Donald Trump is ‘getting his campaign team fired up’ as he hunkers down at Mar-a-Lago after his ‘terrible’ decision to pick JD Vance as vice president, confidential sources have revealed.
The former president’s collapse has been revealed by sources close to Trump as he continues to fall in the polls following the departure of President Joe Biden and the rise of Kamala Harris to the top of the Democratic ticket.
“I think he feels like this election is slipping away from him, and that’s where we’re starting to see him take a nosedive,” Sarah Matthews, a former Trump spokeswoman, told MSNBC.
Republicans and donors are increasingly concerned about Trump’s strategy, which remains obsessed with conspiracies rather than fundamental issues such as the border, the economy and crime.
Anthony Scaramucci, who has close ties to Trump’s inner circle, appeared on The Rest is Politics podcast and revealed that the former president is not traveling through key states because he is “drunk.”
Donald Trump is getting his campaign team fired up as he hunkers down at Mar-a-Lago after his “terrible” decision to pick JD Vance as vice president, confidential sources have revealed
“He picked Vance, he knows Vance was a terrible choice,” Scaramucci said. “He’s making his campaign members nervous that he picked Vance.”
The former White House staffer said this is typical Trump behavior: When things go wrong, he starts firing people.
In August 2016, Trump had a similar meltdown, according to Scaramucci, and “blew everyone up” — at which point he hired Kellyanne Conway and Steve Bannon as advisers.
Trump is reportedly speaking to confidants about firing his campaign managers Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles, who Scaramucci says are “very talented people.”
As Trump hides out in Mar-a-Lago and tries to deflect blame for his downward spiral in the polls, his new opponent is touring key states with her newly elected vice president in tow.
“He picked Vance, he knows Vance was a terrible choice,” Anthony Scaramucci said. “He’s making his campaign members nervous that he picked Vance.”
Not long before Harris took center stage, the former president was riding a wave of success following his heroic survival of an assassination attempt.
Trump triumphantly entered the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee as his polls and popularity soared — and, more importantly, as Biden’s campaign plummeted further toward the point of no return.
It was no big surprise to anyone when Biden dropped out of the race, and even less surprising when his own vice presidential nominee, Kamala Harris, became the name on the ballot.
But after building a campaign strategy around proving Biden unfit for a second term, Trump and his advisers were unprepared for what would happen when the 81-year-old eventually dropped out of the race.
The campaign was shaken as Harris gained popularity, raising $200 million in donations in her first week alone and continuing to rise in the polls.
Trump is reportedly speaking to confidants about firing his campaign managers Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles (pictured)
Harris quickly gained traction among liberal media and Gen Z voters.
His media honeymoon phase has continued since he entered the race, but it was prolonged even further by his choice of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as vice president.
Enthusiasm for Harris is likely to be rekindled once again in light of the Democratic National Convention, which begins August 19 in Chicago.
Meanwhile, a top Trump ally told Axios“President Trump knows he is the only one who can end the media honeymoon with Kamala Harris, and he sees a significant opportunity to do so with Harris’s failure to defend her record on inflation and the border.”
‘However, to overcome the media forcefield protecting Harris, he knows he needs to be very specific with his policy contrasts and is planning to debut a forceful speech very soon.’
Yet even though Trump is supposedly aware of the message he needs to adopt to cut short Harris’ premature victory lap, he has instead been taking cheap shots at the current vice president.
In a disastrous interview with a group of black journalists in Chicago on July 31, Trump claimed Harris “turned black” a few years ago, saying she “all of a sudden took a turn” in her identity.
After criticizing Harris for her race, he bizarrely called her “the most beautiful actress who ever lived” in a chaotic live interview with Elon Musk on Monday.
He has described Harris as “cruel and stupid” and continues to insist that the crowds that flock to her rallies do not exist at her own rallies or at Truth Social, which is a blatantly false claim.
Even fellow Republican Nikki Haley, whom many expected Trump to pick as his vice president, has called for an end to the ridiculous barrage of insults against Harris.
Haley called on Trump to make a “serious shift” in campaign strategy in an interview with Fox News on Tuesday.
“I want this campaign to win, but it’s not going to win by talking about how many people turn out, or talking about Kamala Harris’ race, or whether she’s dumb. You can’t win on those things,” Haley said. “The American people are smart. You have to treat them as such.”
Despite calls from Republicans to stop the outrageous messaging, “Trump is struggling to overcome his anger,” according to a senior Republican source.
In the podcast, Scaramucci says Trump should stick to talking about crime, socialism, the border and the economy to prove that Democrats are “the wrong people for America.”
But, according to a Republican source close to Trump, “he has to convince himself to leave the rest of the garbage behind” in order to follow the script.
Republican pollster Frank Luntz suggested Trump has “the problems” on his side, but his “personality” is contributing to his drop in the polls.
“If it’s about issues, Trump has a much better chance of winning. If it’s about attributes, Harris has a much better chance of winning, because, frankly, people like her more than they like him,” Luntz said over the weekend in an interview with CNN.
“It’s something that, if you’re watching it right now, your head will explode, and that’s part of the problem.”
Other Republican sources have said Trump’s age, 78, has become a factor in his own demise, with some even calling him the Biden of the 2024 campaign.
Several are adding to the speculation that Trump could be on the verge of a collapse.
While Harris’s campaign has certainly improved compared to Biden’s catastrophic poll numbers, she and Trump are still neck and neck.
New polls from DailyMail.com show Trump leading by two points in the race for the presidency.
While other recent polls show the vice president with a sizable lead, our survey of 1,001 likely voters found that 43 percent would vote for Trump if the election were held tomorrow, compared with 41 percent who would vote for Harris.
However, last week the Cook Political Report reinstated its ratings to a “tie” for Georgia, Arizona and Nevada, after previously labeling them as “leaning Republican.”
These states join Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania as the six battleground states.