Donald Trump's Escalating Rhetoric and Behavior Raise Concerns as 2024 Election Approaches

Donald Trump 'feels this election slipping away from him,' ex-aide says: 'When he gets desperate...'

A former Donald Trump aide has claimed that the ex-president has been embracing false theories about his political opponent as Kamala Harris' campaign benefiting from a boost in voter enthusiasm is making him "desperate." "I think that he feels this election slipping away from him, and that's where you're beginning to see him spiral and cling to these conspiracy theories, as you noted with the AI-generated crowds, which obviously can be easily disproven," Sarah Matthews, a onetime spokesperson to the former president, said in an interview on MSNBC's Inside with Jen Psaki. Harris has been drawing huge, enthusiastic crowds at her rallies, but Trump has dismissed them. He reportedly even embraced online theories that these crowds, often captured in videos and photos, are generated by artificial intelligence technology. "I know it's insanity," Matthews said. "There will be people out there that will believe it, though, because he's pushing it. And that's what happens when he gets desperate, is he pushes these conspiracy theories." Matthews said there were other instances where Trump seemed to embrace messages that harmed his campaign. She cited his interview at the National Association of Black Journalists convention as an example, where he said of Harris, "I didn't know she was Black until a number of years ago, when she happened to turn Black, and now she wants to be known as Black." Matthews also noted how Trump attacked Brian Kemp at the recent rally in Georgia. In 2020, Kemp reportedly refused to help Trump in his efforts to "find" votes in his state to reverse the results of the 2020 election. "These are not winning campaign messages," Matthews said. "But that is what he does when he feels like he's under attack, is he uses these kinds of lines of defense that don't make much sense for campaigning." At the rally, Trump ripped Georgia's Republican governor, blaming him for his loss to Democratic President Joe Biden and other things. "He's a bad guy. He's a disloyal guy. And he's a very average governor," Trump said. "Little Brian, little Brian Kemp. Bad guy."

Ex-Aide Breaks Down Why She Thinks Donald Trump Is Really Starting To 'Spiral'

Sarah Matthews, a former press aide to Donald Trump, said the former president is behaving with increasing desperation as his campaign flails against Vice President Kamala Harris' momentum. "I think that he feels this election slipping away from him, and that's where you're beginning to see him spiral and cling to these conspiracy theories, as you noted with the AI generated crowds, which obviously can be easily disproven," Matthews said on MSNBC's "Inside with Jen Psaki" Monday. Trump on Sunday falsely accused Harris of using artificial intelligence to enhance the size of the crowd she drew at a rally in Michigan last week. "That's what happens when he gets desperate," Matthews added, noting that Trump has also recently questioned Harris' racial identity and ramped up his feud with Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R). "These are not winning campaign messages," Matthews said. "But that is what he does when he feels like he's under attack, is he uses these kinds of lines of defense that don't make much sense for campaigning." "I can assure you that his campaign team is telling him to talk about policy," she continued. "They want him to go out there and talk about the economy and immigration and things that voters actually care about, because I can assure you that none of these things that he's talking about in his rallies, or his Truth Social posts, are things that are top of mind for most voters." According to the New York Times, the Republican nominee has often been in "a foul mood these past few weeks," which the newspaper described as the "worst" weeks of his entire campaign. He has repeatedly launched incoherent attacks on his opponent, reportedly rattling wealthy donors.

Losing Makes Trump Crazier, and Being Crazy Makes Him Lose

The primary effect of the Democratic Party's mid-campaign nomination switch from Joe Biden to Kamala Harris has been to unify and reenergize the party's base. It's also becoming apparent the move has set off a secondary effect of destabilizing the Republican campaign by rattling Donald Trump, leading him ignore his advisers and indulge his most deranged instincts. Through July, Trump was enjoying the longest stretch of success of his entire political career. During this time, he was largely heeding the advice of his campaign team and acting relatively -- relatively -- normal (which is to say far from normal but much closer to it than his usual performance). Trump was leading the polls, staying out of the news as much as he could, and more or less staying on message when he was in it. Harris, of course, provided Democrats a surge of momentum. Trump's advisers have a plan to reverse this momentum. They want to drive a message anchored in the progressive stances that Harris and her running mate, Tim Walz, have taken in the past to paint them as kooky liberals. It's not a bad plan. They have plenty of material to work with from both Harris's ill-fated 2020 campaign and Walz's governorship. Trump's campaign brain trust is begging its candidate to focus on this message. "They're pleading with him to adopt a new 'hard-hitting' stump speech to define Vice-President Harris as liberal and weak, advisers tell us," Axios reports. "And praying he'll stop the recidivistic pull to simply improvise haphazardly." But Trump doesn't want to heed this advice. He has been consumed by a mix of envy at Harris's popularity and grievance at his own displacement. He has been complaining at the unfairness of the Democratic Party choosing to nominate a candidate Democrats like instead of the one he prefers to run against and fantastizing openly that somehow Biden will take the nomination back. Trump gave a rambling press conference, perhaps intended to drive the campaign's message about Harris and Walz but predictably lacking any focus. When Trump was attempting to describe a Walz policy that turned the state into a refuge for teenagers seeking medical transition, a potentially dicey issue for democrats to defend, he managed only to blather incoherently that Walz was "heavy into the transgender world." As National Review's Philip Klein observed, to his dismay, "Anybody who isn't already familiar with the Walz record is likely thinking, what the heck is he talking about?" Over the weekend, Trump began claiming wildly that Harris's large crowds have actually been an elaborate hoax concocted through artificial intelligence. Behold the full lunacy of this message: Has anyone noticed that Kamala CHEATED at the airport? There was nobody at the plane, and she "A.I.'d" it, and showed a massive "crowd" of so-called followers, BUT THEY DIDN'T EXIST! She was turned in by a maintenance worker at the airport when he noticed the fake crowd picture, but there was nobody there, later confirmed by the reflection of the mirror like finish on the Vice Presidential Plane. She's a CHEATER. She had NOBODY waiting, and the "crowd" looked like 10,000 people! Same thing is happening with her fake "crowds" at her speeches. This is the way the Democrats win Elections, by CHEATING - And they're even worse at the Ballot Box. She should be disqualified because the creation of a fake image is ELECTION INTERFERENCE. Anyone who does that will cheat at ANYTHING! Trump is literally claiming Harris spoke before an empty room, created a false impression of a large crowd, with the participation of the national media that reported on the event as it occurred. He then bootstraps this ludicrous assertion into the charge that Harris is stealing the election and "should be disqualified." The most important thing about this Trump claim is that it confirms once again that he is both completely demented -- the fake-crowd theory is less plausible than the notion NASA faked the moon landings -- and totally unwilling to abide by the democratic rules of the road. It has become tedious to say so, but supporting his candidacy, even if you prefer his policies on taxes or regulation, in any way is deeply irresponsible. There is a long-standing pattern to Trump's relationship with his political advisers. Sometimes they are able to wrangle him into presenting a quasi-normal face to the public. Eventually, he breaks from their constraints and reveals his derangement to the public. The advisers inevitably agonize over his failure to listen to reason but never seem to question their own underlying goal of handing the world's most powerful job to a madman. The old Trump strategy for defeating Biden seems to have depended on maintaining a lead. When Trump was ahead, he was capable of making rational choices that allowed him to maintain his lead. Now that his lead is gone, so is his willingness to do the things that enable him to win. Losing campaigns often identify their failures and make a course correction. Trump's campaign is instead spiraling into a mental breakdown.

Opinion | Trump's fantasy-based outbursts are getting out of hand, even for him

Sorry, a summary is not available for this article at this time. Please try again later. Former president Donald Trump's ongoing meltdown over his changed electoral prospects is becoming genuinely bizarre. It is foolish to underestimate him, but this doesn't come off as any kind of subtle gambit in a game of three-dimensional chess. It looks and sounds like angry, disoriented flailing that inflicts more self-harm than damage on his opponents. Trump's frustration is not without cause. Recent polls show that Vice President Kamala Harris has erased the lead Trump had over President Joe Biden, and the RealClearPolitics polling average -- often more generous to Trump than some other aggregators -- on Monday had Harris nosing into the lead. Perhaps more galling, Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, have been barnstorming the swing states and drawing the kind of huge, enthusiastic crowds that Trump boasted he alone could muster. That might be the reason for Trump's transparently false and really strange Truth Social post on Sunday that claimed "there was nobody there" at a rally Harris and Walz held last week at Detroit's airport. In fact, as documented by news photographers and television crews, an estimated 15,000 supporters greeted and cheered the Democratic candidates. A crowd that size is hard to miss. Right-wing conspiracy theorists had posted a photograph of one of Air Force Two's shiny engines, claiming that a dim reflection showed there was no crowd at all when Harris and Walz arrived, and that the images of the event were created by artificial intelligence. This kind of paranoid, fantasy-based nonsense gets put out there all the time by unscrupulous provocateurs for whom lying is a business model. But it was unusual that Trump would expose himself to ridicule by endorsing a lie that lacked even the slightest whiff of plausibility. Follow Eugene Robinson Follow That followed a post last week that laid out an unhinged predictive scenario: President Joe Biden, angry that his "presidency was Unconstitutionally STOLEN" by Harris, somehow "CRASHES the Democrat National Convention and tries to take back the Nomination." I understand why Trump was happier when he was running against Biden, but friends and family really ought to tell him that those halcyon days are gone. Other recent Trump posts have been more like the falsehoods and distortions we're accustomed to. He maintained that he is "doing really well in the Presidential Race, leading in almost all of the REAL polls." (Apparently, any poll that finds him not doing well -- such as the New York Times surveys reporting that he now trails Harris in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania -- are, by definition, not real.) He also posted that three debates with Harris are scheduled, though both campaigns have only agreed to one. Away from social media, Trump's public statements have become increasingly divorced from reality. And, yes, I know that's saying a lot. At a rally Friday in Montana, Trump said the following: "Kamala Harris, you know, it's interesting, nobody really knows her last name. If you ask people, 'Do you know what her last name is?' nobody has any idea what it is. Harris, it's like Harris. I don't know, how the hell did this happen?" Whoa. She gets her name from her father, Donald J. Harris, a retired Stanford University economics professor. Surely Trump knows that. Was he obliquely returning to his laughable contention that the vice president, whose mother was South Asian, is somehow not authentically Black -- even though her Jamaican-born father is a Black man whose ancestors were enslaved Africans? Or is Trump really puzzling over some "mystery" that exists only within the confines of his overheated imagination? Or, maybe, it's that he sometimes forgets? This is clearly the case with a story he has been telling about Willie Brown, the former mayor of San Francisco and speaker of the California Assembly, whom Harris dated in the 1990s. In Trump's telling, he and Brown once took a helicopter ride together and Brown told him unspecified "terrible things" about Harris. Trump says he remembers the encounter vividly because the chopper had mechanical problems and had to make a white-knuckles emergency landing. The problem is that Brown says he never rode in a helicopter with Trump, period. And a different man -- former California state senator Nate Holden -- says it was he who once accompanied Trump on a chopper, bound for Atlantic City, that had to put down due to a malfunction. A former Trump aide who was also on that trip confirmed to Politico that Holden was aboard and Brown was not. Both men are African American; otherwise, they look nothing alike. Trump has not yet budged from his version. I will just note that when someone becomes confused and agitated, it is a blessing to suggest it might be time for a nap.

Van Jones: Trump 'freaked out' about not getting as much attention as Harris

Democratic strategist Van Jones said Monday that former President Trump is "freaked out" that he's not getting as much press attention as Vice President Harris and is responding by sharpening his rhetoric about the threat he says his political opponents would pose on the country. "He's failing and flailing. Listen, they're saying that these are the worst three weeks of his campaign," Jones, a CNN contributor, said Monday in an interview with Anderson Cooper. "That's what the press is saying." "This is the year in which he got indicted, convicted, and shot at -- and actually hit -- by a bullet and none of that to him is as bad as possibly not getting as much attention as Kamala," he added. Trump returned to social media platform X Monday for an interview with owner Elon Musk on the Spaces platform. Earlier in the day, he posted a video on X that described the election as "the final battle" and pledged to "liberate America from these villains once and for all." Jones suggested that Trump's darker message is likely a response to the enthusiasm boost that Harris's campaign has seen in the last couple weeks and the subsequent media attention she has gotten. "Like that's the only thing that's happened," Jones said, "is that he's just not getting as much attention as Kamala Harris." "He is more freaked out about that than you know being a convicted crook and someone who almost got killed, so that lets you know the level of narcissistic challenge that we have here," he added. The comments also come as Trump has increasingly focused on the crowd sizes at Harris's rallies. the former president even accused the vice president, without evidence, of using artificial intelligence to inflate her crowd sizes. The Hill has reached out to the Trump campaign for comment.

Donald Trump's ego cannot handle being trounced by Kamala Harris | Robert Reich

Trump is floundering because the attention and positive energy generated by Harris and Walz have threatened his ego As the Harris-Walz team soars (polls are already showing Kamala Harris taking the lead) Trump is cracking up. His ego can't take it. He is incapable of running against a Black woman who's trouncing him. Last Thursday, after 10 days of nonstop Harris news grabbed the limelight, Trump was desperate for attention. He held a news conference that provided no news except for Trump's absurd claim that his January 6, 2021 rally on the mall was larger than Martin Luther King Jr's 1963 rally when he gave his I Have a Dream speech. (King's speech had summoned 250,000 to the mall. Trump's rally drew 53,000, according to the House select committee that investigated the events of January 6.) Martin Luther King Jr's rally also led to the signing of the Civil Rights Act. Trump's rally led to a deadly assault on the US Capitol. Why would Trump want to remind anyone of what he did January 6? He can't help himself. He keeps repeating that the 2020 election was stolen, even though the claim turns off independent voters and does nothing to advance his case against Harris. Over the weekend he posted a link to a 2021 document questioning the security of Georgia's voting machines. When he made a campaign stop in Georgia the previous Saturday, Trump attacked Georgia's Republican governor, Brian Kemp, and Republican secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger - both of whom won re-election in 2022 despite Trump's vocal opposition. Why is Trump attacking Republican leaders in Georgia instead of Kamala Harris? Because Trump will never forgive Kemp and Raffensperger for not joining his attempt to overturn the 2020 election in the Peach State. Trump told the crowd that Kemp is "a bad guy, he's a disloyal guy and he's a very average Governor," adding that if it "wasn't for me, he would not be your Governor. I think everybody knows that." Trump's rant against Kemp is particularly absurd because he needs Kemp's organization in Georgia to help him in the race against Harris. Why is Trump going on about the 2020 election being "stolen" anyway? That claim cost Republicans two Senate seats in Georgia's special elections in January 2021 because it depressed turnout among Republicans who assumed their ballots wouldn't count. When Trump does talk about Harris, he's unable to focus on the policies he could be attacking her on, such as the southern border, and but dredges up racist tropes such as whether she's "really Black." He mispronounces her name and attacks her with ideological platitudes, as he did last Friday at a rally in Montana when he proclaimed that "America cannot survive for four more years of this bumbling communist lunatic." Trump's ego has been so injured by the huge turnout at Kamala's rallies that he's now claiming they're "fake." On Sunday, in multiple posts to his Truth Social platform, he asserted that the huge crowd at her Detroit-area rally was faked by AI. It "DIDN'T EXIST," he posted. "Nobody was there." On Wednesday, he complained that: "If Kamala has 1,000 people at a Rally, the Press goes 'crazy,' and talks about how 'big' it was - And she pays for her 'Crowd. When I have a Rally, and 100,000 people show up, the Fake News doesn't talk about it, THEY REFUSE TO MENTION CROWD SIZE. The Fake News is the Enemy of the People!" None of this has anything to do with how Kamala would govern America or whether she'd be a good president, of course, but Trump appears incapable of separating his fragile ego from trying to get attention and get even rather than get elected president. He's attacking everyone and everything. After the New York Times ran a piece a few days ago about the "the worst three weeks" of his campaign, Trump exploded at what he called "the Failing New York Times, which is a crooked newspaper run by a Radical Left group of Lunatics, is losing readers at a record level." He's making up stuff that has nothing whatsoever to do with Harris or Walz, such as a "scary" helicopter ride with California's Willy Brown that never happened. Trump is cracking up because the attention and positive energy generated by Harris and Walz have threatened his ego so much he cannot directly focus on his opponent. So he falls back on the size of her crowds relative to his, her race, the "stolen election," his grievances against Republicans who didn't support him, and the New York Times. Trump's rage has worked for him in the past but it is not working against Harris and Walz because they are running by a playbook that's fueled by excitement and hope rather than grievance and narcissism.