Is Trump Getting Worse? Not Everyone Agrees

Some Observers Say He Was Always This Deranged

There were hints galore last week, that the deranged Señor T was planning to blame his spate of problems on his campaign managers, Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita, Wiles basically the only competent person left on the planet who will work with him. Crackpot Vivek Ramaswamy was openly campaigning for the job of campaign manager. And while few thought Trump had degenerated quite that far, by Wednesday it was obvious that a change was coming— a big one. Apparently no one ever told Trump why too many kooks in the kitchen is not a good idea.

On Thursday, Tara Palmeri reported that the “tightly run, professionally operated, supposedly impenetrable campaign” was about to crumble. Days before she had heard that “scandal magnet” Corey Lewandowski, who’s had a long checkered past with Trump, was willing to step in and oversee Wiles and LaCivita. And it happened Thursday, “bundled with a handful of other, lesser-known new hires: Taylor Budowich, Alex Pfeiffer, Alex Bruesewitz, and Tim Murtaugh— all ‘veterans of prior Trump campaigns’ with ‘unmatched experience,’ per a campaign statement.”

The only person in politics who can match Trump’s expertise in lying, Steve Cheung, told Palmeri that “Lewandowski’s title will be ‘senior advisor,’ and that Wiles and LaCivita will remain as co-campaign managers. (Trump himself referred to Lewandowski during a press conference on Thursday afternoon as a ‘personal envoy or something.’)  All around Bedminster, where Trump has relocated to escape the South Florida heat, there is a pervasive anxiety that the candidate is trying to recreate the chaos that surrounded his winning 2016 campaign. No one thinks Lewandowski and LaCivita can cohabitate for long, leading some people close to Trump to speculate that he’s trying to push LaCivita out, just as he installed Anthony Scaramucci to fire Steve Bannon and Reince Priebus. ‘Susie is a survivor; she’s not going anywhere. But then you have LaCivita and Corey Lewandowski, two alpha men,’ said a source close to Lewandowski. ‘It’s like Trump just wants them to kill each other and for one to win so he doesn’t have to actually fire anyone.’ One obvious vulnerability facing LaCivita is his astronomical fee. As Trump stews over his fading poll numbers and whether a once easily winnable election is slipping away, there has been growing chatter in some corners of Mar-a-Lago about the $50,000 that LaCivita’s firm, Advanced Strategies, collects from the campaign and RNC each month, which is included in the nearly $1.7 million he’s invoiced the campaign so far this year for various services like placed media, political strategy consulting, and video production, up from the $1.65 million he billed last year. (Sure, it’s not Jeff Roe money, but it has some tongues wagging.) ‘I have never told anyone I will be conducting a forensic audit of the campaign, nor have I alluded to, or have any understanding of, how much money Chris LaCivita may or may not have billed this campaign,’ Lewandowski told me.” 

Though Cheung, of course, says this is all “‘fake news,’ [n]evertheless, the typically jovial LaCivita is now quiet and moody… a dramatic change from the heady days of the Republican National Convention, last month, when he was boasting about the size of his hotel suite.” 

There’s no question the Trump operation has been on tilt since the Biden-Harris switcheroo, and will likely become even more unbalanced as larger-than-life figures like Lewandowski return to the arena. I’m hearing Lewandowski has told allies that he’s been mandated by Trump to build his own all-star roster of alumni from the 2016 campaign, which could eventually rival the tight-knit LaCivita and Wiles loyalists currently in place. “There are things and people that swirl around Lewandowski, and if you bring him back on, they’re coming with him,” said the source close to Lewandowski. “He’s a mini tornado. He stirs things up and brings things into the orbit.”

…Trump has also spent considerable time conferring with his former campaign manager and senior advisor Kellyanne Conway. Sources tell me that she’s still on the fence about joining the campaign, especially given her contract as a Fox News contributor. But Conway is already billing the R.N.C. around $30,000 per month, and switching over to the Trump campaign payroll would be little more than a formality. And as for potential turf wars, Conway seems to believe there’s plenty of campaign to go around. “There’s no more silos, no more turf battles, the field is long and wide enough for the existing campaign structure and personnel that have brought [Trump] this far to be supplemented— but not substituted— by new players,” she told me. 

In any case, Trump’s desire to be surrounded by yes-men and yes-women— Lewandowski literally wrote a book called Let Trump Be Trump— feels like an unnecessary distraction to several on the campaign. “The only thing that Donald Trump needs to do is stop talking about [Kamala’s] race and gender and focus on the policies,” said one Trump advisor. “What is Corey going to do, make up some magic bullet? Everyone knows what has to be done; Trump just has to do it.” Easier said than done, of course. After Trump’s disastrous appearance at the National Association of Black Journalists, where he accused Harris of deciding to “become Black,” a campaign source told me that there was an all-hands call to encourage staffers to ignore the “outside noise,” which some interpreted as a reference to rumors of a leadership change. “They’re all very stressed,” said the campaign source. “Very, very stressed. They’re finally coming to grips that change is coming.” Trump, after all, has a habit of summer house cleanings. In June 2016, he ousted Lewandowski for Conway, and in July 2020, he fired Brad Parscale. Another shake-up appears to be underway. I’m told that Trump is being goaded by his outside kitchen cabinet and former advisors to take action, with these provocateurs criticizing the failure of the Wiles-LaCivita campaign to define Harris immediately after Biden’s exit. There’s also plenty of finger-pointing over Trump’s light schedule. As usual, there’s no shortage of people in Trump’s ear, assuring him that someone else is to blame.

Meanwhile, Jennifer Rubin sees a convicted felon spiraling downward and “unable to handle reality. His opponent is beating him by multiple metrics, especially crowd size. In response, he posted several obvious lies on Truth Social, claiming that ‘nobody was there’ and that photos and video of Vice President Kamala Harris’ crowds were AI-generated… As lawyer and anti-Trump commentator George Conway said on MSNBC, ‘He has completely lost it. This post is, beyond question, delusional. But it was also inevitable because he realizes… he’s not just running for the presidency, he’s running for his freedom.’ Trump’s nonsense is also meant to sow the seeds of doubt if the election does not go his way. He stated in the same post: ‘This is the way the Democrats win Elections, by CHEATING.’ As my Post colleague Philip Bump wrote, ‘the point isn’t to increase Trump’s credibility. It’s to erode everyone else’s. That way, when they accurately report the results in November, Trump can remind his supporters to reject them if necessary.’”

Trump might be conditioning voters for another “Stop the Steal.” But then again, he might be just losing it.

A glitch-plagued Twitter interview (unable to start for 45 minutes) with Elon Musk, owner of the social media site, only made things worse. People on social media reflected shock at hearing him slur and ramble his way through a softball interview. His obsession with President Joe Biden, who is no longer running, sounds like Trump cannot cope with his actual opponents. A much less alarming performance in the debate effectively ended President Biden’s campaign.

Had the media been conscientiously covering Trump, the public would understand these bizarre outings as part of his noticeable cognitive decline. Trump’s sporadic appearances on the trail alone should be grist for the cable news shows. When they do discuss his mental state, it is often in the context of horserace politics. (Axios commented on his AI delusion: “Trump’s advisers and allies worry he’s spending so much time in an alternative reality that it’s undermining his real-world campaign.” How about asking hard questions about how a party can stand behind someone in an alternative reality?)

If President Biden held a news conference with 162 lies, resorted to laughable fabrications, sounded as bad as Trump did on Twitter and scheduled so few appearances, a swarm of investigative pieces exploring his fitness and commentary asking whether he should leave the race would have ensued. Still, the pretense of normality persists.

It works like this: “Trump sounds nuts, but he can’t be nuts, because he’s the presumptive nominee for president of a major party, and no major party would nominate someone who is nuts,” Jeffrey Goldberg, editor in chief of The Atlantic, explained last month. “Therefore, it is our responsibility to sand down his rhetoric, to identify any kernel of meaning, to make light of his bizarro statements, to rationalize.” When not one but multiple rants call “into question not only his fitness for office but his basic cognitive abilities,” the media’s refusal to convey Trump’s unfitness amounts to misleading the public.

With time, Trump’s delusions have gotten wilder, his thinking more scattered. The worse Trump gets, the more untenable the media’s unwillingness to level with voters becomes. Will Bunch od the Philadelphia Inquirer wrote, “[The] false claim by Trump that Harris is generating fake big crowds with AI was a true Captain Queeg moment, maybe the most bat-guano crazy thing I’ve seen in 40 years of covering presidential elections.”

Where does this leave Republicans? The MAGA party is caught in a gloom-and-doom loop, forced to run away from the radical Project 2025 plan, defend an increasingly irrational candidate and make excuses for its unlikable, inept nominee for vice president. One wonders when we will hear and see reports about “Republican panic!” or “Could Republicans dump Trump?” Let’s get real: That sort of coverage is reserved for Democrats. Alas, whatever horserace contest the media continues to present bears little resemblance to the jaw-dropping reality before our eyes.