Bored and loose, Trump drops last shreds of discipline and lashes out

Charlotte, North Carolina: At an airfield rally in Gastonia, North Carolina, at the weekend, Donald Trump did something he had avoided for weeks – he brought up the fictional character Hannibal Lecter, from The Silence of the Lambs.

Earlier in the campaign, Trump amused and confounded audiences with his repeated mentions of “the late, great Dr Hannibal Lecter”, the serial-killer psychiatrist who cooked and ate his victims and whom Trump seemed to use as a metaphor for the types of criminals being let into the United States at the Mexico border.

Donald Trump holds a campaign rally at Lancaster Airport in Lititz, Pennsylvania, two days before the election.Credit: Getty Images

That was the charitable interpretation. Some said Trump was confusing a mental asylum with refugee asylum, while at times, he spoke as though he thought Lecter was a real person.

At any rate, the Lecter “bit” was retired – until now. “There’s nobody worse than him,” Trump told his North Carolina audience. “Silence of the Lambs, who the hell else would even remember that?

“I have a great memory. But they always hit me [so] I don’t bring it up too much. ‘He brought up Hannibal Lecter, what does that have to do with this?’ It has everything to do with it. That’s who we’re allowing into our country.”

Trump’s detractors love to share clips of the Republican nominee during one of these trademark mid-speech digressions and suggest it shows the 78-year-old and his campaign unravelling.

After following him on the campaign trail for the best part of the past two weeks, I’d say that’s a little unfair. He certainly speaks in rambling, stream-of-consciousness circles, but over 1½ hours, taken as a whole, he hits his talking points and mostly makes sense.

However, in the past week, as the long campaign nears its end and the momentum appears to shift towards Democratic candidate Vice President Kamala Harris, there are signs a rattled Trump is lashing out and losing focus. Returning to his old Hannibal Lecter crutch is but one example.

The same Gastonia rally was laced with moments of profanity. “I’m really good at this shit,” he said of his economic aptitude. “It’s all a lot of bullshit, that’s what it is,” he said of the Harris campaign’s latest policy announcement.

The next day in Pennsylvania, Trump embarked on a long, meandering tangent about voter fraud, machine ballots and “cheating”, again sowing seeds of doubt about the integrity of the election. Then he fumed about what he called a “fake poll” that showed he was losing to Harris in Iowa.

At the same event, Trump, again speaking behind panes of bulletproof glass, said a would-be assassin would have to shoot through the assembled media to hit him. “And I don’t mind that so much,” he said, leading to accusations he was again encouraging violence.

It followed a number of outbursts in recent days. In Milwaukee, affected by technical difficulties, Trump asked the crowd if they wanted to see him “knock the hell out of people backstage”. Then, complaining about the height of the microphone stand, he jerked it around with his hands before bobbing his head up and down as people shrieked.

Trump’s recent digressions have included reflections on the campaign and his own advisers, such as his revelation that his aides begged him not to say he would “protect women”, but he was going to do it anyway. “I pay these guys a lot of money, can you believe it?” he said.

Trump has also been indulging his long-standing preoccupation with genetics. At Saturday’s rally in Gastonia, he said retired golfing great Jack Nicklaus “is not going to produce a bad golfer, that’s the way it works … it’s in the family”. Hours later, in Salem, Virginia, Trump turned his attention to the genetic similarities and differences between Elon Musk and his mother.

Donald Trump gestures with his microphone in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.Credit: Doug Mills/The New York Times

Trump has never been a disciplined speaker, and it’s not surprising he would get even looser at the close of this long campaign. He has delivered a version of his 90-minute routine up to three times a day as he crisscrosses the country. He would be entitled to be bored with the material by now, as would his audiences.

(His propensity for boredom is also well-documented. A long inside story of the Trump campaign, published in The Atlantic at the weekend, included an anecdote from someone who heard Trump say to friends at a fundraiser: “People are calling this the most disciplined campaign they’ve ever seen. What’s discipline got to do with winning?”)

CNN reported Trump’s allies were “exasperated” following the rally in Pennsylvania and that his advisers had implored him to stick to the campaign’s core messages on the economy, immigration and the perceived failures of the Biden-Harris administration.

This comes amid a perception, rightly or wrongly, that Harris is gaining momentum at the pointy end of the race. The Democrats have been buoyed by the aforementioned Iowa poll, as well as a number of favourable final polls in key battleground states and a sense that undecided voters, watching the Trump campaign’s ill-discipline, may be breaking for the vice president.

And Harris leant into that perception on Sunday (Monday AEDT) by stripping her stump speech of all mentions of Trump, opting to go super-positive and allude only to “those who seek to deepen division”.

Trump’s most divisive and alarming statements came well before this final stage of the campaign. It was a full year ago that he described his political opponents as “vermin” and said migrants were “poisoning the blood” of America. And it was during the September debate that he claimed, without evidence, that Haitian immigrations were eating people’s pets in Ohio.

The former president’s rhetorical indulgences over the past week have been slack when he ought to be focused and disciplined. But they speak to a familiar Trump attribute: that he does not handle failure – or the threat of failure – well. When faced with loss, a setback, bad news or a bad poll, his instinct is to act up or lash out.

That may say more about the state of the race than the polls themselves.

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