'Funny or weird' stunts are Trump's closing message to voters he needs: WSJ reporter
Donald Trump has donned an orange vest and an apron in the final days of the election campaign, and a Wall Street Journal reporter explained the strategic reasoning behind those stunts.
The former president briefly staffed the fry station at a McDonald's in last week after baselessly claiming Kamala Harris had lied about working there decades ago and awkwardly climbed into the cab of a sanitation truck Wednesday to needle President Joe Biden, who the campaign says called Trump supporters "garbage," and the Journal's senior political correspondent Molly Ball explained the thinking behind those stunts.
"I think in terms of the photo ops and the stunts, you see that these campaigns have a different theory about who the undecided voters voters are at this point," Ball told CNN. "The Trump camp's theory is that the voters they need to reach are the ones who are marginally interested in politics and will only pay attention if something funny or weird happens. So they see Donald Trump on a garbage truck and it's like, 'Oh, that's kinda cool.'"
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"The Harris campaign's theory is different," Ball added. "Their theory is that the undecided voters who are still out there are conservative-leaning, college-educated suburbanites who want the president to be a serious figure. She's not doing these kinds of stunts because she wants to be seen as a serious figure. She wants to convince people that she's presidential. She wants to do things like the speech that I attended on the Ellipse earlier this week where she is trying to strike that tone and have that stature and that gravitas because the undecided voters they are trying to reach and get off the fence at this point are the ones who want to see a president behaving in that traditional presidential manner."
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