I woke up Saturday morning, as you may have, to the sight of Donald Trump performing fellatio on a microphone (no, I’m not linking to it). The clip that was making the rounds on X was 27 seconds. As I scrolled down, I noticed a tweet from a MAGA person scolding the non-MAGA world and offering a clip that ran to about two minutes. This “context,” this person suggested, would explain why he did this and prove once again how diabolically slanted the media was, and how unfair the world was to Trump.
I watched the longer version. Um, news flash: The “context” didn’t help. His mic went out. Someone handed him another one. He griped about his mic for a while. He held the working mic at his side and started to speak, I suppose demonstrating what it was like to be standing on a stage speaking without being heard, when suddenly he did that … thing he did.
So no, there is no context. There’s no conceivable explanation that would leave us thinking, “Oh, OK, sure, so that’s why he emulated a blow job. Who among us wouldn’t?”
Well, maybe there’s one.
Trump is fully losing it. Watch any of his recent speeches for five minutes. He’s completely incoherent. He has been this way for months, but it keeps getting worse. The only thing that’s different now is that it’s a news story—finally!—and more people are recognizing it. Also, his crowds are walking out on him now during these rambling speeches that run to an hour and a half or more.
His campaign is a mess. Over the weekend, The Atlantic published a devastating piece by Tim Alberta about the infighting in the campaign. You really should read it if you haven’t, it’s full of stunning details. The bottom line is as you might guess: The chaos emanates from the top.
But the most interesting thing about the Alberta piece is not any specific anecdote that appears in it. The most interesting thing about the Alberta piece is that it exists at all. That is to say, that all these key players in a presidential campaign are taking time out in the last month of the race (assuming that Alberta has been reporting the piece out for a little while) to gripe to a reporter instead of sticking to doing their jobs. It’s insane.
And you know what else it is? A sign that they’re preparing for a loss. I suppose it could be argued the other way—that Trump insiders are trying to ice rivals out of potential jobs in a new Trump administration. But I’ve covered lots of campaigns in my day, from president to City Council. The people who are laser-focused on winning never do this kind of preelection sniping. You only get this from people who worry that they’re going to lose and who don’t want to be blamed so they’re still considered employable. I have no doubt there are rivalries and grudges in the Harris campaign too. There always are. But we don’t know about them and won’t until the insider books come out. That’s the key difference.
Saturday was quite a day. First, the fellatio clip. Then the Alberta piece hit. And last and best, as day turned to night on the East Coast, boom, the Selzer poll out of Iowa dropped—Harris ahead by three. In Iowa. Could Kamala Harris really win Iowa? Nah, went the consensus. But this poll just might be telling us something about the momentum of this race.
I’m going to beg to differ. It absolutely might be telling us that Harris can win Iowa. First, Selzer is universally respected. Second, maybe Selzer’s polling method is a little different. Different how? Different in the way that is summarized in the headline Marcy Wheeler put on her write-up of the poll at Empty Wheel: “Male Pollsters Shocked—Shocked!!—When a Woman Pollster Discovers Women Voters.” Consider for a second the landscape in Iowa: Late last summer, one of the most draconian abortion bans in the country went into effect.
In the Selzer poll, independent women are backing Harris by 28 points. Senior women back her 63–28. Sit with those numbers for a second. They’re staggering.
Could they be wrong? Sure. But here’s another question to chew on: Could the rest of the polling, which has tended to base its samples on 2020 turnout and the now-infamous “recalled vote,” and which is painfully concerned with undercounting Trump voters, be in fact undercounting Harris voters—the women who are jazzed about her candidacy and the women (and men) who are post-Dobbs Democratic voters?
We’ll find out soon enough, but the point for now is that it was a pulverizing piece of news that ended a week in Trump world that started out, you’ll recall, with the fascist, racist, more-or-less-everythingist rally at Madison Square Garden. I’ve been a little chagrined that coverage of that grisly event has focused almost exclusively on Tony Hinchcliffe’s repulsive joke about Puerto Rico, because so many other disgusting comments were vomited out from that stage. On the other hand, that coverage has given us polls like this one, again from Saturday: Puerto Ricans in Florida prefer Harris by 85–8. Not a typo. There are around 1.1 million Puerto Ricans in Florida; according to Puerto Rico Report, “There are now more eligible voters from Puerto Rico in Florida than from Cuba.” Harris’s numbers among Latinos are up 15 points from July to October.
I didn’t even get to Trump’s comments about women and RFK Jr. and his inability to grab a door handle. In sum: The odor that’s emanating from the Trump campaign right now is one of total free fall. And Harris seems to be peaking perfectly—no mistakes, totally on message; great Saturday Night Live appearance; fantastic LeBron endorsement; wonderful cameos by people like J-Lo and Alicia Keys, who made beautiful remarks over the weekend at a rally outside Philadelphia.
That’s what we have on this day before Election Day: a well-run campaign with a disciplined candidate who is actually talking about people’s lives, versus a Pollock canvas of a campaign led by a candidate who is both losing what remains of his marbles and stewing ever more deeply in the vinegar of his prejudices and hatreds. The only hanging question now is whether enough Americans have taken note.
