Former President Donald Trump is struggling. It’s been evident for weeks now. The glow hadn’t yet faded on his triumphant performance at the Republican National Convention when President Joe Biden ended his re-election campaign. Since then, Trump has had to face a resurgent opponent with Vice President Kamala Harris at the top of the ticket. And, friends, let me tell you, he is not happy about it.
Most infuriating to Trump is his campaign being in a position it has rarely been in: chasing the spotlight. Rather than setting the media’s agenda every day, he’s been forced to watch as Harris has sucked up all the oxygen in the room. The horrible rollout of his own running mate, Sen. JD Vance, of Ohio, has only highlighted how energized Democratic voters have become. Worst of all for Trump, Harris and her running mate, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, have been drawing massive crowds, a fact that had Trump fuming at a news conference at Mar-a-Lago on Thursday.
Most infuriating to Trump is his campaign being in a position it has rarely been in: chasing the spotlight.
Trump hasn’t been doing himself many favors in this post-Biden campaign. While Harris and Walz are crisscrossing six swing states introducing themselves this week, Trump is mostly off the campaign trail. His sudden decision to hold a press event was a clear attempt to draw the focus back to himself, an attempt that will likely prove to be less effective than it’s been in the past.
The problem is that Trump and his campaign spent the last several years preparing to run against Biden and are having difficulty shifting gears, despite having reportedly laid some groundwork to face Harris ahead of the swap. This new reality hasn’t set well with Trump at all, who complained (incorrectly) at his news conference that it’s unconstitutional for Harris to replace Biden as the Democratic nominee. It appears that, without Biden as a foil, candidate Trump no longer knows who he is. In a sign that everything is totally cool and normal with him, Trump launched into a bit of Biden fanfiction on TruthSocial earlier this week, speculating that the president might try to seize back the nomination at the Democratic National Convention this month.
It doesn’t help that the Trump campaign hasn’t landed on an effective message to deploy against Harris beyond the boilerplate anti-Democrat language that typifies the Trump era. (Soft on crime, bad on the border, secretly a communist — you know the drill.) Without a firm strategy in place, we see Trump trying to find something — anything — that works. In the truest to form example, his attack against Harris’ mixed-race background during his appearance at the National Association of Black Journalists convention last week was reportedly unplanned — and has already fizzled out as a talking point.
In his desperation, Trump has also been cycling through potential nicknames for Harris, trying out “Laffin’ Kamala” and “Crazy Kamala” before landing on the baffling choice of “Kamabla.” It’s a choice that’s confusing and unlikely to have any impact on the perception of Harris. It could be a racist dog whistle; it could be a play on the word “blah” to imply that she’s boring; it may be both or neither. (Anyone else old enough to remember former Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa., clarifying he was talking about “blah” people on welfare, not “Black” people, in a speech?)
Trump's outbursts have prompted his staff to run with the ball, like when they threw up projections at a subsequent rally that highlighted Harris’ Indian heritage. The same is true for “Kamabla,” despite it being objective nonsense. HuffPost reporter S.V. Dáte hit up a senior campaign official to ask what it means, the staffer repeatedly only responded with “Kamabla.” See also: This entirely unhelpful X post from Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung:
Embracing “Kamabla” is likely to be more about hoping the base joins in on the evident trolling of the libs than any real understanding of what the heck Trump really means. But it’s clearly far from what the campaign and Trump’s closest surrogates wanted him to be doing. As The New York Times put it, “many in Mr. Trump’s party find this all to be counterproductive, to say the least.” It’s a situation that ironically has him “asking friends and allies how his campaign staff is doing — a question that some say could lead to staff changes,” The Washington Post reported.
What we’re seeing is Trump hunkering down in his comfort zone, returning to the tricks that have become tropes.
But if we’re being honest, his inability to be anyone other than himself, no matter how much it would benefit him, is a given at this point. Same with the affinity for pithy nicknames thing — it’s something that we’ve come to expect from Trump. These things are baked into his political persona by now, and we’re seeing a repeat of the same old shtick he’s been performing since 2016. In other words, what we’re seeing is Trump hunkering down in his comfort zone, returning to the tricks that have become tropes.
It’s wild to realize that what was once shocking from him has become rote, pedestrian even. It’s a feeling that Sid Blumenthal captured in The Guardian when he compared Trump to Laurence Olivier’s character in “The Entertainer,” a man “desperately trying to float his act, shamelessly manipulating and trampling everybody, but incapable of performing anything but the old numbers before a bored audience.” That already threatened to be the case back in 2020, when I noted that Trump was trying to make a shot-by-shot remake of his first campaign. Four years later, he was hoping to try to do the exact same before Harris completely upended that plan. Now, having been denied the rematch that he wanted, Trump is the only one left feeling stale.