Trump Ends Campaign Driven By Ego, Confidence, And a Love of Headfakes

That’s why he’s going to blue states. And that’s why he won’t appear with Nikki Haley.

Donald Trump gestures at supporters as he exits the stage at the end of a campaign rally at Mullet Arena in Tempe, Arizona. (Photo by Rebecca NOBLE / AFP)

DONALD TRUMP HAS ALMOST NO SHOT at winning deep blue New Mexico. He has, perhaps, only a slightly better chance in Virginia. But that’s a pipe dream, too.

And yet, the ex-president is spending critical hours during the closing days of the presidential campaign in each state: hosting a rally in Albuquerque on Thursday followed by one in Salem, Virginia on Saturday.

The use of the campaign’s most precious commodity—time—on unrealistic targets owes largely to one reason: ego. The former president thinks he can win both states, despite private data showing otherwise. And as campaign advisers have repeatedly said, this is his campaign, and if he wants to rally in New Mexico, Virginia, New York, California, or anywhere else, he will.

“We’re the Trump campaign: we’re gonna go where the fuck we wanna go, and too bad if you don’t get it,” a senior Trump adviser said when asked about the blue-state rally schedule.

The two campaign stops are one of the purer distillations of how Trump is operating in his third White House run: both imbued with confidence and thirsty for a blowout victory that would quiet any critic who claims there is a ceiling to his political appeal. It is a tactic driven more by swagger than pushing figurative pawns on the Electoral College chessboard. 

But beyond vibes, the blue-state swing is also a tactical headfake to make Trump seem like a winner who is expanding the map, said a Republican operative familiar with the campaign’s operations. As evidence that it was largely illusionary, the operative noted that GOP polling shows Trump down about 12 percentage points in New Mexico and 7 points in Virginia (polling averages show Vice President Kamala Harris leading by 7 and 6 points, respectively, in the two states).

“He’s doing a strategy of inevitability. Trump’s audience isn’t in New Mexico or Virginia. His audience is a swing voter who is one of the few undecideds in the swing states who are moved by the idea that, ‘holy shit, he’s winning in Democratic states, I’m going to go with the winning team,” said the operative, who didn’t want to go on record dismissing Trump’s chances.

“It’s all a show. The presidential election is about who gets the biggest share of media attention every day. And he’ll get more coverage going to Albuquerque, New Mexico than going to Milwaukee, Wisconsin again.”

The use of spectacle as a political tool has been a predominant feature of Trump’s time in politics. But it’s been amplified this cycle. In the past few weeks, he’s ventured to the Coachella music festival in California and Madison Square Garden in New York—blue-state bedrocks that he will not flip. He’s done unconventional, oddball stunts as well, such as Wednesday when he rode around in a garbage truck to highlight derisive comments made by President Joe Biden in apparent reference to MAGA supporters. Trump then gave a speech in Green Bay, Wisconsin while wearing a garbage man’s industrial safety vest.

But there are opportunity costs to these gimmicks and swings. A trip to California, Virginia, or New Mexico takes time and costs money and is not geared towards ramping up voter interest or registrations in the seven battleground states.

There is a chance that Trump’s blue-state trips might help boost Republican turnout for some congressional races, such as New Mexico’s second congressional district or California’s forty-first. But even Republicans familiar with House campaigns say there has been no real coordination with the Trump campaign over turnout strategy, and the two seats the GOP is eyeing in Virginia, the seventh and second congressional district, aren’t near Trump’s rally city of Salem, anyway.

“This isn’t about control of Congress,” a Trump adviser confided. “This is a ‘he wants it, we do it’ kind of thing.”

At the New Mexico rally on Thursday, Trump hinted at another reason for the visit entirely: “I’m here for one simple reason,” he explained. “I like you very much, and it’s good for my credentials with the Hispanic or Latino community.” 

There was a point this summer, after President Joe Biden’s disastrous debate performance, when Virginia tightened. But operatives on both sides of the political aisle say the race has reset again to its usual political patterns. They say the same is true of New Mexico, though that state is more deeply Democratic than Virginia. 

On a conference call Thursday, a senior Harris campaign official downplayed that either of those locations, or others Trump has hinted at flipping, were in play, even while noting that they weren’t leaving them unattended. “We’re never looking away from places like New Hampshire, and Virginia, New Mexico. We have organizations in all those states. We are tracking data very regularly there and we see very strong support across the board in those states,” the official said.

Still, Republican Senate candidate Nella Domenici insists that New Mexico is “in play” for the first time in two decades. And in recent days, Trump’s team and supporters have similarly pushed the narrative that his map is expanding while Harris’s is closing. On Tuesday, after Harris’s campaign shifted its TV ad spending around, Trump’s campaign co-manager, Virginia-based consultant Chris LaCivita, posted on X that she’s “giving up on North Carolina..pulling money out.   Maybe to drop in Virginia to try and stop the slide ?”

In reality, a Harris campaign aide said the opposite had occurred. The campaign had added to its ad buy in North Carolina but reserved more than needed. The refund on its purchase was spun by Trump world as a pull back. Harris’s campaign is still spending about $1.3 million on TV in the final week in North Carolina while the Trump campaign is on pace to spend about $3.2 million, according to the media tracking firm AdImpact. 

“The Harris campaign has increased its buy in North Carolina,” Governor Roy Cooper told CNN on Wednesday. “She’s here today. She’s coming Saturday.”

So is Trump, for two North Carolina events on Saturday.

As for Virginia, Harris does not appear to be going. She doesn’t have to, said Ben Tribbett, a top Democratic consultant in the state who has occasionally worked with—and more often worked against—LaCivita.

“Even if things went south for us nationally, there is just a firewall in northern Virginia against Trump that is just not crackable. These are federal people,” he said. “If Hampton Roads went to hell, if the Richmond suburbs somehow collapsed, if Viginia got close statewide, you’re not going to crack NOVA.”

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SURE, TRUMP IS WILD-CATTING AROUND in a garbage truck in Wisconsin and taking two blue-state detours in the final days of the campaign. But there’s one event he’s not going to do: a townhall with his erstwhile appointee-turned-primary-rival Nikki Haley.

For weeks, Trump’s campaign co-manager Susie Wiles and Haley’s top adviser Jon Lerner were trying to organize a unity event, but the schedules just never seemed to line up. 

Both camps downplayed any tension, but the reality is that neither Trump nor Haley indicated they wanted to appear next to the other. 

Though the two sides were in talks for a joint appearance at a Sean Hannity townhall—as The Bulwark first reported October 17—Trump made clear the next day that he was annoyed at the idea that he needed Haley.

“I’ll do what I have to do,” Trump hurriedly said when asked in a Fox & Friends interview about her joining him on the campaign trail. “But let me just tell you: Nikki Haley and I fought, and I beat her by 50, 60, 90 points. I beat her in her own state by numbers that nobody’s ever been beaten by. I beat Nikki badly.”

He kept going: “And they keep talking about Nikki, Nikki. I like Nikki. Nikki, I don’t think, should have done what she did, and that’s fine that she did it. But even in her own state—in South Carolina, where she was the governor—I beat her. . . . And then they say, ‘Oh, when is Nikki coming back in?’ Nikki is in. Nikki is helping us already.”

That’s true. Haley has fundraised for him and issued a robocall where she repeated her line from the Republican National Convention that voters don’t have to agree with Trump all the time to support him. Even though she hasn’t appeared with Trump, she seemed to go out of her way Wednesday in a Pennsylvania stop for Senate candidate Dave McCormick to call on Republicans to “take the emotion out” and vote for Trump.

“Nikki endorsed President Trump and remains committed to sending him back to the White House. She’s been happy to help where the campaign felt she was best utilized,” her spokeswoman Chaney Denton said, calling the campaign a “team effort.”

But Haley was clearly troubled by Trump’s controversial Madison Square Garden rally Sunday when a comedian joked about Puerto Rico as a trash island and compared unchecked immigration to unprotected sex with Latinos. Haley, appearing two days later on Fox News’ Special Report, started off by saying she’s “on standby” for the Trump campaign. “They know that we would be there to help . . . we’re on the same team.” 

Then, without prompting, she ripped the event.

“This is not a time to have anyone criticize Puerto Rico or Latinos. This is not a time for them to get overly masculine with this bromance thing that they’ve got going. Fifty three percent of the electorate are women. Women will vote. They care about how they’re being talked to,” she said, adding that another speaker suggested Harris was a prostitute and that an Elon Musk super PAC ad called Harris “the C Word.”

“That is not the way to win women,” she said. “That is not the way to win people who are concerned about Trump style.”

With surrogates like that, who needs a townhall anyway?

Sam Stein contributed reporting