Kamala’s Campaign Pushes Trump’s Impulse Control Problems
I don’t think that even the outlets that recognize the troll are giving the Kamala Harris campaign enough credit for the jujitsu they’re engaged in with the debate. Before I explain why, though, here’s a video of Barack Obama’s skewering of Donald Trump at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in 2011. It provides a useful reminder of the kinds of things that scar a racist narcissist like Trump.
The jujitsu on the debate started with Trump whining, two nights ago, about ABC as an excuse to get out of the debate again.
Early the next morning, Politico was the first to report an actual substantive dispute about the debate: whether the candidates’ mics would be on between questions or not. In the story, Jason Miller got an unsurprising dig suggesting that, Kamala “isn’t smart enough to repeat the messaging points her handlers want her to memorize.”
But before that in the story, this Brian Fallon quote appeared.
“We have told ABC and other networks seeking to host a possible October debate that we believe both candidates’ mics should be live throughout the full broadcast,” Brian Fallon, the Harris campaign’s senior adviser for communications, tells POLITICO. “Our understanding is that Trump’s handlers prefer the muted microphone because they don’t think their candidate can act presidential for 90 minutes on his own. We suspect Trump’s team has not even told their boss about this dispute because it would be too embarrassing to admit they don’t think he can handle himself against Vice President Harris without the benefit of a mute button.”
It was followed by this unattributed quote, digging into Trump’s self-control issues even further.
“She’s more than happy to have exchanges with him if he tries to interrupt her,” one person familiar with the negotiations tells Playbook. “And given how shook he seems by her, he’s very prone to having intemperate outbursts and … I think the campaign would want viewers to hear [that].”
Remember that unattributed quotes often come from people who are otherwise quoted in a piece. Remember, too, that Brian Fallon was Hillary’s spokesperson in 2016.
Fallon has a long history of dealing with Donald Trump.
Fallon’s suggestion that Trump has no impulse control was bound to elicit the only kind of response that horserace campaign journalists can muster: a badgering question to the candidate about a dig the opponent made. And sure enough it did. At a campaign stop, someone asked him about it, and Trump said that, “We agreed to the same rules — I don’t know. It doesn’t matter to me. I’d rather have it probably on, but the agreement was that it would be the same.”
Having elicited a question that got Trump to admit he would prefer to have a live mic, Fallon immediately declared victory.
Then, someone in charge of Trump’s Truth Social account has released content that conflicts with what Trump said publicly, when none of his handlers could prevent it.
If Trump would prefer a hot mic, then why is Trump’s curated Truth Social account complaining that Harris would prefer that too? Fallon has now created the appearance that Trump’s handlers like Jason Miller believe Trump can’t avoid some kind of meltdown during the debate.
Has Trump been using the N-word behind closed doors to refer to Kamala, or only “bitch”?
Then Kamala’s campaign released a video showing clips showing Trump questioning whether he should debate, with chicken noises in the background.
Whatever happens with the scheduled debate now, Fallon has imposed a cost on Trump’s equivocations, making it more likely he’ll have the meltdown he and his handlers are trying to stave off.
It is absolutely true that Kamala is trying to change the terms of the agreement, even as Trump gets cold feet about participating at all. But this arises, I think, out of the dynamic that has made it so hard for Trump to face Kamala in the first place. He can’t suppress his bigotry, but if he doesn’t, he’ll risk losing to a Black woman. A smart, beautiful Black woman.
There’s a Beltway story that that moment in 2011, when the first Black president used Donald Trump’s racist birther campaign to humiliate the reality TV star in front of the entire press corps, was the moment Trump decided he needed to be President. Whether or not that’s true, it’s fairly clear that kind of public humiliation by a Black person triggers Trump in a way other things might not. Trump’s narcissism requires him to maintain the appearance of superiority over everyone else; his racism makes it even more important that that perceived superiority extends to Black people.
And even if the WHCP did convince Trump to run, after considering it, he didn’t run in 2012, when he would have faced Obama. Donald Trump chose not to risk losing to Obama.
Now, because of a decision Joe Biden made, Donald Trump has lost the ability to choose whether he wants to face someone like Kamala Harris. And he’s stuck: The thing his MAGAts like about him is his spontaneous riffs, many of which rely on the humiliation of others. But if he calls the Vice President the N-word or bitch publicly, it’ll further sink him in the polls.
At least from the moment that Kamala started to put on campaign events that Trump would love to pull off, the campaign has been damaging Trump’s ego. Undoubtedly Michelle and Barack Obama (among others) made that worse at the DNC. And all that makes some outburst that could doom his campaign more likely.
Finally, Democrats who fight hard and mean.
The problem for Democrats when they try to fight hard and mean is that the media civility police trashes them for it. The media would never let a Democrat get away with the nasty things Republicans say.
An upside to the last decade: Trump has pushed the Overton window for political trash-talking so far into “uncivil” territory that there’s a wide swath of effective attacks that the Harris/Walz campaign can deploy while still seeming civil by comparison.
I think this is an invention. He had already tried to run before. He has been desperate to be president for a long time. That humiliation story makes it look like whenever he wants something it happens, and is a quintessential Hollywood American resolve story, we all have seen hundreds of time. That’s nonsense.
I think you may not be grasping just how deeply-rooted Trump’s pathology is.
I’m not sure what “this” is, but I’m guessing you missed Marcy’s point.
Yes, it does seem nonsensical to miss that Donald Trump is excruciatingly racist, misogynistic, and addicted to dominance, as a way to show his daddy he’s not weak. Nobody made up his track record regarding the Central Park Five, for example. He wanted them dead even after their convictions were vacated, because Donny can never be wrong.
Plucking Donny’s ego strings is easy peasy. But it takes work to make electoral hay out of it. Kudos to the Harris campaign for doing it.
Now there is an interesting premise: Would DJT have declared to run again if he knew how the opponent was?
Part of him running in 2024 was a chance to avenge himself on Biden, the guy who (goes the story in Trump’s brain) stole the WH from him in 2020.
When Biden decided not to run again, it had to have set Trump off bigly. Now the guy who conquered him 4 years ago gets to ride off into the sunset, and at the same time, a powerful intelligent biracial woman steps up to take his place. For 3+ years, Trump has been seeking vengeance on Sleepy Joe, and now it’s not going to happen. Trump’s not going to get the big concession speech out of Biden that he’s been dreaming of all this time.
Watching the polls — and you Trump’s been watching the polls — has to make him even sadder. Not only will he not get the triumph he had been convinced was inevitably going to happen, but now Harris has everything he wants: rising poll numbers, larger and more vocal crowds at her rallies, and youth.
He may not admit it, but he is scared right now. Angry and scared.
Michelle’s “Who’s going to tell him that the job he’s currently seeking might just be one of those ‘Black jobs’?” jab at the convention last week had to have been at least as painful to Trump as Barack’s White House Correspondent’s Dinner remarks.
And the question above about what language Trump used behind the scenes about Kamala could easily be asked about Michelle and her speech.
There’s a great remix of it.
https://x.com/umichvoter/status/1827866330042671474
Ewan Woodsend, I think it’s more than just a story, as is Harris’s surge in popularity and her fundraising. Donald Trump’s public behavior makes the story entirely believable and his public decline in self control also makes stories about his handler’s fears believable.
i have zero doubt he lets the N-word fly freely and often. sadly, a lot of that generation just throws it around like it doesn’t mean anything. which can’t be anything other than a piddly-ass excuse. that’s my parents generation, and while my dad never said it that i recall, my egg donor did freely. my maternal grands too, as we all cringed and shook our heads. in the South, it was all too frequently just another word to many.
I’m not so sure that the “N”-word was “just another word” to people of a certain generation or region. I grew up in Northern Virginia in the 1970s, hearing the word on a daily basis. It never struck me as just another word for “neighbor,” “colleague,” or “person.” Even when it was uttered without any particular malicious intent, it was nonetheless tinged with an implicit sense of superiority and dominance, and loaded with all of the nasty, dehumanizing stereotypes of the day.
my experience in rural NC was quiet broad, with friends not noticing color. the older folks just outright said it, and nobody paid it much attention. nobody got called out for it, because we didn’t feel the hatred. even if they meant it, it didn’t go far.
Tow things occur to me:
1) At least the one best looking candidate WILL show up to the debate on ABC even if there is no opponent.
2) Must get well known people of all “colors” and “races” to publicly humiliate Trump. I’m thinking the likes of Beyonce, but even Ms Swift. It does not have to be a humiliation – it can be just a factual statement of candidate preference and support. The humiliation would be baked in.