If Trump loses as predicted, it's because he did it to himself

You can't get good volunteers if the people coordinating your phone-banking are all alsp scammers using your name to try to make a quick buck.

Donald Trump wearing far too much spray tan on his face.
Donald Trump on Thursday in Green Bay, Wisconsin.

There's a line from some old Dungeons & Dragons book about how good always eventually defeats evil because good guys work together and make sacrifices for one another, while bad guys inevitably betray each other, because each of them is out for themselves. I've thought about that line a lot the last few years, watching American politics.

Some very good polls came out for Kamala Harris over the weekend, and although I have written in this very newsletter about why the polls can't tell us much, the one that got most of the attention is different. It was done by Ann Selzer, a pollster whose record has been described as "nearly flawless," and it showed Harris three percentage points ahead of Trump in Iowa—a state he won by eight points in 2020 and nine points in 2016. Unlike a lot of professional political pollsters, Selzer is quite rigorous about how she collects her data, and about the conclusions she draws from it. It's standard practice for pollsters to tweak their numbers based on their own assumptions about the electorate—like: "Most of the Black men in our sample say they're satisfied with how Biden has handled the economy. But there are only 13 of them, and in our previous polls, Black men were evenly split. So it seems likely that we just happened to get a group of Black male respondents this time who are Biden fans or doing well financially, but that nationwide, Black men's feelings about the economy haven't actually changed overall." As she explains in this interview, Selzer takes pains to avoid making those kinds of adjustments. She might still turn out to be wrong, but she has explained to the press why she feels confident about her findings.

And the thing is, Selzer's Iowa prediction also lines up with what we can see about the Harris and Trump campaigns. In terms of fundraising and volunteer numbers, Harris has been crushing it; she herself has also been campaigning hard in all the swing states and beyond, and her rallies have been packed. She's got, as the kids say, the juice.

Trump's rallies—the centerpiece of his two previous presidential campaigns—have not been packed. A few weeks ago, he stopped taking questions from the crowd and just swayed to music onstage for 40 minutes. As I write this, he has just begun speaking at a rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where it is past midnight; the event started hours later than it was supposed to. The people who waited to hear him are listening to him complain about how much money he spent campaigning against Joe Biden. The other day, the man had trouble opening the door of a garbage truck. If you haven't seen him lately, he has gone far beyond the level of orange we are accustomed to. He is, as the kids say, cooked.

Donald Trump in an orange safety vest, clearly wearing far too much spray tan or some other kind of orange makeup on his face.

Trump was driving the garbage truck in response to a comment Biden had made to the press, in which the president sounded like he was calling Trump supporters garbage. Biden wasn't, but even if he had been, the whole topic of garbage was only in the news because of the comedian at Trump's Madison Square Garden rally who called Puerto Ricans garbage. And that was big news! Everyone heard about it. The Biden comment, on the other hand, was the kind of thing that was easy to miss if you're not online reading political news all the time. In practical terms, that meant the vast majority of people who saw Trump in the garbage truck thought he was doubling down on the Puerto Rico joke, in some fashion. Generally, you don't want to remind voters of the giant, offensive mistake that may have alienated thousands of them. It's not the kind of thing that the strategists who run political campaigns let happen.

But it is the kind of thing that happens when the people running your campaign are fighting with each other and accusing one another—probably accurately—of scamming the campaign out of funds to enrich themselves. Just like microphone trouble is the kind of thing that happens when you don't pay your bills, as Trump hasn't, and the only audio crews that will work for you are the cheapest ones out there. Just like you can't get good volunteers if the people coordinating your phone-banking are all also scammers using your name to try to make a quick buck.

I texted "Volunteer," got sent to a *different* form, but this one finally worked. So, I'm all signed up to help phonebank for Trump!  In the day since I signed up, the only communication I've received is a bunch of texts asking for money and selling scammy merch. Literally nothing else. —Bluesky post by @colindickey.com, November 1, 2024
@colindickey.com

To bring this back around to what I was saying at the beginning: Donald Trump has made a career out of screwing people over. And the people he surrounds himself with are, by and large, also in the habit of screwing people over. And that works for a while. But after a time, you've screwed over so many people that it's hard to find good help anymore. And the people you've surrounded yourself with—they're trying to screw you over too. It's what made him a terrible president, and it's why I'm pretty sure he's not going to be president again.

Real quick, since this is Monday's newsletter and it's already Tuesday: I called this. I am a genius. The other week, we talked about Elon Musk giving $1 million away to a different registered voter every day, as part of a weird, ineffective, and possibly illegal scheme to get people to vote for Trump. I said, "I'm skeptical that the recipients will really get the money, or won't turn out to have been pre-selected." Anyway, yes, in court today, Musk's lawyers "said the giveaway was not a prize but rather compensation for those chosen to serve as spokespeople," and the director of Musk's political action committee said he had indeed pre-selected the winners. (I am not actually a genius, or at least not because of this. This kind of bullshit is Musk's and Trump's stock in trade.)

The Fun Part

You may have already seen Kamala in the SNL cold open this past weekend, but did you see Beppo? (Don't worry—it's a happy ending.)


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