Why is Trump barely campaigning? Harris lives in his head

Donald J. Trump arrives back to the White House Saturday evening, Dec. 14, 2019, on the South Lawn of the White House after attending the 120th Army-Navy football game in Philadelphia, Pa. (Official White House Photo by Tia Dufour)
John Stoehr
September 21, 2024

Last week, I was telling you about how Vice President Kamala Harris hurt her opponent so badly that he would spend his remaining time on the campaign trail replaying what she did to him at the debate. She damaged his ego by saying to his face and in front of 60 million television viewers:

Donald Trump is what he hates.

A weak, boring loser.

The truth of that is going to preoccupy him so much, I said, that long stretches of his rallies and other appearances will be dedicated to making up a story about how he beat her.

Well, I hate to say I told you so …

— (@)

It wasn’t an isolated moment. Every day since the debate, Trump has been trying to rewrite history, because if she’s right, he’s wrong, and he’s never wrong. He’s a winner. If he does lose, it’s someone else’s fault. Of course, the more he tries, the more he proves her point. She’s gotten so deep under his skin, the man has practically forgotten why he’s campaigning.

At the debate, Harris said at one point: “I’m going to do something really unusual and I’m going to invite you to attend one of Donald Trump’s rallies, because it’s a really interesting thing to watch. You will see during the course of his rallies, he talks about fictional characters like Hannibal Lector. He talks about how windmills cause cancer. And what you will also notice is people start leaving early out of exhaustion and boredom.”

That broke him.

He’s off his game.

— (@)

Here’s a clip from Tuesday. Trump explains why it’s not rambling when he tells stories about Hannibal Lecter and “catapults on the aircraft carriers.” “That's genius when you can connect the dots with “long, sometimes very complex sentences and paragraphs” that “all come together.”

Rambling like that saps strength.

Jonathan Howard, a physician, accepted Harris’ invitation to attend a Trump rally. He went to one on Wednesday in Long Island. In his video, you can see empty seats, contrasting what the Trump campaign says about attendance.

“Here’s footage of low-energy Trump with plenty of empty seats bragging that he did a good job with covid,” Dr. Howard wrote on Twitter that evening. “The crowd was energetic at the start with the warmup acts."

“Trump didn’t drain the swamp.

“He drained the energy and the crowd.”

— (@)

It wasn’t supposed to be this way.

Trump was supposed to be running against Joe Biden. He had been planning the whole time, as Bill Scher wrote Thursday, “to win by portraying his Democratic opponent as feeble and cognitively declining."

“Now, the 78-year-old Trump, who would be the oldest president in history if he completes a second term, faces a younger and more energetic opponent, pressuring him to show that his energy and cognitive abilities have not declined despite considerable speculation that he has.”

Since the Labor Day weekend, Scher wrote, Trump has been “running the laziest of his three campaigns. The shock of Sunday’s second assassination attempt on Trump overshadowed something truly odd in mid-September of a presidential election year – the oddity of one of the two major party nominees taking a golf day with less than 50 days to go.

“He must decide if the presidency is worth less time on the links.”

— (@)

He must decide if he still has the fight in him.

It doesn’t look good.

Harris had been jabbing at him long before their debate. During her first big campaign rally, in July, she taunted Trump for pulling out of an already scheduled debate in September with Biden. Harris said Trump had a lot to say about her. “If you have something to say,” she said, “say it to my face.”

By mid-August, as Trump was accusing her of “hiding” from the press, her spokesman told Roll Call: “He isn’t actually campaigning, his public appearances are disasters, and his Project 2025 agenda is dragging him down as much as it would drag America backward. He doesn’t seem well."

— (@)

Trump seemed to have nothing to fear from a woman in 2020.

During a rally that election year, he said: “Kamala will not be your first female president. She will not be your first female president. It’s not the way it’s supposed to be. We’re not supposed to have a socialist … look, we’re not gonna be a socialist nation. We’re not gonna have a socialist president, especially any female socialist president. We’re not gonna have it. We’re not gonna put up with it. It’s not gonna happen.”

Trump was insulting Biden by saying a woman would be in charge.

But this woman hurt him so badly he can’t stop talking about her.

— (@)

While Trump spends the rest of his campaign denying that he’s too weak and tired to be president, Harris is proving she’s more than strong enough for the job. There was the debate, where Trump did not have the courage to say it to her face, and there was also an interview with Oprah Winfrey. Winfrey brought attention to a little-noticed debate moment, when Harris said that not only is her running mate Tim Walz a gun owner, so is she:

Winfrey: I did not know that!

Harris: If somebody breaks in my house, they’re getting shot.

It was so powerful that one commentator said it was the moment Kamala Harris won the election. I think that remains to be seen. What’s certain, however, is that it wasn’t empty bragging, as we’d expect from Trump.

She means it.

We know she means it, because this is the woman who put so much fear in Trump that he did not look directly at her during the debate. This is the woman who handed him his a— anyway, for everyone to see. This is the woman who has dug herself so deeply into his psyche that he’s barely running for president anymore.

Instead of trying to beat her, he’s trying to prove her wrong.

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