Trump's Campaign Is Collapsing Around His Ears— And He's Freaking The Hell Out

Scaramucci Thinks He May Even Drop Out Rather Than Face Another Defeat

In a deranged open letter to Georgia’s former Lt Gov Geoff Duncan (R) last week, state Republican Party chair Josh McKoon went on a vicious attack, informing Duncan he is no longer a Republican and that he should stop calling himself one. 

In a life otherwise devoid of accomplishment (e.g. dropping out of college, failing as a minor league baseball player, starting a series of sketchy businesses), your nominations by the Republican Party were signal honors, without which you would have never served as a member of the Georgia General Assembly or the Lieutenant Governor of this Great State.  

You repaid this debt of gratitude with a single, largely self embarrassing term in office as Lieutenant Governor.  

As Chairman of the Georgia Republican Party, I write to demand that you cease referring to yourself as a Republican. You are not one.   

Your lapses and failings as Lieutenant Governor alone are sufficient to forfeit your claim to membership in our party. But your desperate and ridiculous endorsements of Joe Biden and now Kamala Harris for President, coupled with your inexplicable opposition in 2022 to Burt Jones and Herschel Walker, not to mention your comical attempt to run for President as an independent candidate, are violations of the oaths of loyalty you repeatedly swore when you qualified as a Republican candidate for office.  

On the surface, your animus against President Trump makes little sense. When you ran for Lieutenant Governor in 2018, you mimicked him like a chimpanzee, even going so far as to falsely claim his endorsement. You begged in 2020 for opportunities to speak on his behalf at Trump rallies and the Republican National Convention. But it has become clear that prostituting yourself to CNN as a Trump critic is now how you support yourself and your family. You will no longer do so claiming to be a Republican.  

Your conduct has given me no choice but to take the following actions to protect the Republican brand:

1) The State Executive Committee will consider action to permanently ban you from qualifying as a Republican candidate for any elected office in this state as your signing of the loyalty oath at this point would obviously be false swearing;   

2) The Republican National Committee will be requested to adopt a resolution permanently banning you from the Republican Party as well as permanently banning you from qualifying as a Republican candidate in any state or territory for any position whatsoever;

3) A resolution condemning your self serving and hypocritical behavior, and expelling you from the Republican Party, will be published on the Georgia Republicans website as a notice to the world clarifying that your commentary is made as an expelled Republican.

4) You will be treated as a trespasser should you attend any event, meeting, caucus or convention of the Georgia Republican Party. Every county Republican Party and Congressional District Party in the state of Georgia will be requested to issue you the same warning and condition.

Consequently, you are not and never will be considered a Republican ever again.  I request that you govern yourself accordingly.

McKoon and Duncan

In his OpEd for the biggest newspaper in Georgia yesterday, Duncan dismissed McKoon and his threats as a minor annoyance. His point though was to talk about how the GOP can recover from Trump and his MAGA movement. And step one is electing Kamala to the presidency. After last week’s deranged rant against Gov. Kemp at an Atlanta rally that paled in comparison to Kamala’s at the same venue— Trump blamed the venue for discriminating against his supporters— Duncan noted that “Trump loyalists in the ranks of the Georgia GOP were caught between the impossible rock and hard place, forced to pick between an accomplished second-term governor and a defeated and disgraced former president whose bid for a second term feels shakier by the day.”

He noted that Kamala’s “event projected forward-looking energy and unity… finally change was in the air. The Trump show, on the other hand, was a familiar jumble of personal grievances and backward-looking complaints centered around the 2020 election that he lost fair and square. As a headline from the Atlanta Journal Constitution described, ‘Donald Trump attacks Brian Kemp at Atlanta rally and revives internal GOP war.’ So much for those calls for unity. Trump claimed that Kemp is ‘very bad’ for the GOP, another statement not only demonstrably false but also contradicted by facts. A poll earlier showed Kemp’s approval rating at 60 percent. Trump’s image is underwater in our state, with just 46% seeing him favorably compared with 49% unfavorably, according to one survey from Quinnipiac University. Among independent voters, who will decide the November election, the gulf is even wider: 43-51 percent. Those are the voters that propelled Kemp to a sweeping margin of victory of nearly 300,000 votes against Stacey Abrams— no need for him ‘to find 11,780 votes,’ as Trump demanded of Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. The broader takeaway from the two events is one campaign is trying to build a broad coalition of ideas while the other would rather shrink to core supporters able to pass a fealty test to its cultlike leader.”

With the Trumpers reeling, some have started losing their moorings. In a weird social media temper tantrum, the chairman of the Georgia Republican Party threatened to permanently ban me from the party. My “sin” was endorsing Biden and then Harris as a means of ending the Trump era.

The rant symbolizes the rot in the GOP Our party revolves less around convictions and governing policies and more toward a cult of personality. Ironically, Trump is a man who spent portions of his adult life as a registered Democrat and whose majority of campaign donations went to Democrats— including Hillary Clinton, John Kerry and even Harris when she was running for California attorney general.

The message from the Trump faithful to Republicans who support a different course is clear: There is no place for you in our ranks. Politics should be about attracting more voters, not fewer— to win an election, but more importantly, to win the hearts and minds of a governing majority.

I get it. Politics is team sport with different jerseys. It’s not easy to go on the other side, especially when their policy positions don’t align with yours on most issues. My hope is that Harris will continue to extend an olive branch to those looking for a new home in November. Time will tell if that works out.

I do know this: The outcome of saddling up for another four years with Trump is preordained to be cloaked in chaos, anger and vitriol, the same unproductive position as when he disgracefully left office last time. Trump’s obsession with power fuels head-scratching disappointments at unexplainable times and places. This weekend’s rally was another painful example.

At the very least, four years under Harris will provide the GOP time to put the pieces back together without Trump and hopefully give this lifelong Republican a chance to help rebuild the party I’ve always called home.

Meanwhile, Newsweek reported that every national poll last week showed Trump losing ground with Kamala already in the lead in the national polling average (128 polls including fake joke polls from the GOP itself) 47-46.9%. Most reputable, unbiased polls show Kamala ahead by at least 2 points. 

Reporting for USA Today, Rex Huppke noted that Kamala seems to have broken Trump, who is flailing, glitching and running scared and “crumbling before our eyes” reverting to childish name calling— “Crazy Kamala,” “lunatic,” “a radical left freak” and a “really low-IQ individual.” Completing the nonsensical litany of false attacks he uses against anyone who opposes him, he decanted that “She doesn’t want anybody saying Merry Christmas.”

Vice President Harris, what have you done to this already very unstable man? The cheese has somehow slid farther off his cracker.

Trump is so shook that backed out of a planned Sept 10 presidential debate on ABC News, instead demanding a Sept. 4 debate at his network safe space– Fox News– with "a full arena audience."

It's the presidential candidate equivalent of throwing a temper tantrum before taking your ball and going home.

… Democrats have finally decided to publicly label Trump “weird” and it’s about time.

What the refocused voters are seeing– what they saw in the Atlanta rally and in the rambling interviews he has been doing– is a man who let an opponent switch up and short-circuit his brain.

Is this because Harris is polling so much better than Biden was? Is it because Trump is intimidated by her? Is it her race and ethnicity? Her gender?

… [I]t's clear that Trump is rattled, and that his usual tricks of hurling insults and invective aren’t working. In fact, the smiling calm of the Harris campaign is making Trump’s cruelty look worse than ever. That’s why the label “Weird” has been sticking. For many, it’s all getting a bit tiresome.

And that just makes Trump angrier, and worse.

We have a long way to go until November, folks. But where we stand here and now, Trump looks like he’s broken. Broken and running scared.