About a dozen Donald Trump campaign aides spoke to Tim Alberta, a staff writer at The Atlantic, about how their candidate strayed from a hitherto on-message campaign to embark on a series of offensive, threatening and self-defeating verbal adventures that have left his team utterly demoralized heading into Election Day. The former president’s predictions of triumph, the reporter who has covered several Republican presidential campaigns concluded, belie a sense of panic among his subordinates that "the bottom has started to fall out" in their efforts.
In the article, campaign sources explain that Trump's newfound discipline unraveled as he succumbed to agitation over his campaign's cautious approach, advice from impatient allies like Corey Lewandowski and the aggravating itch of his natural impulses. In the space of four months, Trump's aides now fear, the former president had dragged himself from probable victory to an avoidable disaster.
Trump, however, still thinks his chances are the same are great. “He does believe that he’s going to win,” Alberta told CNN’s Erin Burnett on Monday, adding that Trump "has a pretty distorted view of political reality, I think that’s been the case for quite some time.”
The takeaway from his conversations, he said, was that the fall campaign had "been a total train wreck of a fall campaign for the Trump folks."
Alberta's campaign observations were echoed by Wall Street Journal reporter Annie Linskey. She reported that the Election Day mood in Trumpworld has quickly turned sour.
"I've talked to some of the Trump people," Linskey told CNN, "They were flat-out optimistic a week ago. I mean, people I was talking to were saying he is the president, [JD] Vance is the vice president. There was a confidence." But, Linskey noted, "That has shifted in terms of the staff members you talk to over there."
As President Joe Biden stepped aside for Vice President Kamala Harris atop the Democratic ticket, Trump pivoted his rhetoric from attacking Biden's age and capabilities to complaining about Harris' mixed-race ancestry. Diatribes against Democrats, immigrants and other people that should have been contained to the private sphere spilled out into the open while his campaign fought against negative headlines and against each other. Even as polls edged back in favor of Trump by late October, any momentum was seemingly snuffed out by right-wing comedian Tony Hinchcliffe opening a Trump rally in New York by calling Puerto Rico an "island of garbage."
While Trump later claimed not to know Hinchcliffe, aides told Alberta that the former president had spent months courting him. He characteristically blamed the fallout on his campaign managers Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita, who had been trying to purge "right-wing trolls" from the operation but were now accused by their boss of having "f***ed this up."
“I think that there is a real fear that the bottom has started to fall out here at the worst possible moment and that they are closing in about as weak a fashion as you possibly could,” Alberta said. Many aides in the Trump campaign, he added, feel like they're "crawling or limping through the tape," and they know exactly who to blame.
They "will not be upset if he loses," Alberta concluded.
