In the final sprint toward Election Day, Donald Trump has mused about former congresswoman Liz Cheney as well as journalists covering his rallies getting gunned down, confirmed that he will put an anti-vax conspiracy theorist in charge of the government’s health care apparatus and explained that talking about a fictional serial killer proves his genius.
And that was all before he declared at a rally Sunday that he should have just stayed in office despite his 2020 election loss and failed coup attempt on January 6, 2021.
“The day that I left, I shouldn’t have left,” he said at a rally in Pennsylvania. “I mean, honestly, because we did so well.”
Trump did not elaborate on how, exactly, that might have worked. At noon on January 20, 2021, Joe Biden became the new president and commander-in-chief. At that moment, Trump would have been a trespasser had he chosen to remain in the White House and subject to arrest.
Trump’s critics cite Trump’s advancing years ― he is now 78 ― and apparent mental decline as the cause for his inability to deliver a succinct closing message as to why voters should, despite everything, return him to office.
“Age and cognitive decline?” offered one veteran Republican consultant on condition of anonymity.
“Psychological decompensation,” said George Conway, whose former wife, Kellyanne Conway, ran Trump’s 2016 campaign in its final months. George Conway supported Trump that election before quickly concluding he had made a terrible mistake.
Trump’s campaign rejected the idea that Trump is losing focus.
“President Trump is the greatest orator in political history and his patented ‘weave’ is a brilliant method to convey important stories and explain policies,” spokesman Steven Cheung said. “The media is too stupid and ignorant to understand or comprehend what is happening in the country and, therefore, is unable to accurately report on President Trump’s achievements while in office and the pro-America agenda he will implement in his second term.”
Weave refers to Trump’s claim that his rambling speaking style of jumping from topic to topic, eventually returning to his original thought, shows off his great intellect.
Vice President Kamala Harris had a much more typical day on the trail, campaigning in Michigan, where she attended a Black church service in Detroit in the morning, visited a local restaurant and barbershop, and held a rally at Michigan State University.
“We have momentum, it is on our side, can you feel it?” Harris said to the roar of the crowd at the rally. “Our campaign is tapping into the ambitions, the aspirations and the dreams of the American people.”
The Harris campaign, which has said its internal data indicates late-deciding voters are breaking their way, is projecting more and more confidence as the days go on. On a conference call with reporters on Sunday, campaign officials boasted they had launched 57,000 door-knocking and phone-banking shifts on Saturday.
“It is bananas big,” a campaign official said of Harris’ ground operation.
Polls in the race remain tight, with both candidates within striking distance in each of the seven swing states.
However, Trump’s increasingly erratic campaign rhetoric in the finals of his 2024 campaign stands in stark contrast to his performance eight years ago, when he robotically stuck to reading poll-tested themes from his teleprompter multiple times a day.
Kellyanne Conway has spoken often about how she persuaded him to stay on message for the final weeks after the release of the Access Hollywood tape on which he was heard to boast that his celebrity allowed him to grab women by the genitals.
Trump took that advice then, hitting the same points over and over every night: the latest Hillary Clinton emails, stolen by Russia and released by Wikileaks; the southern border wall and making Mexico pay for it; bringing back jobs from overseas; fighting radical Islam; and redoing unfair trade deals.
In that final month, Trump cut way back on interviews and largely stuck to the script written for him by others, for the most part avoiding meandering detours. Once he even reminded himself aloud about remaining focused.
“We’ve got to be nice and cool, nice and cool, right?” Trump said at a rally on November 2, 2016. “Stay on point, Donald, stay on point. No side tracks, Donald. Nice and easy.”
Eight years later, Trump instead spends most of his hour-and-a-half speeches on those side tracks.
“When I say insane asylums, and then I say, Doctor Hannibal Lecter, does anybody know? They go crazy. They say, oh, he brings up these names out of— Well, that’s genius. Right. Doctor Hannibal Lecter. There’s nobody worse than him. Silence of the Lambs. Who the hell else would even remember that? I have a great memory, but they always hit me. I don’t bring it up too much because they have to take such a— he brought up Hannibal Lecter. What does that have to do with this? What is it? It has everything to do with it, right?” he said at a North Carolina rally on Saturday.
“So I’ve done something for you that I haven’t done in 20 speeches. I brought up Doctor Hannibal Lecter and we’re allowing him, you watch, you watch these fake people will say again, he brought up Hannibal Lecter has absolutely nothing to do. You know I do the weave, right? The weave. It’s genius. You bring up Hannibal Lecter, you mention insane asylum. Hannibal Lecter. You go out, no. There’ll be a time in life where the weave won’t finish properly at the bottom and then we can talk. But right now it’s pure genius. Hey, I have an uncle, my uncle, Uncle John, my father’s brother, 41 years at MIT, longest serving professor has so many degrees, he didn’t know what the hell to do with them all in the most complicated. I understand a lot of this stuff, you know, I believe in that. Like, I mean, Jack Nicklaus is not going to produce a bad golfer. Right. You know, that’s the way it works. It’s just one of those things and it’s in the family and it’s whatever.”
Kevin Robillard contributed reporting.