Donald Trump Has No Idea What Has Hit Him, and It’s a Joy to Watch

It continues. Six days ago, The New York Times ran a story under the headline “Inside the Worst Three Weeks of Donald Trump’s 2024 Campaign.” Usually, when the country’s most important newspaper runs a story like that, the candidate pays a little attention and the ship begins to right itself. But in this case, it’s just gotten worse. The ship is capsizing, and the captain is losing his marbles.

Right after that story ran, Trump came out with his wild accusation that Kamala Harris’s crowd of thousands at a Detroit airplane hangar was fake. The next night, he did that weird, to borrow an au courant word, interview with Elon Musk, where he made more WTF comments than I can recount, capped by his vow to move to Venezuela (a country ruled by a corrupt autocrat who just cheated massively in this month’s election) if he loses. On Wednesday, he gave a rambling speech at a North Carolina rally.

Then, on Thursday, we had a little taste of some peak Trump crazy. He claimed Harris is responsible for a law in California that says it’s OK to steal from a grocery store as long as your take is under $950. (This is not what the law says.) He made strange comments about Cheerios. He lectured Jews (at a later event) about how if the Democrats win, Jewish people “don’t have a chance” in America, saying of Harris—whose husband is Jewish—that “she doesn’t like Jewish people. You know it, I know it, and everybody knows it, and nobody wants to say it.” And we can’t forget the assertion that more than 100 percent of recent U.S. jobs have gone to migrants.

But wait. These are just the appetizers! Then he called Harris a “Communist” and said the country under her leadership would devolve into a commie dystopia in which “everyone gets health care” (the horror!). And then, the pièce de résistance: At the Jewish event, he praised Miriam Adelson, the huge Trump donor and widow of Sheldon Adelson, mentioning that he’d given her a Presidential Medal of Freedom, which he noted was the civilian equivalent of the Congressional Medal of Honor (given to military veterans) but was “actually much better” because people who receive the latter medal are “either in very bad shape because they’ve been hit so many times by bullets, or they’re dead.”

You know how they say in sports that an opponent has gotten inside the other team’s head? Well, Harris and Tim Walz have certainly gotten inside Trump’s head. Walz’s “weird” comment, which Trump has also responded to in a, well, sort of weird way, was just the start. Harris has also smartly refused to take the GOP campaign’s bait, like when Trump attacked her race and J.D. Vance tried to make her childlessness an issue. Meanwhile, the Harris-Walz campaign trolls Trump in its press releases with snarky language I don’t recall Joe Biden’s or Hillary Clinton’s campaigns using. It sends the message, which must drive him nuts, that they don’t fear him at all.

Meanwhile, what else is Harris doing? Starting to unveil an economic package that, so far anyway, looks pretty great. It’s aimed straight at middle-class voters and focused on housing and grocery prices. You can’t get more kitchen table than that. And the bit about going after corporate price gougers is great. It sends a nice populist signal that she’s willing to make some enemies.

We’re coming up on a month now of Harris being the candidate. That isn’t much time, granted, and of course the race is still in margin-of-error territory and at some point, Trump is bound to find his footing and quit flailing as desperately as he has been.

But all that said, the Harris campaign has been as shrewd as any presidential campaign I’ve ever seen. Her stump speech is excellent. The choice of Walz was great—their personal chemistry is so evident in that video they just released of the two of them chatting about spicy food and whatnot (the right is trying to gin up outrage over Walz saying he eats “white-guy tacos”). The focus on family economics recognizes a potential Harris weak spot and establishes the campaign as not being out of touch. They just haven’t done one thing wrong yet.

And it shows in the numbers. Right after Harris got in, FiveThirtyEight had her ahead of Trump by 0.8 percent. That already represented a significant jump over where Biden was. Her lead then dipped to 0.2 percent for a short time. Today, she’s up 2.9 percent. That’s obviously still close, but the movement is clear. And if the convention goes as well as these past four weeks have, she may start building up a lead that dances just outside the margin of error. She has also reversed the trend in the key swing states, where she now leads narrowly or is tied in every state (even Nevada, where Biden was seven or eight points behind).

And Trump is a hot mess. He’s facing a problem he’s never faced. In 2016, he was running against a very known quantity whom the right had been instructing Americans to hate for 25 years. In 2020, he was running against someone who’d been around for nearly 50 years. He’s spent his time since losing that 2020 race sitting around thinking about his rematch with that opponent.

And now suddenly he’s running against someone else, and to his shock, the more America sees of her (so far), the more America kinda likes her. He can’t understand this, and he simply can’t stand it. Trump’s like a predatory animal in a literal sense. Since he has no conscience, he’s all instinct, and his instinct is to find his prey’s weakness and go after it over and over.

He hasn’t come close to finding Harris’s. She is not a lunatic Communist, she’s not stupid, she’s not any of things Trump is saying she is. The America of 2024 is ready for Kamala Harris. Donald Trump is not and can’t accept that fact. No amount of staff shakeups or focusing on “the issues” can fix that.