Trump goes all in on fear and loathing. Will voters?

By Timothy L O'Brien

At a campaign rally in Pennsylvania on Saturday, Donald Trump speculated about the size of golf legend Arnold Palmer’s penis, described Kamala Harris as a “shit vice president,” sowed doubt about voting integrity and said he was exasperated with “woke” military officers disinclined to help him incarcerate or deport political dissidents and noncitizens.

Some portion of this catalogue of obscenities and grievances, a Trump spokesman said, was an approximation of the Republican presidential candidate’s closing arguments to voters before Election Day on November 5.

There was a time when Republicans chose to wrap a bow around elections by embracing such concepts as judicial restraint, fiscal conservatism, a global approach to national security and trade, respect for the law and Constitution and a modicum of civility and tolerance.

Marvelling and chuckling on stage about an athlete’s genitalia would have been an immediate disqualifier. But that all evaporated when the Trumpistas arrived in 2015, and in about two weeks the longevity of that particular poison will be tested.

Trump’s departure from recent vintages of Republican conservatism — and his cultivation of deep-seated paranoia, conspiracy theories, authoritarianism and macho-infused racism — explain his appeal to a broad swath of the electorate, of course.

He was never going to end his latest White House bid by invoking the high notes of public policy or being an avatar for unity. His traction derives from division and suspicion.

After all, he rolled into the Republican National Convention in July as the survivor of an assassination attempt pitted against a flailing, moribund Democratic geezer who had recently self-immolated in a debate.

He had abundant and precious momentum on his side, Republicans attending the RNC were visibly thrilled, and his advisers pressed him to be a unifier. Nope. He presided over a closing night featuring cartoon characters like Hulk Hogan and delivered a boring, rambling acceptance speech infused with venom. Because that’s exactly who he is, to his core.

Advisers who try to coach Trump to be someone other than Trump simply misunderstand the man. He rarely veers away from the playbook that made him a business curiosity, a reality TV star and a magnetic political figure. He spent most of his 78 years cultivating attention and power and got both in unusual quantities — even though a parade of corruption, predations and epic failures attended his ascent.

Besides, he is so profoundly unspooled and rigidly ill-informed that getting him to articulate fact-based policies and rational approximations of how the world truly functions is a fool’s errand.

The existential question, though, isn’t whether Trump can ever be someone other than Trump. We know the answer to that one. The question is whether his emphasis on performance art and anarchy at the expense of democracy, nation-building, decency, security and prosperity will work again.

Trump’s abracadabra may have made sense when he was running against Joe Biden. It’s been a dead-end approach ever since Harris entered the presidential race. She closed the electoral gap that existed between Trump and Biden in record time and with unusual alacrity and grace.

And amid all of the head-butting that has followed between Trump and Harris — on national TV, in political ads and social media posts, and in one debate — the hard, unglamorous work of retail politicking has been rolling along.

Knocking on doors, opening local field offices and such — the stuff that is the foundation of political ground games and get-out-the-vote efforts — can turn tides in elections. While polls suggest the race is essentially a coin toss, meaningful swaths of voters haven’t made up their minds and may decide the outcome, most obviously in the seven swing states.

Existing supporters also have to be stirred off their couches. Campaigns get to those voters the old-fashioned way. By most accounts the Democrats have fielded a much more ubiquitous and tightly organized ground game than Republicans in this cycle.

Trump and the GOP have outsourced their political fundraising and their ground game to well-heeled, and completely inexperienced, gazillionaires such as Elon Musk who have thrown ample resources into the contest.

The Guardian's Hugo Lowell reported over the weekend that canvassers hired by Musk’s political action committee, America PAC, may have defrauded that operation and lied about the actual amount of door-knocking they’ve done.

For his part, Musk has also taken to offering $1 million prizes to select voters who sign a petition he’s circulating calling for free speech and the right to bear arms, a desperate appeal that also may have the distinction of being illegal.

Trump’s scattershot ground game is worrying some Republicans, including Governor Brian Kemp of Georgia, who said as much to reporters at a Bloomberg News media event during the RNC. Trump himself clearly doesn’t care very much about whether he’s on the wrong path. He’s sticking to his guns.

He also may lack the acuity and stamina needed to even discern where his best path resides. He’s withdrawn from media interviews, further debates with Harris and a more rigorous campaign schedule while also refusing to release any independent professional examinations of his physical and mental health.

Trump has always been a hot mess of irrationality and run-on sentences, going back several decades. But I’ve covered Trump on and off since 1990, and while time has helped make him more mush-mouthed and incoherent than he was 34 years ago, he’s also clearly much more diminished than he was even during the 2020 campaign.

His recent ramblings and an impromptu, oddball bout of dancing at a rally gave Saturday Night Live’s sketch writers all the material they needed over the weekend.

He’s trudging through the 2024 campaign, insults, incongruities and all, I suspect, because he’s a felon under investigation for other possible crimes and he’s desperate to stay out of prison. He prizes the presidency for its legal insulation, and not because he wants to dedicate himself to serving the American people. He is a survivor nonpareil, but that doesn’t make him fit for the Oval Office.

Arnold Palmer, a lifelong Republican, certainly didn’t think so. “He didn’t like it when people were nasty and rude. He didn’t like it when someone was disrespectful to someone else,” Palmer’s daughter, Peg Palmer Wears, told the Sporting News’ Thomas Hauser several years ago. “My dad had no patience for people who demean other people in public. He had no patience for people who are dishonest and cheat. My dad was disciplined. He wanted to be a good role model. He was appalled by Trump’s lack of civility and what he began to see as Trump’s lack of character.”

Voters will head to the ballot boxes 15 days from now in the most consequential US election of the modern era, and we’ll see then how many of them have drawn the same conclusion.