David Frum: This Is What a Losing Campaign Looks Like - The stink of impending defeat fills the air [View all]
The day before Vance tweeted at me, former President Donald Trump was livestreaming to promote a dubious new cryptocurrency venture. That same day, he gave an interview to the conspiracy theorist Wayne Allyn Root in which Trump reverted to old form to denounce mail-in voting because the U.S. Postal Service could not be trusted to deliver pro-Trump votes fairly.
The day before that, the Secret Service had fired upon a man with a rifle near Trumps West Palm Beach golf course. The apparent assassination attempt drove the headlines, but beneath the story was the reality that a candidate for president took a day off to golf only 50 days before Election Day.
Trump golfs a lot, and campaigns surprisingly infrequently. When he does campaign events, he makes odd choices of venue: Today, he will appear in New Yorks Nassau County. New York State has not voted Republican for president since 1984. In 2020, Trump won 38 percent of the New York vote. Yet Trump has convinced himself, or somebody has convinced him, that this year he might be competitive in New York
Rarely, if ever, has a presidential campaign collapsed from seeming assurance into utter chaos as Trump-Vance has
The stink of impending defeat fills the airand so much of the defeat would be self-inflicted.
https://politicalwire.com/2024/09/18/this-is-what-a-losing-campaign-looks-like/
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2024/09/trump-vance-x-campaign-losing/679924/