Donald Trump’s Cloak of Invincibility Has Come Off.

​There was a seismic shift in the 2024 presidential race on June 27 when Joe Biden’s debate performance showed the country that he was not up to the challenge of winning another term against his challenger Donald Trump. The more that President Biden dug in and tried to reassure his party and the country that he was up for the job, the further behind in the national polls he fell. Things began to fall into place for Trump’s return to the White House. 

​Trump was handed a get out of jail free card on July 1 when the Supreme Court ruled in favor of his immunity claims. The Court ruled that presidents have broad immunity when conducting official acts while in office. This casts doubt on the legality of the remaining state and federal indictments that Trump is facing. To put an exclamation point on Trump’s legal victories, a federal judge in Florida dismissed the classified documents case, finding that the special counsel handling the case had been appointed unconstitutionally. 

​Surviving an assassination attempt on his life on July 13 cemented Trump’s image among his base of supporters. He was viewed as the divinely chosen candidate destined to retake the White House. Trump himself believed in the inevitability of his winning the presidency. This is borne out by picking J.D. Vance as his running mate. J.D. Vance is the youngest and most inexperienced of the VP candidates that the Trump campaign had vetted. He won’t bring in many new voters, and more importantly, he won’t help Trump’s odds in the all-important swing states. The pick of J.D. Vance shows that Trump was convinced that he would win the election, and he wanted a VP whose ideologic views were aligned with his and who could be the future of the MAGA movement. 

​Just days after the failed assassination attempt, Trump was welcomed at the Republican National Convention as a concurring hero. The reverence for Trump among his MAGA supporters had never been higher, and even the Democrats thought that it would take a miracle to defeat him in November. That miracle came on July 21 when Joe Biden announced that he was dropping out of the race and throwing his support behind VP Kamala Harris. 

​Harris Becomes the Democratic Nominee for President:  Kamala Harris quickly garnered the support of Congressional Democrats, big donors, and party leaders such as the Clintons and Obamas. Within days of Biden dropping out of the race delegates to the nominating convention began to pledge their support for Harris. On August 6 Harris received enough delegate votes during an online voting process to become the Democratic nominee for president. 

​Enthusiasm among Democrats for Harris’s candidacy has exploded to levels not seen since Barack Obama was the nominee in 2008. Donors both big and small have been pouring money into the Harris campaign, and in the runup to the Democratic National Convention Harris was ahead of Trump in most national polls.

Readjusting to a New Reality: The Trump campaign was built around defeating Joe Biden, and is scrambling to recalibrate against a new opponent. The past three weeks have not gone well for Trump’s campaign or his psyche. The cloak of invincibility has been pulled from Trump and what’s underneath is disturbing.
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With all the light shining on Harris, the Trump campaign and the Republican Party have tried to recapture the narrative, but with limited success. Republicans attribute Harris’s surge in the polls as her honeymoon period, but there is more to it than that. The main obstacle to the Republican’s message getting through to swing and undecided voters is Donald Trump himself. 

Trump Goes on the Attack:   Over the past two weeks Trump has tried to shift the momentum back to his campaign through a series of press conferences and interviews. The press conference at Mar-a-Lago on August 8 was the first of these events and was a prelude of things to come. The Trump campaign had hoped that their candidate would present a substantive case for his election, including his accomplishments and important policy prescriptions. But that didn’t happen.
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Trump has an inexplicable inability to stay on message and quickly defaults to his old playbook of personal grievances, untruths, bizarre theories, and petty personal attacks. The Trump campaign, and even Trump himself realizes that Harris is vulnerable on some key policy issues, namely the border and inflation. Rather than sticking to a winning strategy against Harris, Trump resorts to personal attacks, nonsensical theories and blatant lies. Below are  a few choice examples of Trump’s failing message.

​Personal Attacks on Harris: The personal attacks by Trump won’t stop because he   claims that he is entitled to them due to the mistreatment he has received from the Biden/Harris Administration. The personal attacks are petty and undignified for a candidate running for the highest office in the country. Here are some of Trump’s recent public comments about Harris:

1. Trump has questioned Harris’s race, saying “۰۰۰she was Indian all the way, and then all of a sudden she made a turn and she went-she became a Black person.” “I don’t know, is she Indian or is she Black?”
2. Trump frequently disparages Harris’s laugh, calling it the laugh of a crazy person and lunatic.
3. Trump ridicules Harris’s name by intentionally mispronouncing it whenever he mentions her.
4. Jealous of the fact that Harris’s image is on the recent cover of Time Magazine, Trump couldn’t pass up the opportunity to comment on her appearance, saying that “I am much better looking than her.” Attacking a woman’s appearance is never a good strategy when attempting to capture the all important women’s vote.
5. Trump has called Harris stupid, incompetent, a communist, and the list goes on and on. My advice to Mr. Trump is to stick to the issues and not the personal attacks.  His schtick is getting old and it’s no longer funny.

​Bizarre Theories and Nonsense:

1. Trump is obsessed with crowd sizes. At his Mar-a-Lago press conference he claimed that the crowds at his January 6, 2021 rally in Washington DC were as large, if not larger, than the crowds of people who turned up for Martin Luther King’s speech during the 1963 March on Washington.  Martin Luther King’s speech drew approximately five times more people than Trump’s rally did.
   
2. Last week Trump promoted the untrue theory that the images of the large crowds at Kamala Harris’s rallies were faked by Artificial Intelligence. He even suggested that Harris should be disqualified from the race because creating fake images to enhance her crowd sizes is election interference. Is anyone buying this stuff?
3. Trump has frequently veered off into tangents about the fictional character Hannibal Lector during his rallies. He doesn’t realize that this makes him sound a little bit crazy and leaves many listeners scratching their heads. Calling the serial killing cannibal Hannibal Lector “a lovely man” is nonsensical and doesn’t project competence in a national leader. 

​Untruths and Scaremongering: Trump has always been fast and loose with the truth, but the rapidity with which he tells lies has reached a fever pitch with the rise of Kamala Harris. This makes it difficult to accurately access anything that Donald Trump says, which is why some people dismiss anything he says outright, and others support him out of blind faith. Here are just a few notable lines on his current play list:

1. “Everyone is going to be forced to buy an electric car under Harris.”
2. “Harris is going to destroy Social Security and Medicare.”
3. “Harris will ban private medical insurance.”
4. “Harris wants to take away your guns.”
5. “My tax cuts were the biggest in history.” The tax cuts enacted by Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama were larger.
6. “Democrats are allowed to do abortions even after the birth of the baby.” That would be murder, which is illegal everywhere.
7. “Nobody was killed on January 6th.” There were at least seven people who died in connection to the Capitol riot on January 6, 2021.
8. “All over the world prisons and insane asylums are being emptied into our country, and over twenty million people have come across the border illegally under the Biden/Harris Administration.” There is no proof of any of these claims and border officials call them greatly exaggerated.
9. “Kamala Harris broke the economy,” and “she wants to install a communist like system.”
10. “If Harris is elected there will be a 1929 like stock market crash.”
11. “Harris wants to abolish coal, oil, and natural gas.”
12. “Our country is in decline; in fact, it is dying under the Biden/Harris Administration.”  “America is a third world country.” That’s news to me and to most Americans.                    

​The Democratic Party came to the realization that their presidential candidate was unelectable in the days following the June 27 presidential debate. President Biden’s age, mental acuity and physical stamina were preventing him from being an effective spokesperson for the party and could no longer assure victory in the November election.  Party leaders persuaded Biden to drop out of the race for the good of the party and the country. After several agonizing weeks, Biden did the right thing by dropping out of the race and passing the torch to Kamala Harris.

Today the Republican Party is worried that their candidate may be slipping and turning off voters that they will need in November. In many of his public appearances Donald Trump comes across as paranoid, delusional, and stuck in the past. Campaign officials are frustrated with Trump because they are well aware that Kamala Harris is vulnerable on key issues, particularly border security and the economy. If Trump could stay on message his campaign might have a winning strategy.
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Trump’s dystopian view of America does not play well against Harris’s joyful optimism. Trump should take a page from Ronald Reagan’s playbook, who with hope and optimism portrayed America as that shining city on a hill.

It is Donald Trump’s election to lose, and if he does, he has no one to blame but himself. Trump is already setting the stage to contest the election if he falls short on November 5, 2024. But that is a topic for another day. 

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Thanks,
Armchair American