.”
Even those plans paled in comparison to the Harris campaign and the Democratic Party’s 1,300 staff members across 250 field offices, but it was something. Instead, Trump and his allies have outsourced a good deal of their field operation to his grifter friends, like Charlie Kirk at Turning Point USA.
“Once spurned by top officials at the Republican National Committee, Turning Point’s stature has rapidly grown from a controversial student movement into one of the most active organizations in conservative politics,” Politico reported in June. ”Now, Turning Point is pouring tens of millions of dollars into an ambitious get-out-the-vote operation in three battleground states, making the 2024 election a major test of the organization’s operations—with ramifications not only for Kirk and his organization, but for Trump and the GOP at large.”
Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk onstage before the Republican National Convention on July 14, 2024, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
Problem is, Turning Point has little experience doing GOTV. Its single effort—Arizona in 2022—ended up with Democrats out-hustling Republicans and winning the governorship, the offices of secretary of state and attorney general, as well as a U.S. Senate race. Yet that showing somehow earned Kirk and his organization Trump’s blessing for 2024.
With Trump and his party largely checked out of GOTV, it comes down to Kirk and about 50 other conservative organizations to manage turnout, and they’re seeing it as … well, you gotta read this to believe it: “‘Everyone sees the marketplace here,’ a prominent Republican involved in one of the efforts said. ‘Everyone sees the campaign isn’t doing it, and there is a huge opportunity.’”
It’s a market opportunity. No matter where you look, the grift is strong in the MAGA world.
It’s possible that Trump is already realizing his mistake. According to The Washington Post, “[Trump] has begun hearing from outside allies that he does not have a significant ground game in key battleground states.” And with three months left before Election Day, good luck with that. (Even worse for them, mail voting opens in North Carolina in less than one month, on Sept. 6.)
It may not be too late for Republicans to cobble together something more legitimate, but an effective ground game isn’t something you whip up in a matter of weeks, especially when it’s meant to counter the program that Democrats have been building all year.
The good political instincts Trump once possessed have abandoned him in the past eight years. He’s now left rambling about his petty personal grievances, boring his crowds, lowering morale, and suppressing his own supporters’ enthusiasm.
We ourselves were there not too long ago. We know how much it sucks and how hard it was to motivate casual voters to engage. But now it’s Republicans’ turn to wear the “old, addled man” albatross around their necks. They look across the aisle and see the excitement around Harris and Walz, the size of the crowds, the enormous sums of money they’re raising, and it’s having an impact. Doubt is creeping in among the far-right faithful.
Trump would rather golf and rant on Truth Social about Biden and “disloyal” Republicans than work to persuade voters and energize volunteers. He can’t even pretend to engage in the hard work of getting elected.
Trump’s campaign may be foundering, but Harris still needs our help. Donate what you can to help her win this November.
Thankfully, things don’t look any better for them now.
President Joe Biden dropped his reelection bid on July 21, and even though two and half weeks have passed, Donald Trump refuses to accept the reality that he will now face Vice President Kamala Harris in November. Instead, Trump’s clinging to bizarre fantasies like this one:
“What are the chances that Crooked Joe Biden … CRASHES the Democrat National Convention and tries to take back the Nomination, beginning with challenging me to another DEBATE,” he wrote Tuesday on Truth Social.
While everyone else has moved on, Trump can’t let go, whining to everyone who’ll listen.
“It’s unfair that I beat [Biden] and now I have to beat her, too,” Trump groused in a phone call to an ally last weekend, according to The Washington Post.
Every day that he’s mentally battling Biden is a day he’s not focused on running against the real Democratic nominee. And it shows in his most recent efforts to attack Harris, including calling her “Kamabla” for some reason. “Kamabla” is—what? Is it supposed to sound foreign and scary, like the way he writes “Barack HUSSEIN Obama”? The last thing Trump should want to do is remind a major swing demographic—suburban college-educated white women—of his racism and sexism, and yet he’s going all-in on both.
Donald Trump at Trump National Golf Club in Virginia on Nov. 26, 2020.
But really, everything about Trump now seems old and tired. He looks old and tired, and he sounds old and tired. He’s basically just an old man yelling at a cloud now. His insults, once effective, lack punch.
He can’t even manage to hit the campaign trail much these days. In the six weeks since his infamous June 27 debate with Biden, Trump has held just eight campaign rallies, not including the Republican National Convention, according to The Washington Post. Those rallies include ones held in Florida, Minnesota, and Virginia—none of those battleground states. At best, he’s held just five electorally significant rallies in six weeks. And he’s got only one rally scheduled for the week ahead—in Montana, which he won in 2020 by 16 percentage points. So, not a battleground.
Of course, to Trump, his low-energy campaign is everyone else’s fault. Here’s The Washington Post again:
We’ll tackle Trump’s ground game in a bit, but this was a particularly sage line from that same story: “‘It’s easy to live in Donald Trump’s head,’ one Harris aide wrote, suggesting a story about crowd size now that Harris draws a crowd as big or larger than Trump’s rallies.”
On Wednesday, Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, drew 15,000 at a rally in Detroit, and her campaign is trolling Trump—on his own Truth Social site, no less—by comparing Harris’ and Trump’s crowd sizes at the same Philadelphia venue: Tuesday’s Harris-Walz rally drew 14,000, while Trump’s June 22 rally drew a paltry 4,000.
The Harris campaign posted this on Truth Social, Trump’s own social media site.
And it’s clearly getting to Trump.
“If Kamala has 1,000 people at a Rally, the Press goes ‘crazy,’ and talks about how ‘big’ it was - And she pays for her ‘Crowd.’ When I have a Rally, and 100,000 people show up, the Fake News doesn’t talk about it, THEY REFUSE TO MENTION CROWD SIZE. The Fake News is the Enemy of the People!” he wrote Thursday morning on Truth Social, tossing in a few lies for good measure.
Crowd sizes aren’t the be-all, end-all of campaigns, but for Trump, they hold mythical status. At a recent rally in Georgia, seeing the empty seats in the audience, he blamed the “very liberal school” (Georgia State University) for undermining his rally by allegedly not allowing more people into the venue.
That Georgia rally was a disaster for Trump for another reason too. Rather than treat the audience to an uplifting, motivating experience, Trump used his speech to attack the state’s very popular Republican governor, Brian Kemp.
“He’s a bad guy. He’s a disloyal guy,” Trump said of Kemp. He also referred to him as “Little Brian Kemp” and claimed Georgia had “gone to hell” under his leadership.
Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp and his wife, Marty Kemp, in the city of Marietta on Nov. 3, 2022.
“Atlanta is like a killing field, and your governor ought to get off his ass and do something about it,” he said at one point. He even attacked Kemp’s wife, Marty Kemp, who said she isn’t planning to vote for Trump.
Remember those swing voters in the suburbs? They’re the reason Kemp won this newly minted battleground state—which elected a Democratic president and two Democratic senators—by a relatively comfortable 53-46 margin in 2022. And Georgia Republicans are understandably livid about Trump’s speech.
Let’s talk about Trump’s ground game.
Over the past several cycles, Democrats have refined their get-out-the-vote game. And while there is always room to grow—young voters don’t turn out at high enough rates, for one—Democrats have a well-oiled machine, a collaboration between the party and key advocacy groups to maximize effectiveness.
Republicans, on the other hand … it’s always been a bit of a mess. Some of you may remember Project ORCA from 2012, and how this tech-heavy GOTV effort collapsed on Election Day. Still, they haven’t needed GOTV programs as much. They largely rely on older, whiter voters, who are among the most likely to turn out. And Republican voter-suppression efforts have always made it much harder to vote in urban areas, with nefarious officials doing things like closing polling places and limiting ballot drop boxes.
But Trump takes Republicans’ GOTV dysfunction to new levels. For instance, after he installed his preferred leaders at the Republican National Committee earlier this year, they slashed staffers … including much of their planned GOTV operation.
“The RNC had been planning an extensive field program,” The Washington Post reported recently. “Those now-discarded plans included 88 staff members and 12 offices, and goals to knock on 3 million doors and make 2.4 million phone calls, in Pennsylvania. In Arizona, the RNC’s plan called for 62 staffers and seven offices, aiming for 558,000 voter contacts.”
Even those plans paled in comparison to the Harris campaign and the Democratic Party’s 1,300 staff members across 250 field offices, but it was something. Instead, Trump and his allies have outsourced a good deal of their field operation to his grifter friends, like Charlie Kirk at Turning Point USA.
“Once spurned by top officials at the Republican National Committee, Turning Point’s stature has rapidly grown from a controversial student movement into one of the most active organizations in conservative politics,” Politico reported in June. ”Now, Turning Point is pouring tens of millions of dollars into an ambitious get-out-the-vote operation in three battleground states, making the 2024 election a major test of the organization’s operations—with ramifications not only for Kirk and his organization, but for Trump and the GOP at large.”
Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk onstage before the Republican National Convention on July 14, 2024, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
Problem is, Turning Point has little experience doing GOTV. Its single effort—Arizona in 2022—ended up with Democrats out-hustling Republicans and winning the governorship, the offices of secretary of state and attorney general, as well as a U.S. Senate race. Yet that showing somehow earned Kirk and his organization Trump’s blessing for 2024.
With Trump and his party largely checked out of GOTV, it comes down to Kirk and about 50 other conservative organizations to manage turnout, and they’re seeing it as … well, you gotta read this to believe it: “‘Everyone sees the marketplace here,’ a prominent Republican involved in one of the efforts said. ‘Everyone sees the campaign isn’t doing it, and there is a huge opportunity.’”
It’s a market opportunity. No matter where you look, the grift is strong in the MAGA world.
It’s possible that Trump is already realizing his mistake. According to The Washington Post, “[Trump] has begun hearing from outside allies that he does not have a significant ground game in key battleground states.” And with three months left before Election Day, good luck with that. (Even worse for them, mail voting opens in North Carolina in less than one month, on Sept. 6.)
It may not be too late for Republicans to cobble together something more legitimate, but an effective ground game isn’t something you whip up in a matter of weeks, especially when it’s meant to counter the program that Democrats have been building all year.
The good political instincts Trump once possessed have abandoned him in the past eight years. He’s now left rambling about his petty personal grievances, boring his crowds, lowering morale, and suppressing his own supporters’ enthusiasm.
We ourselves were there not too long ago. We know how much it sucks and how hard it was to motivate casual voters to engage. But now it’s Republicans’ turn to wear the “old, addled man” albatross around their necks. They look across the aisle and see the excitement around Harris and Walz, the size of the crowds, the enormous sums of money they’re raising, and it’s having an impact. Doubt is creeping in among the far-right faithful.
Trump would rather golf and rant on Truth Social about Biden and “disloyal” Republicans than work to persuade voters and energize volunteers. He can’t even pretend to engage in the hard work of getting elected.
Trump’s campaign may be foundering, but Harris still needs our help. Donate what you can to help her win this November.