Exclusive: Trump turns up the crazy for free media in waning days of 2024 race
Trumpworld sources tell 24sight News that Trump's increasingly bizarre and violent rhetoric is designed to garner more attention in final weeks of race, others see effort to depress voting
It’s taking increasing levels of crazy for Donald Trump to get attention these days, which may explain why he cut short a town hall to bob and dance to a playlist of soft rock and opera songs in Pennsylvania Monday night.
Official campaign signs bearing a slogan championed by neo-nazis, issuing increasingly violent threats against his perceived enemies, targeting Black and hispanic immigrants with increasingly racist attacks have become the hallmarks of Trump’s close to the 2024 race.
The 45th president of the United States appears more untethered than ever with just three weeks left in the race for the White House, spurring his Democratic opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, to deem him “weak and unstable”, goading which seems to be working.
But interviews with Republicans close to the former president and others close to the Trump campaign say the former president is straining to get attention — something two Republicans familiar with his campaign attributed to cash concerns.
It’s harder to get free press these days since Trump himself injected a steady stream of violent rhetoric and nonsensical comments into the daily political debate almost a decade ago. The former president is also competing with major catastrophes, from back to back hurricanes to the ongoing war in Gaza, which have drawn eyes and ears away from his stunning campaign threats and promises.
“It used to be riveting television,” one veteran Republican communicator told 24sight News said of Trump’s stagecraft, noting that now it takes a 39-minute music stunt to draw coverage.
*** I’ve removed the paywall for this story. Paying subscribers to 24sight News get access to my original reporting first, then, a few days later, I’ll be removing the paywall so the public writlarge gets a look. If you support independent journalism, think about supporting my work here at 24sight News. ***
There’s plenty of stunning news for the former president to compete against, including news of his own making.
Fabled journalist Bob Woodward published his latest book, “War”, with pages of damning anecdotes about Trump, including the revelation that he provided highly specialized Covid testing machines to Russian President Vladimir Putin in the midst of the pandemic which could have easily been used domestically during the pandemic.
Meanwhile, Harris has flipped the media script on Trump, doing more interviews and appearing on more podcasts — including her first sitdown with Fox News — after being accused by Trump and his campaign of avoiding the press. Now she’s lobbing the same attack back at him.
In a podcast style town hall with Charlamagne tha God Tuesday, Harris stuck close to a disciplined campaign message, but when prompted pushed further. When the author and The Breakfast Club co-host asked Harris why she doesn’t just call Trump’s talk and plans fascism, Harris replied, “Yes, we can say that.”
And at a recent campaign rally in the key bellwether Erie, Pennsylvania, Harris played a montage of Trump interviews promising to attack the “enemy within” the country.
The Trump campaign did not reply to questions from 24sight News Wednesday about his recent behavior and rhetoric. But longtime Trump adviser Stephen Miller, the architect of Trump’s deportation camp plans, posted a public statement after a meandering Trump interview in Chicago saying it was “the greatest live interview and political leader or politician has done on the economy in our lifetimes.”
On the left, longtime analysts like Greg Sargent, have raised concern that consistent exposure to Trump, and attacks against his mental stability and racist language, can backfire and create a sympathy effect.
During a recent stop in Pennsylvania, Trump appeared to have a mental health episode when he launched into a music playlist for 39 minutes — the Harris campaign’s army of social media influencers quickly painted it as further evidence of Trump’s alleged dementia (an unproven accusation).
But the music show appears to have been staged, with a Teleprompter alerting Trump to take two more questions from the audience before starting his playlist.
“He’s doing it for the earned media,” said one veteran Republican working with Trump’s expansive operation. “Act like a crazy man to get on the major networks, and it depresses the vote in the middle.”
Depressing turnout is a key tactic for Trump, something experts on the resurgence authoritarianism have written is being used by neo-fascists around the globe who struggle to win widespread support. Instead of winning more extreme votes, they keep normal voters home.
It also meshes with a hard political reality for Trump after close to a decade on the national stage, he’s only so popular.
Given the widely accepted reasoning that Trump has a hard “ceiling” of support nationwide, based on his performance in the last two elections and a decade of national polling which places his support somewhere around 47 - 48%
Former Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Corbett, who has been working with a bipartisan group of moderates, Keep Our Republic, to educate voters on how elections work — and why their votes are safe and secure, amid Trump’s years of lies about voter fraud — said on “60 Minutes” Sunday that extremist language still influences the voters in the middle who will likely decide the election in just a few weeks.
“Right here, is very important,” Corbett said, holding his hands in front of him to show the political middle of the country, which has increasingly tuned out news and politics in part because of the constant chaos of the Trump era.
But inside Trump’s orbit, veteran advisers say the reasoning is more basic — he’s out of money, following a race in which he spent millions on defense lawyers in civil and criminal cases and has struggled to draw from a well of small-dollar donors his team tapped into with abandon years ago.
Undergirding Trump’s extreme tactics are a concern that he can’t buy his way onto the air, onto social media and onto phones in the final stretch of the race, according to one Republican close to the former president.
As details of the latest round of fundraising were revealed Tuesday, Times’ campaign finance reporter Teddy Schleifer reported that Harris’ big-dollar campaign group outraised Trump’s by a 4:1 margin.
And Trump’s outsourcing of ground-level campaign organizing, bankrolled in large part by Trump mega-donor Elon Musk, has struggled amid poor cell coverage for canvassers using the Musk app, despite the fact Musk owns a global satellite network.
The Daily Beast reported Tuesday on long-simmering rumors that campaign co-manager Chris LaCivita was milking the former president for an inordinate amount of money — a mortal sin in Trumpworld which has been used against previous campaign managers, like 2020 chief Brad Parscale, to speed their downfall.
The piece penned by veteran investigative reporter Michael Isikoff was headlined, “Trump in cash crisis as campaign chief’s $22 million pay revealed.”
Similarly, the New York Times reported on Trump lashing out at longstanding Republican mega-donors privately last month as he scrounges for cash.
But other Trumpworld sources downplayed concern over LaCivita’s pay, telling 24sight News that LaCivita’s pay is on par with what a top campaign consultant would earn for a presidential race.
But so far, Trump’s increasingly violent and fascistic messaging, threatening to imprison his political opponents and use the 1798 law which formed the basis for placing Japanese Americans in internment camps during World War II, has worked at placing him in the center of the national stage, again.
Trump, as played by James Austin Johnson, made it back on the cold open of Saturday Night Live this past weekend, with a word-salad of an answer for “Family Feud” leading Kenan Thompson’s host to conclude, “Show me dementia.”
Seems that the crazy is just a different kind of (bad) theatre, in some instances at least.
So, what's worse? The crazy all by itself, the staged crazy, or that the crazy that is used to try and keep our eyes off of the blatant fascism he wants to propagate?
Man, I am so tired of this man's antics. Election Day can't get here soon enough. >.<