He Can't Do It
Pundits who say the Trump campaign lacks a strategy for running against Harris still don't understand what drives the candidate
Donald Trump can’t pivot.
Almost three weeks after Joe Biden exited the presidential race, his one-time opponent was in Montana still campaigning against him:
We’re gonna get Joe Biden out of the White House. What’s he doing now? What’s he doing? You know, he wanted to debate. If we didn’t have a debate he’d still be there. Can you imagine? If we didn’t have a debate—why the hell did I debate him? How did he do? Do you think he’s happy? Do you think he’s happy with the—I don’t think so. He’s not too happy. You know they took [the nomination] away from him. They really did. They took it away. The guy had fourteen million votes, [Harris] had none.
. . . . .
Four weeks ago, think of it, four weeks ago the media said [Harris] was grossly incompetent, and I said oh this is gonna to be an easy race. She didn’t have a chance of beating me, she couldn’t do anything, they wanted to get her out, they thought she should resign with crooked Joe Biden—what do you like better, it doesn’t matter anymore but what do you like better? [POLLS AUDIENCE] Crooked Joe or Sleepy Joe? Sleepy Joe? Crooked Joe? Okay ready? They’re both correct. I think Crooked Joe is more correct than—you like, all right, ready? Crooked first, right? What do you like better? Crooked Joe? [AUDIENCE CHEERS] Or Sleepy Joe? [AUDIENCE CHEERS] Crooked seems to aways win, I mean he’s a crooked guy. All he had to do is—think of it, if he didn’t do the debate he’d still be running, they’d be saying how great he is, he’s a brilliant man, wonderful guy, really at the top of his game.
Trump so desperately wants to run against Biden—a candidate he believes he was ready to defeat handily—that he is suspended in time. Leading his supporters through the Biden name-calling routine he’s been using for years, Trump behaved as if it were still six weeks ago, when he was on offense and Biden was struggling.
Now he is immobilized.
Facing a new opponent who has unified her party and galvanized pro-democracy Americans against him, Trump is unable to accept the world he now finds himself in.
When I say incapable, I mean it literally. Trump’s pathological lying superimposes whatever he wants the world to be on however the world really is. If he wants the 2020 election to have been stolen, then it was stolen. If he wants January 6 to have been a non-violent protest, then that’s what it was. If he wants violent crime to be worse today than when he was in office, then so be it. Or border crossings. Or unemployment. He will assert as real whatever builds him up and suits his purposes, then live in the reality he creates.
For years, his supporters have willingly lived there with him, while Republican party elites who know it’s all fabricated have been too craven to confront him. That’s how he’s been able to build a political career around his pathology.
But his pathology will fail him politically in those rare instances when reality is immutable. It failed him on January 6 when Mike Pence refused to go along with the fabrication that there was a valid reason to discard electoral votes.
It’s failing him now.
Nothing Trump does can bring Biden back as his opponent. His lament about the debate reveals that at some level he knows it. “Why the hell did I debate him?,” he asks out loud. “If he didn’t do the debate he’d still be running.”
The wise and rational thing for Trump to do would be to adjust to the new conditions that external reality has cooked up.
That’s what Biden did when he saw his party desert him. Dropping out of the race wasn’t on anyone’s radar before the debate, but within three weeks Biden made the calculation that he couldn’t recover from the fallout and acted accordingly.
Of course, Trump is neither wise nor rational. He cannot redirect without facing up to a situation that has to be terrifying to him.
Recalibrating his campaign to run against Kamala Harris requires accepting a lot of difficult facts.
It requires accepting that the strategy Trump had been using effectively against an old and frail opponent is now irrelevant.
It requires accepting that he’s trailing in the polls.
It requires accepting that his crowds are smaller than hers.
It requires accepting that his best efforts may lead to defeat. And defeat raises the possibility of prison.
Trump cannot accept these facts.
So he acts out like an angry patron demanding to speak to the manager about how he’s being cheated out of what is rightfully his and he’s just not going to accept it. He had everything set up for victory before Democrats turned the tables on him, and that’s unfair. Like a toddler, he melts into a tantrum when faced with something he doesn’t like that he can’t change or wish away.
When Trump emerged on the political scene, I wrote extensively about how the psychological is political in the Trump era, and anyone who tries to impose a standard political framework on his behavior is destined to be confounded when Trump doesn’t behave like any other political candidate would. I remain confounded—although perhaps I shouldn’t be—by how many political analysts act as if they still don’t understand this.
Anyone puzzled by why the Trump campaign hasn’t pivoted to Harris doesn’t understand it. Anyone puzzled by Trump’s continued diatribes against Biden doesn’t understand it.
[Trump] cannot redirect without facing up to a situation that has to be terrifying to him.
Meanwhile, in the world as it is, the Trump campaign has genuinely difficult decisions to make.
The strategic and tactical necessities of running against an ebullient Kamala Harris are entirely different than anything the Trump campaign was prepared to do. They have very little time to define Harris before she successfully defines herself, as she has started to do during a week’s worth of successful rallies and which she will be able to continue doing at next week’s Democratic convention. And they need to recalibrate their message, which turned heavily on presenting an energetic contrast to a lumbering opponent—a message which now threatens to boomerang on their 78-year-old standard bearer.
Ultimately, however, the campaign’s biggest liability will be the candidate himself.
Curiously, Trump announced that he will stay off the campaign trail until the DNC has concluded in two weeks, thus ceding the playing field to his opponent at a time when she is surging. It’s not clear whether this is his own doing or the decision of his handlers, who after watching Trump’s unhinged press conference last week must recognize that putting him in front of the cameras can do more damage than letting the campaign go dark.
Neither option is helpful to them, but what choice do they have? Ultimately, the success of a campaign rests with the candidate, and the Trump campaign is saddled with a candidate incapable of rationally addressing the biggest challenge he has faced in his political career.
Donald Trump is battling ghosts. He can’t quit Joe Biden.
This column calls to mind images of Hitler in his bunker, calling for non-existent Panzer corps to be thrown against the advancing Allies.
And, what whirlwind will we reap when the millions of MAGA faithful find out that the wizard has no powers? They can't very well admit that it was all a fever dream and that they just wanted to rage against the fading of their white, christian, male, entitled light, can they? So will they insist, along with their leader, that they have once again been cheated by [one or more "other" groups or powerful individuals]? Will that result in more violence? We live in exceedingly dangerous times.