Has Harris finally broken Trump? He's flailing, glitching and running scared.
Vice President Harris, what have you done to this already very unstable man? The cheese has somehow slid farther off his cracker.
Folks, I think Vice President Kamala Harris has broken Donald Trump.
I mean, it’s fair to say he was already broken – in all ways, really – but since Harris became the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee July 21, the GOP’s favorite felon and presidential nominee has been crumbling before our eyes.
Following up his leaning-hard-into-racism moment at last week’s National Association of Black Journalists convention, where he bizarrely suggested Harris only recently “happened to turn Black,” Trump held a Saturday rally in Atlanta that was a festival of ranting and raving, arguably the worst display of Trump’s snarling we’ve seen in some time.
Kamala Harris has already reduced Donald Trump to a quivering pile of hate and insults
He called his opponent – a woman who is the sitting vice president of the United States, an accomplished prosecutor and a former U.S. senator – “Crazy Kamala” and a “lunatic” and “a radical left freak.”
He said, falsely, “She happens to be really a low-IQ individual,” and then added, without a hint of self-awareness: “We don’t need a low IQ.”
Then he babbled this gem: “The two words are 'Merry Christmas.’ She doesn’t want anybody saying Merry Christmas.”
...
Trump went so far off the rails at his Atlanta rally that he started attacking Republicans
And then he aimed his drunk-uncle-inspired rhetoric at Georgia’s popular – and Republican! – governor, Brian Kemp, whom Trump hates because he wouldn’t help him overturn the state’s election results in 2020.
“Atlanta is like a killing field, and your governor ought to get off his a-- and do something about it,” Trump boomed.
He attacked Kemp’s wife, saying she once thanked him for endorsing her husband but has now turned on Trump.
...
Then Trump went back to bad-mouthing Kemp who, two years after Joe Biden won Georgia, beat Democrat Stacey Abrams soundly: “He’s a bad guy, he’s a disloyal guy, and he’s a very average governor. Little Brian, Little Brian Kemp.”
It's clear Harris is in Trump's head
Vice President Harris, what have you done to this already very unstable man? The cheese has somehow slid farther off his cracker.
Trump is so shook that he backed out of a planned Sept. 10 presidential debate on ABC News, instead demanding a Sept. 4 debate at his network safe space – Fox News – with "a full arena audience."
...
Trump and his campaign have wholly lost the air of inevitability
In the summer weeks before Harris’ ascension, after President Biden’s disastrous presidential debate performance, Trump and his campaign were riding high, and the candidate himself was being, by his standards, normal. He was almost quiet.
Then came the horrifying assassination attempt on Trump that he thankfully survived, and the promises that he was a changed man, devoted to unity. Republicans rode that into the Republican National Convention, projecting a sense of inevitability. Trump even picked hardcore MAGA tush-kisser JD Vance as his vice presidential nominee, ignoring advice to choose someone who might broaden the ticket's appeal.
Then Biden dropped out and endorsed Harris. And people started to realize that Vance is a weirdo. Since then, the wheels have come off the GOP’s wagon, and Trump has backslid into a somehow worse version of the Trump whom voters sent packing in 2020. He's panicked and flailing. Quicker than ever to default to the racism that has always undergirded his worldview.
The man has been Kamala-cized.
...
What the refocused voters are seeing – what they saw in the Atlanta rally and in the rambling interviews he has been doing – is a man who let an opponent switch up and short-circuit his brain.
...
A lot of time remains before the election, but Trump is running scared
There’s plenty of time for Trump and his campaign to regain footing or for Harris to make missteps that swing things back in the Republicans’ direction.
[Pause on that point in this excellent piece: kamala is vice president of the United States, spent the afternoon with President Biden in the Situation Room getting briefed on Israel-Iran. And she's running a 100-day dash to the presidency. She does not have time to do the sitdowns that the pampered, privileged Fourth Estate are beginning to whine that she is not doing. This is a new age in mass communication if we needed any more reminder. They can get everything that they want listening to her speeches. This is another way of saying, if I were her, I would not do sitdown interviews. THAT is where a misstep can most likely happen. I've got my sprinter's shoes on and I'm motoring. I'm not slowing down for a sitdown.]
But it's clear that Trump is rattled, and that his usual tricks of hurling insults and invective aren’t working. In fact, the smiling calm of the Harris campaign is making Trump’s cruelty look worse than ever. That’s why the label “weird” has been sticking. For many, it’s all getting a bit tiresome.
And that just makes Trump angrier, and worse.
We have a long way to go until November, folks. But where we stand here and now, Trump looks like he’s broken. Broken and running scared.
