Donald Trump Unravels As Kamala Harris Rises
As Harris sees an extraordinary surge in polls and draws massive crowds in swing states, Trump is growing increasingly unhinged, dishonest, racist, and misogynistic—showcasing why he's unfit to lead.
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While Vice President Kamala Harris is having the best three weeks of her political career, former President Donald Trump is having the worst of his 2024 campaign.
Although it feels like more time has passed, it’s only been three weeks since President Biden made his historically selfless decision to drop out of the 2024 presidential race and endorse Kamala Harris. Since that fateful Sunday on July 21, Harris has run a nearly flawless political operation, consolidated support across the entire Democratic Party, and made joy a cornerstone of her pro-democracy movement.
Building on this momentum was Harris’s intuitive pick of Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her running mate, whose happy energy, communication skills, and ability to translate progressive policies for rural voters make him an ideal partner for Kamala Harris against Trump and Vance's angry, fake populism.
The excitement around the Harris-Walz ticket is real and showing up in polling.
Over the weekend, a New York Times/Siena College poll showed Kamala Harris with notable leads in key battleground states. It’s important to note that this is the same poll that has consistently found President Biden falling behind Donald Trump. The poll showed Harris with a 4-point lead over Trump in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania.
Of all the battleground states, Harris only needs to win Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania (along with Nebraska’s 2nd district) to hit the 270 electoral college votes necessary to win the presidency.
This NYT/Siena battleground poll comes amid an avalanche of positive polling for Kamala Harris. Her lead is widening in the FiveThirtyEight polling average, bolstered by multiple national polls showing her taking the lead. Harris is also gaining ground and taking the lead on important issues.
A new poll from the Financial Times found for the first time this election cycle that Donald Trump is losing on the issue of the economy, with Kamala Harris at 42% to Donald Trump’s 41% on who voters trust more with the economy. Previous polls had President Biden in the mid-to-low 30s and Trump consistently above 40%.
This polling shift isn’t an anomaly - it’s clearly reflecting authentic enthusiasm for Harris and Walz on the ground.
Last week, Harris and Walz went on a remarkable tour of key battleground states, going from Pennsylvania to Wisconsin to Michigan to Arizona to Nevada, drawing massive crowds of tens of thousands of supporters in rallies that were just downright fun.
It’s clear we’re seeing the most dramatic vibe shift over the shortest period of time in recent political memory, and many are feeling excited about the increasing likelihood of a Kamala Harris victory. Donald Trump, on the other hand, is not handling the rising fortunes of his political rival well, to say the least.
Kamala Harris, a Black and Asian American woman, outmaneuvering Trump is bringing out a convergence of his rage, racism, and misogyny in increasingly deranged ways. The rise of Harris triggered all of Trump’s insecurities and bigotries, and it’s manifesting both privately and publicly - sparking concerns among his own advisors.
The Unraveling Of Donald Trump
Donald Trump, who has largely been off the campaign trail, instead sending his running mate J.D. Vance to make sparsely attended appearances, has been raging about Kamala Harris.
In an in-depth article over the weekend from The New York Times titled “Inside the Worst Three Weeks of Donald Trump’s 2024 Campaign,” journalists Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan took us inside Trump’s flailing campaign of worried advisors and a Donald Trump who is showcasing the worst version of himself.
One excerpt depicts the uncontrollable anger Donald Trump feels and how he’s lashing out at Kamala Harris privately, calling her a “bitch” to his aides. You read that right. From the Times piece:
Indeed, Mr. Trump has often been in a foul mood the past few weeks. He has ranted about Ms. Harris. He has called her “nasty,” on “Fox & Friends,” and a “bitch,” repeatedly, in private, according to two people who heard the remark on different occasions.
In a new episode of The Daily out on Monday morning, Jonathan Swan expanded on his reporting, giving us some insight into what’s driving Trump’s anger at Harris:
“One thing I can’t underscore enough is just how much contempt Trump has for Harris. He actually respected Hillary Clinton’s intellect. As much as he despised her, he thought she was smart. He does not think Kamala Harris is smart. And, in fact, he’s been counseled by some advisors to try not to show as much of that contempt publicly. So, he does think he’s up against someone who is incompetent and is not gonna perform well in a debate against him. It could be a big miscalculation.”
Trump has long underestimated people of color and women. This bigotry presents itself in how Trump handles tough questions from journalists who are women, people of color, or both. You can also see it in how he handles his political rivals.
Trump’s disdain for Barack Obama came partially because he couldn’t handle a Black man being more competent than him in every way. Part of Trump’s anger at Hillary Clinton was the same but as a woman. Now, having Kamala Harris as his chief political rival, who is both a woman and a person of color, is triggering Trump in new and profound ways.
We only need to look at Trump’s public behavior since Kamala Harris has become the Democratic nominee to corroborate the reporting about his private conduct.
Just this past weekend, Donald Trump took to “Truth Social” to post blatant lies, claiming that Kamala Harris is using AI to fake her crowd sizes. We have all seen her crowds with our own eyes in live footage from multiple networks, which has been corroborated by journalists on the ground. The lie fell flat, with even right-wing grifters on Twitter debunking the conspiracy theory.
This crowd-size lie was a recent symptom of Trump’s despondency in the face of an increasingly likely electoral defeat that will lead him to face accountability in his looming criminal trials. He is clearly spiraling out of control.
When Trump gets desperate, he always turns to disinformation. In recent weeks, disinformation and racism, Trump’s two main political tactics, have been deployed to a dizzying degree.
At a now-infamous appearance at the National Association of Black Journalists two weeks ago, Donald Trump was not only blatantly disrespectful to the Black journalists on the panel, like ABC’s Rachel Scott, but he also launched an attack on Kamala Harris that was downright disgusting and objectively racist.
Trump squirms when faced with accountability for his words and actions, especially when the person presenting that accountability is a Black woman. Rachel Scott asked totally valid questions, but Donald’s fragile ego simply couldn’t handle a Black woman competently taking him to task. So, he lashed out in a way that he felt would personally hurt Kamala Harris and appeal to the worst corners of his base. Trump questioned Harris’s racial identity.
DONALD TRUMP: I’ve known her a long time indirectly, not directly very much, and she was always of Indian heritage, and she was only promoting Indian heritage. I didn’t know she was black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn black, and now she wants to be known as black. So I don’t know. Is she Indian, or is she black?
Rachel Scott: She is always identified as a black woman from a historically black college.
DONALD TRUMP: I respect either one, but she obviously doesn’t, because she was Indian all the way, and then all of a sudden she made a turn, and she went, she became a black person. And I think somebody should look into that, too, when you ask… continue in a very hostile, nasty tone.
Donald Trump’s first big attack on Kamala Harris was a new form of birtherism, falsely claiming that Harris isn’t really Black. This is, of course, nothing new. Trump’s history of bigotry is well-documented. But the bigotry really ramps up when he thinks he’s losing.
Another example of Donald Trump's great unraveling came at his spontaneous press conference last week. In an effort to get some media attention back on himself amid the Kamala Harris positive media frenzy, Trump took questions off the cuff at Mar-a-Lago. Needless to say, as usual, it did not go well.
During that press conference, Trump told one of the wildest lies I’ve ever seen from him. While defending January 6 rioters, Trump claimed that his January 6 speech, which incited an insurrection led by white supremacist groups, had a bigger crowd than the 1963 March on Washington, one of the largest Civil Rights protests in history:
“The biggest crowd I've ever spoken before was that day [Janaury 6]. And I'll tell you, it's very hard to find a picture of that crowd. You see the picture of a small number of people relatively going to the Capitol, but you never see the picture of the crowd.
The biggest crowd I've ever spoken - I've spoken to the biggest crowds. Nobody's spoken to crowds bigger than me. If you look at Martin Luther King, when he did his speech - his great speech, and you look at ours, same real estate, same everything, same number of people, if not - we had more…. You look at it, and you look at the picture of his crowd, my crowd, we actually had more people.”
Comparing a crowd of people that would go on to wave confederate flags as they laid siege to the Capitol alongside white supremacist groups with an iconic Civil Rights moment like the “I Have A Dream” speech is absurd, insane, and implicitly racist.
This surely won’t be the last depraved moment from Trump in the coming months.
While the outcome of the election is far from certain, and we still have a lot of work to do, it’s clear Donald Trump is sweating. He has an instinct for knowing when he’s losing, and right now, as the race currently stands, Trump is very much losing.
As I’ve written for years, never underestimate Trump’s capacity for self-sabotage. If Kamala Harris’s momentum keeps rolling, we’re going to continue to see Trump act out.
While Trump’s delusional mind might think this behavior is damaging Harris and bolstering his base, it’s only backfiring on himself, reminding Americans why they voted him out of office in the first place: Trump is unstable, unhinged, and unbecoming of a leader.
I don’t read much fiction these days so perhaps I’m not a good judge, but this story is becoming unbelievable. Thank you, Ahmed, for bringing us some of the lowlights.