It Says So Much About Our National Trajectory
So all that’s left now is today, tomorrow and Election Day itself. Almost over; no one will miss it, especially not the operatives trying to get the ever-unlikely Trump over the finish line. On Friday, Dan Pfeiffer wrote— and published yesterday— that Señor T is stumbling his way towards the line, basically a mess. And he contends that in a close race like this “nothing is more important than closing strong”… which Trump certainly is not doing. Last week was mayhem, a series of self-inflicted Trumpish chaotic disasters:
On Sunday, Trump held a disastrous rally in Madison Square Garden filled with racist, misogynistic regret including the Puerto Rico joke heard around the world;
On Tuesday, Trump talked about the major role that anti-vaccine crank Robert F Kennedy Jr. would play in setting health care policy in a Trump Administration;
On Wednesday, Trump brought up both his history of sexual assault and his role overturning Roe v Wade when he said would protect women “whether they like or not;”
On Thursday, Trump sued Sixty Minutes for $10 billion for a laughable series of reasons; and
Also on Thursday, Trump suggested that Liz Cheney should be shot for not supporting him.
Kamala is closing strongly. Her speech on the ellipse, “in front of 75,000 people [where] she knocked it out of the park” is polling well. Since then, “her campaign played offensively, dictating the terms of the political conversation. Trump is reacting to her and is clearly off his game.”
And, sure, “While most voters made up their mind months if not years ago, there is a slice of voters who don’t decide until the final week. The news environment in the final week is very influential with these voters. They have either been going back and forth for months or, more likely, are just tuning into politics in the final days before the election. This is particularly true because our media ecosystem makes it challenging for all but the biggest junkies to follow political news. Campaigns track what voters are hearing about the candidates. In focus groups, the first question asked of respondents is often how much they have heard about a candidate and whether what they heard made them feel better or worse about that candidate. The poll often includes an open-ended question asking voters to volunteer what they have heard. Those responses are then put into a word cloud to see what’s breaking through. Here’s an example from a recent Navigator Research poll about Project 2025.
[U]ndecided voters are cross-pressured between their distaste of Trump’s chaotic conduct and divisive rhetoric and their belief that he will be better on the economy. Over this last week, Trump excelled in reminding voters what they like least about him. The drama and division. It’s exhausting; and for some voters it might be the straw that breaks the camel’s back.
According to Harris Campaign Senior Advisor David Plouffe, Trump antics are hurting him. On Friday, Plouffe tweeted:
It’s helpful, from experience, to be closing a Presidential campaign with late deciding voters breaking by double digits to you and the remaining undecideds looking more friendly to you than your opponent.
Let’s hope we get a few more days of Trump being Trump.
And his campaign has been a complete dysfunctional backbiting mess, despite having Susie Wiles, a professional, trying too keep it on track. Over the weekend, Tim Alberta essay about the chaos was published by The Atlantic: Inside The Ruthless, Restless Final Days Of Trump’s Campaign. The source of the dysfunction, of course, is Trump himself, who “never had much use for calm and quiet. He didn’t appreciate normalcy. Above all, he couldn’t stand being babysat. ‘People are calling this the most disciplined campaign they’ve ever seen,’ Trump remarked to friends at a fundraiser this summer, according to someone who heard the conversation. He smirked at the compliment. ‘What’s discipline got to do with winning?’”
Trump’s divide and conquer strategy that he used in all endeavors for his whole life has been a disaster for the campaign. “Even as they battled Democrats in a race that refuses to move outside the margin of error,” wrote Alberta, “some of Trump’s closest allies spent the closing months of the campaign at war with one another: planting damaging stories, rallying to the defense of wronged colleagues, and preemptively pointing fingers in the event of an electoral defeat. At the center of this tumult, people close to Trump agreed, is a candidate whose appetite for chaos has only grown— and serves as a reminder of what awaits should he win on November 5.
“[E]very hour his campaign spent attacking Harris as if she were a credible opponent— rather than bludgeoning her as the airheaded, unqualified, empty pantsuit Trump was sure she was— gnawed at the former president. Finally, he ran out of patience. On July 31, during an onstage interview with the National Association of Black Journalists, Trump publicly unloaded the sort of race-baiting barbs that his aides had, up until that point, succeeded in containing to his private diatribes. ‘I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn Black,’ Trump told the journalists onstage, eliciting gasps from the audience. ‘I don’t know, is she Indian or is she Black?’ In the days after his NABJ appearance— as staffers scrambled to satisfy their boss’s appetite for pugilism without indulging his racist and misogynistic impulses— Trump began to lose confidence in his team. He had long dismissed the warnings from certain friends, such as his former acting director of national intelligence, Richard Grenell, that Wiles and LaCivita weren’t up to the job. But now he had reason to wonder. With Harris climbing rapidly in the polls and his own favorability numbers slipping, Trump was pondering, for the first time, a shake-up of his team.”
By late summer he was courting two freaks from past campaigns, “Kellyanne Conway and Corey Lewandowski, discussing what it might look like if they rejoined his political operation in a formal capacity. Trump told Lewandowski— who promptly agreed to come aboard— that he missed the ‘fun,’ freewheeling nature of that first run for the White House. He told Conway, meanwhile, that he worried he was being overly ‘managed’ by his current team… Lewandowski had promised Trump a return to the ‘killer’ vibes of 2016. But the details of his new role were left open to interpretation. Lewandowski believed— and told anyone who would listen— that he would outrank the existing campaign leadership. Trump himself, meanwhile, assured Wiles and LaCivita that Lewandowski would be a utility man, serving as a key surrogate while helping organize election-security efforts and field operations in swing states. But it turned into open warfare until Wiles gave Trump an ultimatum— it was Lewandowski or her and LaCivita. Lewandowski did a lot of damage before Trump finally banished him.
And there were two more crackpots besides him— a Vance crony Alex Bruesewitz, the one behind the whole Haitians eating peoples’ pets catastrophe, and a Trump groupie, Laura Loomer, “best known for racist and conspiracist bombast… What sealed Loomer’s fate, according to two people who were part of these conversations, wasn’t just her racist diatribes but also her appearance: Trump, who is generally appalled by plastic surgery, was disgusted to learn about the apparent extent of Loomer’s facial alterations. Trump regarded the Loomer episode as a one-off nuisance. His advisers, however, feared that something more fundamental had gone amiss. The past month had seen the campaign spiral into a free-for-all. Lewandowski was going rogue. Morale was plummeting among the rank-and-file staff. And Trump himself seemed intent on sabotaging a message—curbing immigration, fighting inflation, projecting strength on the world stage— that had been engineered to win him the election. Privately, Wiles confided to friends that she and LaCivita felt they’d lost control of the campaign. Lewandowski was planting negative stories about them. “sowing distrust and spreading rumors”— in the media and with Trump, including that they were stealing millions of dollars from the campaign, causing Trump to wig out.
By the time October rolled around, the campaign’s strategy was “Keeping voters’ attention on Harris— while, to the extent they could, keeping Trump out of his own way— had produced the most significant movement in his direction since her entry into the race. Not that Trump wasn’t doing his best to muck things up. The 40 minutes he spent onstage in Pennsylvania swaying silently to music prompted aides to exchange frenzied messages wondering whether the audio could be cut to get him off the stage. (Ultimately, they decided, letting him dance was less dangerous than letting him rant.) A week later, back in the all-important commonwealth for another event, he left aides slack-jawed by marveling at the ample genitalia of the late golf legend Arnold Palmer. Even as the political class settled on Trump as the betting favorite, his allies couldn’t shake a pair of very bad feelings. The first was about ground game: With much of their party’s resources being diverted to legal efforts, the GOP’s field operation was struggling to keep pace with the Democrats. The patchwork strategy left Republicans heavily dependent on outside help. But good help is hard to find. Elon Musk’s canvassing program was fast becoming a punch line in Republican circles… As the race moved toward its conclusion— and as the constellation of helpers and hangers-on surrounding Trump began positioning themselves to take credit or deflect blame— more than a few people close to the candidate were shopping dirt on their internal rivals. A sense of foreboding settled in over the campaign. There was so much bad blood, several aides told me, that something was bound to spill out into the open.”
Entering the final weekend of October, I noticed something in conversations with numerous Trump staffers: resignation. They had long since become accustomed to working in the high-intensity, zero-margin-for-error environment created by Wiles and LaCivita. But this home stretch of the campaign hadn’t just been hard and stressful; it had been disillusioning. Several campaign officials had told me, throughout the spring and summer, how excited they were about working in the next Trump White House. Now those same people were telling me— as paperwork was being distributed internally to begin the process of placing personnel on the transition team and in the prospective administration— that they’d had a change of heart. The past three months had been the most unpleasant of their careers. Win or lose, they said, they were done with the chaos of Donald Trump— even if the nation was not.
Standing in the bowels of Madison Square Garden on the evening of Sunday, October 27, an irate group of Trump staffers, family members, and loyalists was looking for someone to blame.
The prime-time show playing out just beyond their corridor had been eight years in the making. Trump, hailed as “the man who built New York’s skyline” by a roster of celebrity speakers, would stage an elaborate homecoming to celebrate his conquest of the American political psyche. It seemed that nothing— not even the $1 million price tag for producing such an event— could put a damper on the occasion.
And then, before some in the audience had even found their seats, the party was over.
The first presenter, a shock comedian named Tony Hinchcliffe, told a sequence of jokes that earned little laughter but managed to antagonize constituencies Trump had spent months courting. One was about Black people carving watermelons for Halloween; another portrayed Jews as money-hungry and Arabs as primitive. The worst line turned out to be the most destructive. “I don’t know if you guys know this, but there’s literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now,” Hinchcliffe said. “I think it’s called Puerto Rico.”
The blowback was instantaneous. Elected officials— Democrats, and, before long, Republicans too— blasted the comedian’s remarks. Headlines from the world’s leading news organizations described the event as every bit the hate-fest Republicans had promised it wouldn’t be. Trump aides were blitzed with text messages from lawmakers and donors and lobbyists wanting to know who, exactly, had the bright idea of inviting a comic to kick off the most consequential event of the fall campaign.
In truth, some of Trump’s senior staff hadn’t actually watched Hinchcliffe’s set. The Garden was a labyrinth of security checkpoints and political processions, and the event had barely been under way when he spoke. Now they were racing to catch up with the damage— and rewinding the clock to figure out how Hinchcliffe had ended up onstage in the first place.
It didn’t take long to get to the answer: Alex Bruesewitz.
Technically a mid-level staffer—formally a liaison to right-wing media, informally a terminally online troll and perpetual devil on the campaign’s shoulder— Bruesewitz had grown his profile inside Trump’s orbit. The candidate’s appearances on various bro-themed podcasts were hailed as acts of strategic genius. But there was one guest booking Bruesewitz couldn’t secure: He wanted Trump to talk with Hinchcliffe on his show, Kill Tony. When word got around that Trump was looking for opening acts at the Garden, Bruesewitz made the introductions. Trump’s head of planning and production, Justin Caporale, ran with the idea. No senior staff ever bothered to vet Hinchcliffe themselves.
Now, with their grand celebration quickly morphing into a public-relations nightmare, Trump’s allies stewed. Two decisions needed to be made, and quickly: whether to inform the man of the hour about this disaster before he took the stage, and whether to issue a statement rebuking Hinchcliffe and his remarks. Some staffers feared throwing Trump off his game at such a crucial moment, and others argued that showing any weakness would just make things worse. But LaCivita dictated a short statement to the communications team that was blasted out to reporters across the arena, distancing the campaign from Hinchcliffe, while Wiles pulled the former president aside and explained the situation. (Trump, aides told me, was merely annoyed at the time; only after watching television coverage the next morning would he rage about how Wiles, LaCivita, and Caporale had “fucked this up.”)
Backstage at the Garden, in the blur of debate and indecision over damage control, it was Stephen Miller who pondered the bigger picture. According to two people who were present, Miller, the Trump policy adviser whose own nativist impulses are well documented, was not offended by Hinchcliffe’s racist jokes. Yet he was angered by them all the same: He knew the campaign had just committed a huge unforced error. He believed that Bruesewitz had done profound damage to Trump’s electoral prospects. And, in that moment, he seethed at what this lack of discipline portended for Trump should he return to power.
The irony, apparently, was lost on Miller. He and his colleagues would spend the coming days savaging Bruesewitz for his recklessness when really— as ever— the culprit was a man whose addiction to mayhem creates the conditions in which a comedian who was once dropped by his talent agency for using racial slurs onstage could be invited to kick off the closing event of the election without a single objection being raised.
“If we can’t trust this kid with a campaign,” Miller said to the group, according to one of the people present, “how can we trust him in the White House?”
Jeffrey Epstein hit it on the head in 2017... and then he was suicided in his jail cell:
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