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.