In one of his first interviews after he was almost assassinated at a rally in Pennsylvania last month, Donald Trump said he felt that he had been saved ‘by luck or by God’, adding: ‘I’m supposed to be dead, I’m not supposed to be here.’
It was an odd sentiment from a man previously not given to deep introspection but some close to him insist that the close shave has wrought a profound change.
Vanity Fair magazine last week quoted a Trump campaign insider as saying: ‘He’s been watching that seven-second clip of how close he was to getting shot right in the head over and over and over again. He may actually legit have PTSD.’ In fact, a trauma therapist told the Mail that hypothesis was distinctly possible.
He‘s certainly lost the sureness of political touch that saw him take the White House in 2016.
Ever since Joe Biden abruptly announced he wouldn’t be standing for re-election against his old foe and Kamala Harris emerged as the de facto Democrat nominee, Trump has made a series of misjudgements so tin-eared that campaign insiders are reportedly wondering whether their man actually now even wants to win the presidency.
Donald Trump was left bleeding from his ear after being shot at a rally by a would-be assassin
They fear he may be consciously sabotaging his own campaign having got locked in a ‘self-destructive spiral’ that has seen his once convincing lead in the polls evaporate in just weeks.
A friend of Trump described his behaviour to Vanity Fair as ‘nuts’. Another campaign source wailed: ‘It’s like he’s choosing to lose.’
Other US media outlets have been reporting the same bleak mood in the Trump camp, with sources admitting they cannot remember him performing as badly as he has done in the three weeks since Biden made way for Harris.
The move appears to have completely blindsided Trump and the man who clings to the myth that his 2020 defeat was fraudulent, now claims that the Democrats ‘cheated’ and are trying to ‘steal’ this election, too, by ‘unfairly’ replacing their candidate in what he insists was a ‘bait-and-switch’ trick.
His increasingly erratic behaviour was there for all to see two weeks ago when Trump took to a stage in Chicago to address the National Association of Black Journalists Conference.
It offered an opportunity for the Republican presidential contender to consolidate his relationship with black American voters, who have been increasingly deserting the Democrats in one of the most surprising developments in this year’s election campaign.
Instead, he shot himself in the foot, big time. Asked if he thought Harris was only on the ticket because she was a black woman, he suggested – almost unbelievably – she wasn’t actually black.
He claimed that his Democrat presidential rival – whose father is from Jamaica and mother from India – had spent years claiming to be Indian but ‘only happened to turn black’ a few years ago. ‘Now she wants to be known as black,’ he said.
There were audible gasps in the convention hall when he said it and Republican strategists held their head in their hands.
Quite apart from the fact that none of what he said was true, it was a suicidally rash thing to say to a hall full of black opinion-formers.
He compounded this error a few days later when he headed to the crucial swing state of Georgia, where a third of voters are black.
Trump could have used the campaign stop there to pour oil on troubled waters. Instead, he devoted 10 minutes of his speech to reopening a long-running feud with the state’s Republican governor Brian Kemp, who is rather more popular in Georgia than he is and whose support Trump could well do with.
‘Little Brian, little Brian Kemp. Bad guy,’ muttered Trump, reaching for his usual school playground vocabulary of insults.
In a final flourish, a candidate who really could do with regaining the flagging support of white suburban women in November’s election laid into Kemp’s wife Marty for having the temerity to have been lukewarm about his candidacy. His party’s campaign advisers once again winced at his recklessness.
Meanwhile, on his social media site, Truth Social, Trump has been circulating claims so wildly speculative that they border on the deranged.
One post alleged that Biden is so furious about his mistreatment by his party that he might gatecrash this week’s Democratic National Convention in a bid to regain the presidential nomination. Suffice to say, Biden’s participation was very different.
Trump has also accused the Democrats of waging psychological warfare by using AI to create videos and pictures of massed crowds turning out for Harris on the campaign trail.
Trump clashes with ABC’s Rachel Scott at the National Association of Black Journalists
In a reference to images of a massive turnout at a rally in Detroit, Trump ranted: ‘She’s a CHEATER. She had NOBODY waiting, and the “crowd” looked like 10,000 people! Same thing is happening with her fake ‘crowds’ at her speeches.’
The idiocy of such a move was thrown into sharp relief shortly afterwards when multiple TV news crews and agency photographers confirmed their footage and images were genuine.
Indeed, the main effect of Trump’s allegations was to highlight that Harris was attracting bigger crowds than he was.
As for Harris herself, Trump prefers to dismiss her simply as ‘stupid’, a highly charged putdown of an opponent who is the first black woman Vice President.
Campaign advisers admit insults of this sort are not helpful, even if insiders insist he genuinely believes it.
Even Trump’s Machiavellian former campaign adviser Roger Stone has called it ‘counter-productive’ but, shrugging off any warnings, the ex-president insists he knows what he’s doing.
Campaign advisers are urging him to attack Harris on policies where the Left-winger from California is vulnerable with undecided moderate voters instead of wasting time thinking up nicknames for her.
He has so far circled through ‘Kamabla’, ‘Laughin’ Kamala’, ‘Crooked Kamala’ and ‘Crazy Kamala’ but is said to be unhappy with all of them.
When he isn’t insulting his opponent in his speeches, Trump has taken to displaying a puzzling obsession with mentioning Hannibal Lecter, the fictional, insane and cannibalistic serial killer played on screen by Anthony Hopkins.
It appears that Trump is trying to connect the murderous bogeyman with his contention that many illegal immigrants come – like Lecter – from mental institutions but critics complain that it’s become just one more distraction from the serious points he should be making.
The truth is that without ‘Sleepy Joe’ to mock as ‘cognitively impaired’ Trump appears to be at a loss as to how to adapt to fighting Harris.
Biden cries at the Democratic National Convention as he gave one of his final major addresses as president earlier this week
Facing an opponent nearly 20 years younger than himself – she’s 59 and he is 78 – Trump is only too aware that he’s now the one on the back foot over questions of age.
Like Biden, Trump – whose father developed Alzheimer’s disease – occasionally mixes up people’s names and experts have raised questions about his own cognitive functions. His nephew, Fred, (who has endorsed Harris) this week claimed Trump is showing signs of dementia like his grandfather by spouting ‘craziness’ and refusing to stick to the script at rallies.
He also appeared to speak with a lisp during his rambling two-hour interview with the multibillionaire owner of X, Elon Musk, earlier this week.
Trump’s unhappiness has been compounded, it’s claimed, by the much tighter personal security arrangements introduced since last month’s shooting exposed the Secret Service’s many deficiencies.
These new measures prevent him doing what he loves most: appearing at open-air rallies and playing golf.
However, what infuriates the Republican hierarchy most is that it should have been so easy to puncture the giant hype balloon that Democrats and their media allies have been able to inflate around Harris.
Only a few months ago, she was widely dismissed even within her own party as a viable successor to Biden given that polls showed she was equally, if not more, unpopular.
Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris speaks at the convention in Chicago
Indeed, even as recently as July, when the Republicans held their National Convention in Milwaukee just days after that bullet shaved Trump’s ear, the party faithful believed that victory was assured as the assassination attempt had turned their man into a ‘living martyr’ who would be unbeatable.
Wearing an overly large white bandage on his right ear, Trump’s call in his convention address for national unity, suggested his ordeal had softened him.
This briefly alarmed Democrats, who felt this might ‘seal the deal’ with undecided moderate voters. But they were relieved just a few days later when Trump was back to his usual polarising self at a rally in which he compared senior Democrat Nancy Pelosi to a dog and dismissed her as ‘crazy as a bed bug’.
If some believe that was another opportunity for the Republicans to change the narrative that was foiled by their leader, there have been plenty more since.
Holding a press conference a week ago at his Mar-a-Lago base in Florida appeared to be a great idea, as it highlighted the craven refusal of Harris – notoriously terrible at speaking off-the-cuff – to do the same.
Instead, Trump turned triumph into tragedy by boasting about the size of the crowd he addressed at his rally on January 6, 2021 – yes, the same crowd he’s accused of inciting to go off and storm the US Capitol.
Worse, he then compared it to the audience that watched civil rights icon Martin Luther King make his famous ‘I Have A Dream’ speech in Washington in 1963 and claimed his crowd was bigger.
It wasn’t, but the fact that he was so tone deaf as to have made the comparison in the first place speaks volumes for his ailing political instincts, say critics.
At a rally in North Carolina last Wednesday, Trump did make an attempt to address various key campaign issues, such as the economy.
But he rather ruined the authenticity of his message by repeatedly telling his audience that ‘they’ – his campaign team – had told him to do so as ‘they say it’s the most important subject’.
At a press conference at his golf club in New Jersey the following day where he used a huge array of grocery items as props, Trump delivered a pre-prepared speech that largely stuck to the economy. However, the fact that he had to read it off pages in a binder – a radical departure for a politician who prefers to ad-lib – suggested his heart wasn’t really in it. Asked if he would now refrain from vicious personal attacks, he defiantly shot back: ‘I think I’m entitled to personal attacks.’
Republican polling expert Frank Luntz has warned there has been a ‘broad shift’ in the polls toward Harris, as they picked up ‘undecided’ voters who were put off by Trump’s personality.
In comments that echoed Vanity Fair’s take, he said Trump appeared to have ‘lost control’ and was ‘committing suicide’, with self-destructive behaviour such as his recent praise for Elon Musk’s sacking of union members for striking over better working conditions. They were just the sort of people who might have voted for him, Luntz observed.
Of course, all is far from lost for the Republicans. Voters are still concerned about the same issues, such as immigration and inflation. As happened with Biden, all it could take would be one terrible outing by Harris and the public mood could change entirely.
As her opponents know, she cannot avoid TV debates and press conferences forever. And when she does put her head above the parapet, even Democrats will concede she is vulnerable.
Even if she doesn’t mangle her comments in the laughably unintelligible ‘word salads’ for which she’s notorious, she has a lot of explaining to do when it comes to her uninspiring record as VP, her Left-wing history and her shameless political shape-shifting in recent years.
Republicans are itching to get their claws into her and believe they have plenty of ammunition. The problem is, they’ll need Trump to fire it, and at the moment he’s proving to be a dangerously loose cannon.
