The Trump Crack-Up

Robert B. Reich, Tribune Content Agency on Aug 14, 2024

As the Harris-Walz team soars (polls are already showing Kamala taking the lead), Trump is cracking up.

His ego can’t take it. He is freaking out that his opponent — a Black woman — has more energy and momentum behind her than he has.

Last Thursday, after 10 days of Kamala in the limelight, Trump was so desperate for attention that he held a news conference that provided no news.

During it, Trump absurdly claimed that his Jan. 6, 2021, rally on the National Mall was larger than Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1963 rally, when he gave his “I Have a Dream” speech. (King’s speech had summoned 250,000 to the Mall. Trump’s rally drew 53,000, according to the House Select Committee that investigated the events of Jan. 6.)

King’s rally also led to the signing of the Civil Rights Act. Trump’s rally led to a deadly assault on the U.S. Capitol.

Why would Trump want to remind anyone of what he did on Jan. 6, 2021?

He can’t help himself. He keeps repeating that the 2020 election was stolen, even though the claim turns off independent voters and does nothing to advance his case against Kamala Harris.

Over the weekend, he posted a link to a 2021 document questioning the security of Georgia’s voting machines. When he made a campaign stop in Georgia the previous Saturday, Trump attacked Georgia’s Republican governor, Brian Kemp, and Republican secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger — both of whom won reelection in 2022 despite Trump’s vocal opposition.

Why is Trump attacking Republican leaders in Georgia instead of Kamala Harris? Because Trump will never forgive Kemp and Raffensperger for not joining his attempt to overturn the 2020 election in the Peach State.

Trump told the crowd that Kemp is “a bad guy, he’s a disloyal guy and he’s a very average governor,” adding that if it “wasn’t for me, he would not be your governor. I think everybody knows that.”

Trump’s rant against Kemp is particularly absurd because he needs Kemp’s organization in Georgia to help him in the race against Harris.

Why is Trump going on about the 2020 election being “stolen” anyway? That claim cost Republicans two Senate seats in Georgia’s special elections in January 2021 because it depressed turnout among Republicans who assumed their ballots wouldn’t count.

When Trump does talk about Harris, he’s unable to focus on the policies on which he could criticize her, such as the southern border, but dredges up racist tropes such as whether she’s “really Black.”

He mispronounces her name and attacks her with ideological platitudes, as he did last Friday at a rally in Montana when he proclaimed that “America cannot survive for four more years of this bumbling communist lunatic.”

Trump’s ego has been so injured by the huge turnout at Kamala’s rallies that he’s now claiming they’re “fake.”

Yesterday, in multiple posts to his Truth Social platform, he asserted that the huge crowd at her Detroit-area rally was faked by AI. It “DIDN’T EXIST,” he posted. “Nobody was there.”

On Wednesday, he complained that:

“If Kamala has 1,000 people at a Rally, the Press goes ‘crazy,’ and talks about how ‘big’ it was - And she pays for her ‘Crowd.’ When I have a Rally, and 100,000 people show up, the Fake News doesn’t talk about it, THEY REFUSE TO MENTION CROWD SIZE. The Fake News is the Enemy of the People!”

None of this has anything to do with how Kamala would govern America or whether she’d be a good president, but Trump appears incapable of separating his fragile ego from his desperation to get attention and get even rather than get elected president.

He’s attacking everyone and everything. After The New York Times ran a piece a few days ago about the “the worst three weeks” of his campaign, Trump exploded at what he called “the Failing New York Times, which is a crooked newspaper run by a Radical Left group of Lunatics … losing readers at a record level.”

He’s making up stuff that has nothing whatsoever to do with Harris or Walz, such as a “scary” helicopter ride with California’s Willie Brown that never happened.

Trump is cracking because the attention and positive energy generated by Harris and Walz are threatening his ego so much he cannot focus on his opponent. So he falls back on the size of her crowds relative to his, her “Blackness,” the “stolen election,” his grievances against Republicans who didn’t support him, and The New York Times.

Trump’s rage has sometimes worked for him in the past, but it is not working against Harris and Walz because they are running by a playbook that’s fueled by excitement and hope rather than grievance and narcissism.

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(Robert Reich, former U.S. Secretary of Labor, is professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley and the author of “The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It.” Read more from Robert Reich at https://robertreich.substack.com/)