'Can’t understand this': Trump a 'hot mess' and 'facing a problem he’s never faced': analysis

16 August 2024

On Sunday, July 21 — only three days after Donald Trump's acceptance speech at the 2024 Republican National Convention in Milwaukee — there was a major bombshell in the United States' presidential race: President Joe Biden dropped out, endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris for president. Now, less than a month later, Harris is the official Democratic presidential nominee and has small single-digit leads over Trump in many of the national and battleground state polls being released in mid-August.

Harris will make her acceptance speech at the 2024 Democratic National Convention, which gets underway in Chicago this Monday, August 19.

Trump has been angrily railing against Harris nonstop. But in an article published on August 16, The New Republic's Michael Tomasky stresses that for all his anger, "hot mess" Trump is painfully unfocused as a candidate.

"He's facing a problem he's never faced," Tomasky argues. "In 2016, he was running against a very known quantity whom the right had been instructing Americans to hate for 25 years. In 2020, he was running against someone who'd been around for nearly 50 years. He's spent his time since losing that 2020 race sitting around thinking about his rematch with that opponent. And now, suddenly, he's running against someone else. And to his shock, the more America sees of her, so far, the more America kinda likes her."

Tomasky adds, "He can’t understand this, and he simply can't stand it."

Tomasky compares Trump to a "predatory animal" whose "instinct is to find his prey's weakness and go after it over and over" — only so far, he "hasn't come close to finding Harris'."

"She is not a lunatic communist," Tomasky writes. "She's not stupid, she's not any of things Trump is saying she is. The America of 2024 is ready for Kamala Harris. Donald Trump is not and can't accept that fact. No amount of staff shakeups or focusing on 'the issues' can fix that."

Michael Tomasky's full article for The New Republic is available at this link.

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