Donald Trump Is Working Scared

Donald Trump has been working for president for practically a decade. He has by no means received the favored vote as a result of his insurance policies are out of contact with most American voters. However all through his everlasting marketing campaign, the scandal-plagued former president has displayed adequate power and aplomb to safe the Republican nomination thrice in a row and to flip sufficient battleground states to win the Electoral Faculty in 2016. He got here near doing so once more in 2020. And he’s again at it this yr.

However one thing may be very completely different about Trump’s 2024 marketing campaign. The perennial candidate, who as soon as seized each important alternative to advertise himself, is working scared this yr.

Make no mistake: Trump continues to be within the information, as main media shops proceed to contort themselves to current the Republican’s reelection bid as one thing akin to a traditional marketing campaign. He makes authoritarian pronouncements on his failing Reality Social media platform. He seems at stage-managed marketing campaign occasions, although, as Vice President Kamala Harris has famous, “folks begin leaving his rallies early out of exhaustion and tedium.” And he nonetheless participates in what he expects might be pleasant interviews with MAGA allies.

However this week, Trump canceled what would have been his premier interview look of the autumn marketing campaign—a half-hour section on CBS’s 60 Minutes that promised to afford him equal billing with Harris, the Democratic nominee who confirmed up for a troublesome however truthful spherical of questioning. Trump’s absence was duly famous on the opening of the particular version of 60 Minutes, which aired Monday evening. Correspondent Scott Pelley started this system by explaining that the back-to-back look by the candidates on what stays this nation’s high TV information program has been a “custom for greater than half a century,” and that Trump—who spoke enthusiastically, if considerably weirdly, with 60 Minutes in 2016, and a superb deal extra combatively in 2020—had initially agreed to an prolonged dialog with Pelley this yr.

“However, sadly, final week, Trump canceled,” Pelley revealed. Why? “The marketing campaign supplied shifting explanations,” mentioned Pelley. “First, it complained that we might fact-check the interview. We fact-check each story. Later, Trump mentioned he wanted an apology for his interview in 2020” with veteran 60 Minutes correspondent Lesley Stahl, by which she interrupted one of many candidate’s extra outrageous makes an attempt to unfold misinformation on nationwide tv.

So, ultimately, viewers watched Harris doing precisely what we count on of a presidential candidate—and a president. She sat down for a critical interview with a journalist who requested probing questions and demanded frank solutions. In the meantime, Trump hid out after he bought caught mendacity about crowd sizes at a Sunday rally in Juneau, Wisconsin, the place he was swarmed by flies.

The previous president was nonetheless beneath cowl on Tuesday, as Harris took extra questions on The View, The Howard Stern Present, and The Late Present With Stephen Colbert. The Republican candidate’s solely deliberate look was a stage-managed “city corridor” occasion with “Trump Transition Workforce” members Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard.

Trump might be again on the street late within the week for extra rallies—together with a genuinely unexplainable occasion at Calhoun Ranch in Coachella, California, a state that gave him solely 34 p.c of the vote in 2020 and the place he isn’t anticipated to do any higher this yr. (Lest anybody think about that the previous president is likely to be concentrating on a base of supporters in California’s Riverside County, a Desert Solar headline from 2020 places that fantasy to relaxation: “Biden carried each Coachella Valley metropolis within the 2020 election.” Within the metropolis of Coachella itself, the vote was Biden 7,948, Trump 2,008, a 4-to-1 margin for the Democrat.)