Trump Campaign Staff Already Pointing Fingers, Please Oh Please Oh Please
A case for guarded optimism!
Over the weekend, The Atlantic published a long look by the always-well-sourced-in-wingnut-land Tim Alberta at the last few months of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. Now, we are cautiously, cautiously optimistic about Kamala Harris’s chances on Tuesday. So after reading the piece, we threw an entire salt mine’s worth of salt over our left shoulder, turned in a circle three times, and spit until our mouth was as parched and gritty as the Gobi Desert.
Still, generally it is considered a bad sign for a campaign when these sorts of backbiting post mortems full of anonymous quotes and ass-covering come out before the election. Normally you save it for the days and weeks after, when everyone is still sorting through the wreckage and yelling at Anthony Weiner for being hornier than a rhino with a great big horn.
This one is a fun read. [Throws more salt over shoulder.] And what comes through most clearly is something very unsurprising that many have noted over the decades: Donald Trump is often his own worst enemy. He simply can’t help himself. Take the opening anecdote, when, after June’s debate, he announced what he believed was his hilarious new nickname for Joe Biden:
“The guy’s a retard. He’s retarded. I think that’s what I’ll start calling him,” Trump declared aboard his campaign plane, en route to a rally that evening, according to three people who heard him make the remarks: “Retarded Joe Biden.” […]
As Trump demurred, musing that he might debut the nickname at that night’s event, his staffers puzzled over the timing. Biden was on the ropes. Polls showed Trump jumping out to the biggest lead he’d enjoyed in any of his three campaigns for the presidency. Everything was going right for the Republican Party and its nominee. Why would he jeopardize that for the sake of slinging a juvenile insult?
Why? Well for starters, had any of you met Donald Trump before you signed on to work on his campaign? Have you all been living on the surface of the sun with your eyes closed and your hands over your ears? You might as well ask why Lebron James dunks a basketball: Because he can.
The funny part to us is that slapping the R-word on Joe Biden probably would have been like a lot of other Trump scandals that would be career-enders for any other politician. There would have been much wailing and gnashing of teeth for 24 hours, and then there would be a new scandal to pay attention to, and the R-word would join the innumerable list of racist, sexist, ableist, stupid pebbles Trump has tossed into the pond over the last decade.
But this incident led to a realization among Trump’s aides that, again, see that “surface of the sun” question above: Trump was bored and restless being a fairly disciplined and normal candidate, even though it was working for him.
“People are calling this the most disciplined campaign they’ve ever seen,” Trump remarked to friends at a fundraiser this summer, according to someone who heard the conversation. He smirked at the compliment. “What’s discipline got to do with winning?”
Totally, man. If we had known about that quote over the summer, we would have encouraged him to be an even bigger asshole.
Alberta reports that in the days after Biden dropped out of the race and was replaced by Kamala Harris, his campaign managers Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita — actual campaign professionals — told him that their strategy would not change. Once the initial Democratic euphoria wore off, Harris would come back down to Earth. Don’t overreact, they told Trump.
Almost immediately, the giant idiot went onstage at a forum with the National Association of Black Journalists and questioned whether Harris is really Black. And we were off to the races.
In the firestorm after the NABJ appearance, Trump blamed everyone else and started thinking that his team was failing him. So he turned to two of 2016’s big guns: Kellyanne Conway and Corey Lewandowski. Which in our opinion is like if, having been poisoned, you inhaled a scuba tank full of hydrogen cyanide as an antidote.
Lewandowski in particular immediately did what he did on past campaigns: threw his weight around, tried to take over everything, undermined Wiles and LaCivita, and generally behaved like the meathead he is. Trump assured his campaign managers that Lewandowski was something of a “utility player,” a jack-of-all-trades working on field operations. Instead:
He began taking aside junior staffers and department heads alike, one at a time, informing them that he spoke for Trump himself. He made it known that he would be in charge of all spending, and that he needed people to tell him what wasn’t working so he could fix it. Meanwhile, he began calling the campaign’s key operatives in the battleground states, probing for weaknesses in Trump’s ground game and assuring them that a strategy shift was in the works.
Campaign aides tried to spin Alberta that this was the time when Trump reverted to his 2016 self. And there is something to that. What none of the campaign workers appear to have admitted is that his 2016 self was the real Trump. He was always likely to re-emerge at some point.
Trump compounded his mistake by picking JD Vance as his running mate, listening to his idiot failson Don Jr. over his advisers. In turn, the Extremely Online Vance brought along a staff of groypers, those young online bigots who seem to never talk to anyone who doesn’t keep a cross and a can of lighter fluid in his car in case his klavern’s Grand Dragon suddenly calls a meeting.
In particular, there was a groyper named Alex Bruesewitz on Vance’s staff. He was the one who is blamed for pushing Vance’s interest in the infamous ZOMG HAITIAN IMMIGRANTS IN OHIO ARE EATING PEOPLE’S PETS story. (Yr Wonkette’s opinion is that JD Vance deserves all the blame, he’s an adult with agency.) Vance publicized the immigrants-eating-pets story without coordinating with the campaign, where most everyone except Trump realized repeating it was grotesquely harmful to them.
Brueswitz was also the guy responsible for booking jackass insult comic Tony Hinchcliffe to open Trump’s Nuremberg rally at Madison Square Garden on October 27. Somehow no senior staff on the campaign, particularly LaCivita and Wiles, vetted Hinchcliffe before he got onstage and insulted millions of Puerto Ricans and reportedly energized Latino voters who oppose Trump.
The capper on this Bruesewitz story is that even Stephen Miller, a man who all but did Sieg Heil salutes during his own speech at the MSG rally, knew it was a galactic fuckup:
According to two people who were present, Miller, the Trump policy adviser whose own nativist impulses are well documented, was not offended by Hinchcliffe’s racist jokes. Yet he was angered by them all the same: He knew the campaign had just committed a huge unforced error. He believed that Bruesewitz had done profound damage to Trump’s electoral prospects.
Son, if Stephen Miller thinks you went way too far with the public racism, you went way too far with the public racism.
Again, billions and billions of grains of salt, so read the story now, because if our optimism is misplaced, it will be a lot less funny on Wednesday.
Help Wonkette keep the lights on and the liquor cabinet stocked.
These yahoos. Not only is it party over country, it's self-interest above all else. I do wonder if they are ever going to turn on the top malignant narcissist. You'd think with all of them displaying those tendencies in greater or lesser quantities, maybe some "not me" fingers will point at Trump as being toxic as fuck. Y'all signed on for the ride, though, no sympathy for those maimed in the process.
I'm going to say something that I think would horrify most Republicans. They say (among other things) that Harris will listen a lot to her advisers, so she's 'weak'. They've said similar things about Biden. You know what? I hope she does! Washington is, well, awash in subject experts who are routinely ignored by Presidents and Cabinet members who ignore their hard-earned counsel in favor of their pet ideological agendas. I say, fuck that noise. I favor the Jean-Luc Picard school of leadership - assemble expert opinions, find the best ones, forge consensus.