Donald Trump Has No Idea What Has Hit Him, and It’s a Joy to Watch (2024)

It continues. Six days ago, TheNew York Times rana story under the headline “Inside the Worst Three Weeks of Donald Trump’s2024 Campaign.” Usually, when the country’s most important newspaper runs astory like that, the candidate pays a little attention and the ship begins toright itself. But in this case, it’s just gotten worse. The ship is capsizing,and the captain is losing his marbles.

Right after that story ran, Trumpcame out with his wild accusation that Kamala Harris’s crowd of thousands at aDetroit airplane hangar was fake. The next night, he did that weird, to borrowan au courant word, interview with Elon Musk, where he made more WTF commentsthan I can recount, capped by his vow to move to Venezuela (a country ruled bya corrupt autocrat who just cheated massively in this month’s election) if heloses. On Wednesday, he gave a rambling speech at a North Carolina rally.

Then, on Thursday, we had a littletaste of some peakTrump crazy. He claimed Harris is responsible for a law inCalifornia that says it’s OK to stealfrom a grocery store as long as your take is under $950. (This is not what the lawsays.) He made strange comments about Cheerios. He lectured Jews (at alater event) about how if the Democrats win, Jewish people “don’t have achance” in America, sayingof Harris—whose husband is Jewish—that “she doesn’t like Jewish people. Youknow it, I know it, and everybody knows it, and nobody wants to say it.” And wecan’t forget the assertion that more than 100 percent of recent U.S. jobs havegone to migrants.

But wait. These are just theappetizers! Then he called Harris a “Communist” and said the country under herleadership would devolve into a commie dystopia in which “everyone gets healthcare” (the horror!). And then, the pièce de résistance: At the Jewishevent, he praised Miriam Adelson, the huge Trump donor and widow of SheldonAdelson, mentioning that he’d given her a Presidential Medal of Freedom, whichhe noted was the civilian equivalent of the Congressional Medal of Honor (givento military veterans) but was “actually much better” because people who receivethe latter medal are “either in very bad shape because they’ve been hit so manytimes by bullets, or they’re dead.”

You know how they say in sportsthat an opponent has gotten inside the other team’s head? Well, Harris and TimWalz have certainly gotten inside Trump’s head. Walz’s “weird” comment, whichTrump has also responded to in a, well, sort of weird way, was just the start. Harrishas also smartly refused to take the GOP campaign’s bait, like when Trumpattacked her race and J.D. Vance tried to make her childlessness an issue.Meanwhile, the Harris-Walz campaign trollsTrump in its press releases with snarky language I don’t recall Joe Biden’sor Hillary Clinton’s campaigns using. It sends the message, which must drivehim nuts, that they don’t fear him at all.

Meanwhile, what else is Harrisdoing? Starting to unveil an economic package that, so far anyway, looks prettygreat. It’s aimed straight at middle-class voters and focused on housing andgrocery prices. You can’t get more kitchen table than that. And the bit about goingafter corporate price gougers is great. It sends a nice populist signalthat she’s willing to make some enemies.

We’re coming up on a month now ofHarris being the candidate. That isn’t much time, granted, and of course therace is still in margin-of-error territory and at some point, Trump is bound tofind his footing and quit flailing as desperately as he has been.

But all that said, the Harriscampaign has been as shrewd as any presidential campaign I’ve ever seen. Herstump speech is excellent. The choice of Walz was great—their personalchemistry is so evident in that video they just released of the two of themchatting about spicy food and whatnot (the right is trying to gin up outrageover Walz saying he eats “white-guy tacos”). The focus on family economicsrecognizes a potential Harris weak spot and establishes the campaign as notbeing out of touch. They just haven’t done one thing wrong yet.

And it shows in the numbers. Rightafter Harris got in, FiveThirtyEight had her ahead of Trump by 0.8 percent. Thatalready represented a significant jump over where Biden was. Her lead then dippedto 0.2 percent for a short time. Today, she’s up2.9 percent. That’s obviously still close, but the movement is clear. Andif the convention goes as well as these past four weeks have, she may startbuilding up a lead that dances just outside the margin of error. She has alsoreversed the trend in the key swing states, where she now leads narrowly or istied in every state (evenNevada, where Biden was seven or eight points behind).

And Trump is a hot mess. He’sfacing a problem he’s never faced. In 2016, he was running against a very knownquantity whom the right had been instructing Americans to hate for 25 years. In2020, he was running against someone who’d been around for nearly 50 years. He’sspent his time since losing that 2020 race sitting around thinking about hisrematch with that opponent.

And now suddenly he’s runningagainst someone else, and to his shock, the more America sees of her (so far),the more America kinda likes her. He can’t understand this, and he simply can’tstand it. Trump’s like a predatory animal in a literal sense. Since he has noconscience, he’s all instinct, and his instinct is to find his prey’s weaknessand go after it over and over.