Is Donald Trump Even Trying To Win The Election?

Trump sure seems to be half-assing his presidential campaign, but that doesn't mean he can't win.

Republican presidential nominee, former U.S. President Donald Trump, dances on stage as he finishes speaking at a campaign rally. Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images.

As Donald Trump’s legal woes compounded this past Spring—even culminating in a jury finding him guilty on 34 felony counts of financial fraud—my inclination was to assume that in 2024, Trump would be a fiercely motivated candidate. 

Because this time he isn’t just running for President, he’s running to stay out of jail.

So it’s been somewhat surprising to see Trump turning out to be just a remarkably lazy candidate, particularly as it’s become clear that three out of the four cases against him would get mothballed only if he wins November’s election.

Which makes me wonder: Is he even trying to win? For Trump, is being president again actually a fate worse than jail?

Axios is out with a new report on just how few rallies he’s doing this year relative to his previous runs. 

There’s been a steep drop-off from 2016 to 2024.

According to Axios:

• Trump held 72 rallies between June and September of 2016. He's held 24 in that period this year, with another on the calendar for Monday.

• Even with the pandemic raging in 2020, Trump controversially hit the road with 15 rallies in September and 43 over the five weeks leading up to Election Day.

Let’s put aside his robust court schedule this year and his understandable decision to lay somewhat low after being shot at during a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania in July. Relative to his two prior runs, Trump is still pretty much just phoning it in this year. And it’s starting to alarm folks in his own party.

According to The AP:

Republican activists in swing states say they have seen little sign of the teams tasked with knocking on doors and turning out infrequent voters on behalf of Donald Trump, raising concerns about the party’s presidential nominee relying on outside groups for an important part of his campaign operations.

…with fewer than 50 days until the Nov. 5 election, dozens of Republican officials, activists and operatives in Michigan, North Carolina and other battleground states say they have rarely or never witnessed the group’s canvassers. In Arizona and Nevada, the Musk-backed political action committee replaced its door-knocking company just this past week.

Which raises the question: “Why?” Trump understands the consequences of a loss in November, yet he still doesn’t seem inclined to do even the minimum expected of a presidential candidate.

In today’s piece, I’ll explore several theories for why Trump is spending more time on the golf course than on the rally stage. Is this a shrewd campaign strategy, or a spiral of self-sabotage?

Trump Is Old And Addled

One theory for why Donald Trump isn’t powering forward as he had in previous campaigns is obvious even to the untrained eye: Trump is older and slower than he used to be, and, critically, he just doesn’t have the stamina for a full-fledged campaign.

Trump is well known to be the king of projection, and we are at a point now where much of what he has said about Joe Biden now applies to himself. At age 78, Trump is officially the oldest major party nominee in U.S. history. And it’s showing. 

As Roll Call reports, “[S]ome Republican political strategists and pollsters have noted Trump often is more subdued at his once-raucous rallies and other public events.” As we’ve seen this cycle, Trump famously has a hard time stringing sentences together at his rallies, and in fact regularly gets confused, as when he mixed up Obama and Biden, or Nancy Pelosi and Nikki Haley. With his constant and baffling references to Hannibal Lecter, he also seems to have confused migrants seeking “asylum” with people leaving mental “asylums.” 

It’s notable that once Joe Biden stepped aside and Trump was suddenly running against Kamala Harris, Trump hasn’t once offered to take a cognitive test against her. 

Trump’s rambling has gotten so bad that his own supporters regularly will leave his rallies halfway through, a phenomenon Kamala Harris hilariously triggered Trump with during their recent debate.

And Trump has now begun offering up explanations for his rambling asides, portraying it as a brilliant tactic he calls “the weave.”

According to The Independent:

“When I do the weave... you know what the weave is?” Trump asked the crowd.

“I’ll talk about nine different things and they all come back brilliantly together.”

But as Trump biographer Tim O’Brien has observed:

“The reason he’s now offering these convoluted explanations of his speech patterns in his public appearances is because he’s hyper-aware that people have noted that he’s making even less sense than he used to,” O’Brien said. “What we’re seeing now is a reflection of someone who’s very troubled and very desperate.”

Historian

Heather Cox Richardson

clocked this same “desperation” at a recent rally.

But today’s speech struck me as different from his past performances, distinguished for what sounded like desperation. Trump has always invented his stories from whole cloth, but there used to be some way to tie them to reality. Today that seemed to be gone. He was in a fantasy world, and his rhetoric was apocalyptic. It was also bloody in ways that raise huge red flags for scholars of fascism.

And now, despite Trump’s post-debate delusional bravado, Trump is desperate to avoid another debate with the Vice President. He—or at least his team—knows that he can no longer hold his own, particularly next to someone decades his junior. Trump is simply scared to get spanked like that again.

Or as former Trump Communications Director put it recently, Trump has “lost his fighting spirit.”

Avoiding another debate with Harris is arguably one of the most clear-eyed strategic campaign decisions Trump has made yet this cycle. But at a basic level it is an acknowledgement that he simply doesn’t have what it takes to wage the same campaign that he used to.

It’s All About The Grift

Considering how relatively few campaign rallies Trump has held this cycle, it was notable that one recent appearance he made was in the not-at-all-a-swing-state of New York, appearing at the Nassau Coliseum on Long Island.

During his appearance, which was billed as a booster for Long Island Republican candidates in an area of New York where Republicans did quite well in 2022, not even Trump seemed to believe his own bluster when he announced “We’re going to win New York!” 

But it soon became clear there was another reason he was in the Tri-state area: to make a stop at PubKey in New York City, a Greenwich Village crypto-themed bar where he used $900 worth of bitcoin to buy burgers for patrons there. This visit came days after he announced his own new crypto scheme with his sons Don Jr. and Eric called World Liberty Financial. For Trump, this year’s presidential campaign, like his administration and every campaign prior, is about lining his own pockets and that of his family.

While the Trumps have been light on details about the new venture, which is being led by two sketchy entrepreneurs Chase Herro and Zachary Folkman, we can add this to the long list of ethically questionable financial conflicts of interest were Trump to win again in November. As Salon reminds us, “Trump is also hawking bibles, tennis shoes, NFTs and even pieces of the suit he was wearing during the assassination attempt in August, as if it is a holy relic.”

A presidential candidate launching a new business venture less than two months before an election is certainly ethically dubious and unprecedented in U.S. history, yet that has never stopped Trump before. But it is his pending windfall from his majority stake in Trump Media and Technology Group, the parent company of his social media site Truth Social, that is the big kahuna for Trump. After having registered his shares for sale in April, Trump recently tried to put to rest any speculation that he intended to sell the shares once the lock-up provision passes on September 25th, saying:

“The reason it’s down is that a lot of people think I’m going to sell, and if I sell, it wouldn’t be the same. I can understand that, but I have absolutely no intention of selling,”

His statement had the desired effect, which was to boost the stock temporarily, although it’s dropped back down to around $12 per share since, which would still net Trump a $1.4 billion windfall were he to sell.

And while there could be legal ramifications for his going back on his word not to sell in the nearterm, when presented with the choice between being president again or taking his $1 billion and going home, we all know which option Trump would choose in a heartbeat, especially if the civil fraud judgment against him in New York amounting to just shy of a half billion dollars were to stand.

The Electoral College Is His Friend

Donald Trump learned a very important lesson in 2016: Thanks to the Electoral College, in order to win the presidency he doesn’t have to win the most votes. And in Trump’s recent behavior—such as his meltdown at the NABJ conference where he claimed Kamala Harris “turned Black” or even his “they’re eating the dogs, they’re eating the cats” rant during the debate—there is some 2016 Trump scorched earth IDGAF energy at play.

And why wouldn’t there be?

One can imagine the conversations, where Trump advisors desperately plead with him to stay on message, and not to be creepy or angry, with Trump asking why he should follow their advice when his own instincts in 2016 led to his only electoral victory. There is a perverted logic to Trump following that playbook for the final month and a half of the campaign this year just as he did eight years ago.

Political logic dictates that for Donald Trump to win in 2024 after losing in 2020, he needs to increase his vote share by appealing to a wider cross section of voters. But Trump seems to be operating on a “simply motivate the base” strategy. Why try to get more than 47% when it was enough to win in 2016?

The simple answer, of course, is that it wasn’t enough to win in 2020. But that was against Biden. Perhaps Trump is calculating that against another woman like Harris, the 2016 strategy is precisely what could win it for him again.

For a while, it appeared that Kamala Harris’s entrance into the race had reshaped the traditional Republican advantage in the Electoral College. 

But that advantage appears to be back, though the 2.5-point spread some prognosticators Harris she needs is smaller than that in 2020 when Joe Biden needed a 4-point popular vote victory to secure a 306-232 EV win. 

Thanks to the outdated and anti-democratic Electoral College, scorched earth worked for him in 2016 and it just might work again. 

Trump Knows All He Has To Do Is Keep It Close

Unfortunately, the Electoral College isn’t the only institution providing a potential boost for Trump this year. Trump has learned a lot since 2020, and while neither the courts nor his Vice President delivered him the presidency in the aftermath of his election loss last time, he now has allies around the country who are scheming to ensure that it’s not just up to the courts—and certainly not up to the VP—this time around. 

According to The New Republic:

At least 70 pro–Donald Trump election denialists are working as election officials in key swing states, according to a report published Monday from Rolling Stone and the right-wing extremism research newsletter American Doom.

Officials who had promoted election conspiracy theories were identified in at least 16 counties in six swing states: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania.

As Democratic election lawyer Marc Elias has warned:

“We are going to see mass refusals to certify the elections” because Republicans are “counting on the fact that if they don’t certify in several small counties, you cannot certify these statewide results.”

Which makes this tweet by Mueller She Wrote all the more chilling.

Ground Zero in this fight is Georgia, where Trump loyalists have taken over the state election board and have begun implementing rules to cause certification delays. The latest is their new rule declaring that all votes must be counted by hand. The end game here is to somehow delay certification past the certification deadline, at which point if no one has 270 electoral votes, the presidential election could be thrown to the House and determined by a 50-state vote of the House delegations—math that strongly favors Trump. 

As Jay Kuo laid out back in August:

Trump and his allies want to take Georgia off the board in case it goes blue again. The effect upon the Electoral College math would be profound. Were Trump to prevail in Pennsylvania, but still lost all of the other swing states, as he did in 2020, he would need to prevent Georgia from moving to Harris’s column. 

In such a scenario, a contested Georgia election would mean neither side reaches 270 Electoral College votes, throwing the election to a vote by the Congressional House Delegations and therefore to GOP control.

Key to this plan to keep it close enough to justify election delays on a county or state level are Republican-leaning pollsters who are flooding the zone with partisan polls showing the election is tight. Say Kamala Harris is ahead by two points by all credible, non-partisan pollsters and in fact wins by two points on Election Day, but the polling averages, thanks to bad right-wing actors, showed a tie. In such a case, the pro-Trump forces would have a stronger argument to delay certification and potentially push it to the House. 

It is this one-two punch by the new anti-democratic right that Donald Trump is counting on to carry him past the finish line, regardless of whether he actually earns it himself.

It should be noted that Marc Elias himself has tried to tamp down heightened fear of such a scenario, making clear that “there’s mechanisms in place to ensure elections are certified.” But we’d be fools to put anything past Trump and his MAGA minions. The Harris campaign, including Elias and his army of lawyers, are certainly preparing for every eventuality.

Indeed, we already dodged one anti-democratic right-wing bullet this week when Republicans in Nebraska refused to go along with a Trump-driven scheme to make the state winner take all in November, which would have denied Kamala Harris a potentially crucial electoral vote.

Maybe He’s Just A Narcissist

There’s one more theory we should briefly consider. Perhaps it’s just as simple as Trump not wanting to try to win so he can’t be blamed for his eventual loss. This is classic self-preservation, and psychologically, a malignant narcissist like Trump cannot accept defeat so has to mentally prepare by refusing to even try.

But let’s remember one thing: No matter the reason, even if Trump just brings his C game as he currently appears to be doing, the right-wing media, streamers and influencers, billionaires funding pro-Trump super PACs, and bad faith operatives backed by Russia are all working overtime to prevent a Harris victory. So even with a lazy and dispirited Trump, we have to work as though Kamala Harris remains the underdog.

Because in our system, stacked against Democrats by the Electoral College with an opponent with no ethical or moral guardrails, she genuinely is.