If July was the month of Donald Trump’s ascension into living martyr, having survived an assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania, then he will remember August as the month when that newly acquired omnipotence somehow deserted him.
So far it has been a month of abject misery for the Republican candidate who has been as surprised as everyone else by the storming assurance and energy with which Kamala Harris has revived the Democratic campaign. And the disastrous opening to Monday night’s virtual fireside chat with Elon Musk on X neatly represented just how bewilderingly the 2024 election campaign has been turned on its head.
Democratic glee and snarky asides greeted the 45-minute delay to the interview due to technical issues which Musk, presenting himself as a latter day Johnny Carson, assured viewers and listeners were caused by a malicious attempt to sabotage the platform. The conversation represented a public consolidation of the alliance between Musk and Trump – and served to announce the former president’s return to Twitter/X.
Only three weeks have passed since Trump stood before his people at the finale of the Republican convention in Milwaukee. The mood in the arena that night was triumphal and shot through with an old-fashioned evangelical strain. The shocking fact that someone had tried to murder Trump on live television framed the entire convention in a different light.
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The delegates behaved as though they believed Trump, standing before them with a rectangular gauze bandage covering the bullet-graze wound to his ear, was the chosen one. He opened his address by promising the audience he would tell them exactly what had happened. “And you’ll never hear it from me a second time because it’s actually too painful to tell.”
Not sufficiently painful, however, to prevent him from taking Musk and the audience through the events in Butler in vivid detail again on Monday night. Even the most loyal of Trump supporters would have privately conceded that his convention speech lacked focus: he even managed to make his account of the assassination attempt long-winded and dull. Still, that night had concluded with a small army of Trump family members on stage and balloons falling and Republicans secure in the sense that it didn’t matter if their man was below par because he still looked dynamic and forceful next to his opponent Joe Biden.
It is understandable that Trump is having difficulty reconciling himself with the disappearance of that reality. He is hardly alone. In the weeks before the convention the author and journalist Tim Alberta wrote a jaw-dropping profile of Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles, the maestros behind Trump’s election campaign, for the Atlantic magazine. It was deliciously gossipy and notable for the extreme confidence within the campaign.
But it also made glaringly clear just how much the entire strategy was dependent on using Biden as the prop to accentuate Trump’s perceived strengths. Once Biden took the stunning decision to step down from his candidacy, he shattered that Republican hall of mirrors, and the Trump campaign has found itself in an empty room with broken glass as Harris euphoria sweeps the country.
Everything that Trump has publicly said since, including on Monday night, has been an attempt to regain the traction that seemed irresistible in Milwaukee. Last week he ventured that Harris’s elevation as Democratic pick “seems to me to be actually unconstitutional”. It was a theme he returned to in his conversation with Musk. “This was a coup. This was a coup of a president of the United States. He didn’t want to leave, and they said: ‘we can do it the nice way, or we can to it the hard way’.”
Musk, with a cloth ear, given the events in Butler, chimed in by saying: “Yeah, they just took him out back behind the shed and basically shot him.”
The theory that the Democrats have executed an internal coup against a sitting president is one that the suddenly fragmented Republican campaign will build on. Trump’s claims that images of Harris’s massive rallies have been AI-generated smack of desperation. And as he slowly gets his head around his new rival – labelled “San Francisco Radical Kamala Harris” on his newly active X account – it is dawning on Trump that the projections of a landslide win have disappeared.
The latest national polls show Harris ahead by four points, 50-46, among voters in the vital up-for-grabs states of Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan. More alarmingly for Trump, Harris and her vice-presidential pick Tim Walz have delighted the Democratic heartland, provoking a seismic jump in energy and fundraising. Trump may have looked active on the campaign trail compared to Biden, but he must be shocked and even intimidated by the energy and organisation and stamina of Harris’s storming three weeks. Now, he must reconcile himself to matching it: not easy when you are 78 and your opponent is a youthful 59.
The misery will continue with next week’s jamboree in Chicago when all of Trump’s nemeses – Barack Obama, the Clintons and Biden himself – will take to the stage on successive Democratic convention evenings and own the headlines and broadcasts for a week.
The Trump campaign will surely spend those same days developing a strategy to change the terms of the conversation and to somehow drag Harris away from her mantra – “we’re not going back” – to the world of fear and division in which Trump has excelled.
But it will not be easy. You don’t have to scroll very far on Trump’s X feed to arrive on his post on January 8th, 2021. “To all of those who have asked, I will not be going to the Inauguration on January 20th.”
His chances of attending the next inauguration are suddenly looking far from assured as he labours through this punishing August.
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