Two weeks ago, Donald Trump was riding high, envisioning a landslide victory against Joe Biden after beating an assassination attempt, briefly proclaiming himself to be a new man, and enjoying a drama-free convention that felt like an early victory party. Days later, of course, Biden euthanized his campaign, elevating his vice president as his presumptive replacement and definitively resetting the table. Trump, who is now at parity in the polls with Kamala Harris, has responded with his own stages of grief: complaining at the unfairness of a new challenger; befuddled by the inability of his campaign to land a punch against Harris; furious at the suggestion, proffered by his own team, that her gains were inevitable; and annoyed at having to clean up J.D. Vance’s messes.
Predictably, the campaign’s loss of elevation has all manner of Trump courtiers and advisors blaming each other for the past week’s various fuckups and distractions—including at least one major unforced error by the principal, himself. “It’s just two weeks, and I’m like, what the hell is going on,” one stunned Mar-a-Lago denizen told me.
In many ways, their frustration is understandable. For months now, Trump’s campaign has been lauded for its eerie proficiency under the co-management of political professionals Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita. And yet, in recent days, Wiles has faced an unusual degree of criticism in Trumpworld, after she quickly jumped on the Vance train and was charged with vetting him. LaCivita, for his part, is getting lashed for publicly gloating about Trump’s ostensible path to 320 electoral college votes. Some detractors blame both Wiles and LaCivita for not having a backup plan for Harris (a source familiar countered that they were “exceptionally ready”); others are frustrated over the statement Wiles and LaCivita issued celebrating the resignation of Paul Dans, the director of Project 2025, after Democrats made it politically toxic. “They danced on the grave after Dans resigned,” said one Washington insider. “It was a ‘Let this be a warning to anyone who claims to have the president’s ear,’ but with a knife.”
Naturally, there’s an emerging consensus that this insider squabbling, reminiscent of an earlier chaotic era, is distracting from the race. In one pointed example, twenty sources took the time to blame Kellyanne Conway for leaking negative stories about J.D. Vance to The Bulwark’s Marc Caputo. “A lot of people are very frustrated. There are cracks within the ranks and team, why are the consultants knifing Kellyanne in the Bulwark?” said another Trump ally. “They should be focusing on Kamala.”
Vance Elegies
Until this week, I’m told Trump was still enjoying the honeymoon stage with Vance, and largely ignoring the brutal savaging his V.P. pick has received on social media. In particular, he was distracting himself with the promise of the Silicon Valley money that Vance might haul from tech billionaires like Marc Andreessen and Elon Musk. Now, however, Trump is said to be perplexed that the furor over Vance’s “childless cat ladies” comment hasn’t died out, forcing him to waste time defending an underling. As I’ve previously reported, Trump has long viewed the requirement that he pick a vice president as unnecessary, a perspective he shared openly this week, when he told Fox News’s Harris Falkner that Vance would have no impact on the election. “If he keeps slipping in the polls, he’ll blame J.D. Vance, but he would never take him off the ticket,” said the Mar-a-lago denizen. “That’s a very drastic move. He’d have to admit he made a mistake.”
One former Pence advisor suggested to me that Vance’s beating is par for the course. Pence, this person reminded me, was once picked apart for saying that the Disney movie Mulan was proof that women shouldn’t serve in the military. “Moral of story: women in military, bad idea,” Pence said when he was a radio jock. The difference, of course, is that J.D. Vance is a millennial candidate with a much larger media footprint, extending from Facebook to Fox News, and a long history of contradictory communications that have come back to haunt him. I’ve heard from Democrats who are licking their chops over Vance’s past comments to a Yale classmate that he “hate[s] the police,” something they’re all too ready to highlight. “J.D. has a very tough road ahead for him,” another advisor said. “If it gets worse, Trump will just ignore him and move him aside.”
As Vance’s favorables dropped last week, there was even some concern about the campaign’s ability to fill a large venue in Arizona on Wednesday—leading the Trump team to select a local Christian University with a 1,000 person capacity, instead. Their fears were abated when a line wrapped around the corner, and again when the campaign ran out of room at venues in Reno and Las Vegas. Hillbilly Elegy is once again the No.1 book on the New York Times bestseller list, both in hardcover and paperback.
In any case, for now, Trump’s team is clenching their fists and waiting for an end to the Harris honeymoon period, which they anticipate could extend until Labor Day, with her V.P. selection coming as soon as Monday and the D.N.C. the following week. Some are optimistic that the window could be even shorter, pointing out that she’s basically in the same poll position as Biden before the debate, when Trump still had a slight lead in the battleground states. They’re also running ads bashing Harris on the border, trying to define her as a weak and invariably dishonest California liberal. But nobody is harboring any illusions that they’re facing a weaker opponent.
Trump, meanwhile, has been setting new fires by ad-libbing attacks about Harris’s gender and identity that advisors wish he would have kept to himself. One of the worst examples, of course, came on Wednesday, during his tense and awkward appearance at the National Association of Black Journalists, when Trump firmly planted his hand on the third rail by questioning Harris’s racial identity and suggesting that she is more Indian than Black. (Harris is biracial, with an Indian mother and a Jamaican father.)
Trump, of course, has been proud of his gains with Black voters, especially Black men, which may have spurred his defensive and ill-conceived appearance at the event. “Why did he go to the Black Journalists conference when you have Kamala Harris in a sold out arena with Meghan Thee Stallion, and then they have him at an event where his mic doesn’t even work and he’s not even talking to voters, he’s talking to journalists?” one of the allies questioned.
When I asked LaCivita how the campaign has been processing this cavalcade of unforced errors, he offered a characteristically Trumpian assessment. “This team of professionals has been through more campaigns than all the bedwetters on Twitter and prognosticators in the media combined” he told me. “We don’t get rattled by imaginary ‘chatter,’ we execute and live in reality.”
