It is hard to believe that it has been only a week since former President Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris debated each other in Philadelphia.
This week, at least from a public relations perspective, the Trump side appears to have lost focus on its messaging, while the Democrats' campaign seems to be going well.
Fifty-seven days is a long time in politics, so the Trump side still has many structural advantages going into this last stretch. Trump continues to appear on numerous outlets, unafraid to talk about policy. RFK Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard - former Democrats in crucial party positions - are actively campaigning on his behalf.
The news on foreign wars in Ukraine and Israel has continued to be negative for all that the Biden-Harris administration has put into them. While there's hope that the Fed may drop interest rates, the pricing situation at the local grocery store is grim. Americans are hurting, and Harris's borrow-tax-spend proposals will exacerbate the household budgets, not improve them.
The public also sees that the media's uber-protective treatment of Harris as she hides and hides is not suitable for the world. When Harris did speak to a local Philadelphia ABC affiliate, her responses, essentially canned lines from the debate, showed how unprepared she was. She is next appearing in front of Black Media Journalists who will fawn over her every statement and cackle, and that will result in more positive media coverage for her for a few days - and a reasonable public will again wonder what's in this candidate that makes her so likable to the Deep State.
And then there was the debate itself. Everything about it —from how the debate stage was set up to how the questions were asked of the two candidates to how Trump was repeatedly fact-checked, whereas Harris was let go, spewing numerous lies—is a travesty of the Fourth Estate.
On This Week, the ABC News Sunday morning program, even veteran journalist Martha Raddatz, a strong anti-Trump media personality, couldn't take it anymore. Governor Maura Healey of Massachusetts, appearing as a Harris surrogate, had no clue how to answer Raddatz's charge that Harris openly lied about abortion during the debate, ably supported by moderator Linsey Davis, a sorority sister of Kamala Harris.
When Trump said that Democrats had supported policies that allow fetuses coming near to term to be killed, Davis fact-checked Trump. But Raddatz pointed out that nine states, including Washington D.C., have no restrictions on abortions whatsoever. Regarding military deployments, Harris said at the debate that American active-duty military personnel are not in any combat zone anywhere, a record for any president. This, too, was a lie. Raddatz pointed out that over 2,500 troops in Iraq and 900 in Syria are serving, often under grave danger. If the debate moderators had fact-checked Harris live, the media could not have engaged in their narrative that she won the debate - and that a post-debate poll bounce was to be expected.
In a change election (practically every government around the world has lost power and ceded to the opposition at the polls), the November election is Trump's to lose. Since the debate, the Trump campaign has engaged in a series of unpardonable, unforced errors, bringing this election needlessly to a too-close-to-call state.
At the debate, Trump’s remarks about Haitian immigrants didn’t resonate with his usual strong leadership tone. No one knows if the story is accurate, and at this stage of the game, Trump cannot win a media battle if the media doesn't want to cover the story.
The story got non-stop coverage for the next four days, and running mate JD Vance was forced to be on the defensive on the Sunday morning talk shows. Vance, who tends to repeatedly call journalists by their first name, doubled down on the pet story as if to say that the campaign intended all along to bait the media to cover the plight of Springfield, Ohio, residents overrun by Haitian immigrants - by promoting pet memes. Then, Vance made three significant unforced errors.
First, he meant to link the more significant illegal immigration problem, on which Harris is the weakest, to the immigration problem in Springfield. The error here is that the Haitians in Springfield are legal under a Temporary Protective Status granted by a presidential executive order issued by Joe Biden. By conflating legal immigrants, whom Trump always praises, with illegal immigrants who have ransacked American cities, Vance had been forced into an unenviable corner.
Second, he voiced his vehement displeasure with the Biden-Harris TPS policy on the Haitians, but this was going to be a losing argument. Elections have consequences, and under federal law, a president can grant TPS legal protections to citizens of any country. Vance has put himself in the uncomfortable position of questioning arcane immigration policy instead of focusing like a laser on the devastation that unchecked illegal immigration has brought to America's cities.
Third, he was arguing about Springfield as the junior Senator from Ohio, immediately bringing into focus his lack of political clout in Washington to address this issue over the two years he has been complaining. To people watching, Vance showed that he is still a J.V. politician, excellent in front of cameras but relatively weak in getting things done.
Vance tried to escape his difficult situation by challenging his TV hosts, but his defensive tone didn’t land well with the audience. Blaming the messenger wasn't going to get him through the interview, and the frequent first-name references only made it worse.
We admired Trump for his outstanding discipline until last Tuesday. However, we do not know if recent personnel changes have encouraged him to take risks and explore more controversial claims. Whatever may have happened within the campaign, it is clear that Trump and Vance must get back to the pre-debate campaign discipline.
While a sizable member of the Democratic coalition in our latest TIPP Poll disagreed with how Biden was replaced by Harris, as a practical matter, the question before us is whether those disgruntled Democrats will vote for Trump or Harris. The unforced errors of the Trump campaign and Harris's joyful campaign aided by the media have forced Democrats to stay in the Harris camp. This is why Harris is leading in the national polls and breaking even with Trump in the battleground states.
America needs Trump to recover quickly from last week's unforced errors and win in November. He is the only person now who can reverse this trend of unelected bureaucrats running policy at the highest levels of the U.S. government with unknown puppeteers designing America's vision.
The Trump campaign owes it to Americans not to mess up even once going forward.
