How Long Until Trump Fires His Campaign Managers?
Chris and Susie best be sleeping with one eye open.
1. Pear-Shaped
One of the Iron Laws of Trumpism is that it’s always someone else’s fault. So when Donald Trump looks out today and surveys the world, someone will have to be blamed.
From the jump, I want to make it clear that none of this is based on insider reporting. I’ve been at the beach for 10 days so I’m coming to the world with entirely fresh eyes. And what I see suggests that Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles could be in trouble.
Take a walk with me.
For starters, the reality is just plain bad. Donald Trump does not care about pointy-headed election models or fancy-analysis. But he understands big-picture stuff. And here are some big pictures:
Not only is he losing, but he hasn’t touched bottom and Kamala Harris hasn’t found her ceiling.
Trump understands crowd size, too. Not because it tells you anything about the Electoral College but because it is a proxy, in his lizard brain, for energy—and energy equals strength.
Trump sees what’s going on in this sphere, too:
Just how big was the crowd at Vice President Kamala Harris Las Vegas rally Saturday?
Her campaign put out a news release Sunday afternoon saying it’d been 12,000.
The Reno Gazette Journal had reported 17,000.
The best current estimate, based on new information from the campaign, is about 15,000 with 4,000 turned away.
You know what else Trump understands? Money. And boy oh boy . . .
Not. Good.
Especially because the DJT stock was supposed to be his nest egg—the token that established generational wealth and made him an actual, real-deal billionaire.
There’s other stuff that probably registers at a subconscious level with Trump.
The JD Vance pick has turned into a fiasco. Vance is a laughingstock and it’s been widely reported that Trump was pushed into the pick by a combination of Tucker Carlson, Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and Don Jr.
And speaking of Elon, there was the Twitter fiasco last night in which Trump looked like a lispy, beta simp. It’s one thing for Ron DeSantis to get goaded into doing a low-rent interview on an unstable platform filled with amateur-hour tech glitches. But for the former president to also get used by Musk in an effort to prop up his failing company?
Believe me: If there’s one thing Trump hates more than looking stupid, it’s other people using him to make money. Especially when Trump’s own platform is cratering.1
More humiliations are coming. Trump’s convention speech was watched by 28.4 million viewers. Next week, Kamala Harris’s speech is going to blow that number away.
Since none of this can be Trump’s fault, someone is going to have to pay.
2. Blame Shifting
Who’s it going to be?
Trump would probably love to fire JD Vance, but can’t. And he can’t fire Tucker, Elon, or Don Jr. either.
He can’t fire Kamala. Or the mouth-breathers retail investors who are bailing on his stock.
He can’t even fire the Secret Service people who allowed a sniper onto a rooftop.
But you know whom he could fire?