" />

The Moderate Voice

An Internet hub with domestic and international news, analysis, original reporting, and popular features from the left, center, indies, centrists, moderates, and right


You are here: Home / Donald Trump / TROUBLED DAYS FOR A DIMINISHING DONALD TRUMP

TROUBLED DAYS FOR A DIMINISHING DONALD TRUMP

by Leave a Comment

Things have not been going well for former President Donald Trump. In fact, they’ve gone so badly that former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie says a frantic Trump has been reverting to his “best hits.” Some analyists have compared today’s Donald Trump to the “Fat Elvis,” an aging entertainer coasting on longtime familiar riffs who is not who he used to be.

How bad are things going for Donald Trump?

1. Trump’s appearance before the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) was a disaster. It made a nuclear explosion look like a fart at Taco Bell.

What was televised was bad enough: Trump acting angry and defiant as three African-American journalsts questioned him…Trump serving up a litney of lies…then questionining whether his rival for the presidency Vice President Kamala Harris was really black or was an Asian who suddenly “became” black for political reasons. MSNBC called it a “train wreck” – which was a compliment to what took place and an insult to train wrecks.

But what came out later was equally damning. Trump blamed his hour delay in appearing onstage on an association audio problem but that (too) was a lie. According to Axios, Trump wouldn’t go on because they were going to fact check him and he refused to be fact checked. They were just about to announce that he wouldn’t be appearing when he walked out onstage. Some attributed Trump’s raising the race issue to impulse, others attritubed it to strategy. It is now a Trump/MAGA riff. Trump is playing the race card.

2. Trump’s poll numbers have been going down since President Joe Biden announced he would’t run and Harris took the torch and ran with it raising tons of cash and talking to wildly enthusiastic, overflow campaign audiences. She has now taken the lead in the Real Clear Politics averge of polls. Can this change? Yes. But for now she’s clearly on the upswing nationally and in many swing states.

3. Trump was sidely condemned for congradulating Russia President Vladimir Putin for making “another great deal” in the major hostage exchange of U.S. and Russian prisoners. This is likely to hurt him with independent voters or Republicans who may be ready to divorce themselves from MAGA.

4. He did a campaign stop in Atlanta and got most coverage for his angry attack on Georgia Governor Brian Kemp because Kemp wouldn’t help Trump overturn 2020 presidential election results. And then, for good measure he threw in some insults aimed at Kemp’s wife and other Georgia Republicans. Trumps track record of being political poison to Georgia Republicans is likely to continue.

5. Trump and the GOP had prepared for a campaign that would hammer away at the issue of Biden’s age, energy, and perceived cognitative issues. Biden received widespread mainstream and conservative media scrutiny. But now Trump is the oldest person in the race and his age and cognitive issues (word salads, slurring, mixing words together or saying a meaningless word) is receiving the scruity. The age issue lives on with Trump, at 78, the oldest Presidential candidate in American history.

6. Trump’s political schtick has gotten old and a feature of his rallies is now some audience members heading for the exits before he’s done.

EJ. Dionne in the Washington Post:

But here is why 2024 may be Trump’s undoing: We have been here for nine long years. When Trump went after Hillary Clinton in 2016, the media didn’t know what to do with him, and Democrats did not know how to respond. Journalists debated for years over whether Trump’s lies should, in fact, be called lies. (Pretty much all outlets finally decided a lie is a lie.) In 2016, Democrats underestimated Trump right to the end. There’s none of that now.

Trump was so novel and such a viewer-magnet that his harangues were often shown in full on cable television. Sometimes, the media preferred showing empty lecterns anticipating Trump’s arrival to broadcasting the words of his foes in either party. And, for a while in 2016, the media occasionally rationalized their decisions by blaming Clinton for not being interesting enough. That’s not happening anymore. Or, at least, not to the same degree because Trump’s act has grown tired and often boring, as his Republican convention speech showed.

Since election night 2016, the greatest fear in the guild of political analysts has been writing off Trump prematurely again. And, yes, the polls show a tight race. But you can’t explain Harris’s surge or Trump’s distemper unless you acknowledge that the world has not stood still since the showman first came down that escalator. Trump and the media will make a big mistake by fighting and covering the last war.

USA Today’s Rex Huppke:

Folks, I think Vice President Kamala Harris has broken Donald Trump.

I mean, it’s fair to say he was already broken – in all ways, really – but since Harris became the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee July 21, the GOP’s favorite felon and presidential nominee has been crumbling before our eyes.

Following up his leaning-hard-into-racism moment at last week’s National Association of Black Journalists convention, where he bizarrely suggested Harris only recently “happened to turn Black,” Trump held a Saturday rally in Atlanta that was a festival of ranting and raving, arguably the worst display of Trump’s snarling id we’ve seen in some time.

[…]Then Biden dropped out and endorsed Harris. And people started to realize that Vance is a weirdo. Since then, the wheels have come off the GOP’s wagon, and Trump has backslid into a somehow worse version of the Trump whom voters sent packing in 2020. He’s panicked and flailing. Quicker than ever to default to the racism that has always undergirded his worldview.

The man has been Kamala-cized.

[…]There’s plenty of time for Trump and his campaign to regain footing or for Harris to make missteps that swing things back in the Republicans’ direction.

But it’s clear that Trump is rattled, and that his usual tricks of hurling insults and invective aren’t working. In fact, the smiling calm of the Harris campaign is making Trump’s cruelty look worse than ever. That’s why the label “weird” has been sticking. For many, it’s all getting a bit tiresome.

And that just makes Trump angrier, and worse.

We have a long way to go until November, folks. But where we stand here and now, Trump looks like he’s broken. Broken and running scared.