Trump’s insult tour
Maybe offending two-thirds of the country isn’t a great campaign strategy.
Last week, former President Donald Trump generated controversy for telling a group of Christian conservatives that they wouldn’t need to vote again if he’s re-elected to the White House. “We’ll have it fixed so good, you’re not going to have to vote,” he told them.
Trump’s critics suggested that the comment indicated that Trump, as president, would attempt to cancel future elections; his defenders argued that Trump meant that his second term would be so successful that Republicans wouldn’t need to vote in large numbers in the future, since he would accomplish all of the party’s priorities in the next four years.
Given an opportunity to clarify his remarks, in an interview with Fox News anchor Laura Ingraham, Trump didn’t exactly indicate which interpretation was correct — but he did make another accidentally revealing comment.
“I said, vote for me, you’re not going to have to do it ever again. It’s true,” he explained. “Because we have to get the vote out. Christians are not known as a big voting group. They don’t vote. And I’m explaining that to them. You never vote. This time, vote. I’ll straighten out the country, you won’t have to vote anymore. I won’t need your vote.”
That claim is not, in fact, true. According to CNN exit polling, Christians made up 68% of the 2020 electorate — the exact same share they make up of the U.S. population, according to Gallup.
But the comment nevertheless reflects the continuance of Trump’s years-long pattern of painting demographic groups — even those with whom he is allied — with a broad brush and trafficking in baseless stereotypes.
Later in the Fox interview, he similarly insulted Jewish Americans, claiming that any Jews who oppose his candidacy “should have your head examined” because of his support for Israel. He picked up on that theme in a radio interview on Tuesday, saying “if you’re Jewish, if you vote for a Democrat, you’re a fool.” When the radio host called Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff a “crappy Jew,” Trump said “yeah,” signaling his agreement.
But all of that was just prelude to Trump’s performance on Wednesday, when he repeatedly insulted a trio of Black journalists in an on-stage interview at the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) conference. Just as he has questioned the religious identity of Jewish Democrats, he then went on to question Vice President Kamala Harris’ identity as a Black woman.
“I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn Black, and now she wants to be known as Black,” Trump said. “So I don’t know, is she Indian or is she Black?” (Harris has always identified as half-Black, half-Indian American.)
After the NABJ event, Trump doubled down on questioning Harris’ racial identity, both in a Truth Social post and at a rally in Pennsylvania. He also said that Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), who is Jewish, has “become a Palestinian” and a “proud member of Hamas.”
Trump’s third campaign for the presidency has often been lauded as more sophisticated than his previous operations — and, in many ways, that’s been true. The 2024 Republican platform, for example, showed Trump’s political savvy, moderating the party’s positions on issues like abortion and same-sex marriage.
But, at the end of the day, Trump will always be Trump — and that means a candidate who can only be constrained by advisers for so long, and who will inevitably return to making false and offensive statements. His campaign team, smartly, has made many efforts to reach out to Black voters this cycle — why do you think he was at the NABJ event in the first place? — but, ultimately, it just isn’t in Trump’s arsenal to reach beyond his base of supporters.
That same focus on tending to the base — instead of reaching new constituencies — was also on display in his selection of Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) as his running mate. Unlike other decisions throughout the campaign that signaled an attempt to moderate (like his willingness to clash with pro-life conservatives), Trump’s VP pick was an obvious slab of red meat for the base. It was the decision of a campaign so confident in its victory — which then seemed likely, after the Biden debate collapse — that it didn’t need to do anything more than turn out the voters it already had.
Then, of course, Biden was replaced with Harris, and everything changed. As was predictable, Vance’s elevation hasn’t seemed to help Trump much now that his campaign is in a more difficult position. In fact, to to the list of groups Trump has casually insulted in recent days (Christians, Jews, and Black people), Vance added single women, after his 2021 comments about “childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives” resurfaced.
At one point during the NABJ event on Wednesday, Trump was asked if the Ohio senator was prepared to hypothetically take over as president if the duo is elected; Trump didn’t exactly rush to his running mate’s defense.
“I have great respect for him,” Trump responded. “And for the other candidates too. But I will say this, and I think this is well documented: historically, the vice president, in terms of the election, does not have any impact. I mean, virtually no impact… It’s all about the presidential pick. Virtually, never has it mattered.”
In general, throughout the last few days, Trump has seemed to struggle with the changed state of the election. “Our whole campaign was geared towards him and now we have to steer it towards her,” he said at the NABJ conference. In posts on Truth Social, he has suggested that his campaign was defrauded by Democrats, because of the money it spent on advertising against Biden.
Instead of changing his campaign strategy, though, he has doubled down on some of his extreme positions, including pardoning January 6th rioters, which he said he would “absolutely” do on Wednesday.
To be clear, Trump has insulted his way to a presidential victory before — and he very much could do it again. According to most polls, he either holds a slight advantage in the contest or is tied with Harris. The structure of the Electoral College gives him an even better shot at victory.
But, without Biden in the race, Trump can no longer coast off of his opponent’s unpopularity; he must actually reach out to voters he lost in 2020. Luckily for Trump, Harris does have several legitimate vulnerabilities — but instead of highlighting them, he is now digging himself deeper into the hole of questioning her race.
In Harris, he is running against an opponent who is quickly gaining popularity and leading a party that is suddenly united and enthusiastic — and still has a potential post-convention bounce to come. Just as Democrats needed to change strategy after Biden’s disastrous debate — and they did, in a big way — Trump now needs a new strategy to face a new, very different opponent.
But Trump, who has spent the last several days repeating stereotypes he has trafficked in for decades, is not someone who takes easily to new situations. Instead of “pivoting,” he and his running mate have managed to make comments that could easily offend Christians, Jews, mixed-race people, and single women — groups that, together, make up roughly two-thirds of the country.
That’s not exactly a winning strategy for a campaign that suddenly finds itself needing to make up ground.
More news to know
There are several important stories from across the globe this morning. Let’s start with CBS News:
The Biden administration has agreed to a prisoner exchange with Russia and is expected to soon secure the release of three American citizens imprisoned in Russia including Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, Marine veteran Paul Whelan, and Russian-American radio journalist Alsu Kurmasheva, a senior administration official confirms. The swap would be part of an historically complex 24-person prisoner swap between the U.S., Russia, Germany and three other Western countries.
Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has issued an order for Iran to strike Israel directly, in retaliation for the killing in Tehran of Hamas’s leader, Ismail Haniyeh, according to three Iranian officials briefed on the order.
NPR:
After spending almost two decades in the U.S. military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, the alleged mastermind of the 9/11 terror attacks, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, and two of his accomplices have agreed to plead guilty in exchange for sentences of up to life in prison rather than face a death-penalty trial.
The settlement agreements with the Pentagon, announced Wednesday, bring partial closure to a case that has dragged on for twenty years and become mired in legal gridlock. Many family members of the nearly 3,000 people who died in the September 11, 2001, attacks want the 9/11 defendants put to death, but as a trial became increasingly unlikely, plea bargains were widely viewed as the only way to resolve the case.
Venezuela’s electoral body announced on Monday that the country’s president, Nicolás Maduro, comfortably won another six years in office, beating his main opponent by seven percentage points in a vote that was marred by widespread irregularities.
But partial election results, provided to The New York Times by a group of researchers associated with Venezuela’s main opposition alliance, supply new evidence that calls the official result into question.
Their figures suggest that an opposition candidate, a retired diplomat named Edmundo González, actually beat Mr. Maduro by more than 30 percentage points. The researchers’ estimate of the result — 66 percent to 31 percent — is similar to the result obtained by an independent exit pollconducted on Election Day across the country.
It was not possible for The Times to independently verify the underlying tallies, which the researchers say were collected from paper receipts produced by about 1,000 voting machines, about three percent of the country’s total. By Wednesday, Venezuela’s government-controlled election authority had still not released detailed results, despite growing international pressure.
The day ahead
Biden: The president has nothing on his public schedule.
Harris: The VP will deliver the eulogy at a service for the late Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX) in Houston. Lee served in Congress for 29 years before dying at age 74 on July 19.
Senate: The upper chamber will hold a procedural vote on the Tax Relief for American Families and Workers Act, the bipartisan deal to expand the Child Tax Credit and extend several corporate tax cuts. The measure passed the House in a sweeping 357-70 vote in January, but Republicans are expected to block its advancement in the Senate.
House: The lower chamber is out until September.
Trump: The GOP presidential nominee has nothing on his public schedule.
Vance: The GOP vice presidential nominee will travel to Arizona to visit the U.S.-Mexico border, a stop aimed at highlighting the Biden-Harris administration’s immigration policies.
Please do not conflate “childless” with “single”. Many women are married with no children and many single women are mothers.
Donald Trump has been schooled in the belief that any attention, positive or negative, is important. I think he didn’t like that the Harris campaign has been getting so much attention from the media and he planned to redirect the focus back on himself. He has succeeded as we are now reading (appalled, etc.) about him once again. He is a master at manipulating the media. It can’t be said enough that ignoring him could possibly be a good idea, although quite impossible. Heather Cox Richardson advises that a joyful, creative society cannot be seduced by the darkness of authoritarianism. On that note, take a breath and do something that brings you some joy today! 🙂