This Is What a Losing Campaign Looks Like

David Frum: “The day before Vance tweeted at me, former President Donald Trump was livestreaming to promote a dubious new cryptocurrency venture. That same day, he gave an interview to the conspiracy theorist Wayne Allyn Root in which Trump reverted to old form to denounce mail-in voting because the U.S. Postal Service could not be trusted to deliver pro-Trump votes fairly.”

“The day before that, the Secret Service had fired upon a man with a rifle near Trump’s West Palm Beach golf course. The apparent assassination attempt drove the headlines, but beneath the story was the reality that a candidate for president took a day off to golf only 50 days before Election Day.”

“Trump golfs a lot, and campaigns surprisingly infrequently. When he does campaign events, he makes odd choices of venue: Today, he will appear in New York’s Nassau County. New York State has not voted Republican for president since 1984. In 2020, Trump won 38 percent of the New York vote. Yet Trump has convinced himself, or somebody has convinced him, that this year he might be competitive in New York…”

“Rarely, if ever, has a presidential campaign collapsed from seeming assurance into utter chaos as Trump-Vance has… The stink of impending defeat fills the air—and so much of the defeat would be self-inflicted.”