Trump In For A Hell Of A Rude Awakening. He’s Not Winning

Let’s put the schadenfreude on ice, shall we? Because while it’s going to be a rough few months from now until the 5th of November, ultimately we will prevail and we will dance in the streets, once more, when Donald Trump goes down in flames. And this time, it will be for the last time. Or, perhaps not. Perhaps the mental illness and moral rot that so afflicts the GOP that it has gotten to this point will stick with Trump as the standard bearer for 2028. Or, perhaps post-election the torch will be passed to J.D. Vance, who I predict will be picked as Trump’s VP next week.

To quote Steve Schmidt, “At some level, this Milwaukee gathering has been a decade in the making. Once, it was much harder to tell what precisely it was, [the minority faction that is MAGA] and what it wanted to do. There is no such lack of clarity today. Fascists will convene in Milwaukee, and call themselves ‘Republicans,’ but all loyal Americans will recoil at a pack of vandals running with desecration as their North Star and extremism as their constant bearing.” That’s the state of play going into next week. But in light of Joe Biden’s recent fumblings, which the media have played to the hilt, Trump and his cadre are convinced that a “landslide” — his word, on several occasions now — victory is right ahead.

Now in reality a landslide is not going to happen. Trump characterized his 2016 victory as a landslide. Joe Biden then won with the exact same electoral college figures in 2020 — so if that’s a “landslide” then fine. But if we’re talking about a landslide like Reagan/Mondale, no. Give that one up. That is a relic of the past, given what journalist Tim Alberta calls, “the trench-warfare realities—a vanishing center of the electorate, consecutive presidential races decided by fractions of percentage points, incessant governing impasses between the two parties.” But Alberta spoke with Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita, Trump’s two co-chairs for his recent article in The Atlantic, and they have a different idea.

In the scenario they were imagining, not only would Trump take back the White House in an electoral wipeout—a Republican carrying the popular vote for just the second time in nine tries—but he would obliterate entire downballot garrisons of the Democratic Party, forcing the American left to fundamentally recalibrate its approach to immigration, economics, policing, and the many cultural positions that have antagonized the working class. Wiles and LaCivita wouldn’t simply be credited with electing a president; they would be remembered for running a campaign that altered the nation’s political DNA.

It’s a scenario that Democrats might have scoffed at a few months ago. Not anymore. “The numbers were daunting before the debate, and now there’s a real danger that they’re going to get worse,” David Axelrod, the chief strategist for Barack Obama’s two winning campaigns, told me in the first week of July. “If that’s the case—if we get to the point of fighting to hold on to Virginia and New Hampshire and Minnesota, meaning the main six or seven battlegrounds are gone—then yeah, we’re talking about a landslide, both in the Electoral College and in the popular vote.”

Axelrod added, “The magnitude of that defeat, I think, would be devastating to the party. Those margins at the top of the ticket would sweep Democrats out of office everywhere—House, Senate, governor, you name it. Considering the unthinkable latitude the Supreme Court has just given Trump, we could end up with a situation where he has dominant majorities in Congress and, really, unfettered control of the country. That’s not far-fetched.”

In the course of many hours of conversations with the people inside Trump’s campaign, I was struck by the arrogance that animated their approach to an election that most pundits long expected would be a third consecutive cliff-hanger. Yet I also detected a certain conflict, the sort of disquiet that accompanies abetting a man who is both a convicted felon claiming that the state is persecuting him and an aspiring strongman pledging to use the state against his own enemies. People close to Trump spoke regularly of his victimhood but also his own calls for retribution; they expressed solidarity with their boss while also questioning, in private moments, what working for him—what electing him—might portend.

At the center of the campaign, I would come to realize, is a comedy too dark even for Shakespeare: a mad king who shows flashes of reason, a pair of cunning viziers who cling to the hope that these flashes portend something more, and a terrible truth about what might ultimately be lost by winning.

This is a beautifully written piece and if you can only read one piece in its entirety today, I recommend that this be the one. What follows is the description of Susie Wiles realizing that working for Trump was a political strategist graveyard, in so many ways, but then she decided that she would go to work for Trump if he made her the queen of his campaign, basically. Then there’s a description of LaCivita coming on board the campaign, albeit realizing that “Trump was still every bit the erratic, combustible man who’d renounced his own vice president the moment he ceased to be completely servile.” So clearly these people talked themselves into making a Faustian bargain. And that is vintage Trump.

The article then goes through a detailed commentary on Lara Trump taking over the RNC and the fear that a lot of Republicans have about how campaign donations are spent, culminating in this statement. “The day before I visited headquarters, one Trump aide, who requested anonymity to speak candidly, confessed to me that doubts about the field strategy permeate this campaign. This person predicted that Wiles, LaCivita, and [Jim] Blair will either look like geniuses who revolutionized Republican politics—or the biggest morons ever put in charge of a presidential campaign.”

“I accept that framing,” Blair told me, flashing a smirk. “And I live by it every day.”

As Blair and I stood up to leave the conference room, he stopped me. The smirk was gone. He wanted to make something clear: He takes these decisions very seriously. “Because if we lose,” he said, “I think there’s a pretty good chance they’re going to throw us in jail.”

It was a startling moment. I’d heard campaign aides make offhand remarks before about expecting to end up incarcerated for helping Trump. But this was more direct, more paranoid. Blair was telling me that, in a second Biden administration, he expected deep-state flunkies to arrest him for the crime of opposing the president. And he wasn’t alone. Brian Hughes, a campaign spokesperson known for his extensive government work and generally affable demeanor, nodded in agreement as Blair spoke. “I think we all feel that way,” Hughes said.

Now this is batshit weird. I don’t think this is normal thinking. But I share it here because it characterizes the mindset of this campaign. The people working for Trump know that he’s a convicted felon and a lunatic but they don’t care and they project this paranoid, vengeance seeking mindset onto the Democrats. And it’s not our mindset. This is a Trump/MAGA mindset.  There’s another telling phrase in here, with respect to mail-in voting. It was something that people in the Republican party begged Trump to validate and finally it happened — ergo “Swamp The Vote” — and Wiles explained it thusly:

“You work on something, work on something, work on something, and then in some bizarre, unexpected way, somebody phrases it differently—or it’s somebody that he particularly respects in a particular area who says it—and that’s it.”

This, to any normal minded person, is a description of the thought processes of a lunatic. Bottom line here, this is all about a group of people calling themselves Republicans when what’s actually happening here is a group of greedy ambitious people, running a fascist candidate, a failed former president, (voted out after one term, then convicted of 34 felonies,) and trying to package him as something wonderful and new.

There is nothing about Donald Trump that is either wonderful or new. There is a belief amongst the Republicans that Joe Biden has tanked himself and it is not a rational belief. This is not a replay of 2016 where you have two candidates, neither of whom have ever been president — which is the norm. We don’t have the norm in 2024. Trump, as president, is a known quantity. That’s what makes this election unique and intriguing. We have an incumbent president who has done a great job vs. a former president who did a horrible one and was voted out.

It is sheer fantasy that Biden’s gaffes, however embarrassing they were, have served the purpose of disillusioning massive numbers of voters, who will now decide that if it’s a choice between a gaffe-prone imcumbent and a convicted felon former president, that they’ll do whatever they can to get the convicted felon back in power. The simple truth, I believe, is that Biden will be reelected. Maybe not by as big a margin as he deserves but certainly by a sufficient margin to stay in power.

The media is all in a tither and the political junkies are going over everything at a granular level, because that’s what we do. In a sense, both groups are in a bubble and talking to one another, but not if we’re able to read the larger picture of normal people and the country as a whole. And my reading of the tea leaves is that Biden is not in the dastardly and desperate trouble that a lot of the press — or even some of his Hollywood buddies — would have you believe.

But Trump is. That said, we’ll know a lot more in 114 days, 12 hours.

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