In less than a week, former President Donald Trump will find himself back on the debate stage, this time facing Vice President Kamala Harris. Trump is certain to project his trademark swagger. But there’s no mistaking that next week’s ABC News debate takes place in a political landscape that has shifted dramatically since Trump’s last head-to-head, with President Biden on June 28.
Trump’s political headaches extend beyond a string of brutal polls that show Harris leading the race both nationally and in key swing states, including Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. For months leading up to the first presidential debate, Trump projected a sense of political inevitability that had Democratic insiders ready to concede defeat. Now that doom and gloom has lifted. In the light of day, Trump’s bravado strikes most Americans as tone deaf.
as the designated old guy in the race, Trump will now be forced to prove his own vitality and mental sharpness against an opponent who made her political career by dominating televised debates. Those 90 minutes will be a minefield for an already distracted and irritable Trump.
It doesn’t help matters that the former president is coming off one of his worst campaign weeks in recent memory.
On Labor Day weekend, which traditionally marks the beginning of the all-out sprint to Election Day, Trump chose to linger in the shadows. While Harris rallied voters in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania and her vice presidential nominee, Tim Walz, fired up a huge crowd at Milwaukee Laborfest, Trump holed up at his Mar-a-Lago mansion for a round of golf and a few angry messages posted to Truth Social.
Trump’s absence from the Labor Day campaign frenzy was especially noteworthy given how heavily his 2016 campaign relied on speaking directly to disaffected workers throughout the Midwest. Maybe Trump has lost interest in those labor voices he once claimed to care about. Or perhaps his campaign is still licking its wounds after GOP vice presidential nominee JD Vance was nearly booed off stage by union firefighters at a Boston event.
Or maybe Trump is so hard to find these days because he’s still ducking questions about why his campaign staff turned the solemnity of Arlington Cemetery into a political circus last week, in an event that resulted in staffers allegedly physically assaulting a cemetery worker for trying to preserve the dignity of America’s fallen heroes. That incident was so toxic it led to a rare public rebuke from the U.S. Army — and from countless veterans who shared their displeasure with Trump and Vance’s social media accounts.
Trump will almost certainly face questions about his conduct at Arlington Cemetery next week, though. It will be tough for his campaign to cook up a convincing excuse for violating the law and disgracing America’s combat dead all in the name of petty partisan politics. It’s also clear that Trump is incapable of understanding why his campaign’s actions were so reprehensible in the first place. In remarks last week, the ex-president said only that public attention around his breach of protocol was “disgusting.”
One of Trump’s big “Art of the Deal” tactics is to behave like a winner even when he’s losing. That might work when you’re outworking and outpacing your opponent, as Trump was with Biden. But it’s tough to project a sense of easy victory when the Harris-Walz ticket now dominates nightly news headlines — and the only time American voters see Trump and Vance is when one of them is bullying a private citizen online.
Trump’s campaign no longer projects the kind of macho confidence that made so many voters view him as a take-no-prisoners fighter of the political establishment. Instead, both Trump and Vance now project the anxiety and irritability of two guys who seem well aware that things aren’t going well — and that nobody around them has a plan to fix any of the serious problems they’re facing.
The Trump we’ll see at next week’s debate is one the American people aren’t used to seeing. The polls and the momentum are now running soundly against him, and the vice presidential nominee he once touted as a game-changer is now a historic drag on the Republican ticket. When Trump has been in similar circumstances before, he’s quickly devolved into a radioactive blend of bottomless self pity and blame-casting.
Voters who saw that act in 2020 ended up deserting Trump in droves — though it’s unlikely anyone who wants to remain in his orbit has the courage to tell Trump that. Is he really about to make the same mistake twice?
Max Burns is a veteran Democratic strategist and founder of Third Degree Strategies.
