Meet The New Trump

Same as the old Trump.

Opinion

Trump’s ‘disciplined’ campaign is unraveling

The out of control Trump — suppressed in recent months with varying degrees of success — is back.

For the last year, we’ve been hearing about the “disciplined,” “competent” and “professional” campaign Donald Trump is running. After his chaotic 2016 and 2020 campaigns, he brought in longtime Republican operatives Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita to lead a “low-drama” operation.

Well, the cat lady is out of the bag.

The trauma caused by the broadly panned choice of Sen. JD Vance as a running mate, combined with President Biden’s withdrawal from the race and the massive outpouring of support for Vice President Harris, have had a terrible effect on Trump: They have caused him to revert to being himself.

Discipline has broken down, and the out-of-control Trump — suppressed in recent months with varying degrees of success — is back on full display.

“Christians, get out and vote just this time,” he told an evangelical audience a week ago. “In four years, you don’t have to vote again. We’ll have it fixed so good you’re not going to have to vote.”

His Fox News ally Laura Ingraham tried to tone down this apparent promise by Trump to make this election America’s last. “You will leave office after four years?” she asked him.

“Of course,” Trump replied. “By the way, and I did last time.”

How reassuring.

Vance, for his part, defended his attack on Harris and other people who do not have children as “childless cat ladies,” even as other Vance comments came to light, calling for a “war” against those who say it’s okay not to have children, attacking the “childless cabal” and proposing that people with children should have more votes in elections than the childless, who are “sad, lonely, pathetic.”

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Vance stood by “the substance of what I said” about cat ladies. “I’m sorry,” he told interviewer Megyn Kelly. “It is true.”

Campaigning in Reno, Vance expanded his oeuvre of ugliness, invoking the racist “great replacement” conspiracy theory. Harris, he said, “won’t stop until every single illegal immigrant that she let in becomes a voter, handing over control of your country to people who shouldn’t even be here.”

And then came Trump’s tour de force at a gathering of the National Association of Black Journalists, where he repeatedly attacked his questioners and challenged the ethnicity of Harris, the daughter of an Indian mother and a Jamaican father who went to Howard University and joined the Black sorority Alpha Kappa Alpha. “She was always of Indian heritage and she was only promoting Indian heritage,” Trump said on Wednesday. “I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn Black. And now she became a Black person.”

As if that weren’t evidence enough that the Trump campaign has gone off the rails, Trump ally and former adviser Sebastian Gorka could be seen on television calling Harris “a disaster whose only qualification is having a vagina and the right skin color. She’s a DEI hire, right? She’s a woman, she’s colored. Therefore she’s got to be good.”

And there on Fox News was host Jesse Watters, a Trump mouthpiece, telling viewers that he “heard the scientists say the other day that when a man votes for a woman, he actually transitions into a woman.”

Also on that esteemed network, Sen. John Neely Kennedy (R-La.), a frequent Trump surrogate, repeatedly called Harris a “ding dong” while also faulting her for giggling and identifying her as a “loon.” The host, Neil Cavuto, criticized the “bash-a-thon of name-calling at her” as “dumb” and asked, “Do you worry how that comes across?”

Kennedy did not.

The dog whistles are trumpets and fog horns and tornado sirens. The GOP message is clear:

It's bad to be a woman, and it's bad to be black, and it's bad to have anything to do with any kind of immigrant.

Neither was Trump spokesman Steven Cheung concerned about appearances, taking to social media to attack “the pieces of sh-- in the media” and the Harris campaign.

Trump, that paragon of self-control, was on Truth Social this week posting or reposting messages declaring Nancy Pelosi “BAT S--- CRAZY” and an “evil witch”; calling the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol an “inside job” and Election Day 2020 “the real insurrection”; proclaiming himself to be what “God has ordained”; railing against Fox News (running ads from “perverts”); repeating a common QAnon slogan; and lamenting that low fuel prices could help “CRAZY KAMALA HARRIS WIN.” Later in the week, he shared a conspiracy theorist’s bogus claim that “Harris’s own birth certificate [proves] she is lying about being Black” and disparaging the deal that secured the release from Russia of Paul Whelan, Evan Gershkovich, Vladimir Kara-Murza and others: “Our ‘negotiators’ are always an embarrassment to us!”

Above all, he was attending to his top priority: enriching himself. He urged his social media followers to “Get your Bitcoin Sneakers now” and directed them to a website where they could pay up to $499 for a pair of high-tops that say “Trump Crypto President.” The sneakers, along with “Victory Cologne,” coolers and other sneakers commemorating the failed assassination attempt on Trump, are being sold by CIC Ventures LLC — a company owned by Trump. “FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT” announce the $299, shooting-themed sneakers, showing an image of a bloodied (but lean and muscular) Trump raising his fist.

Trump is now using his assassination attempt to make a buck — not for his campaign, not for the family of the man killed in the shooting, but for himself. Meet the new Trump, same as the old Trump.

It’s as though the near-death experience brought out all of Trump’s worst attributes. “They all say, ‘I think he’s changed since two weeks ago. Something affected him,’” Trump told a rally crowd in Minnesota. “No, I haven’t changed. Maybe I’ve gotten worse, actually.”

At his speech to evangelical Christians, he said of Harris, “She doesn’t like Jewish people.” (She is married to one.) He said he “took a bullet for democracy. ... I might have taken it because of their rhetoric.” (The shooter was a registered Republican and a motive hasn’t been identified.) He spoke of “defeating Kamala Harris in a landslade,” mispronouncing both her name and the geological phenomenon, before correcting the latter.

At the Minnesota rally, he bragged about his golf game and revived old attacks against Hunter Biden and a fantasy about mixed martial arts fighters taking on migrants. He also said that he “will not give one penny to any school that has a vaccine mandate,” which would risk reviving the childhood diseases of polio, measles, mumps and chickenpox.

On Ingraham’s show, Trump talked some more about the shooting (“my hand was loaded up with blood”) and said he took it as a good sign that his wife was concerned: “She either likes or loves me, and that’s nice.” He explained his reticence to debate Harris, who he says has “the laugh of a crazy person,” by reasoning that people “already know everything.”

He said the Opening Ceremonies of the Paris Olympics “was a disgrace” for supposedly mocking “The Last Supper.” (Organizers say it was actually a portrayal of the Greek god Dionysus.) And he sought to explain his promise that people won’t have to vote again in four years by saying that “Christians do not vote well. They vote in very small percentages.” Voter turnout among evangelical Christians is exceptionally high.

Trump needs to change the subject — and he’s not getting any help from Vance.

Vance’s explanations of the newly resurfaced comments from his past about “childless sociopaths” (“I’ve got nothing against cats”) haven’t satisfied many inhabitants of Planet Normal, including Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), who told CNN’s Manu Raju: “It was offensive to me as a woman. Women make their own determinations as to whether or not they’re going to have children or cats or dogs or how many kids they’re going to have.”

The Ohio senator has also complicated Trump’s attempts to disown Project 2025, the compilation of far-right policy proposals developed by many of his top advisers for a second Trump term. The campaign’s implausible claims that it had “nothing to do with” the project is undermined by the foreword Vance wrote for a new book by Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts, the main force behind Project 2025. “In the fights that lay ahead, these ideas are an essential weapon,” Vance wrote.

He is still trying to find his voice on the stump. “If Kamala Harris wants to talk about loyalty, then she should look in the mirror!” Vance recommended in a speech in Nevada. The campaign apparently noticed that this sounded as though he were praising the Democrat, for the next day he revised the line: “If Kamala Harris wants to see the face of disloyalty, she can look in the damn mirror!”

Vance still struggled with the teleprompter and alternated between saying “Nevada” and “Ne-vah-da.” But he handled the Trumpian flourishes with aplomb, riling crowds to boo the media, promising the “largest deportation program in American history” and calling Harris names: “wacky San Francisco liberal,” “wacky, out-of-touch liberal.” He echoed Trump’s falsehoods about rising violent crime under Biden — it has been falling — and asserted that “four years ago, things were going well.” Four years ago, the economy had collapsed and Trump was bungling the pandemic response.

So much dishonesty must have overwhelmed the sound system, for Vance’s mic went out at one of his Nevada events. He tapped it, blew on it, tapped it some more — then waved it in the air and went on talking, inaudibly, until somebody got him a new one.

There were also problems with the sound system at the NABJ conference — and, in retrospect, it would have been better for Trump if the microphones didn’t work at all.

ABC News’s Rachel Scott opened with a reasonable question: asking why Black voters should trust him after his long history of racist remarks and his dining with a white supremacist at Mar-a-Lago.

Trump exploded. “I don’t think I’ve ever been asked a question so — in — in such a horrible manner,” he said, then railing: “fake news ... very rude introduction ... invited me under false pretense ... you were half an hour late ... couldn’t get the equipment working.”

He asserted that he was “the best president for the Black population since Abraham Lincoln,” before railing some more: “thirty-five minutes late ... hostile manner ... a disgrace.”

The questioning moved on to other topics, but Trump was stuck. “A very hostile, nasty tone,” he said, before claiming that migrants are “taking Black jobs.”

“What, exactly, is a ‘Black job,’ sir?” Scott asked.

“A Black job is anybody that has a job,” Trump shot back.

When Fox News’s Harris Faulkner, a sympathetic questioner on the panel, asked about credit-card debt in the Black community, Trump again referred to Scott: “This woman was unable to get the right equipment,” making it “very hard for me to hear you.”

When Faulkner asked whether Vance was ready to assume the presidency, Trump, perhaps not hearing the question, offered no endorsement: “Historically, the vice president, in terms of the election, does not have any impact.”

Trump stumbled in trying to explain whether his call to immunize police from prosecution would extend to the officer who has been charged with murder for killing Sonya Massey, an unarmed Black woman, in her home.

And when Semafor’s Kadia Goba asked a question about his age, Trump went right back to attacking Scott. “Look, if I came onto a stage like this and I got treated so rudely as this woman treated me ...” Trump began.

“Oh my goodness!” interjected a stunned Faulkner.

Trump’s staff then yanked him off the stage, 34 minutes into the scheduled hour-long session.

His campaign issued a statement denouncing “liberal mainstream media malpractice.” Vance labeled the response to Trump’s racial attack on Harris “hysterical.” And Trump, on Truth Social, resumed the assault, saying Harris is a “stone cold phony” in her racial identity. “The questions were Rude and Nasty, often in the form of a statement, but we CRUSHED IT!” Trump announced.

Trump moved on to a friendlier reception at a rally in Pennsylvania — but his words were no less zany. He announced that Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), who is Jewish, “has become a Palestinian” and “a proud member of Hamas.” The GOP nominee repeated that immigrants are “poisoning our country.” He said a former aide’s account that he “started throwing hamburgers at the wall” at the White House “was all bulls---.” He claimed that his is “the number one selling mug shot in history.” He twice said that the Republican Senate candidate in Pennsylvania, David McCormick, is running to be governor.

And Trump confessed to being disoriented by his new opponent. “Two weeks ago, I was talking about Biden,” he told the crowd. “I didn’t even know her name. Nobody did. Kamala. Hello! Beautiful. I didn’t even know her name.”

Now, he has a chance to meet her. “Well, Donald,” Harris said at one of her own boisterous rallies, “I do hope you’ll reconsider, to meet me on the debate stage. Because, as the saying goes, if you got something to say, say it to my face.”

For the Trump aides trying to impose discipline on their unraveling candidate, the very notion must be terrifying.