'Buffoon' Trump is 'making blunder after blunder' in closing weeks: analysis
The New Republic's Michael Tomasky is asking Democrats to take a deep breath and not abjectly panic about polls showing that the 2024 presidential election remains remarkably close despite Vice President Kamala Harris's dominating debate performance over former President Donald Trump.
In his latest column, Tomasky contends that the 2024 election was always going to be close given the intense polarization of American voters.
With this in mind, he cautions Democrats against believing that Trump is some kind of "evil genius" capable of manipulating the electorate to his will.
In fact, Tomasky believes that Trump appears to be doing his best to sabotage his campaign in its final weeks.
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"He may be evil," writes Tomasky. "But he’s no genius. He’s a buffoon. And while he may of course still win — he is a buffoon who is unfortunately optimized for the vicissitudes of the Electoral College — my little sniff of the zeitgeist suggests to me that he and his campaign are making blunder after blunder, and they’re hurting him."
To illustrate this, he points to Trump's decision to quadruple down on peddling false smears against Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, which he said isn't even about the issue of immigration anymore but about "more crazy s--t these crazy bastards say."
He then allows that Harris needs to do more to seal the deal with swing voters, but then adds that such moves would be customary for many campaigns and not signs of panic.
"She’s running a disciplined campaign," he argues. "Trump is starting to flail. If he gets much farther behind, he’s going to start getting scary and dangerous... Right now, he’s sitting down there at Mar-a-Lago beginning to come to grips with the reality that he might lose to a Black woman, who royally thumped his ass the one time they shared a stage and who so far is surviving the attacks that I’m sure Trump thought would be pure gold, about her being a Marxist radical and not having borne children."