From our friends at The Atlantic:
This Is What a Losing Campaign Looks Like
How does Donald Trump’s running mate have so much time on his hands?
By
David Frum
September 18, 2024
A first draft of this story opened: “It’s not every day that a candidate for vice president of the United States rage-tweets at you.”
Backspace, backspace, backspace. Although it’s
not every day that a candidate for vice president of the United States
rage-tweets at me personally, it is almost every day that Senator J. D. Vance rage-tweets at
somebody. (I had tweeted, in part, this: “The difference: The upsetting things said by Trump and Vance are not true. The upsetting things said about Trump and Vance are true.” Vance responded: “I’d say the most important difference is that people on your team tried to kill Donald Trump twice.”)
But then
here he was yesterday, for example, quote-tweeting one of the English-speaking world’s premier apologists for the Assad dictatorship in Syria, in order to assail Hillary Clinton. On September 14, he
was mixing it up in the X comments with a reporter for
The Intercept and the host of an online talk show.
In other words, to have J. D. Vance as your own personal reply guy is not such an accomplishment.
But it raises the question of how a nominee for vice president has so much time on his hands. Can you imagine, say, Dick Cheney, scrolling through his mentions, getting irritated, and firing off a retort? Neither can I.
So here’s my second draft: What we’ve been seeing from Trump-Vance is not the behavior of a winning campaign.
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 Trump’s 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 York’s 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.
Yesterday, Trump
posted a pledge on his Truth Social platform to restore the deductibility of state and local taxes. That’s an important issue for upper-income taxpayers in tax-heavy New York. Trump did not mention that he himself, as president,
signed the legislation that capped state and local deductibility at the first $10,000, to help fund the Republican tax cut of 2017.
Vice President Kamala Harris has been driving a message of abortion rights and middle-income-oriented economic policy in must-win states. She sat for back-to-back solo interviews, both in Pennsylvania,
the first with a local ABC affiliate,
the second with the National Association of Black Journalists on the Philadelphia public station WHYY.
Trump’s main message of the week, meanwhile, has been that he was not wrong to accuse Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, of stealing and eating pets—a message that has put him at odds with the state’s Republican governor and local mayors and police chiefs. The only thing Trump said that made more impact were the four words he
posted Sunday morning: I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT!