Days after his debate drubbing by Harris, Donald Trump is still flailing

Days after a debate that he hoped would restore his 2024 election lead over Vice President Kamala Harris, former president Donald Trump has found himself digging deeper and deeper into a hole of his own making.

He is trailing Harris in fundraising, in most polls taken following their face-off in Philadelphia on Tuesday, and now in the poll-of-polls averages that political forecasters look to when making their predictions of who will win the November presidential election.

Perhaps most importantly, he is beginning to fall behind Harris in nearly all of the key states where voters will, under America’s byzantine electoral system, determine who shall serve atop the country’s executive branch for the next four years.

It’s a stunning and quick reversal of fortune for the former president, who has spent most of the time since he announced his third presidential campaign leading in those same polls.

Despite the candidate’s messaging troubles, the Trump campaign still believes they are ahead.

A polling memorandum released by the campaign on Thursday states that the campaign’s internal surveys found he has gained ground against Harris in the wake of his debate performance.

That’s at odds with most public polling, which shows Harris tied or ahead in battleground states and opening up a lead nationally that is exceeding the margin of error. Either way, Trump doesn’t seem to be changing his course or focusing on policy.

At a press conference in California on Friday, he devoted much of the time he spoke to repeating baseless racist smears of pet-eating by Haitian immigrants, which not only have drawn condemnation from the White House but have resulted in credible bomb threats against schools and municipal buildings in Springfield, Ohio.

One operative on the campaign said Trump’s decision to bring on a coterie of old hands such as Corey Lewandowski, as well as keeping company with conspiracy theorists like Laura Loomer doesn’t bode well for the remainder of the campaign.

“The new mantra is ‘let Trump be Trump,’ but we’ve seen where that leads,” they said.

“He is who he is, and he isn’t going to change.”

Trump had benefited from the rapid decline of President Joe Biden. He was also helped by years of inflation, the aftereffects of America’s shambolic exit from the 20-year-old war in Afghanistan, and Biden’s visible aging, the latter of which was on full display when the two men debated in Atlanta on June 27.

So when Biden announced he was exiting the race and throwing his support to Harris less than a month later, Trump called it a victory brought on by what he described as a dominating debate performance — “the greatest in history.”

And on the heels of the unsuccessful assassination attempt against him just weeks before the Republican National Convention kicked off in Wisconsin, Trump and his entourage were riding high when Biden shifted the goal posts by releasing a letter informing Americans that he was standing down — and moments later endorsing Harris as the Democratic standard-bearer.

The ex-president, despite so forcefully knocking the sails out of the then-Biden campaign by laying bare his successor’s inability to defend his record, has spent the nearly two months since flailing from one strategy to another in an effort to blunt the near-vertical rise of Harris.

People close to Trump’s presidential campaign — his third over the last three four-year election cycles — have lamented his inability to stay on topic as he has lost ground to Harris.

Even as polls have continued to show him leading Harris when it comes to who voters trust more on a number of key issues — the economy, immigration, and others — Trump has utterly failed to stick to attacking her on policy grounds.

Instead, he has cycled through a seemingly endless stream of negative nicknames and crass personal attacks, including calling into question her ethnic background, mocking her laugh, calling her “Comrade Kamala” and occasionally referencing the vice president’s father’s background as a Marxist economic scholar, as he did during their debate on Tuesday.

But none of the varied attacks have landed. Instead, Trump has been reduced to spouting insane conspiracy theories — including that immigrants in an Ohio town have been eating the pets of residents.

The unhinged exchange took place in the first third of the 90-minute debate, with Trump, already off-kilter after Harris mocked the sizes of crowds at his signature rallies, shouting: “In Springfield, they’re eating dogs — they’re eating the cats. They’re eating … the pets of the people that live there. And this is what’s happening in our country, and it’s a shame.”

One former campaign operative who is still active in Republican politics told The Independent as the debate was wrapping that Trump was “kicking [Harris’s] ass” and compared her to Pam Grier, the uber-cool star of 70’s Black cinema, while also comparing Trump to Archie Bunker, the racist, elderly lead character in Normal Lear’s All in the Family sitcom.

But Trump’s inability to remain focused isn’t a bug of his campaign — it’s a feature.

During a rally in North Carolina last month, the ex-president mocked aides who want him to stick to policy and stay away from the insult politics that powered his rise through the GOP.

“‘Sir, please stick to policy, don’t get personal,’” he said, imitating them.

During an interview with podcaster Lex Friedman earlier this month, he rejected the suggestion that a policy critique would be more effective.

‘I think you have to criticize, though,” Trump said. “I think they’re nasty.”

By and large, Trump aides don’t expect him to have any sort of epiphany or shift to conventional campaigning.

One former aide who remains close to people on the campaign said the only thing that really animates the ex-president on the stump is when he gets personal.

“You can tell when he’s reading off the prompter — he’s just phoning it in, no emotion at all,” they said. “He will do what he does and there’s no coaching him.”

Charlie Black, a longtime GOP strategist, put it similarly in an interview with Time earlier this month.

He told the magazine that the ex-president, ideally, “should be talking issues, not throwing personal insults all over the place.”

“But he won’t do that. He doesn’t appear capable of it,” he added.