Trump Is Trying Hard to Lose
He’s more erratic than ever—and right as the campaign comes to a close.
CANCELING EVENTS, LESS CAREFULLY BLENDING his BBQ-sauce-tinted bronzer, admiring Arnold Palmer’s pecker, empathizing with Harvey Weinstein, cursing before Catholic priests, lamenting a fictional loss of cows, and going full fascist. This is Donald Trump’s final sales pitch to voters.
Is he trying to lose?
Assuredly not. Trump is obsessed with winning. But, still, it’s hard to imagine a less constructive close to a campaign. Are any still-wavering voters swayed by Trump’s latest lies about January 6th, or his authoritarian plans for his critics, let alone his fondness for The King’s large penis?
We should assume some Trump campaign staffers—specifically those who are not part of the sprawling nepotism racket—have explained to him that undecided voters broke for him over Hillary Clinton by 18 percent in 2016. A focused message at the eleventh hour can be decisive.
But Trump is increasingly incoherent and unstable and doesn’t seem to care if voters know it. Last week he pulled out of scheduled interviews with NBC and CNBC and an appearance at an NRA event, raising questions about his physical and mental state. He is clearly tired. After Politico reported Friday that someone on his campaign said Trump is “exhausted,” he appeared to fall asleep at a campaign event that day.
Fatigue is costing Trump whatever self-control he has left.
Last week he paused a town hall after two attendees had medical incidents. But rather than continue the Q&A, he asked the audience if anyone else wanted to faint, then said: “Let’s not do any more questions. Let’s just listen to music. Let’s make it into a music. Who the hell wants to hear questions, right?” He proceeded to play music from his campaign’s playlist for nearly 40 minutes, during which he swayed like a drunk old man at the corner of the party everyone chooses to ignore.
Two days later, Trump once more couldn’t pretend to be serious even after something of far greater consequence occurred. Following the killing of Yahya Sinwar—the most important moment for Israel’s security since Hamas undertook the massacre that Sinwar had planned on October 7, 2023—Trump and his campaign were silent for an entire day. When asked by reporters to respond, Trump criticized President Biden for constraining Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and then said, “my reaction is he was not a good person. That’s my reaction. That’s sometimes what happens.” He didn’t mention the hostages.
Trump appears quite committed to this lazy, undisciplined, even presumptuous approach to the last stage of the campaign.
He taunted his fat supporters over the weekend with a call for their wives to get the “pigs” off the couch to vote for him.
In recent days, he has suggested Abraham Lincoln should have “settled” the Civil War.
He said Harris should be investigated and removed from the ticket because 60 Minutes edited their interview with her.
He said he would demand, in a conversation with Rupert Murdoch, that Fox News stop running ads he doesn’t like, and cut appearances with guests who support Harris, for the remainder of the campaign.
Other media outlets are a source of intense focus and frustration for Trump, as well. He is angry at ABC News for fact-checking him during the presidential debate, and he said 60 Minutes should be taken off the air and that CBS should lose their license for the edits the show made. As for that show, he told Howard Kurtz in an interview that aired Sunday: “We’re going to subpoena their records,” and he wrote on Truth Social, “RELEASE THE TAPES FOR THE GOOD OF AMERICA. We can do it the nice way, or the hard way!” 60 Minutes responded on Sunday by noting that Trump’s accusations are “false” and reminding viewers that Trump chose not to sit down with the network.
Kurtz and other Fox News hosts have tried helping Trump out, but to no avail. Twice in as many days, the ex-president has refused to back off statements about domestic political opponents being “the enemy within”—people like Rep. Adam Schiff and Nancy and Paul Pelosi, who he says are “sick” and should be “handled” by the military. Instead, Trump has tripled down.
Facing a staggering gender gap, Trump called Harris “a shit vice president” on Saturday night, two days after crapping on Nikki Haley, whom his campaign is hoping to include at a rally in the next two weeks. When asked on the curvy couch at Fox & Friends about reports he would deploy Haley on the campaign trail, Trump said, “I beat her in her own state by numbers that nobody’s ever been beaten by. I beat Nikki badly.”
By alienating the very demographic he needs to close out this election, Trump almost looks like he wants to blow this.
Of course, Trump is also lying as he breathes. His fake story about John Deere seemed quite self destructive—even for Trump—three weeks out from Election Day. No, he didn’t threaten tariffs on the farm equipment company and cause them to scrap their plans for a plant in Mexico, as he said at the Economic Club of Chicago.
Trump’s special sauce—of ignorance and incoherence mixed with his narcissism—is getting freakier. At a Univision town hall, a voter, speaking in Spanish, pushed him on the lies he has spread that migrants in Springfield, Ohio were eating pets. Trump said he was reiterating “what was reported” and then pivoted to the burdens placed on a town where thousands of immigrants settled, “most of whom don’t speak the language at all.”
His response to a Florida voter asking whether numerous natural disasters had caused him to reconsider his position on climate change was sheer lunacy. Elsewhere at the town hall, one man who identified himself as a Republican said he was concerned about Trump’s role in the January 6th riots. Trump not only defended the rioters but associated himself with them.
“They thought the election was a rigged election, and that’s why they came,” he said, adding falsely: “There were no guns down there. We didn’t have guns. The others had guns, but we didn’t have guns.” He concluded by calling it “a day of love.”
BEING AROUND UNDECIDED VOTERS clearly just wasn’t Trump’s jam. He’s used to sycophants. And the expressions in the faces of the audience members—a mix of confusion and incredulity—said it all.
After his Univision appearance, Trump shared a conspiracy that the government “staged” the January 6th riot at the Capitol. His new insurrection branding campaign includes repeating this lie about the rioters being unarmed.
But he went even further on a podcast hosted by Dan Bongino, asking why the defendants from that day are “still being held,” and complaining: “Nobody’s ever been treated like this. Maybe the Japanese during the Second World War, frankly. They were held, too.” Comparing Japanese Americans held in internment camps with rioters who attacked the U.S. Capitol—that’s as crazy as it is outrageous.
Trump is clearly tired of the campaign and not interested in pretending anymore. He told an audience in Detroit last week that his “liberation day” is coming. He just wants the power back he once held, power he can abuse far more than he did when he had to face re-election in 2020. He trusts that he’s winning and doesn’t need to persuade undecided voters, he just needs to make it to November 5, when an army of Americans is ready to disrupt the process on his behalf in order to block a Harris victory.
While Trump has called this campaign “the final battle,” he is treating it almost like a joke. The recklessness he exhibited in October makes it clear he is more unmoored from reality than we previously thought. His victory would be ever more dangerous than what we have feared.