Panicking Trump Melts Down Over How Big Kamala’s Crowds Are

Donald Trump is losing in more ways than one. According to a Marquette Law School Poll national survey published Thursday, the Republican presidential nominee is trailing Vice President Kamala Harris by four percentage points.

Americans have identified Trump as the old man in the race since President Joe Biden dropped out last month, and key swing states that had previously identified as red are now considered toss-ups, according to the Cook Political Report.

Yet one issue above everything else is really gnawing at the bloviating populist: his dwindling crowd size.

“If Kamala has 1,000 people at a Rally, the Press goes ‘crazy,’ and talks about how ‘big’ it was—And she pays for her ‘Crowd,’” Trump wrote on Truth Social Thursday. “When I have a Rally, and 100,000 people show up, the Fake News doesn’t talk about it, THEY REFUSE TO MENTION CROWD SIZE. The Fake News is the Enemy of the People!”

Photographic evidence proves otherwise. Pictures of Trump’s Philadelphia rally in late June—which was held at the same arena as Harris’s event on Tuesday—stand in stark contrast to images of the Democrat’s packed crowds. Photos of Trump onstage include backgrounds loaded with empty seats and even entirely empty sections.

Meanwhile, Harris’s explosion onto the campaign trail just a handful of weeks ago has brought scores of crowds lining up to see her speak, with some queues (like the one in Eau Claire, Wisconsin) trailing for more than half a mile to enter the arena, reported AFP.

In 2016 and 2020, Trump relied on the visual logic of his loaded rallies—and, by extension, the lackluster crowds attending his opponents’—as evidence of his titanic popularity among everyday Americans. But Harris’s ability to meet and exceed Trump’s numbers has really rattled him, along with the conservative establishment. On Thursday, news of Harris’s massive crowds reached the top of the Drudge Report, the most heavily trafficked conservative news aggregator, paired with the headline: “HARRIS CROWDS ROIL MAGA.”

Other top stories on the site hinted at more chaos inside Team Trump, including concerns that Trump is “panicking” and that a short-notice afternoon press conference at Mar-a-Lago, which is reportedly only permitting the attendance of reporters hand-selected by Trump’s team, is evidence of Trump losing faith with his campaign.

“Re: Trump’s self-announced press conference today at 2 pm: He’s panicking,” wrote former Trump White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham on X (formerly Twitter.) “I’ve seen this play many times. He thinks his team is failing him & no one can speak better/’save’ his campaign/defend him but him. He hates the coverage Harris is getting & thinks only he can fix it.”

Ready or not, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has more dead animal stories up his sleeve.

The independent presidential candidate has doubled down on his side-of-the-road hunting strategies, telling reporters outside an Albany courthouse on Wednesday that he had picked up roadkill his “whole life” and has a “freezer full of it.”

Journalists reportedly took the anecdote for a joke until Kennedy’s campaign spokesperson Stefanie Spear clarified that he had been serious and that Kennedy uses the meat to feed his ravens, according to the Associated Press. Spear also added that the presumptive Kennedy heir no longer had the “21 cubic foot (0.59 cubic meter) refrigerator” used for storing the meat at his Westchester County residence.

While salvaging roadkill for meat isn’t unheard of in more rural areas of the country, it’s also a strange topic for any presidential candidate since Teddy Roosevelt. Kennedy’s bizarre story of picking a dead bear cub off the road, posing with its slashed carcass, driving it down to Manhattan, and staging it in Central Park a decade ago has been met with national shock, with some critics accusing Kennedy of animal abuse.

The disturbing tale—which was originally reported on by Kennedy’s relative for The New York Times in 2014—was tied to Kennedy in a New Yorker exposé on Monday. In response, Kennedy quipped that “maybe that’s where [he] got [his] brain worm,” referring to a 2010 incident in which he suffered from “brain frog” and short-term memory loss that he chalked up to a parasitic worm in his head.

Kennedy had hoped to stave off any buzz created by the New Yorker article. Before the story was published, Kennedy posted a video to his X account in which he made light of the whole event, bizarrely telling actress Roseanne Barr (of all people) that he had originally thought to skin the cub before telling friends at a dinner that it would instead be funnier to leave it in the heavily trafficked park.

“I had an old bike in my car that somebody had asked me to get rid of, and I said, ‘Let’s go put the bear in Central Park, and we’ll make it look like he got hit by a bike,’” Kennedy said in the video. “Everybody thought, ‘That’s a great idea.’ So we did that, and we thought it would be amusing for whoever found it or something.”

Donald Trump has been throwing a prolonged tantrum, as he struggles to accept that he is no longer running against President Joe Biden.

The former president and convicted felon has become increasingly distressed at the state of his campaign, according to a Washington Post report published Thursday.

As Vice President Kamala Harris has relaunched the Democratic Party’s campaign, Trump saw his fundraising edge dissipate under the shadow of her $310 million influx in July. At the same time, his campaign has struggled to find its footing in the new matchup, leaving some close to the campaign wondering how it was possible they were so ill prepared, according to the Post.

After flying so high at the Republican National Convention in July, it seems that Trump has had a hard time adjusting to the fact that his fight is not over.

“It’s unfair that I beat him and now I have to beat her too,” Trump told an ally in a phone call last weekend, according to the Post.

Trump has reportedly been complaining nonstop about Harris’s surging media coverage and positive polling, which has since seen her rise above Trump in crucial national polls. Trump has also been anxiously asking his friends how they feel about his campaign, according to five people close to the campaign who spoke to the Post on the condition of anonymity.

The Republican nominee has also reportedly been getting flack from friends and allies over his performance at recent events. Last month, Trump made a disastrous appearance at the National Association of Black Journalists, which quickly devolved into a hostile performance rife with racist responses and caused his team to pull him offstage early, sending Republicans spiraling over what to do next.

People familiar with the inner workings of the campaign have said there has, surprisingly, been little chaos as a result of the other team’s sudden upheaval. Trump spokesperson Steven Cheung told the Post that any allies or advisers who were questioning the campaign were “unnamed sources who have no idea what they are talking about and are doing nothing but helping Democrats.”

Meanwhile, Trump’s nostalgia for his low-energy run against Biden is tangible. The former president took to Truth Social Tuesday night to fantasize about the Democratic National Convention, inventing a version in which Biden swoops in and steals the nomination back from Harris.

Now Trump’s race is very different. It requires a much more sophisticated ground game, which his campaign has yet to put together—and even his allies are noticing.

Conservative radio host Erick Erickson wrote on X Thursday, “Forget the money and ads, the Democrats’ ground game is far surpassing the GOP ground game. They’ve been registering new voters and farming for absentee ballots with paid operatives, some of whom are making up to $40 an hour. The GOP has nothing at that level.”

Trump is much more used to doing one major event a week. This week, as his running mate J.D. Vance hit the road, Trump stayed home in Florida to fundraise and do interviews. After months of campaigning, it’s unclear whether Trump has the stamina to carry his campaign to November.

Hints of Donald Trump’s cognitive decline have been seen for the past several months, perhaps even years, as he campaigns to return to the White House, and experts are noticing.

The health and science publication STAT spoke to several experts in memory, psychology, and linguistics about patterns in Trump’s speech, which seems to growing more incoherent. Comparing his speeches from this year to those from 2017, researchers discovered that Trump uses shorter sentences, confuses his word order more often, repeats words and topics, and frequently goes on tangents.  

These changes in Trump’s speech could be due to something as benign as mood changes or as serious as the beginnings of Alzheimer’s disease, the experts said. One academic, social psychologist James Pennebaker, performed a statistical analysis of transcripts from Trump speeches between 2015 and 2024, and found telling differences in how the former president and convicted felon speaks.  

Pennebaker, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin, found that Trump has increased his “all-or-nothing thinking,” using words such as “always,” “never,” and “completely.” This, along with his decrease in the use of positive words and increased references to negative emotions, could be a sign of depression, Pennebaker said.

A sharp increase in all-or-nothing thinking is linked to cognitive decline, Pennebaker added. “Another person [whose] all-or–nothing thinking has gone up is Biden,” he said. 

Pennebaker also found that Trump has spoken more about the past since 2020, with less time speaking about the future, and uses simpler words and sentence structures now compared to before he was elected president. Pennebaker citied a metric for analytic thinking where Trump measures quite low on complexity of thought: Most presidents score in a 60 to 70 range in their speeches, but Trump’s speeches land him between 10 and 24.

“I can’t tell you how staggering this is,” Pennebaker told STAT. “He does not think in a complex way at all.”  

During the 2024 campaign, Trump has made many gaffes, including mixing up Congresswomen Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, seemingly forgetting events right after they happen, and fumbling during speeches. There have been so many incidents that his opponents have even made video supercuts of his missteps. Even while he was president, former White House staffers and people like Representative Nancy Pelosi say there were clear signs of cognitive decline. With President Biden withdrawing from the 2024 election in part due to concerns over his mental acuity, perhaps Trump ought to consider whether his own mental state makes him unfit for leadership.  

J.D. Vance is begging people to stop calling him and Donald Trump weird.

During a campaign stop in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, on Wednesday, Vance was asked to respond to the whole “weird thing,” which was popularized by Minnesota Governor Tim Walz before he was tapped to be Vice President Kamala Harris’s running mate. 

The Republican vice presidential nominee attempted to dispel rumors of his weirdness. 

“I think that what makes Donald Trump and I good candidates and a good team is that we’re normal guys who wanna make this country great again, and we want Americans to be able to live the American dream,” he said.

Vance quickly pivoted into slinging some dirt of his own. He called Walz “pretty weird” for not kissing his wife onstage during his rally in Atlanta, which drew a crowd of more than 12,000 people. At Vance’s rally across town, the Ohio senator attracted a group of just over 200 people, according to local news outlet WHYY.  

Throughout Vance’s appearance Wednesday at Wollard International, an airplane part manufacturer, Vance made his best case for just how normal the Republican ticket is. But for Vance, even softball questions elicited strangely hostile, awkward answers. 

At one point, Vance was asked why people in Wisconsin would want to get a beer with him. 

“I guess, I guess they’d wanna have a beer with me because I actually do like to drink beer,” he said, signaling his apparent normalcy. “I probably like to drink beer a little bit too much, but that’s OK, I’m sure the media won’t give me too much crap over that.”

Vance proceeded to gush about his running mate, saying he’d never met someone “who likes normal people more than Trump.”

This week, Vance has been traveling solo, stopping in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan, never far from the Harris-Walz campaign. On Friday, he will be rejoined in Montana by former President Donald Trump, who hasn’t campaigned all week.