Signs That Trump (and Trumpists) Are Scared
The more bravado they attempt to show, the more they reveal their fear.
Disclaimer: This post consists primarily of tea-leaf reading. Past performance is not indicative of future results. Do not operate heavy machinery while reading this post. But please stick with me.
For the past few months, I’ve been noticing signs of Trump and his campaign fraying around the edges. (I won’t refer to it as “unraveling” quite yet, because Trump has a history of pulling some unexpected rabbit out of his hat that changes, if not the trajectory, then at least the energy of his political campaigns.)
That fraying started, of course, when President Biden stepped aside and what Trump thought was a certainty was now entirely upended. “Unfair!” he whined. “Illegal!” he cried. Neither of those things were true, but that didn’t hinder Trump’s self-pity, nor did it prevent him from perpetuating those lies among his followers.
But the fraying didn’t end there. He didn’t regroup and recalibrate his campaign strategy, if he ever had a strategy other than outsized knee-jerk responses. No, he continued portraying himself as the injured party, as he always has.
He did add one facet to his campaign or, rather, he moved something to the foreground that had previously been in the background. Now that he was running against a female candidate of mixed racial heritage, he confidently placed his racism and misogyny center stage.
If you look closely at recent campaign related events, however, there are some signs that he’s still not feeling too confident about his campaign on the whole, despite all of his public-facing bluster.
Debates
In his only debate with Kamala Harris, Trump was the mop and Kamala was the janitor. In other words, she mopped the floor with him. Over the course of the debate, we all witnessed his blood pressure gradually rising to a crescendo while Harris remained cool, calm, and in control.
In the aftermath of that evening’s events, he knew he lost, and lost badly. Consequently, he has refused to do any more debates, using the flimsy excuse that early voting has already started. But here’s a reminder: In 2016, in the election in which Trump prevailed, early voting started on September 23. All three presidential debates that year were held after early voting had begun — on September 26, October 9, and October 19. There was no such objection to participating in any of those debates.
A more recent excuse, made to Kelly Anne Conway on Fox Nation, is that the debates are rigged. He used the word “stacked.” Of course, he claims that everything is stacked against him. The debates are rigged. Voting is rigged. The news media are rigged. Even on the day before the Vice Presidential debate, he was already whining that it was rigged against Vance. The bottom line: He’s afraid.
Panic Posts
In the wake of the revelations in Jack Smith’s recently filed superseding indictment in the D.C. insurrection case, Trump has reverted to his ALL CAPS STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS POSTS on his financially failing social media platform. Use of the CAPS LOCK key is always a “tell” when something has gotten under his skin, and he’s been using it a lot lately, even before this most recent legal milestone.
Given the detail included in Jack Smith’s filing, including plenty of specific damning sworn testimony from Mike Pence, Trump has good reason to panic, perhaps more than ever before.
In hindsight, perhaps it wasn’t the best idea for Trump to unleash an angry mob on his most loyal acolyte.
Polling
It’s foolish to think that polling numbers at any point in a campaign are guaranteed to be accurate predictors of election outcomes. That said, since the beginning of Harris’ campaign, polling numbers have consistently gotten worse for Trump and better for Harris. Don’t get me wrong. It’s still a very close race, one in which every vote will matter.
Yet, according to the combined polls, the more people hear from Trump, the less they like him; the more people hear from Harris, the more they like her.
That trend has to be getting under Trump’s very thin skin.
Dwindling MAGA Enthusiasm
Despite the occasional Darwin Award finalist running through Category 4 hurricane winds with a Trump flag, there is dwindling support even among his most devoted cultists.
Crowd size is dwindling at Trump rallies and, conversely, it’s increasing at Harris/Walz events. Lately, Trump has been blaming his crowd size on the Secret Service. He’s even claimed, after being restricted for security reasons by the Secret Service to a relatively small rally venue that held a couple thousand people, that there were “40,000 to 50,000” supporters who were denied admission.
Trump supporters are leaving rallies early, bored by Trump’s endless repetitive blather. They’ve seen and heard it all before. There’s video footage of this phenomenon all over the internet, with streams of attendees departing rally venues while Trump’s rant can still be heard over the loudspeaker. His rallies these days consist of a combination of the same old grievances he’s always had — most of which center around his perpetual victimhood — and an occasional new crackpot conspiracy theory.
There have been numerous reports from various parts of the country that Trump yard signs are conspicuously absent compared to his previous campaigns, even in deep red states. Is this an indication of flagging support? Or have his supporters merely spent so much money on useless Trump merchandise that they can’t afford to purchase the yard signs?
The Trump/Vance campaign has no ground game to speak of. There are very few campaign offices, no grassroots Get-Out-The-Vote effort to speak of. One reason that’s been cited for that failure is a lack of funding. Trump seems to be relying on his personal magnetism, such as it is, to attract voters. He’s managed to wrestle back the media spotlight in the last couple of weeks, which gives him free campaign publicity nationwide. But it’s questionable whether than can make up for lack of local organizing and GOTV efforts.
He needs money (or perhaps I should say, he wants someone else’s money). Harris and Walz are out-raising him in money, mostly with individual small dollar donations. Trump may have millions in dark money behind him. But while huge contributions to superPACs from megadonors may help him with things like advertising and his mounting legal fees, the megadonors themselves still only have one vote each (assuming they’re U.S. citizens). The encouraging thing for the Harris/Walz campaign — aside from their success in out-raising the Trump/Vance campaign — is that those individual small donors also represent voter enthusiasm. We’ll know more detail after October 15, which is the Federal Elections Commission filing deadline for quarterly reporting.
There’s been a spike in his hawking of merchandise. Wildly overpriced Trump watches. Melania’s book. Worthless coins with his face on them. Cheesy gold sneakers. Shotgun shell concho bracelets and necklaces with his name on the concho. (That one will make the ammosexuals happy.) Coffee mugs with his mugshot. Trinkets with his ear-nick fist pump photo. The proceeds may go to his campaign or they may go directly into his pockets. Given his decades-long history of sketchy accounting practices, it’s hard to tell. But he may be squirreling away money for life after politics.
In what certainly seems like desperation, he’s been threatening the very voters that he needs, trying to frighten them into voting for him. For example, on September 19, he told two separate Jewish audiences that, if they failed to vote for him, “the Jewish people would have a lot to do with a loss.” He went even further by saying that the state of Israel would no longer exist if he weren’t elected.
Grasping at Straws
Trump and his campaign have been focusing their attacks on the most inconsequential things, because they haven’t been able to come up with any meaningful attacks on either Harris or Walz. Their attacks mostly have been throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks and, so far, none of it does.
For a while, they were perseverating about Harris’ college employment record. Did she lie when she said she had worked at McDonalds? They got stuck on that, simply because she didn’t include her college summer job on her professional resume.
They tried to characterize Tim Walz as a liar because he used the term “IVF” instead of “IUI” to describe his wife’s and his procreation process. (Remember, this accusation comes from the spokespeople for a guy with 33,000+ documented lies while he was in office and countless others since then.)
The campaign and Trump’s MAGA allies have spread rumors about immigrants being paid to attend Kamala Harris’ rallies. This lie does double duty because it disparages immigrants AND it calls into question the legitimacy of the crowd sizes at Harris’ rallies. (It’s always about the cult leader’s obsession with crowd size.)
Much of the above is speculation, as previously noted. But taken in its totality, a picture emerges of a campaign that is on shaky ground, nearly three months after the change at the top of the Democratic ticket and just about a month away from Election Day.
Should Trump’s campaign shakiness provide a glimmer of hope for Harris and her supporters? Only time — and actual votes — will tell.