Trump’s ‘disciplined’ campaign is unraveling

The out of control Trump — suppressed in recent months with varying degrees of success — is back.

For the last year, we’ve been hearing about the “disciplined,” “competent” and “professional” campaign Donald Trump is running. After his chaotic 2016 and 2020 campaigns, he brought in longtime Republican operatives Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita to lead a “low-drama” operation.

Well, the cat lady is out of the bag.

The trauma caused by the broadly panned choice of Sen. JD Vance as a running mate, combined with President Biden’s withdrawal from the race and the massive outpouring of support for Vice President Harris, have had a terrible effect on Trump: They have caused him to revert to being himself.

Discipline has broken down, and the out-of-control Trump — suppressed in recent months with varying degrees of success — is back on full display.

“Christians, get out and vote just this time,” he told an evangelical audience a week ago. “In four years, you don’t have to vote again. We’ll have it fixed so good you’re not going to have to vote.”

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His Fox News ally Laura Ingraham tried to tone down this apparent promise by Trump to make this election America’s last. “You will leave office after four years?” she asked him.

“Of course,” Trump replied. “By the way, and I did last time.”

How reassuring.

Vance, for his part, defended his attack on Harris and other people who do not have children as “childless cat ladies,” even as other Vance comments came to light, calling for a “war” against those who say it’s okay not to have children, attacking the “childless cabal” and proposing that people with children should have more votes in elections than the childless, who are “sad, lonely, pathetic.”

Vance stood by “the substance of what I said” about cat ladies. “I’m sorry,” he told interviewer Megyn Kelly. “It is true.”

Campaigning in Reno, Vance expanded his oeuvre of ugliness, invoking the racist “great replacement” conspiracy theory. Harris, he said, “won’t stop until every single illegal immigrant that she let in becomes a voter, handing over control of your country to people who shouldn’t even be here.”

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And then came Trump’s tour de force at a gathering of the National Association of Black Journalists, where he repeatedly attacked his questioners and challenged the ethnicity of Harris, the daughter of an Indian mother and a Jamaican father who went to Howard University and joined the Black sorority Alpha Kappa Alpha. “She was always of Indian heritage and she was only promoting Indian heritage,” Trump said on Wednesday. “I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn Black. And now she became a Black person.”

As if that weren’t evidence enough that the Trump campaign has gone off the rails, Trump ally and former adviser Sebastian Gorka could be seen on television calling Harris “a disaster whose only qualification is having a vagina and the right skin color. She’s a DEI hire, right? She’s a woman, she’s colored. Therefore she’s got to be good.”

And there on Fox News was host Jesse Watters, a Trump mouthpiece, telling viewers that he “heard the scientists say the other day that when a man votes for a woman, he actually transitions into a woman.”

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Also on that esteemed network, Sen. John Neely Kennedy (R-La.), a frequent Trump surrogate, repeatedly called Harris a “ding dong” while also faulting her for giggling and identifying her as a “loon.” The host, Neil Cavuto, criticized the “bash-a-thon of name-calling at her” as “dumb” and asked, “Do you worry how that comes across?”

Kennedy did not.

Neither was Trump spokesman Steven Cheung concerned about appearances, taking to social media to attack “the pieces of sh-- in the media” and the Harris campaign.

Trump, that paragon of self-control, was on Truth Social this week posting or reposting messages declaring Nancy Pelosi “BAT S--- CRAZY” and an “evil witch”; calling the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol an “inside job” and Election Day 2020 “the real insurrection”; proclaiming himself to be what “God has ordained”; railing against Fox News (running ads from “perverts”); repeating a common QAnon slogan; and lamenting that low fuel prices could help “CRAZY KAMALA HARRIS WIN.” Later in the week, he shared a conspiracy theorist’s bogus claim that “Harris’s own birth certificate [proves] she is lying about being Black” and disparaging the deal that secured the release from Russia of Paul Whelan, Evan Gershkovich, Vladimir Kara-Murza and others: “Our ‘negotiators’ are always an embarrassment to us!”

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Above all, he was attending to his top priority: enriching himself. He urged his social media followers to “Get your Bitcoin Sneakers now” and directed them to a website where they could pay up to $499 for a pair of high-tops that say “Trump Crypto President.” The sneakers, along with “Victory Cologne,” coolers and other sneakers commemorating the failed assassination attempt on Trump, are being sold by CIC Ventures LLC — a company owned by Trump. “FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT” announce the $299, shooting-themed sneakers, showing an image of a bloodied (but lean and muscular) Trump raising his fist.

Trump is now using his assassination attempt to make a buck — not for his campaign, not for the family of the man killed in the shooting, but for himself. Meet the new Trump, same as the old Trump.

It’s as though the near-death experience brought out all of Trump’s worst attributes. “They all say, ‘I think he’s changed since two weeks ago. Something affected him,’” Trump told a rally crowd in Minnesota. “No, I haven’t changed. Maybe I’ve gotten worse, actually.”

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At his speech to evangelical Christians, he said of Harris, “She doesn’t like Jewish people.” (She is married to one.) He said he “took a bullet for democracy. ... I might have taken it because of their rhetoric.” (The shooter was a registered Republican and a motive hasn’t been identified.) He spoke of “defeating Kamala Harris in a landslade,” mispronouncing both her name and the geological phenomenon, before correcting the latter.

At the Minnesota rally, he bragged about his golf game and revived old attacks against Hunter Biden and a fantasy about mixed martial arts........

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