Trump sways his way into final two weeks of campaign as Kamala surges toward the finish line

We may be getting a glimpse into how emblematic Donald Trump’s 39-minute music gap was at his town hall appearance with Kristi Noem the other night.  Less than an hour into the event, as he and Noem were waiting for paramedics to help a woman in the audience who had fainted, Trump called a halt to everything, telling the crowd, “Let’s just listen to music. Who the hell wants to hear questions?” Not Donald Trump, obviously

Speculation abounded about what had happened to Trump at the Pennsylvania event.  Donald Graham in The Atlantic called Trump’s behavior “signs of someone having a breakdown…like Joe Biden’s disastrous debate against Trump in June, when the president’s fumbling performance and struggle to get sentences out made it impossible to believe he was up to the task of serving for four years.”

While he was president, Trump was famously disinterested in the mechanics of governing and managed to take more than 300 days off to play golf during his four years in office.  He has seemed equally disinterested in presenting his plans if he is elected president to fans at his rallies, often veering off into disjointed orations about the fictional Hannibal Lecter, shark attacks on electric boats, and Kamala Harris’ “radical Marxist professor” father.  The New York Times reported that at one event last weekend, Trump paused during an attack on Harris’ immigration record to tell “one quick story” about a friend of his who owns an automobile manufacturing plant in Mexico.  He got through about two sentences before losing the thread of the story and complaining that if he “mispronounced one word,” he would be accused of being “cognitively impaired,” which reminded him of President Biden, whom he accused of being “cognitively repaired.”  Then he told the crowd the election was three and a half months away, not the three and a half weeks that remained until the election at the time he spoke.

Today, multiple news outlets took note of the fact that Trump has canceled or put off numerous interviews and appearances recently.  Trump pulled out of a speech to the NRA yesterday, leaving the gun-nut group to explain that the former president had “scheduling issues.”  Politico noted Trump’s cancellation of scheduled interviews on CNBC and with NBC News, as well as his refusal to appear on the CBS show, 60 Minutes, when he discovered that he would be fact-checked. 

Axios reported today that Trump had cancelled a Pennsylvania appearance in September with Polish President Andrzej Duda, a strong supporter of Ukraine’s war against Russian aggression.  In August, Trump cancelled an interview with the Detroit News when he was told that his interviewer planned on bringing up crime data for Detroit that showed a steep drop in violent crime, assaults and robberies. 

With less than three weeks until election day, what is going on with Donald Trump?  One report earlier in the week said that when he is at Mar a Lago, Trump has been bragging to visitors and staff that he’s got the election “in the bag.”  Polling seems to fluctuate like the weather, with Kamala up nationally one week and Trump up the next, and watching the polls in swing states is guaranteed to make you sea sick.

In the clips I have seen of Trump speaking at town halls, he seems exhausted and disinterested, a trend that climaxed in his musical interlude in the Philadelphia suburbs this week.  His interview at the Economic Club of Chicago was a disaster that showed Trump doesn’t have any plans for the economy beyond tariffs, a word he can say but not explain.

There is always speculation that the Trump campaign is sitting on some sort of October surprise bombshell they will release next week or the week after, and Trump is simply sitting back and waiting for the bomb to go off.  This seems unlikely, however, with Trump on Thursday once again accusing Harris of concealing her racial identity, saying that “a lot of people didn’t know she is Black.”  Going back to that stale attack doesn’t sound like a man who knows that something bigger and badder is in store for his Democratic opponent.

Meanwhile, Kamala Harris seems to have come into her own, making three appearances in a single day in Wisconsin and scheduling appearances with President Obama and the very popular Michelle Obama for later next week.  Plus, the Harris campaign is teasing a big rally with a “surprise” musical star for the week before the election.

No one in the Harris campaign is sitting on their hands, least of all the candidate.  That cannot be said of Donald Trump, as he cancels one interview after another.  Stay tuned.  The rest of this campaign is going to be as volatile as a meth lab.