Will the Democratic
Convention Break Trump?
It
comes at a fragile time for the Crazy Old Orange Man.
AUG 19, 2024
EVER
SINCE DONALD TRUMP chose JD Vance as his running mate and then got a new
general election opponent a week later, he hasn’t been the same. Watching Vice
President Kamala Harris’s popularity soar, his polling lead vanish, and Vance
become a mistake has been destabilizing.
Trump
has responded to his campaign freefall by returning to his security blankets of
conspiracy and racism. He has also nursed fantasies of Joe Biden returning to the ticket, and claimed that a
crowd of thousands attending a Harris rally was fake and produced by artificial intelligence, that his audience
on January 6th was larger than the crowd at Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream”
speech, and that “more than . . . 100 percent” of new jobs have gone to migrants.
Though
ranting and spreading lies comforts Trump he can’t seem to land a blow on
Harris. His “radical left lunatic” label hasn’t stopped her climb. One of his attempts to trash her ended up becoming a story about
his memory when he confused two black men.
To get
him to stay on message, his campaign made some babysitting plans: Calling them “mini-rallies,” they convinced Trump to give policy
speeches. Last week’s “speech” was on the economy.
With
his props of assorted groceries—brands, products, and prices he has no
familiarity with—against the incongruous backdrop of his expensive New Jersey
golf club, Trump claimedHarris is “unbelievable in terms of her badness,” and declared “I
think I’m entitled to personal attacks.”
This
week will be gutting for Trump, as Democrats gather in Chicago for the
convention that has transformed (with Biden stepping aside) from dreaded
funeral to celebratory festival.
A-listers,
adulation, attention—Harris and her party will draw everything Trump pines for
yet cannot have. His nominating speech at the GOP convention was roundly
mocked, and Harris’s speech on Thursday is likely to attract a much larger
audience.
The
vice president will be praised by party stalwarts—Barack and Michelle Obama,
and Bill and Hillary Clinton—as well as celebrities like Julia Louis-Dreyfus.
Former presidents or vice presidents or first ladies or party nominees—from
George W. Bush to Dick Cheney, Dan Quayle, Mike Pence, and Mitt Romney—don’t
show up at Trump’s conventions because they refuse to endorse him.
There
will be protests in Chicago, and Trump will be cheering them on—but while he’s
hoping for 1968, even he knows the vibe will be far closer to 2008.
As
Harris supporters plan marathon viewing, many other Americans are likely to
tune in, hoping to spot megastars sprinkled among the delegates. There is also
the potential for celebrity surprises—what if something explosive happens like
Beyoncé or Taylor Swift suddenly sweeping out on stage to sing?
Trump
will be paying close attention to every production detail. From lighting to
backdrops, and of course pretty faces, Trump obsesses about what makes good
television. His entire political persona is aimed at the
show.
And Trump’s preoccupation with ratings is well documented. Ramin Setoodeh, author of Apprentice in Wonderland, recorded him, post-presidency, saying that one can be “mean” or “evil” but: “There’s only one thing that matters and that’s ratings. If you don’t have ratings, it doesn’t matter.”
In
February 2017, two weeks into his presidency, Trump spoke at the National
Prayer Breakfast where he pronounced Arnold Schwarzenegger’s ratings on The
New Celebrity Apprentice a “disaster.”
Of
course the former California governor had replaced Trump on the show, and Trump
could not resist the deadly sin of pride, with a little spite thrown in as
well. “I want to just pray for Arnold . . . for those ratings,” he told the
bewildered crowd of believers.
SO THE
ENERGY AND EXCITEMENT inside Chicago’s United Center and the diverse and
perhaps unconventional convention programming will bother Trump—but it’s the
ratings that will infuriate him.
And
the more Trump decompensates the more he will blame his staff and demand
someone fix his campaign. With his polls down Trump recently brought back Corey
Lewandowski—an accused groper and batterer whom he fired from his first campaign eight years ago, a
lowlife who likes the kind of trouble that involves the police. While the
candidate doesn’t take advice, Lewandowski will be a senior adviser, layered
over the grownups who have been running Trump’s first ever quasi-professional
campaign. Lewandowski prefers unleashed Trump.
In
response to being blamed, Trump’s staff is leaking. They are telling the press
about their plans to right the ship—the plans that he keeps pissing
on—and how his close aide known as the “human printer,” who facilitates his every phone and internet whim, doesn’t feel
like she has to answer to the campaign minders who want Trump reined in.
Team
Trump is likely hoping their candidate, desperate for a headline, doesn’t fire
someone midweek. What he will almost definitely do is tweet (or “Truth”) about
how the Democratic convention is fake. Trump has called it “rigged,” as part of
his effort to paint the Biden-to-Harris switch as illegitimate—a “coup”—that is
likely a pretext for him to dismiss the results should he lose in November.
“Why
is she going to the convention? Because it’s a rigged convention, obviously.
She got no votes,” he said Saturday.
