Trump Stepped on a Rake Yesterday—and He Knew It

The speech in Lititz, Pennsylvania was pure grievance. Privately, campaign staff groaned.

Former President Donald Trump walks out to speak at a campaign rally held in Lititz, Pennsylvania on Sunday, November 3, 2024. (Photo by Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images)

DONALD TRUMP DOESN’T ADMIT TO MISTAKES, but he knew he made one Sunday morning.

For 96 minutes, at his first of his three rallies that day, Trump barely looked at his teleprompter. He darkly obsessed about election fraud, railed against polls showing him down, and savaged the “bloodsuckers” in the news media, adding he wouldn’t mind if “the fake news” took an assassin’s bullet for him.

The crowd laughed. Privately, campaign staffers groaned. Trump sounded as if he were losing. And this was no way to start the week or close out a presidential campaign with three days left until Election Day.

“He knew after he got off stage,” said a confidant who spoke with Trump afterward about the Lititz, Pennsylvania rally Sunday morning and relayed the ex-president’s frame of mind to The Bulwark on condition of anonymity. The source would not disclose the contents of the conversation, but said Trump tacitly acknowledged he should’ve stuck more to the script.

“The thing about Donald Trump,” the confidant said, “is that, even when goes off, he knows it’s not necessary to be mad or litigate grievances about 2020. It helps them. It hurts you.”

Whatever was specifically said by and to Trump after the morning rally, the message to dial it back was agreed to by all aboard the subsequent plane ride to North Carolina with the senior staffers in tow: co-campaign managers Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles, senior advisers Taylor Budowich, Jason Miller, Stephen Miller, Steven Cheung, and donor and confidant Steve Witkoff. At the next rally, in Kinston, North Carolina, and then in Macon, Georgia, Trump was more subdued. In fact, he was so subdued that he was mocked by critics as “low energy.” But, from the campaign’s perspective, at least there was no more talk about reporters as human shields.

“There wasn’t a come-to-Jesus talk with Trump. We don’t have those, really. It was just making adjustments on the fly, kind of typical,” said another source, a consultant connected to the campaign who, along with the Trump confidant, provided information about its inner workings for this report.

Beyond the distraction of the controversial rhetoric, the consultant said, what was damaging about the rally was Trump’s demeanor: “We’re going to win this. But he sounded like he thought he was losing.”

Efforts to fine-tune Trump to the proper calibration between fiery and inflammatory have been a feature throughout his time in politics. And as the Sunday “adjustments” show, it often takes a village of advisers to nudge him back on track, but he first has to be receptive to doing it. During his first run for office, he spent much of the close sticking to script and keeping a relatively low profile. This time around has been different, with the ex-president musing about how he should have remained in office after losing in 2020, calling pollsters who showed bad results for him his enemy, and offering cryptic warnings to, among others, Michelle Obama.

Part of the issue is that Trump himself has changed. He is 78 now. And with a campaign that revolves so heavily around his moods, his multi-state travel schedule—in which he’s held multiple rallies each day—are proving exhausting. That’s amplified when, as on Sunday, Trump woke up angry to a trifecta of bad news:

• On Saturday afternoon, well-respected pollster J. Ann Selzer released an Iowa survey through the Des Moines Register and USA Today’s news network that showed Trump losing the red state to Vice President Kamala Harris by three points. It triggered an avalanche of negative coverage that reinforced the narrative of how much women dislike Trump. Top Trump pollster Tony Fabrizio and the campaign’s chief data consultant, Tim Saler, whipped up a memo to staunch the flow of negative coverage.

• Later that evening, NBC gave Harris a cameo on Saturday Night Live, a precious dose of earned media on a highly watched show, something producer Lorne Michaels had explicitly said he wouldn’t do. The Trump campaign was apoplectic.

• On Sunday morning, polling from the New York Times—a publication the former Manhattanite can’t quit—suggested he would lose the race because he was marginally trailing Harris in select swing states. Once again, Fabrizio and Saler drafted and published a pushback memo flyspecking the poll’s internals.

“This was as much about pushing back on the media as it was placating the boss. He was infuriated,” said a campaign adviser. “But all of us trust Tony’s numbers, including the boss.”

The adviser added two pertinent notes: “In Tony, we trust” and, nevertheless, “Sunday morning sucked.”

Evidence of how much it sucked was visible in Trump’s speech that morning, which illustrated a candidate rattled by the news and, in turn, rattling his own campaign. 

At one point, as Trump rambled on stage, Wiles deliberately walked into his line of sight and appeared to glower at him. Some observers assumed she was expressing her displeasure with his off-script comments about “the fake news” as human shields that were already starting to burn up social media. But a campaign adviser said she was just out there trying to make eye contact to let him know he needed to wrap up the speech because it stretched on too long. Either way, it didn’t work. He kept rambling.

Backstage in Lititz, after Trump aired his grievances, his mood started to brighten. The New York Times polling wasn’t causing many waves—eclipsed, in part, by the shock caused by his own remarks—and NBC had agreed to give him free air time on Sunday Night Football and NASCAR in order to provide equal time to each candidate after the Saturday Night Live cameo with Harris.

So campaign staff arranged American flags as a backdrop that Trump stood in front of as he shot a 90-second spot backstage that hit all the high points he should have driven home while actually onstage.

“Remember,” Trump said. “Kamala and her friends broke it. I alone can fix it.”