Republicans Rip Into “Foolish” Trump for Losing Focus

Donald Trump seems incapable of staying on message, and it’s seriously beginning to worry Republican lawmakers, according to a report NOTUS published Thursday. 

Trump’s campaign attempted to debut a smaller messaging event on Wednesday, as part of a new strategy to get the president to stay on topic. Trump predictably detoured into his typical racist fearmongering and personal attacks against his opponent, Kamala Harris. 

Despite the Trump team’s efforts to curb its loquacious candidate and its insistence on running a  “disciplined” campaign, it seems that nothing the team does can prevent Trump from, well, being Trump. And Republican lawmakers aren’t impressed. 

“Let’s be real: He lost in ’20. He has a solid base but has done nothing, or worse, alienated anyone from coming back to him,” one Republican lawmaker told NOTUS. “It’s like the sixth or seventh season of a show that was once funny but now panders to his base.

“If he continues down this road and Harris stays her course and the economy starts to show signs of improvement, he will be a two-time loser,” the Republican added.

Another Republican congressperson who spoke anonymously to NOTUS warned that Trump “needs to get back on message and start talking about policy differences.

“If he doesn’t do this I think he will lose and probably cost Republicans the House and Senate,” the GOP lawmaker said. 

A third House GOP member told NOTUS that Trump was “rattled” and needed to “get on message.”

Trump has reportedly been struggling to manage his frustration following President Joe Biden’s decision to drop out of the presidential race. What was once a sleepy, one-event-a-week campaign has turned into an actual race, against a younger candidate with considerable energy and enthusiasm behind her. This anger seems to be coming out in different ways, and undermining Trump’s ability to effectively campaign without alienating his supporters and backers. 

Last month, just days after Harris announced her campaign, one of Trump’s aides fired off some extremely angry texts to wealthy GOP backer Miriam Adelson on behalf of the former president, according to The New York Times. Adelson, who is worth roughly $30 billion, is one of the Republican party’s wealthiest backers. 

The texts accused Adelson of having allowed RINOs (Republicans in Name Only) to run her Preserve America PAC. Trump and Adelson were scheduled to meet and make up this week, and it’s not clear that the comments will affect Adelson’s giving. 

Last week, Trump repeatedly attacked Georgia Governor Brian Kemp, much to the dismay of his allies and supporters, who believe it will hurt his chances in Georgia. One House Republican told NOTUS it was “extremely foolish” for Trump to go after Kemp. 

“If he displayed self-discipline and impulse control, he’d win,” the lawmaker explained to NOTUS. “The issues favor us. He’s been unable to focus on the issues and is behind. This is his race to lose, and he’s shooting himself in the foot. There’s some Trump fatigue too, and if he’d focus on issues and get off the personality attacks, he’d connect more with voters.”

But Trump hasn’t proven that he’s able to do that. The former president was meant to speak solely about the U.S. economy on Wednesday, but the Republican nominee couldn’t help but play into what his audience was most responding to, and they seemed excited by his jokes and jabs at Harris. But, ultimately, Trump’s audience of supporters isn’t representative of the electorate.

Typically, an election cycle has two or three presidential debates and just one showdown between the vice presidential candidates. But J.D. Vance wants to mix that formula up.

On Thursday, the Ohio senator announced that he would commit himself to more debates against Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, believing that the “American people deserve as many debates as possible.”

“Not only do I accept the CBS debate on October 1st, I accept the CNN debate on September 18th as well. I look forward to seeing you at both!” Vance wrote on X (formerly Twitter) Thursday morning.

But there may be more than meets the eye to the unprecedented second debate invitation, as September 18 holds a different kind of significance for the Republican campaign: It also marks Donald Trump’s sentencing date after a New York court found the former real estate mogul guilty of felony business fraud charges.

It’s not yet clear if Walz has agreed to the second debate—but doing so could divert attention from the first criminal sentencing of a former president in U.S. history.

“CNN invited both Senator Vance and Governor Walz to a Vice Presidential debate this fall, and Senator Vance has accepted,” a CNN spokesperson told CNBC in a statement.

“We are always in communication with the campaigns around opportunities for the American public to hear from leading candidates for President and Vice President of the United States, and we look forward to this programming in the fall,” the spokesperson said.

Tim Walz and J.D. Vance will be debating on CBS News on October 1.

CBS News invited Walz and Vance for a debate in New York City on Wednesday, offering them a choice of September 17, September 24, October 1, and October 8. Walz quickly confirmed his willingness, posting on X that afternoon, “See you on October 1, JD.”

And on Thursday morning, Vance finally agreed. He even tried to pressure Walz into a second debate hosted by CNN in September, a clear sign that things are not going well for him.

Typically, the vice presidential candidates don’t debate more than once leading up to an election, and many see the proposition as desperation from Vance and the Trump campaign.

When Vance was initially asked by Fox News’s Laura Ingraham Wednesday evening if he would show up to the October 1 debate, he waffled.

“I strongly suspect we’re going to be there on October 1, but we’re not going to do one of these fake debates where they don’t actually have an audience there, where they don’t actually set the parameters in a right way where you can have a good exchange of ideas,” Vance told Ingraham.

“In other words, we’re not going to walk into a fake news media garbage debate. We’re going to do a real debate, and if CBS agrees to it, then certainly we’ll do it,” Vance added.

But things clearly changed in the Trump team’s calculus. Vance’s debate follows Donald Trump’s decision last week to debate Kamala Harris, after weeks of hesitating and complaining about Harris replacing Joe Biden on the Democratic ticket. He attempted to schedule a new debate on GOP-friendly Fox News, only to face criticism from his own supporters. It seems that now Trump and Vance are getting desperate in the face of Harris and Walz’s surge in the polls.

Donald Trump’s vice presidential pick, J.D. Vance, just got a little bit weirder.

On top of the wannabe authoritarian’s other archaic views of women, the Ohio senator revealed to Fox News Wednesday that he doesn’t believe it’s “normal” for suburban women to care about their reproductive rights.

“What do you say to suburban women out there who are marinating in this propaganda?” prompted Fox News host Laura Ingraham, claiming that some women have fallen into the belief that abortion is banned nationally.

“Well, first of all, I don’t buy that, Laura,” Vance said. “I think most suburban women care about the normal things that most Americans care about.”

But Vance’s assumption that suburban women don’t care about abortion is plainly wrong—and Trump’s campaign might be doing better in the polls if they paid attention to the data. An April Wall Street Journal poll found that abortion ranked head and shoulders above other issues in seven battleground states, with 39 percent of surveyed suburban women describing it as a “make or break” issue in the 2024 election.

An August report from the Kaiser Family Foundation found that one in seven U.S. women have had an abortion at some point in their lives and that three out of four U.S. women believe abortion should be legal in most or all cases. Roughly 74 percent of the polled women also opposed leaving it up to the states to decide the legality of the lifesaving procedure.

“JD Vance thinks he gets to tell women how to live our lives,” Harris-Walz 2024 spokesperson Sarafina Chitika said in a statement. “Women are sick of Trump, Vance, and their Project 2025 obsession with controlling our most private decisions. We’ll shut the door on them this November.”

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.