Trump, rejecting advice, tries mockery, insults, AI against Kamala, but is it working?

There’s really no other choice but to let Trump be Trump.

While Kamala Harris rocked the DNC with an unexpected appearance and short speech to the rapturous crowd, Donald Trump continued to attack his new opponent, sometimes in odd ways. 

He is ignoring public advice from such close Republican allies as Lindsey Graham. "If you have a policy debate, he wins," the senator said on "Meet the Press." "Donald Trump the provocateur, the showman, may not win this election."

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Nikki Haley, who’s only nominally endorsed Trump, delivered a similar message to Fox’s Bret Baier: "The campaign is not going to win talking about crowd sizes. It's not going to win talking about what race Kamala Harris is.  It's not going to win talking about whether she's dumb. I think the campaign needs to focus."

With the man he really wanted to run against, Joe Biden, pushed out of prime time to deliver a fiery speech that mainly touted his own accomplishments – and attacked Donald – Trump adopted the mindset that characterizes many White House occupants: 

If you geniuses are so smart, how come I’m the one who was elected president?

That’s especially true of Trump in 2016, when nearly everyone, including Hillary Clinton, was convinced that she would win. Perhaps that’s why she obviously enjoyed taunting Trump at the Chicago convention, smiling contentedly to the chants of "Lock him up!" – a play on the Trump crowds in that campaign shouting that she should be locked up.

When Barack Obama clashed with John McCain at a meeting after the 2008 campaign, Obama felt compelled to remind his former adversary that he had beaten him in that race. 

Trump, who is expanding his operation, bringing in his first campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, and other past loyalists, is trusting his instincts.

One of the strangest moves by the 45th president was to use AI to post pictures of women wearing "Swifties for Trump" T-shirts. The women don’t exist. But it came a week after Trump, who seems enamored of Taylor Swift, falsely accused Harris of using AI to artificially create a big crowd at the Detroit airport – which was quickly disproven by wider shots of the thousands of people there.

Maybe that was just shtick. And perhaps that term also applies to a fake image depicting Trump and Harris as a couple, with him touching her enormously pregnant bare belly.

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More concerning is the video he posted on Truth Social. It begins with a fake image of Harris holding a sign that says "I am a moron." In a parody version of the Alanis Morissette song "Ironic," Trump accuses Biden (there’s that name again) of having dementia and says Harris was "pulling the strings to cut his rope."

But that’s the mild part.

"Make the ballots fake on election day; no matter who votes, count’s on the take. Spent her whole damn life down on her knees; To be commander in chief, that’s how you say please."

We all know that "down on her knees" is an unmistakable sexual allusion. It’s a reference to her relationship with future San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown, who she openly dated in the 1990s. (Brown was technically still married but had been separated from his wife for many years; he appointed Kamala to two state boards.)

Trump generally has a gut-level feel for an opponent’s weakness. Maybe he believes mockery is the best way to deal with a woman of color. The jabs don’t seem to be landing, but Trump is right that he’s the one who got elected. Everyone else is staff or spectators.

The Trump campaign yesterday tried to knock down Harris’ claim that crime was higher during his administration. He cited a 2021 change in the way the FBI estimates crime statistics as making that an apples-and-oranges comparison, and independent reporting backs that up.

But as I wrote yesterday, the election is largely not going to turn on wonky arguments about border statistics or price-gouging. Go to Kamala’s home page and there is no listing of policy proposals, none. She may come to regret that.

Harris has still offered no explanation of why she abandoned her far-left positions of 2020 – Abolish private health insurance! Ban fracking! – but she’s got to confront that at some point rather than leaving it to unnamed aides.

Instead, she’s hoping to ride a wave of excitement – which should be boosted by the star-studded DNC – to a seat behind the Resolute Desk. She is running as a 59-year old happy warrior against Trump, who’s now the old man in the race at 78. But her polling numbers will eventually deflate to earlier levels, and she’ll have to withstand a furious two-month attack by Trump and MAGA World. 

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The Trump campaign assailed the first night of the Democratic convention by saying "they would rather talk about President Trump than the problems facing our nation due to Kamala Harris’ failures." 

The mentions on Monday night: 

Trump: 147 times

Border: 8 times

Economy: 27 times

Inflation: 3 times

Prices: 5 times

Crime: 6 times.

The Harris camp, meanwhile, castigated her opponent for comments at a Pennsylvania rally: "Trump’s advisors are desperately trying to get Donald to stick to his script. But he can’t help but veer off into rants about whether or not he and JD Vance are weird, yell that he believes the American dream is dead, and…whatever this was." (A comment about Russian ships pulling up to New England.) 

Keep in mind that Trump is also running against a hostile press corps that is quite enamored of Kamala-mentum. Many pundits push the argument that he’s a threat to democracy. I haven’t seen such unbalanced coverage since the Clinton-Gore bus tour of 1992. 

Most journalists have given Harris – and for that matter, Tim Walz – a total pass on refusing to do interviews, as if that’s not their job.

A month ago, Biden was expecting to be giving his acceptance speech in Chicago, rather than being shamefully pushed so late that he finished at 12:30 a.m. ET, with BS excuses about how there was just too much applause during the night. That’s how quickly things can change in politics.

Some critics in the media are saying that Trump has gotten boring, that what seemed fresh and tough and entertaining in 2016 now appears stale and familiar. Maybe, but Trump didn’t win that year by running on immigration and crime, he won based on his anti-establishment persona – exactly the sort of charge being aimed at Kamala.

The widespread assumption that Trump would cruise to victory, especially after the failed assassination, has been replaced by a media consensus that Harris is riding a cultural wave that will swamp him.

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But that’s faulty logic. Trump still has the easier path to the magic 270. He’s still neck and neck with Harris in the battleground states after all the negative stuff dumped on him, including a criminal conviction.

And he’ll eventually figure out how to undermine Harris, even if it means cycling through one strategy after another until something works. That is, and has always been, the Trump way.