Don’t Get Psyched Out! Trump Is an Evil Buffoon, Not an Evil Genius.

The final weeks of this campaign will be hard fought. Now’s not the time to be jumping at shadows.

by Michael Tomasky

Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

There are six weeks to go now, and as we enter the home stretch of this election year, I think it’s crucial for all of us to remember something. Liberals tend to ascribe to conservatives the quality of an evil genius. It plays into a lot of stereotypes. In one of my all-time favorite Simpsons episodes, the head of the Springfield Republican Committee was, of course, Mr. Burns. Dracula was also a member.

In real life, Karl Rove probably has a lot to do with this posture. The media elevated him to genius stature quite early on in George W. Bush’s campaign. In fact, Rove was wrong about a lot of stuff. His candidate didn’t win the popular vote, lucked out in Florida because a bunch of Jewish voters in Palm Beach County accidentally voted for Pat Buchanan, and ended up being “elected” by an unprincipled Supreme Court. Later, the Republican realignment that Rove confidently predicted never materialized, instead crashing hard on the rocks of a dishonest and costly war and a deregulatory scheme that nearly destroyed the world economy. But the media, forever on the hunt for a Great Man of History, venerated him, and as a result he got in liberals’ heads.

My message to you today is on the importance of not getting psyched out in these next six weeks. Our tendency, at times like these, is to see catastrophe lurking everywhere. Remember the waning days of the 2008 campaign? Remember the stories in those closing weeks that surely meant the death of the Obama candidacy? The Obama aunt who was living in the United States illegally? The young John McCain volunteer who went to the police claiming that a Black man attacked her and carved a B (for Barack) on her face with a knife? I remember people saying, “Oh my God, that’s it, we’re cooked.” Obama won handily.

Republicans aren’t evil geniuses. That is especially true of the Republican now running for president. He may be evil. But he’s no genius. He’s a buffoon. And while he may of course still win—he is a buffoon who is unfortunately optimized for the vicissitudes of the Electoral College—my little sniff of the zeitgeist suggests to me that he and his campaign are making blunder after blunder, and they’re hurting him.

Take this Springfield jag they’ve been on. Trump, J.D. Vance, and their aides argue that it doesn’t matter that they’re lying about Calico à la King and Schnauzer Scallopine; every day that immigration is dominating the headlines is a good day for them.

This is exactly the kind of thing worry-minded liberals are always inclined to concede. But is it true? I say it’s nonsense. I don’t think this story has helped them at all. Trump still has an overall advantage on immigration in polls, but at least one poll came out last week showing Kamala Harris within five points of him on that issue (and two points on the economy). And anyway, as the Springfield story’s legs continued to sprint into days three, four, five, and six, was the story really “immigration”? Or did it morph into “more crazy shit these crazy bastards say”?

I contend the latter. And it’s pretty clear that if the Trump-Vance ticket loses, cat and dog eating is going to be a late-night TV punchline for years to come.

The headline of the Politico Playbook email to subscribers Sunday morning summed it up: “New polls boost Harris as Trump hits turbulence.” The good-news poll, from NBC, had Harris up five points nationally. The Trumpy turbulence referred to a Washington Post story that described the free-for-all that the Trump campaign has become. One aide told the paper: “The through-line is his campaign is 96 percent him. It’s not even ‘Let Trump be Trump.’ It’s ‘Let Trump be unsupervised at all times.’ They just feel like, ‘We can’t control him, so let’s hope he wins anyways.’”

This does not bode well for MAGA world. I suspect that, slowly, the polls are going to get a little worse for him. It will start to look, or maybe already does look, like Harris has distinct advantages in Michigan and Wisconsin; some recent polls are even suggesting that Pennsylvania is tilting in that direction. Mark Robinson’s web-surfing history has probably made Harris the slight favorite now in North Carolina. Florida is down to four points, and Texas, the perpetual white whale of Democratic dreams, is actually looking a little beige, at six. I wouldn’t bet today on Harris winning either of those, but the point here is that if they become part of the media narrative, that Florida and Texas are in any way up for grabs, it’s going to drive Trump nuts. Nutsier.

Look: Trump could obviously still win. We shouldn’t kid ourselves. His deportation plan is pretty popular. There are still things I think Harris needs to do. The “vibes” phase of the campaign was awesome, but it’s over (although the Oprah event was pretty vibey and seemed a success). She does need to do some media interviews, and then interviews with TikTokers and YouTubers and such, who are more important now than the media.

I think she should also give a couple big policy speeches, of the sort candidates usually do early in the process—you know, laying out their foreign policy vision at Georgetown, that sort of thing. Her abbreviated campaign skipped that whole part. I think she needs a couple high-profile events like that—an economic vision speech at Michigan State University, a foreign policy vision speech at Duke. She has a ton of sizzle but still needs a little more steak.

But she’s running a disciplined campaign. Trump is starting to flail. If he gets much further behind, he’s going to start getting scary and dangerous—but that’s a future column. Right now, he’s sitting down there at Mar-a-Lago beginning to come to grips with the reality that he might lose to a Black woman, who royally thumped his ass the one time they shared a stage and who so far is surviving the attacks that I’m sure Trump thought would be pure gold, about her being a Marxist radical and not having borne children (that’s yet another column!). It’s got to be driving him bonkers.

So, take the last weeks of this campaign seriously enough to not get complacent—but do not impute to Trump or his Republican Party any manner of genius. They’re fools. They’re out of touch with middle America, compared to Harris and especially Tim Walz. Trump’s act—and that’s all it’s ever been, an act—is getting old to the voters who don’t worship him but who took a flyer on him in 2016. Harris was right: Trump supporters bailing early on his rallies are becoming a familiar sight.

Come to think of it, that Simpsons episode included a few other recurring characters as members of the local GOP, and they were all clowns, one of them literally: Dr. Hibbert, Superintendent Chalmers, and Krusty. That’s mostly who we’re up against. So don’t spend the next six weeks panicking at the smallest setback. The one who should be panicking is the guy who’s behind in every poll and is scheduled to be sentenced three weeks after Election Day.

FOOTNOTE: At the time, I loved the McCain volunteer story. It was so, as the kids say, cray-cray. The young woman was named Ashley Todd. Eventually, she confessed that she fabricated the story. The local police were aided in their investigation by the fact that the carved B on her face was backward—she’d clearly slashed herself while looking in a mirror! But it had some Obama backers in a panic for a minute.

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