How Trump’s carefully planned week kept veering off script

Donald Trump’s political endurance this year has been attributed in part to voters’ faded memories about why they denied him a second term four years ago.

The former president is doing his best to remind them.

Despite a carefully scripted week of campaign events aimed at counter-programming the Democratic National Convention, Trump undercut much of his messaging with a series of off-the-cuff remarks, rants and blunders that threatened to stoke the kind of Republican anxiety he has spent much of the past month trying to tamp down.

Donald Trump takes photos with supporters after speaking at Il Toro E La Capra restaurant in Las Vegas on Friday.Credit: Roger Kisby/The New York Times

On Monday in Pennsylvania, he struggled to clarify a previous comment that he believed the Presidential Medal of Freedom, which honours civilians, was “much better” than the Medal of Honour given to military members. On Tuesday in Michigan, he claimed that Vice President Kamala Harris had won the Democratic nomination after a “vicious, violent overthrow of a president”, and called Chicago, which hosted the Democratic convention, “a war zone that’s worse than Afghanistan”.

He openly rejected advice from allies to limit his personal attacks on Harris and other Democrats during a speech on Wednesday in North Carolina. He called the nation’s first black vice president “lazy” during a stop in Arizona on Thursday afternoon and that night rambled during a 10-minute phone call with Fox News. The anchors ultimately cut him off and ended the interview, but Trump picked up where he had left off by quickly phoning into Newsmax.

And on Friday, Trump concluded his week by embracing Robert F. Kennedy Jr in exchange for his endorsement, a move with an uncertain impact on tilting the race in his favour.

“One of the ways to win over swing voters is not by personal attacks. By nature, they don’t love partisan politics, but they’re also not thrilled about the direction of the country and the performance of the economy,” said Kevin Madden, a long-time Republican strategist who worked on presidential campaigns in 2004, 2008 and 2012. “And every day Trump isn’t talking about that is a wasted day.”

Still, several people close to Trump said they were pleased with his performance this past week. Parts of his speeches were focused on policy, and he was able to make his points about calling for tax cuts, deregulation and domestic fossil-fuel production that his allies view as crucial to victory.

The race remains neck-and-neck nationally and in battleground states, according to a New York Times polling average.

David Urban, a Trump political adviser, said the former president had shown considerable improvement this week, a sign that he was focused on the new dynamics in the race.

“It’s going to be a tough race, no doubt, but if he just talks about the big issues, [such as] the economy, inflation, immigration and crime, we win,” Urban said.

Despite the calls to focus on the issues, Trump has made it clear that he intends to keep running his campaign his way. “I think relatively to what they’re doing, and how radical they are and how in many ways how sick they are, I think I’m doing a very calm campaign,” Trump told reporters recently, adding: “I have to do it my way.”

Privately, Trump has grown more comfortable with the dynamics of the race. For the past month, he has faced a barrage of internal criticism and advice from allies, including Steve Wynn, the long-time casino magnate. Wynn paid for polling that he told the former president had shown independent voters were key to his victory, and they wanted him to stick to the issues.

Trump has told two people that he struggles to avoid making personal attacks because of how much animosity he feels for his opponents. He said that overwhelming hostility, whether it was for Jeb Bush, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden or now Harris, made it difficult for him not to take shots, according to the two people, who insisted on anonymity to discuss private conversations.

Despite a carefully scripted week of campaign events, former US president Donald Trump undercut much of his messaging with a series of blunders.Credit: Doug Mills/The New York Times

The former president’s schedule this week was unusually busy. He had not had such an active stretch of campaign events since the end of his primary campaign. And unlike his now-signature rallies, the venues were primarily small and the crowds significantly smaller.

In a concerted effort to draw a contrast with Harris, Trump, who regularly assails the mainstream media, embarked on a series of interviews, granting brief one-on-one sessions to CBS News, NBC News and CNN, among others.

Whether the effort worked to contain Harris’ momentum was unclear. But midway through his week of policy events, Trump made his disdain for the exercise clear as he mocked advisers who had urged him to limit personal attacks.

“Let me ask you about that,” he said to the crowd at the North Carolina rally. “We’re going to do a free poll. Here are the two questions: Should I get personal? Should I not get personal?”

The crowd roared in favour of personal attacks. “I don’t know,” he said. “My advisers”, he paused, “are fired.”

Trump was relatively focused at the start of the week. Inside a manufacturing plant in York, Pennsylvania, on Monday, he largely stayed to his messaging on the economy. Digressions were relatively few.

But he seemed to increasingly veer into more asides as the week continued. As the Democratic convention went on, he made it clear in his remarks that he was watching, practically undermining his campaign’s efforts to downplay the Democrats on the national stage.

Trump said he had felt compelled to defend himself from criticism and attacks. Biden, he said several times this week, was an “angry man” who was “seething”. Barack Obama was “nasty”.

During Harris’ speech Thursday, Trump fired off a series of social media posts in real time, criticising the number of people she had thanked. After she praised her late mother for instilling in her the value of hard work, Trump posted: “Kamala’s biography won’t lower prices at the Grocery Store, or at the Pump!”

And he sought curious targets, too. Trump complained this week on social media and during public events about Governor Kathy Hochul of New York, whose speech at the convention on Monday received relatively little attention. He took aim at Governor Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania on social media, saying that his remarks were “really bad and poorly delivered”, and called him a “highly overrated Jewish Governor”.

On Tuesday, Trump’s campaign expected him to announce new policies. Those included calling for the death penalty for child rapists and sex traffickers as well as supporting felony punishments for doctors who perform surgery on transgender children without parental consent, though experts said such consent was already required.

But when Trump failed to mention any of the policies at the event, a campaign aide said the former president did not want the news to be lost in the shuffle of convention week. Trump then mentioned his support for the death penalty for sex traffickers halfway through his speech in Arizona on Thursday.

Part of Trump’s struggle to stay on message could be linked to his visible lack of interest on stage when he read his prepared speech. When Trump stuck to the script, he often sounded affectless, as if he was resigned to just getting through the remarks. But he seemed energised when he fell back on familiar habits and interacted with supporters.

Trump walks off his plane in West Palm Beach, Florida.Credit: Doug Mills/The New York Times

“It’s just insane, but you can’t walk across the street to get a loaf of bread, you get shot, you get mugged, you get raped, you get whatever it may be. You’ve seen it, and I’ve seen it, and it’s time for a change,” Trump said in Michigan about American cities.

The biggest news for Trump this week had less to do with him and more to do with Kennedy, the independent presidential candidate who ended his campaign for the White House on Friday and endorsed Trump.

Mike Reed, a former communications director for the Republican National Committee, said Trump had a strong week, pointing to paid advertising targeting Harris’ record and the former president’s decision to patch things up with Governor Brian Kemp of Georgia, a Republican who opposed Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election but endorsed him on Thursday.

“To cap things off, Trump secured RFK Jr’s endorsement, which could help put him over the top in the Sun Belt and Rust Belt states that are razor-close right now,” Reed said. “The Trump campaign is playing to win, and that is a huge help to our candidates in Senate races.”

Rob Godfrey, a Republican strategist in South Carolina, said Trump had done himself some good by holding a series of tailor-made campaign events during the Democratic convention.

“Despite the fact that there were some distractions, which there will be wherever Donald Trump goes, I don’t think the week for him was a net loss,” Godfrey said. “It just happened to be a net win for the Democrats.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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