I know, I know. I, too, have seen The New York Times-Sienna poll in which Donald Trump leads President Joe Biden in several battleground states. However, you’re forgetting the nature of Donald J. Trump. Even without considering the impact of the Republican nominee now being Felonious Trump, there’s plenty of reason for hope.
Firstly, Trump relies on sycophants, regardless of their abilities or competence. Exhibit A: Installing his failed songstress daughter-in-law as the head of the Republican National Committee. She, in turn, is hiring based on whether the applicant can maintain a straight face while insisting that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump. Nothing else really matters. Sure, why not have people who can’t organize their sock drawers in charge of every aspect of your campaign? Earlier this month, Trump strategist Chris LaCivita told top Trump donors at a Mar-a-Lago gathering (naturally): “We’re focused on quality over quantity.” Looks like they’ll have neither.
Not that there weren’t plenty of idiots involved in the 2020 campaign. “They spent their money on unnecessary overhead, lifestyles-of-the-rich-and-famous activity by the campaign staff and vanity ads. You could literally have 10 monkeys with flamethrowers go after the money, and they wouldn’t have burned through it as stupidly,” Republican campaign consultant Mike Murphy told The Associated Press in 2020. Multiply that stupidity level by three for 2024.
Secondly and even more importantly, Trump can’t help but be Trump. His family views the RNC’s cash and their own campaign’s cash as a slush fund. Of the $1 billion Trump raised in the years of 2017 through 2020, $356 million of it was shielded from disclosure through the use of a web of limited-liability companies, according to The Associated Press. Opacity hardly suggests that the money was spent legitimately. Trump’s rapacity and greed is one of the reasons he lost in 2020. In the final weeks of the campaign, Trump had grifted so much out of his campaign coffers that he didn’t have enough money to effectively run the campaign. Biden ran $142 million of ads in the final days of the 2020 election, outspending Trump 2-to-1.
That leads to the third point. When you’re grifting, there’s not going to be a lot left. As The Washington Post noted, “The situation has alarmed G.O.P. officials in key states, like Arizona, Georgia and Michigan, who have yet to receive promised funding, staff or even briefings on the new plans since the Trump team took control of the Republican National Committee in March.” That was at the beginning of May. Yikes!
In 2020, Trump told campaign staffers not to worry because “I have an ability to go to those states and rally. Biden has no ability. I go to a rally, we have 25,000 people.” Who needs ads on television or people knocking on doors to reach the millions of American voters — including undecided ones — when you can rant at 25,000 people who were going to vote for you anyway?
Morons in charge of key decisions, money disappearing as quickly as it comes on for who knows what, and no ground game. What couldn’t go wrong?
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