How Trump Can Blow It, Again
Republicans left their national convention convinced that a sweeping victory awaits them in November, but Milwaukee highlighted the Trump campaign’s delusional incompetence and the GOP’s electoral peril
By Mark Cromer
Kamala Harris can beat Donald Trump. Say that again: Kamala Harris can beat Donald Trump.
It’s worth repeating because, like it or not, it is true. Very true.
And the Republican Party, from its leadership to its base, should be chanting that fact to itself like a mantra each and every day as a reminder that in their wild-eyed belief that Trump will easily wipe the electoral floor with Harris they are paving the road to their own obliteration.
For years, the GOP has been yammering about Harris being a do-nothing DEI pick who is almost as incapable as her boss is of stringing a coherent sentence together or articulating a substantive policy initiative. The Republicans taunted the Democrats with ‘Make My Day’ dares to pass the torch to her so they could have the exquisite satisfaction of watching Trump eat her alive at the ballot box. The GOP’s water boys on Fox News have goofed on and guffawed at everything from Harris’s laugh to her looks to her tendency to nod affirmatively as she’s making a point during a speech.
Well, Republicans, be careful what you wish for.
After all that brave trash talk about Harris, the sycophants of The Donald are now staring at national polling that shows the race to essentially be a toss-up, with the Real Clear Politics polling averages giving Trump a 1.6 percent edge as of July 23rd, an eyelash of a lead that’s so deep in the margin of error as to be irrelevant. And that follows the convention and the assassination attempt, indicating that neither event produced a significant swing of the needle for Trump.
It’s anybody’s game right now.
There’s no question that last week’s Republican National Convention was a historic event that offered the former president, still freshly wounded from an assassination attempt, along with the assembled party bigwigs, delegates and activists, an amazing platform from which to reach the American people and make a united case for returning Trump to the White House. Supporters, detractors and undecideds alike would all be tuning in to watch the return of the man who within seconds of being shot in the face at a rally rose to his feet and raised a clenched fist over his blood-streaked face to shout ‘Fight! Fight! Fight!’ as Old Glory fluttered above.
It was such an unbelievably iconic moment that powerfully framed Trump’s true grit in that instant that the Left predictably couldn’t bring themselves to believe it. Within hours if not minutes of the attempt on Trump’s life the claim that the shooting was a false flag operation staged to elicit mass sympathy and respect for Trump was running neck and neck with those on the Left that understood the shooting was very real indeed but were publicly mourning its failure to kill the former president.
Within moments of the attempted assassination of Trump, the American people were once more treated to a blood-chilling demonstration of just how deep so much of the Left has descended into utter homicidal depravity.
In a matter of seconds, the presidential campaign of 2024 was scrambled in a manner that left the Democrats even more off-balance as they had to contend with not only whether or not to continue on with their stalking horse candidate Joe Biden, whose physical decline, mental deterioration and political decomposing continued to be captured on camera in real time, but now how to proceed with their campaign against Trump.
The electrified convention that showcased a unified and energized GOP clearly added to the Democrats despair that was rapidly growing into despondency, particularly as it appeared President Biden’s handlers had successfully warded off intraparty efforts to retire the cutout in favor of a November Hail Mary pass thrown by a younger quarterback called off the bench late in the fourth quarter.
Yet by the time the balloons dropped with Trump and his running mate Sen. J.D. Vance assembled with their families onstage at the Fiserv Forum, the GOP had inadvertently revealed weaknesses that could provide the Democrats with a pathway to a come-from-behind victory on Election Day.
And those weaknesses can be summed up in one word: Trump.
His hour and a half acceptance speech, the longest ever by far among a candidate from the two major parties, dissolved into another riff about his greatness and his first term of magical accomplishments, including brazenly gaslighting his way through a declaration that he built the wall. “I will end the illegal immigration crisis by closing our border and finishing the wall, most of which I’ve already built,” Trump offered in a reality-free boast. “On the wall, we were dealing with a very difficult Congress, and I said ‘Oh, that’s okay. We won’t go to Congress.’ I call it an invasion. We gave our military almost $800 billion. I said ‘I’m going to take a little bit of that money because this is an invasion’ and we built…most of the wall is already built.”
It’s not surprising Trump would once again feed a bald-faced lie to the very adoring masses he betrayed with his failure to accomplish his signature campaign vow—to build the wall—during a first term in which the Republicans controlled both the House and the Senate for the first two critical years when he had an unobstructed window to deliver the primary job he was elected to perform.
Instead, Trump was willingly rolled and cornholed by Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan, the open-border and mass immigration GOP zealots who got Trump to focus on corporate tax cuts instead. By the time Trump was voted out of office in 2020, he had built approximately 52 miles of ‘wall’ and repaired another 458 miles of fencing on the southern border. Trump’s betrayal played a pivotal role in costing him enough of the white working-class vote, particularly men, that he lost Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia and Arizona in 2020 and the presidency along with them.
Trump’s hallucinatory state continued on stage in Milwaukee as he mused about his Gandalf-like ability to cast spells that end regional conflicts and ward off global wars. “We have no wars. I could stop wars with just a telephone call. I could stop wars with just a telephone call,” Trump told the ecstatic crowd. His telephonic prowess at ending global conflicts is so unimaginably impressive that he had to repeat it, lest anyone miss or doubt it.
This is Trump’s template on the stump: repeat everything as often as possible to take what otherwise would be a tight and convincing 30-minute address that would successfully advance a policy initiative and bury it in a two-and-a-half-hour blizzard of Trump babble, leaving his salivating on-air throat-holsters at Fox News marveling at how long he can talk.
By the end of his acceptance speech, it was surprising that Trump didn’t rip off his jacket, as Hulk Hogan did with his own shirt earlier in the evening, revealing a Jetpack and launch himself off the arena stage, through the roof and into the night sky as the revival-goers writhed in orgasmic ecstasy below.
Trump’s indulgence in some long-playing self-revelry is certainly understandable given his literal near-death experience, but it also serves as a reminder that he finds it very difficult if not impossible to focus on clear and concise objectives and coherently promote them as vital policy initiatives and not another testament to his own greatness.
Democrats were desperate to run against Trump in 2024 for a reason and the convention, as exhilarating as it was for the Republicans, reminded them why.
If Trump remains focused on Trump and runs his campaign accordingly, Harris is poised to not only keep the Oval Office for the Democrats but well positioned to help them hold on to the Senate and retake the House. While Harris is certainly burdened by the Biden Administration’s dismal record on a variety of critical issues that dominate the priority list for most American voters as well as her political record in her home state of California, where her fellow progressives continue to wreak havoc with their cultist edicts issued from Sacramento and city halls, that may matter little if Trump can’t coherently make a convincing affirmative case for his return to the White House.
Trump’s campaign must draw the correct conclusions from his disastrous performance in 2020 and his resulting loss of an election that he should have won handily against Biden and recalibrate accordingly.
Doing so should not be difficult, at least on paper.
Going forward, Trump should set a hard ceiling of 30 minutes for his addresses at campaign rallies and events, eliminating the excessive hour or two more he usually spends repeating himself. Speaking in a loop-like-fashion for two or more hours at a time is not a qualification for the presidency. Laying out specific policies with some detail that are designed to address national issues is, however, and that requires him to prepare, focus and execute with consistency.
In Trump’s case, less is definitely more in 2024.
As he works the stump, Trump must zero in on three domestic issues that resonate mightily with voters—immigration, crime and the economy—and stay focused on them. No more long verbal forays into all that he has done and plans to do for Israel, no more fantasy role-playing out loud his foreign policy make-believes about Ukraine, NATO or Taiwan.
Most of the American people and the voters he needs to win in November don’t really care about Ukraine’s existence when the United States is being overrun and dissolved right in front of them.
Since one can’t honestly or adequately confront and resolve virtually any significant issue in America today without first addressing mass immigration into the United States, Trump must make this the touchstone of his campaign once again but instead of blathering about all that he claims to have accomplished he needs to debut a tight, decisive plan to shut down the border (hint: declare a state of emergency and deploy the military), carryout scaled-up interior enforcement and eliminate the migration pull factors.
Again, this will require him to be prepared, focused and limited to tight 30-minute time frames. Not his strong suit but at least conceivably doable.
On crime, Trump should stick to the same template but focus on escalating federal law enforcement presence in hotspots around the country—New York, Baltimore, Chicago, San Francisco, Seattle and Los Angeles would be good starts—and explaining in detail how he intends to bring the hammer down on states and jurisdictions that insist on maintaining policies that cycle career criminals back onto the streets.
Trump has to make the case that mass waves of wanton criminality can only be answered with mass incarceration. The only thing diversion programs have accomplished is more quickly directing professional predators back on the streets to further terrorize their victims. But in order to credibly accomplish this, Trump has to stop bragging about his promoting and then signing the disastrous First Step Act, which poured tens of thousands of convicted criminals back onto the streets. He must acknowledge it was a mistake that he’s learned from and vow to unleash an updated and more aggressive version of the 1994 crime bill while never allowing Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner anywhere near public policy decisions again.
Again, Trump must be focused and remain on message. Set the stage, describe the problem and deliver a detailed policy as the solution. All within a tidy 30 minutes, like a Beatles concert circa 1964-66. Then say goodnight and off to the next show.
As far as the economy is concerned, like crime and immigration it’s an easy sell for Trump to explain what a shitshow the country has wallowed in since 2020, but he must quickly take responsibility for the mistakes that were made under his watch (acknowledging them would be a sign of strength and accountability, versus his usual penchant to play crybaby and blame everyone else) and then offer his plan to ignite a mass reshoring of living wage manufacturing jobs that will provide millions of American citizens with living wages and protective benefits.
There can be no equivocating or half-measures, a Marshall Plan for America is in order, a reindustrialization on steroids. Wall Street’s hedge funds, venture capital groups and private equity firms can either get on board or get the hell out of the way, but durable goods and every other manner of consumer products must once again be made in America and provide a future-building wage to the citizens who make them.
And Trump has to be able to offer a fairly detailed outline in 30 minutes or less of how he intends to make such a massive reinvestment into America’s heartland happen, hitting all the policy keynotes and narrative heartbeats in a coherent and linear manner. Here is where we are, here is where we are going and here is how I am going to get us there.
The difficulty for Trump is the discipline this will require to deliver it consistently over the next three months. He has to be disciplined on the campaign trail and he has to be disciplined during any debates with Harris. Trump’s first debate appearance with Biden in late September 2020 proved to be a disastrous affair for the president, whose constant interruptions and heckling of Biden made him appear unhinged and prevented the public from watching Biden’s brain fog at work.
It’s not too much to say that Trump’s first debate performance against Biden in the fall of 2020 played a critical role his subsequent loss little over a month later. While Trump did somewhat restrain himself with Biden last month, to devastating effect, Harris will prove to be a much different candidate on stage with Trump than Biden was and will offer a different set of opportunities and risks for Trump.
One thing is certain: name-calling isn’t going to cut it.
If Trump decides against or is incapable of running a serious campaign in the closing months of the race and chooses instead to vamp around the country in his traveling wrestling exhibition road show, bragging about himself and taunting Harris with schoolyard insults like ‘Cackling Kamala’ or, heaven forbid, overtly correlating his surviving the assassination attempt with God divinely ordaining his return to the White House, then he better get used to Harris’s laugh because she’s going to have the last one of the campaign at his expense.
There should be no mistake that a Harris campaign will reinvigorate and reunite the Democrats, energizing the party’s core voting blocs of blacks, women and the college-groomed, self-described ‘elites’ whose distaste for America has cemented their role within the party’s leadership. The heartbeats of the Harris campaign will include issues like access to abortion and appeals to end what they call “gun violence” by curtailing the right to own guns (versus calling out violent crime by cracking down on violent criminals).
But the real focus of the Harris campaign’s core messaging will be Trump himself. He will continue to be painted as Trump the congenital liar. Trump the spastic bully. Trump the chaotic charlatan.
For all the talk about a Trump landslide, one only need to review the electoral map and Trump’s tenuous leads in the battleground states to understand that the 2024 election in all likelihood will come down to whether Trump can hold onto his losing 2020 electoral haul and recapture several of the key states he won in 2016 but lost the second time around. The good news for Republicans is that Trump appears likely to fold Arizona and Georgia back into his column, though his lead in Georgia has already been shaved by Harris to just three percent, according to polling analyst Nate Silver.
Trump also seems in a better position to pick up Nevada, which he lost in both 2016 and 2020, and there appears to be at least an even chance that he holds onto the slim lead he currently enjoys in Virginia and possibly rolls that into his ledger in November. If the Old Dominion goes for Trump in 2024, it will be the first time it has been carried by a GOP standard-bearer in 20 years and would almost certainly spell doom for Harris as it would mean Trump could lose the entire ‘Blue Wall’ of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin but would still win the election.
But Trump’s campaign should consider bringing at least one of those Rust Belt states back into Trump’s column as an absolute do-or-die proposition and go all-out to achieve it, relegating any other unexpected wins to the status of gravy. The priority of winning Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin was clearly a major consideration in the campaign’s wise selection of Vance as the nominee for Vice President, but Trump has to do more if he wants to prevail in at least one if not all three of those states.
And the key to doing that is simple enough: It’s the white vote, stupid.
White working and middleclass Americans, the single largest voting bloc in the country, will once more play their decisive role in deciding who the next president of the United States will be and Trump’s ability to expand the turnout of white working-class voters and run up his margin with them, especially in these three key states, will determine his fate in November.
If he can restore his baseline numbers among white voters to what he pulled in 2016 (57-percent to Clinton’s 37-percent) and enlarge their turnout by even just two or three percent in those key states, he will win another term decisively.
Whether that stark reality sinks in with Trump and motivates him to start directly addressing the vast majority of his voting base by name—as he rightly has for black and Latino voters—and inspires him to detail how another term in office for him will benefit white voters, their families, their communities and their future or not remains unclear, but the clock is ticking and Trump’s track record is not encouraging.
Trump has a real chance at becoming only the second president in American history to be elected to nonconsecutive terms.
But precisely because he is Trump, he is also perfectly capable of blowing it, again.