Donald's Fallen Down. So Why Can't He Get Up? (Josh Marshall, TPM)

"...he is painting a picture of himself as lost and weak — still complaining about money spent on Joe Biden, repeatedly trying to get out of debates, insisting he’s not weird. It’s all very defensive, unfocused and, more than anything else, tired."

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/donalds-fallen-down-so-why-cant-he-get-up/sharetoken/64f66da2-d3a3-4537-a66a-27e85bd889a4

August 26, 2024 2:54 p.m.

Excerpt:

. . . Since then, Trump’s campaign has gone from one line of attack to the next without any of them seeming to gain traction. As with everything else about Donald Trump, he is the campaign. It is an immediate emanation of him in a way that simply applies to no other major presidential candidate. A friend asked me over the weekend why there is still this cottage industry of reporting about Trump’s frustrations, enthusiasms, pet peeves and more, staffers’ efforts to get him to focus, to not lash out, as though he were an entitled billionaire’s preschooler in the care of a troop of overwhelmed nannies or governesses. Nothing like this exists, she noted, for any other politician or presidential candidate. And she is absolutely right about that. It’s part of the laziness of much of the national political press and the reality distortion vortex that surrounds Trump.

But this kind of reporting isn’t entirely off base or without utility. We don’t know what Kamala Harris’ personal feeling or mood is at the moment. We assume that she and her campaign have a strategy and they’re working to execute it. We assume that, like most adults would, she’s going to work at that regardless of whether she’s feeling up or down or angry or hurt on a particular day. Similarly, the very few people who have some real read on her mood or what’s going on in her head at the moment are not going to be discussing that with reporters, except perhaps obliquely and rarely.

But it’s not just that Trump has crazy moods and an incredibly leaky campaign. It matters more because Trump’s campaigns are, and his presidency was, entirely an expression of him. When Joe Biden’s age, stamina and focus were a topic of constant conversation and speculation, his defenders would point out that a presidency isn’t the work of a single individual. There’s a huge array of people just in the White House, let alone throughout the administration. They operate under the broad guidance of the President and a small subset of questions and tasks come directly to the President. But it’s not a Tom Cruise movie. It’s not some endless series of feats of strength. If the President needs to take a nap, that’s actually fine. Vladimir Putin isn’t waiting for him to nod off in order to launch some secret attack. With Donald Trump, though, in his presidency and especially in his campaigns, it really is all him. His momentary moods, changes of focus, attention really do matter quite a lot if you’re trying to understand what’s happening.

Trump’s 2016 campaign originally was almost entirely him, until the final months, with a few flunkies and third-string campaign hands mostly carrying out orders at his direction. His 2020 campaign was far more amply staffed. But the same basic dynamic remained. His 2024 effort had been much more stable, with two campaign co-chairs with little personal drama who seemed to keep Trump mostly focused through the campaign. But nothing’s been the same since July 21st. On Saturday, the Post published a story on his current funk. The title tells the tale: Trump allies try to energize him as he struggles to adapt to Harris. The article describes Trump’s apparent unwillingness to campaign hard in a campaign in which he is now at least a bit behind. He’s impatient with staffers who are trying to keep him focused on a small set of policy issues which move the public in his favor — mainly inflation and immigration. He’s mainly focused on a series of weird complaints and huffy denials that his campaign is going poorly. He’s still doing a very limited number of campaign events and, according to the Post article, he’s leaning into August as the time of the year he hangs out with family and focuses on golfing everyday. His handlers can clearly see what he apparently can’t, which is that with all this chatter taken together he is painting a picture of himself as lost and weak — still complaining about money spent on Joe Biden, repeatedly trying to get out of debates, insisting he’s not weird. It’s all very defensive, unfocused and, more than anything else, tired.

. . .more

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/donalds-fallen-down-so-why-cant-he-get-up/sharetoken/64f66da2-d3a3-4537-a66a-27e85bd889a4