How Trump’s Obsession Could Tank His Own Campaign

Donald Trump’s obsession with convincing his supporters to surveil the upcoming presidential election may ultimately be hurting his campaign.

The Republican nominee has repeatedly claimed that Republican Party officials only need to focus on ensuring election integrity in November, and has centered his campaign’s efforts on recruiting thousands of poll watchers and poll workers. As a result, the campaign is relying on a constellation of outside groups to rustle up the traditional networks of volunteer door-knockers and canvassers.

These groups include Elon Musk’s incredibly shady America PAC as well as Turning Point Action, the advocacy arm of white-nationalist Charlie Kirk’s organization. A recent FEC rule change from March now allows for canvassing super PACs to coordinate directly with campaigns on messaging and campaign data. As a result, Trump’s scrappier in-house volunteer program can be boosted by funds from megadonors.

However, outsourcing this aspect of the campaign could prove problematic if strong personnel and structural dynamics don’t fall into place. The America PAC recently underwent a change in leadership, which caused it to clean house with its vendors supplying the workers.

The Trump campaign said it has rounded up more than 150,000 poll watchers and poll workers, reviving concerns about voter intimidation that first cropped up in 2020. The number of employed campaign staff and campaign volunteers is far smaller.

James Blair, the campaign’s political director, posted about the campaign’s operations on X Thursday, following a report from Axios that relied on numbers he’d shared last week.

In his update, Blair wrote that the campaign was bolstered by 14,500 community volunteers called “Trump Force 47 captains.” He said 2,500 of them had been trained in the last week alone, and has previously estimated that another two thousand would join every week until election day.

Last week, Blair had said that outside groups had employed more than 1,000 canvassers in battleground states, which would rise to 2,500 by election day. He said that the campaign employed hundreds of staff across the battleground states.

The Republican National Committee had plans in place for a more expansive canvassing effort, those plans were discarded once Trump’s team took over in March, according to documents obtained by The Washington Post.

While Trump’s focus on election integrity may not have been a detractor when he was running against President Joe Biden, it certainly looks that way now. Since announcing her candidacy, Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign said it has worked with 330,000 volunteers and has a staff of 15,000 people.

“What’s happened in the last couple of weeks is we actually have a real race. This is a real presidential campaign. The Biden-Trump version of this was one event a week by each candidate, very rarely on the campaign trail and no real engagement,” Kevin Madden, a Republican strategist, told the Post. “Now this is going to be one of those campaigns where strategies matter, resources matter, time matters, and there is not much room for error.”

Several people close to the Trump campaign told the Post that there was an ongoing effort to get the easily distractible candidate to focus more on attacking Harris and other Democrats.

Trump has falsely claimed that Democrats are actually encouraging illegal immigration for the purpose of bolstering their voter base. Meanwhile, he was the one who killed a bipartisan border deal earlier this year that would have helped curb the entry of undocumented immigrants in the United States.

Trump has repeatedly said the priority of the Republican Party is to tighten election restrictions, but his fearmongering is fed by his own baseless claims of election fraud and conspiracy theories about widespread noncitizen voting. Trump’s election martyrdom from 2020 may be the nail in the coffin of his 2024 campaign.

This story has been updated.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. tried to meet with Kamala Harris to discuss a Cabinet position in exchange for ending his independent campaign for president, but was rejected, and it might be because she benefits from him staying in the race.

The Washington Post reports that Kennedy tried to meet with Harris last week, but neither she nor her campaign responded. Kennedy met with Donald Trump in Milwaukee last month about the same issue and also had a similar phone conversation with Trump that was later leaked online.

“I think it is a strategic mistake for them. That’s my perspective,” Kennedy told the Post regarding his rejection by the Harris campaign. “I think they ought to be looking at every opportunity. I think it is going to be a very close race.”

Aside from Kennedy’s outlandish political views, Harris has a big practical reason for not giving Kennedy what he wants. Kennedy draws more right-leaning voters to his campaign than left-leaning ones, hurting Trump much more than Harris. It helps her if Kennedy stays in the race.

Kennedy’s campaign is well funded thanks to early support from right-wing donors hoping he would peel away support from the Democratic ticket, as well as from his running mate, Silicon Valley philanthropist Nicole Shanahan. But his prospects, which were never that high as a third-party candidate, have taken a nosedive as Harris has seized the Democratic nomination and as damaging revelations about him have come out.

Those revelations include that he dumped a baby bear carcass in New York’s Central Park more than a decade ago, has multiple sexual assault allegations against him, is lying about his voting residence, and once had a worm in his brain. With these strikes against him, it’s not surprising that neither the Trump nor the Harris campaign has taken him up on his offer.

Donald Trump was scheduled to give remarks on economic policy at a small messaging event in Asheville, North Carolina, on Wednesday—but the former president couldn’t help but venture way, way off topic as his speech devolved into angry ad hominem attacks against Kamala Harris, mixed into his own typical word salad.

The pared-down speaking event is part of the Trump campaign’s new strategy to keep its candidate on topic, by having him speak to smaller crowds about only one thing at a time. Trump didn’t seem committed to this idea for even one event.

“This isn’t a rally, but this is a different kind of a thing. Today we’re going to talk about one subject,” Trump said. “They say it’s the most important subject, I’m not sure it is. But they say it’s the most important—inflation is the most important, but that’s part of economy.”

When trying to speak about the vice president’s not-yet-released economic plan and her influence on the U.S. economy, Trump veered off-script to complain about her laughing. “For nearly four years Kamala has crackled as the American economy has burned,” Trump said.

“What happened to her laugh? I haven’t heard that laugh in about a week. That’s why they keep her off the stage. That’s why she’s disappeared. That’s the laugh of a crazy person, I will tell you if you haven’t noticed—it’s crazy,” Trump said. The crowd seemed to respond to Trump’s detour into bashing Harris, and so he happily repeated the line. “She’s crazy!”

“Her laugh is career-threatening,” Trump said.

The Republican nominee readily abandoned his talking points, instead opting to play to his audience of roughly 2,500 fans, fantasizing about firing his opponent.

“Kamala! You’re fired!” he screamed, pointing forcefully as the crowd cheered. “Get outta here! Go! Get outta here!”

“Right?” he asked someone in the front row. He pantomimed again as the room whistled and cheered. “Get her out,” Trump growled. “Boom.”

Overall, Trump couldn’t manage to stay on focus, even though his spokespeople have lauded the so-called “discipline” of his campaign. He patted himself on the back for his train-wreck interview with Elon Musk, proudly admitted he didn’t understand what a “net zero” carbon emissions policy meant or how wind energy works, and accused Europe of tending to be a “little bit woke.” He grinned as he remarked that was now “changing,” portraying a grotesque attitude amid deadly anti-immigrant riots that have spread across the U.K.

Trump made his regular detours into racist fearmongering about immigrants, pretending to recount—without so many details—a violent crime done by “a gentleman from a certain country, I won’t mention—happened to be in South America.”

The former president tried to list other violent crimes perpetrated by people he called “the Kamala migrants,” but couldn’t remember a single detail. It’s almost as if that wasn’t what he was meant to be speaking about in the first place.

“There were four or five other situations over the last couple of days. Rape and murder. Rape and beating. Rape and something else. And sometimes just immediate killing. These people are brutal,” Trump cried.

Trump then attempted to tie migrants back into the main subject of his speech, blaming them for basically every economic problem.

Overall, Trump delivered all the classics, despite the fact that his campaign was pretty much begging him not to.

While enthusiasm for Kamala Harris soared, Donald Trump’s pick for vice president was making zero sense before a small crowd in Byron Center, Michigan.

In one portion of J.D. Vance’s speech Wednesday, he seemed to forget what the average American spends on an economy vehicle, claiming that thanks to Harris’s spending policies, the “average new car costs nearly $50,000 a year”—a figure that would hardly translate to anything other than luxury vehicles.

Vance also flubbed a spur-of-the-moment interaction with a supporter, who shouted out that the potential administration should “fire Granholm,” referring to Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm. But Vance seemingly forgot who that was, instead responding that they would “fire the Agriculture Secretary.”

“She’s not doing a very good job,” Vance said, forgetting the gender of Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack.

The Ohio senator also tried and failed to brush off comments that Trump made during a one-on-one interview with Elon Musk on Monday, in which the Republican nominee praised Musk for firing striking workers. The comment earned the ire of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, whose president described the behavior as “economic terrorism.”

“Well look, I like Teamsters’ president, I think he’s a good guy,” Vance said of Sean O’Brien. “But I think he’s wrong about this.”

“Donald Trump was not talking about firing Michigan autoworkers,” he continued. “He was talking about firing the employees of Twitter who use their power to censor American citizens. Those people ought to be fired.”

Vance, who famously authored The New York Times-bestselling memoir Hillbilly Elegy, has seen a significant decrease in the association of positive labels by voters since he was announced to the Republican ticket. Descriptive options such as “young,” “smart,” and “businessman” have all gone down among survey participants, according to a poll by centrist Democratic pollster Blueprint.

Most participants were aware of Vance’s strange and off-putting remarks, including an instance in which Vance claimed that childless adults should not hold positions of power as they don’t have a “direct stake” in the future of the country, deriding Democratic Party leaders as “childless cat ladies.” Approximately 50 percent of respondents said they were aware of Vance’s comments, while 55 percent said they were bothered by it.

Potential voters were also disturbed by a 2021 interview in which Vance defended a Texas abortion law’s lack of exceptions for instances of rape and incest by claiming that the resulting pregnancies were simply “inconvenient.” Roughly 62 percent of survey participants said they were “bothered” by that description, while 50 percent noted that it “bothers me a lot.”

J.D. Vance’s views on gender and parenting have come back to haunt him, again.

In 2020, long before he entered politics, Vance appeared on a podcast where the host said that having grandmothers help raise children is “the whole purpose of the postmenopausal female.”

Vance agreed—and that wasn’t all of what was discussed on the episode.

The host also said that grandparents helping to raise children is a “weird, unadvertised feature of marrying an Indian woman,” and Vance again agreed, recounting how his mother-in-law, a biology professor in California, took a sabbatical from her job to help look after his newborn son.

“Painfully economically inefficient,” Vance said, making a larger point of what he saw as a societal problem. “Why didn’t she just keep her job, give us part of the wages to pay somebody else to do it, right? Because that is the thing that the hyper-liberalized economics wants you to do.”

The point that Vance seemed to be trying to make in 2020 was that this kind of economic thinking was at the root of today’s political problems. But it’s definitely strange to hear him agree that the entire purpose of a woman who is too old to bear children is to raise grandchildren. Not only is that offensive, but it’s also dismissive of other abilities or choices that women make.

The point about Indian culture is stranger still, as if Vance thinks his experience with his wife Usha’s parents represents all of Indian culture. It is true that intergenerational households are common in Indian culture, but the podcast’s tone coupled with Vance’s previous remarks (and proposed policies) on women without children evoke a less than sincere interpretation.

Over the past few weeks, Vance has had to repeatedly explain and defend his comments about “childless cat ladies” made to Tucker Carlson in 2021. It seems this podcast will also have him on the defensive, as it again shows that he has some archaic views about family life.

Not even a booming stock market could rescue Donald Trump’s terrible Truth Social stock.

The Dow Jones Industrial average gained more than 200 points on Wednesday, following the release of a Labor Department report found that year-over-year inflation had reached its lowest point in three years, according to CNBC.

However, not even the good news about inflation could rescue Trump’s struggling social media stock, which took a dive earlier this week after Trump posted on X (formerly Twitter) for the first time in more than a year. Truth Social hit its lowest rate in months, valued at $24.60 per share.

By Wednesday, Trump’s stock was valued at just $23.97 per share. Trump will be stuck with his company’s stubborn, stagnant stock for just one more month, when he is legally allowed to sell his shares without board approval.

Trump’s campaign attempted to reframe the good inflation news on Wednesday by skewering Harris over consumer prices, which did not decrease. Incidentally, he appeared to cite “Kamalanomics” as the apparent cause for what is ultimately an improved economic situation.

Last week, Trump tried desperately to blame Harris for a dip in the stock market, dubbing it a “KAMALA CRASH!” Unsurprisingly, the nickname didn’t quite catch on.

J.D. Vance on Wednesday doubled down on Donald Trump’s comments about firing striking workers.

As Vance addressed a small crowd at a campaign event in Michigan, a CBS News reporter gave Vance a chance to clean up the mess Trump made during his conversation with Elon Musk earlier this week.

“The UAW president said that Donald Trump and Elon Musk sneered at labor workers when talking about how Elon Musk fired folks looking to organize. The Teamster president who also spoke at the RNC called this ‘economic terrorism.’ What’s your reaction to the backlash that Donald Trump’s getting from that interview?” asked the reporter.

“Well look, I like Teamsters’ president, I think he’s a good guy,” Vance said of Sean O’Brien. “But I think he’s wrong about this.”

“Donald Trump was not talking about firing Michigan autoworkers,” he continued. “He was talking about firing the employees of Twitter who use their power to censor American citizens. Those people ought to be fired.”

Adam Bettcher/Getty Images)

It looks like no one briefed Vance on how to answer this question. Regardless of their workplace, threatening to fire workers for concerted labor activity, such as going on strike, is illegal under the National Labor Relations Act.

Musk was accused of violating labor law at X (then known as Twitter) when he fired an employee who was attempting to organize against return to office plans. He also retaliated against unionized janitors, laying off the Twitter custodial staff right before the holidays.

Vance’s faulty logic of pitting autoworkers organizing in Michigan against workers wronged by Musk at Twitter, Tesla, and SpaceX won’t hold up.

On Tuesday, the United Auto Workers filed federal labor charges against Trump and Musk. They accused the billionaires of “illegal attempts to threaten and intimidate workers who stand up for themselves by engaging in protected concerted activity, such as strikes.” Maybe they can now add Vance into the mix too?

Donald Trump may be too much for Palm Beach, Florida, to deal with.

The town is reviewing legal options, including closing his Mar-a-Lago country club, to help residents feel safe following the assassination attempt against Trump last month. Since then, the Secret Service has closed the main road to the club, South Ocean Boulevard, with security around the property increased. Local police say it won’t be opened again before Election Day in November.

Despite the road’s closure and increased checkpoints, Mar-a-Lago has remained open, with hundreds of people attending different events, including ones hosted by the president. That has touched a nerve with the town’s leadership.

“In my mind, if the road is closed, the Mar-a-Lago Club is closed,” Mayor Danielle Moore said in a council meeting Tuesday. “There’s no way in God’s green earth that they can bring 350 people into that club. It’s completely illogical that you’ve got a road closed and then you’re going to let 350 strangers into your club.”

“However, you can’t have it both ways, boys and girls,” Moore added. “Either the club’s open or not.”

The mayor, the town council, and the residents all said at the meeting that they didn’t want anything to happen to Trump, and that politics didn’t play a role in their discussion, which was prompted by concerns that the town won’t receive a reply to a July 22 letter it sent to the Secret Service asking for “the legal authority authorizing it to implement the road closure for the specified duration and even when protectee(s) are not in residence in the Town.”

Trump may not take the town’s concerns kindly. The events the club hosts rake in money, and Trump enjoys getting feted by the right and far right who come to sing his praises, sometimes literally. And he certainly doesn’t have a history of recognizing how much his presence costs the residents of the places he visits.

Trump is still holding firm on his conspiracy that Vice President Kamala Harris couldn’t possibly pull large crowds to her campaign events and is using artificial intelligence to digitally enhance images of her rallies.

When asked by a reporter to follow up on his comments earlier this week that an image of thousands of people attending Harris’s Detroit airport rally was fabricated using A.I., Trump doubled down.

“You said Harris’s crowds were A.I. and that there weren’t people there. There’s all kinds of video evidence from people who were there who have proven that false. Can you tell us about why you made that claim?”

“Well, I can’t say what was there, who was there,” Trump responded.

“We have the biggest crowds ever in the history of politics,” Trump continued, getting defensive.

Well, here’s an easy fact-check: An estimated 15,000 people showed up to Harris’s airport rally in Michigan.

Trump has long been obsessed with crowd sizes. Last week, things got weird as he tried to claim his January 6 crowd was larger than Martin Luther King Jr.’s March on Washington. “Nobody’s spoken to crowds bigger than me,” said the former president. “If you look at Martin Luther King when he did his speech, and you look at ours ... we had more.”

The vice president’s campaign vehemently denies that the image of her Detroit crowd was faked in any way despite Trump posting on Sunday that Harris “CHEATED” or “‘A.I.’d’ it” and that the massive crowd “DIDN’T EXIST!”

Perhaps Trump is lashing out due to his insecurity about his upcoming micro-event strategy, where the former president will hold smaller “messaging events” rather than large-scale rallies.

Fundraising for the Democratic National Convention has gone through the roof, shattering previous Republican and Democratic fundraising efforts with a whopping $94 million, according to the host committee, Development Now for Chicago.

“Today’s announcement is a reflection of the unified love for our city, and we couldn’t be more grateful for the broad coalition of partners who came together to ensure Chicago could put its best foot forward at this convention,” Christy George, the host committee’s executive director, said Wednesday in a statement obtained by the Chicago Tribune.

The announcement listed AT&T, Invenergy, and United Airlines as major investors, according to the Tribune, though a more comprehensive picture of donors will be available after the convention ends next week.

All in all, the committee raised $9 million more than the Republican National Convention in July, which brought in $85 million, according to Milwaukee’s host committee.

The milestone arrives alongside a Monmouth University poll illustrating skyrocketing momentum behind Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign. There were significant boosts in enthusiasm among Democrats—which leaped from 46 percent to 85 percent now that Harris is the nominee—as well as independent voters, who similarly jumped from 34 percent when President Joe Biden was in the race to 53 percent with Harris.

“This is clearly a different ballgame. The nominee change has raised the ceiling for potential Democratic support in the presidential contest by a small but crucial amount, at least for now,” said Patrick Murray, director of the independent Monmouth University Polling Institute, in a statement.