By Terry Manning
What does Donald Trump have against happy women?
After three marriages, you would think he would breathe a sign of relief when encountering a woman who is in a good mood, but no. “Laffin’ Kamala” Harris, as he describes her so derisively, is driving him nuts.
Watching him flip, flop, twist, and turn trying to get a handle on the best way to counter her candidacy for president gives me more than a little hope Trump is well on his way to losing in November.
His Republican allies urge him to focus on issues such as inflation that have found purchase with concerned voters. Even a dyed-in-the-wool Democrat like myself can appreciate the frustration of watching prices climb senselessly for everything from big-ticket items to smaller everyday necessities.
The former president has rebutted those pleas, claiming he has a right to wage unpopular personal attacks on Harris as a response to a so-called “weaponization” of the Justice Department against him. He insists President Joe Biden and the “Deep State” are out to persecute him, never mind that he has done the things he is accused of and been convicted by a jury of his peers of 34 felony charges related to election interference.
An accused criminal standing trial. In what kind of crazy banana republic does that happen?
So we get “Laffin’ Kamala,” “Lyin’ Kamala,” willful mispronunciations of her name, and claims she is dodging articulating her positions on policy matters. They should hope she continues ducking the issues because that’s where she is stronger than they expected.
On the border, The Washington Post reports illegal entries fell last month to their lowest level in four years. Yes, Biden borrowed from asylum restrictions initially established during the Trump administration during the COVID pandemic. But the fact remains, Biden did something, a stark contrast to a Trump-directed scuttling of a bipartisan border plan many Republicans considered a grant of decades of their anti-immigration wish list items.
Trump told House Republicans to kill the deal so he would have it as a campaign issue. Let it be one, but make sure he doesn’t get away with telling only the part of the story that makes Biden look bad and himself look like a problem solver.
On inflation, a “build from the middle” approach championed by Biden is finally bearing fruit, with inflation cooling last month to its lowest level in three years. This should allow the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates in September, lowering costs across the board for the middle class and everyone else.
Then maybe, just maybe, some of those millions of millennials can realistically consider buying homes and starting families. That is the kind of activity that traditionally has made America great, not scheming in back rooms over who will be the next target of far-right cancel-culture warriors.
His MAGA cult members are catching on, too, that a second Trump presidency is no longer a sure thing. Social media is rife with reporters and audience members posting photos and videos of people at Trump rallies filing out long before the repetitious rambling they’ve heard for the better part of a decade comes to a close.
High-profile influencers on the fringe right are also finding reasons to break with the former president.
Last week, articles in The New Republic and, again, The Washington Post detail how well-known figures such as Candace Owens, Andrew Tate, Mick Fuentes, and Laura Boomer are criticizing Trump for running a faltering campaign. They claim he has changed, even going so far as to say he has become part of the Deep State they blame for every encumbrance.
They blame the influence of large donors, fatigue over his repeated claims of a stolen election, and a message they say has softened to appeal to a wider group of potential voters.
Fuentes, a white supremacist podcaster who has met with Trump at Mar-a-Lago, is quoted in the Post saying Trump is “headed for a catastrophic loss” and he plans to send his minions to disrupt Trump rallies in battleground states until the former president agrees to tack farther to the right.
Sounds like quite a change for the man who once bragged he could shoot someone in the middle of New York City’s Fifth Avenue and his supporters would still vote for him.
I’m not saying the Trump campaign is a sinking ship, but these rats are running from something.
Terry E. Manning is a Clemson graduate and worked for 20 years as a journalist. He can be reached at teemanning@gmail.com.
