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Former President Donald Trump appears frustrated with the momentum behind Kamala Harris’ campaign.
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Trump’s message this week included bragging about the size of his audience and defending Biden.
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Some allies recognize the challenges of the campaign and the need for Trump to stay true to his message.
This summer, it seemed like former President Donald Trump had power over his life, but now it appears to have been a brief moment.
He was leading in the presidential polls. His opponent delivered perhaps the most disastrous debate performance in recent history. The Supreme Court granted him some presidential immunity, and a Florida judge threw out his case about secret documents. He survived a literal assassination attempt.
But the images of Trump laughing, surrounded by revelers wearing their own ear bandages, while Hulk Hogan rips off his shirt to show his support for the former president, almost feel like a distant memory.
Since Vice President Kamala Harris became the presumptive Democratic nominee, there has been an undeniable enthusiasm surrounding her campaign, from record donations to closing the gap — and even leading — in the polls in several swing states.
With the latest wave of momentum surrounding Harris’ choice of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate, the former president even appears a little rattled.
When approached by Business Insider about reports that Trump is frustrated with the momentum of Harris’ campaign, Trump called it “fake news.”
“President Trump and his campaign team are doing everything they can to win this election,” he said in an email, adding that the stakes were too high and “everyone knows they have to pull together in unison. The party and the movement have never been more united.”
Trump continues to deviate from his message
When President Joe Biden was his opponent, but Trump seemed to have no trouble continuing to spread his message: Biden is too old, look at the border, look at how high the prices are in the supermarket, etc.
But Trump seems unable to get Harris’ message across. At times, she even seemed visibly frustrated during a press conference this week about the hype surrounding her campaign.
He couldn’t help but bring up race and gender, even falsely questioning Harris’s race during a speech at a conference for black journalists, despite allies urging him to focus on these issues.
He even defends Biden.
In a post on Truth Social on Tuesday, he baselessly claimed that Harris and other Democrats had “stolen” the presidency from Biden.
At a press conference at Mar-a-Lago on Thursday, he again asserted that Biden had “the right to run for office” but that Democrats had “taken that right away.”
When a reporter asked Trump at the same press conference if he was concerned about the size of the crowd Harris drew, he seemed to react with exasperation. “Oh, give me a break,” he said, accusing the press of ignoring the large crowd he drew.
He even went off on a tangent by claiming that he drew a larger crowd to the National Mall on January 6, 2021, than Martin Luther King Jr. did in 1963 when he delivered the famous “I Have A Dream” speech. (King had an estimated 250,000 people. The January 6 Committee estimated Trump had 53,000.)
Some of Trump’s allies are also concerned
It’s not just Trump who seems shocked by the way the election outcome has changed. Some on the right have lost confidence that the former president will win in November.
“At the convention, it was game over, and the Democrats realized that,” Richard Porter, a member of the Republican National Committee, told The Washington Post. “It felt like it was too good to be true, and it was.”
Five people close to the campaign, who asked not to be named, told the Post that Trump has been relentless in expressing his frustration with how the race is shaping up. “It’s unfair that I beat him and now I have to beat her,” Trump recently told an ally, the outlet reported.
Sen. Lindsey Graham, a staunch Trump ally, even acknowledged to the Post that the campaign “has hit some bumps.”
Ben Shapiro, a right-wing commentator, told The New York Times that Trump should focus on attacks on the Harris-Walz campaign and “stick to one simple point: You were better off in 2019 than you are in 2024.”
Whether the momentum behind Harris’ campaign will ultimately lead to a victory in November is impossible to say.
Meanwhile, it’s possible that Trump’s handling of this isn’t helping him.
Read the original article on Business Insider
