Donald Trump spokesperson Karoline Leavitt called the campaign “disciplined” Thursday after one of the most chaotic press conferences he’s had so far.
During an appearance on Fox News, Leavitt praised the Trump team’s supposedly controlled efforts against Vice President Kamala Harris, just as Trump gave a wild press conference from Mar-a-Lago.
“This is a disciplined campaign,” said Leavitt. “And we’re disciplined because we are led by President Trump, who wakes up every day and focuses on the issues that matter to the American people.”
But Trump was anything but disciplined during his meandering rant Thursday, as he ricocheted between making wild claims about his crowd sizes and weak excuses for his lackluster week of campaigning. In one afternoon, Trump seemingly flip-flopped on whether he would agree to debate Harris, going from not debating her at all to offering three dates.
Trump is so unrestrained that he couldn’t help but put his foot in his mouth, once again attacking Georgia Governor Brian Kemp, who refused to overturn his state’s presidential election results in 2020.
Trump previously spoke about Kemp at his rally in Atlanta over the weekend, the last campaign event before his apparent staycation, taking a significant portion of his stage time to cut down Kemp.
Trump’s decision to skewer Kemp has reportedly sparked some concern from Trump’s allies, who had hoped he might actually win in Georgia. Several people close to Trump’s campaign told The Washington Post that there was a concerted effort to persuade Trump to stay on message and focus his attacks on Harris and other Democrats, not Republicans like Kemp.
Trump spokesperson Steven Cheung dismissed concerns from allies about messaging. “Our message discipline is second to none,” he told the Post. “It’s why President Trump was able to take out Joe Biden in the debate; it’s why we’ve been so successful thus far, and it’ll be why President Trump will win the election.”
While the word “disciplined” certainly seems to have worked its way into the Trump team’s talking points, its candidate continues to be anything but.
Read more about Trump’s campaign:
Donald Trump hasn’t let up on insisting that Vice President Kamala Harris only recently became Black.
During a bumbling press conference at Mar-a-Lago on Thursday, the Republican presidential nominee deflected a direct question probing his reasoning for claiming that the biracial Democrat had “turned Black.”
“Kamala Harris’s father is Jamaican American, and she went to a historically Black college,” prompted a reporter, referring to Harris’s attendance at Howard University. “How is she only recently deciding to be Black?”
“You’ll have to ask her that question because she’s the one that said it. I didn’t say it,” Trump said. “But I’ve known her a long time, I actually contributed to her campaign a long time ago, because I was a developer—I contributed to lots of campaigns, to Democrats, Republicans; some were liberal, some were conservative, but you’ll have to ask her about that.
“To me it doesn’t matter,” he continued. “But to her, from her standpoint, I think it’s very disrespectful to both, really. Whether it’s Indian or Black, I think it’s very disrespectful to both. To me it doesn’t matter.”
Reporter: How is Kamala Harris recently deciding to be Black?
Trump: You have to ask her because she said it I didn’t say it.. I think it’s very disrespectful to both whether it’s Indian or Black pic.twitter.com/GLb4MEOaNS
— Acyn (@Acyn) August 8, 2024
Trump’s outrageous claim sprang up at the National Association of Black Journalists convention last week, when the 78-year-old white candidate tried and failed to curry favor with the crowd by trash-talking Harris’s racial identity.
“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,” Trump said at the convention, seemingly unable to grasp how a person could have two parents from different cultures but still manage to appreciate both. (More than 10 percent of the U.S. population, according to the 2020 census, is multiracial.)
Donald Trump is losing in more ways than one. According to a Marquette Law School Poll national survey published Thursday, the Republican presidential nominee is trailing Vice President Kamala Harris by four percentage points.
Americans have identified Trump as the old man in the race since President Joe Biden dropped out last month, and key swing states that had previously identified as red are now considered toss-ups, according to the Cook Political Report.
Yet one issue above everything else is really gnawing at the bloviating populist: his dwindling crowd size.
“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,’” Trump wrote on Truth Social Thursday. “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!”
Photographic evidence proves otherwise. Pictures of Trump’s Philadelphia rally in late June—which was held at the same arena as Harris’s event on Tuesday—stand in stark contrast to images of the Democrat’s packed crowds. Photos of Trump onstage include backgrounds loaded with empty seats and even entirely empty sections.
Meanwhile, Harris’s explosion onto the campaign trail just a handful of weeks ago has brought scores of crowds lining up to see her speak, with some queues (like the one in Eau Claire, Wisconsin) trailing for more than half a mile to enter the arena, reported AFP.
In 2016 and 2020, Trump relied on the visual logic of his loaded rallies—and, by extension, the lackluster crowds attending his opponents’—as evidence of his titanic popularity among everyday Americans. But Harris’s ability to meet and exceed Trump’s numbers has really rattled him, along with the conservative establishment. On Thursday, news of Harris’s massive crowds reached the top of the Drudge Report, the most heavily trafficked conservative news aggregator, paired with the headline: “HARRIS CROWDS ROIL MAGA.”
Other top stories on the site hinted at more chaos inside Team Trump, including concerns that Trump is “panicking” and that a short-notice afternoon press conference at Mar-a-Lago, which is reportedly only permitting the attendance of reporters hand-selected by Trump’s team, is evidence of Trump losing faith with his campaign.
“Re: Trump’s self-announced press conference today at 2 pm: He’s panicking,” wrote former Trump White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham on X (formerly Twitter.) “I’ve seen this play many times. He thinks his team is failing him & no one can speak better/’save’ his campaign/defend him but him. He hates the coverage Harris is getting & thinks only he can fix it.”
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