Dumbest. Republicans. Ever.

Tim Alberta looks behind the curtain at the Trump 2024 campaign. You won't believe what he finds.

Photo by Karsten Winegeart on Unsplash

In my post yesterday on whether the vibes were shifting in favor of Harris, I omitted one data point: the extent to which each campaign is leaking to the press. This is also a dimension that favors Kamala Harris. Proving a negative is impossible, but by and large the Harris campaign has been extremely disciplined, with nary a leak. Axios has multiple reports about tension between Harris staffers and the Biden White House, which seems like an understandable residual effect of Biden withdrawing from the race in July. There has been no reporting that I have seen, however, about backbiting within the Harris campaign.

To be fair, much the same could have been said about the Trump campaign as well. Indeed, one of the mantras in the political coverage has been how professional Trump’s 2024 race has been compared to his 2016 and 2020 efforts.¹

That changed this weekend, however, when the Atlantic’s Tim Alberta dropped quite a behind-the-scenes peek at the Trump campaign. The story traces the campaign from the June debate with Biden to the past week. There are two clear-cut takeaways. The first is that a whole bunch of Trump staffers are shifting the blame to two people if they lose: longtime Trump aide Corey Lewandowski (who was his usual anarchic self when Trump brought him back on board in August) and JD Vance staffer Alex Bruesewitz (who is blamed for both magnifying the Springfield, Ohio pet-eating rumors and for having insult comedian Tony Hinchcliffe kick off Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally.²

The hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World does not really care all that much about such kerfuffles. Because the second takeaway is that the folks staffing Trump have the greatest mental blinders in human history. While it is possible that Lewandowski and Bruesewitz are responsible for some of the campaign miscues, the fact remains that the enabling chaos muppet is still convicted felon Donald J. Trump.

The evidence is shot through Alberta’s story. Indeed, the opening anecdote is about how in late June, when Trump seemed most likely to win the election, and Trump wanted to call Biden “retarded.” His staff talked him out of it, but:

Over the next several days—as Trump’s aides held their breath, convinced he would debut this latest slur at any moment—they came to realize something about Trump: He was restless, unhappy, and, yes, tired of winning. For the previous 20 months, he’d been hemmed in by a campaign built on the principles of restraint and competence. The former president’s ugliest impulses were regularly curbed by his top advisers; his most obnoxious allies and most outlandish ideas were sidelined. These guardrails had produced a professional campaign—a campaign that was headed for victory. But now, like a predator toying with its wounded catch, Trump had become bored. It reminded some allies of his havoc-making decisions in the White House. Trump never had much use for calm and quiet. He didn’t appreciate normalcy. Above all, he couldn’t stand being babysat.

“People are calling this the most disciplined campaign they’ve ever seen,” Trump remarked to friends at a fundraiser this summer, according to someone who heard the conversation. He smirked at the compliment. “What’s discipline got to do with winning?”….

In conversations with nearly a dozen of the former president’s aides, advisers, and friends, it became apparent that Trump’s feeling of midsummer tedium marked a crucial moment in his political career, setting off a chain reaction that nearly destroyed his campaign and continues to threaten his chances of victory. Even as they battled Democrats in a race that refuses to move outside the margin of error, some of Trump’s closest allies spent the closing months of the campaign at war with one another: planting damaging stories, rallying to the defense of wronged colleagues, and preemptively pointing fingers in the event of an electoral defeat.

At the center of this tumult, people close to Trump agreed, is a candidate whose appetite for chaos has only grown—and serves as a reminder of what awaits should he win on November 5.

This section of Alberta’s story is hardly surprising. It is merely a reminder of the overwhelming evidence that Donald Trump lacks the impulse control, emotional regulation, and policy knowledge to be president of the United States.³

Hopefully, American voters will remember this when they vote. What is fascinating, however, is the ability of Trump’s campaign staff to lie to themselves even more assiduously than Niall Ferguson. This was the paragraph from Alberta that made my jaw drop:

Entering the final weekend of October, I noticed something in conversations with numerous Trump staffers: resignation. They had long since become accustomed to working in the high-intensity, zero-margin-for-error environment created by [campaign co-managers Susan] Wiles and [Chris] LaCivita. But this home stretch of the campaign hadn’t just been hard and stressful; it had been disillusioning. Several campaign officials had told me, throughout the spring and summer, how excited they were about working in the next Trump White House. Now those same people were telling me—as paperwork was being distributed internally to begin the process of placing personnel on the transition team and in the prospective administration—that they’d had a change of heart. The past three months had been the most unpleasant of their careers. Win or lose, they said, they were done with the chaos of Donald Trump—even if the nation was not.

I get politically ambitious campaign staffers hoping to work in a White House, but in this case one has to ask: what the hell are these Trump staffers thinking?! Is it really surprising that Donald Trump is a mercurial chaos muppet? Trump has been this way throughout his political career. Hell, in the last 24 hours alone Trump has promised that RFK Jr. would have a “big role in the administration” if he wins the election! According to the New York Times, on Sunday Trump told his supporters, “that he ‘shouldn’t have left’ the White House at the end of his term, escalated his unfounded claims of voter fraud and said ‘I don’t mind’ if reporters are shot at.”

Elizabeth Saunders observed in Good Authority over the weekend that Trump has become very predictable when it comes to foreign policy. As someone who has observed Trump’s brand of immature leadership for quite some time, let me suggest that Saunders is being modest: Trump has become predictable across a wide array of behaviors. When it comes to campaigning and running the federal government, Trump craves chaos. Any GOP campaign staffer who believed otherwise was born yesterday.

1. I have my doubts about this but we will see who has the last laugh later this week.

2. It is to Alberta’s credit that he is well aware of this dynamic, writing, “As the race moved toward its conclusion—and as the constellation of helpers and hangers-on surrounding Trump began positioning themselves to take credit or deflect blame—more than a few people close to the candidate were shopping dirt on their internal rivals. A sense of foreboding settled in over the campaign. There was so much bad blood, several aides told me, that something was bound to spill out into the open.”

3. Not gonna lie, it also reminded me of “crazy Claire” from 30 Rock.