A high-powered supper was held on August 2 at Howard Lutnick, the CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald, in Bridgehampton, New York. Among the almost 130 persons who dined under an air-conditioned camp were some of Donald Trump’s wealthiest followers, including billionaire hedge fund businessman Bill Ackman, who sat next to the previous president, and Omeed Malik, the leader of another bank, 1789 Capital.
Some guests hoped that Trump’s departure from his previous mistakes may give him a signal to reevaluate. He abstained.
Before the dinner, answering a question that voiced concerns about the upcoming election during a small roundtable discussion inside Lutnick’s house, Trump said,” We’ve got to stop the steal”, reviving yet again his false claims about the 2020 election– claims that his advisers have urged him to drop because they do n’t help him with swing voters.
Trump also brought up his question about Vice President Kamala Harris ‘ cultural identity, which he had made two days earlier at a meeting of the National Association of Black Journalists.
He falsely claimed that Harris had just recently chosen to detect as Black for social reasons, which was a show of brazen race-baiting that was even against Trump’s requirements.
But Trump showed no dread. He told the irate donors that Friday night,” I think I was right.”
Eventually, Harrison LeFrak, the heir of a New York real estate home and his father’s long-time friend, inquired about Trump’s plans to win over Democrats and what his optimistic outlook for the country would be at dinner under the tent. It appeared to be a demand for comfort.
Trump did n’t offer any. He instead addressed Harris ‘ criticism before saying,” I am who I am.”
The charity came amid a span of flailing and self-harm that began after President Joe Biden’s July 21 departure from the competition and support of Harris to achieve him. Close Trump allies have compared this strategy to be the most difficult and rockiest since a late 2022 muddle where he debated the Constitution’s termination and had dinner with an outspoken ideologue and a white nationalist.
Since then, Trump has engaged in verbal and written hostility with allies, including a volley against the governor. Brian Kemp of Georgia at an Atlanta rally– the kind of mean-spirited people attack on a common Republican that his own allies believe helped fall two Senate races in Georgia in January 2021 and was hurt Trump in the state, a crucial battleground in November.
More than a hundred people near to Trump were interviewed, almost all of whom insisted on anonymity to identify personal conversations and activities.
Trump has responded with one forced failure after another while attempting to make a strong and consistent argument against her as Harris has transformed the contest, campaigning vigorously and drawing about even with Trump in some polls.
He has found the change unsettling, those who interact with him say. Trump had grown accustomed to running for president against an 81-year-old president who had trouble navigating words, thoughts, and steps. He suddenly finds himself competing with a Black person who is attracting a sizable crowd and who is almost 20 years his senior.
The people around Trump see a prospect knocked off his joints, nothing like the gentleman who reclined softly July 15 as he watched as hundreds of members cheered him on the first day of the Republican National Convention. After the attempted assassination two days prior, Trump, wearing his earbands, became a living saint. The Democrats had already lost inside the Milwaukee industry, and the only thing left to wonder was how much of a percentage Trump’s victory would be.
In a statement in response to the monitoring for this account, a director, Brian Hughes, said that Trump” continues to run a winning strategy and has built a motion focused on making our nation good again”. Steven Cheung, a different spokesperson, claimed that Trump had presented a “positive” vision of the nation in opposition to Biden and Harris ‘ “perversely liberal policies.”
That first night in Milwaukee now seems like a distant memory, as if it never happened, to Trump’s closest allies.
A Foul Mood
Trump claimed at the dinner on August 2 that the media had been making up stories about his slow recovery from the assassination attempt. One person in attendance said,” I’m not nicer,” according to him.
Another said Trump described himself as “angry”, because” they”– unspecified adversaries that the attendee took to mean Democrats– had first tried to bankrupt him and then to kill him.
Trump has in fact been complaining frequently in recent weeks. He has riled about Harris. He has called her “nasty”, on” Fox &, Friends”, and a “bitch”, repeatedly, in private, according to two people who heard the remark on different occasions. ( Kamala is not how the campaign would characterize her, and that is not how President Trump has characterized her. )
Even close allies can manipulate him because of his quickness to rage.
A week before the Hamptons fundraiser, on July 25, Trump stunned one of his wealthiest patrons, Miriam Adelson, the widow of casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, by having an aide, Natalie Harp, fire off a series of angry text messages to Adelson in Trump’s name, according to three people with knowledge of what took place.
According to a person with knowledge of the situation, Adelson and Trump had a friendly meeting with Trump a week prior to the Republican National Convention.
Adelson’s super political action committee, Preserve America, is being run by the people who wrote the texts, and who they are funding with it with millions of dollars.
At the time, Preserve America was spending nearly$ 18 million on a week’s worth of ads aiding Trump in three battleground states. According to the texts, Adelson’s late husband would never have tolerated that because the officials overseeing Preserve America were” RINOs”– Republicans in name only.
Ike Perlmutter, the former chair of Marvel Entertainment, who had hoped unsuccessfully that Adelson would contribute to a rival super PAC that he supports, later told two of the people that Adelson’s aides discovered that the outburst against her had been encouraged by one of the people. ( A lawyer for Perlmutter did not respond to an email seeking comment, and an adviser to Adelson, Andy Abboud, declined to comment. )
Adelson may have reason to doubt her support for Trump, which is still unrealized from the text messages.
As a result of extensive investigation into Vance’s previous statements, Trump has received complaints from donors about his running mate, JD Vance, as well as a lament that America was run by” childless cat ladies.”
Trump dismissed out of hand donors ‘ suggestions that he replace Vance on the ticket. Trump’s advisers were questioned by Trump’s inner circle about Vance’s remarks about childless women before choosing him, though.
And when a donor at the roundtable discussion inquired about Democrats trying to paint the Republican ticket as “weird,” Trump replied,” Not about me,” according to two people with knowledge of the incident at the August 2 fundraiser. They’re saying that about JD”.
Trump made no mention of Vance’s lack of confidence. Instead, he simply said to him,” Attach, attack, attack.” And Trump has been impressed over the past week as Vance attacked Harris and her new running mate, Gov. Two people who have spoken to Trump have praised Tim Walz of Minnesota on the campaign trail and given him credit for his scouting efforts. They claimed that Trump had referred to Vance as a great “athlete” in the media.
Whipsawed by Events
Trump’s recent posts on Truth Social show how uninformed he is about the upturned election, and he deals more with projection than subtext.
Despite his public insistence that he prefers to face Harris than Biden, those close to him deny that assertion. He had been on a glide path to an all-but-certain victory. He must now work for it.
Trump has also been whipped through by a seven-week roller-coaster ride of events, including his own attempted suicide, the election of a running mate, his opponent’s withdrawal from the race, his potential new rival, a potential Iranian assassination threat, and new layers of security that have given his properties a bunkerlike feel, more than at any time since he was in the White House.
Also unsettling to him: For the first time in Trump’s political life, his opponent has received more sustained news coverage than he has, beating him at the game of “earned media”, the kind that costs campaigns nothing to produce.
Additionally, Harris has received a lot of positive coverage.
According to Tony Fabrizio, the chief pollster for the Trump campaign,” Hill has received the equivalent of the largest in-kind donation of free media I think I have ever seen.”
Trump has seemed to want to wish his new situation away. He asserted on Truth Social that Biden wanted undo it and regretted his decision to leave. He has repeatedly expressed his concern over how badly Democrats have treated Biden. He has complained about how unfair it is that he’s had to start the race over again. He has spoken out about wasting time, money, and millions of dollars on Biden, only to discover that the final 100-day sprint will feature a new opponent.
And Trump claimed to have tried to” steal” the election from him again, referring to the Democratic ticket’s reshuffling in light of the COVID pandemic that occurred in state legislatures midway through the 2020 election cycle.
He has also peppered his advisers with questions about whether Harris can sustain her momentum, constantly asking what new polling shows.
The pollster for Trump, Fabrizio, told the campaign staff that the polls would decline before improving shortly after Harris replaced Biden as leader of the Democratic Party. However, Fabrizio has argued that the race has not fundamentally changed, and that Harris ‘ liberal record on crime and her part in Biden’s unpopular policies, particularly those relating to immigration, will turn her favor once voters are educated.
Fabrizio has predicted to campaign colleagues that Harris will have two to three more good weeks, through the Democratic National Convention, and then her poll numbers will turn in the other direction.
Others are more concerned with what private polls reveal to them. Trump received less than 50 % of the vote in Ohio in a recent private poll conducted by Republican pollsters, according to a person with firsthand knowledge of the results.
Struggling to Frame the Attack
Trump and his campaign are still negotiating over how to define her, attack her, and even give her a bad name after almost three weeks since Harris became his Democratic opponent.
He used” Crooked,” an insult he had used against both Hillary Clinton and Biden, before calling her” Laffin ‘ Kamala” and mocking her laugh. Lately, he has favored” Crazy Kamala”.
His advisers have gone to great lengths to evaluate policy-based attacks to find out which candidates in the battleground states like. Condensing everything into a specific frame may seem difficult, according to some of the people who have spoken out about having so much information about Harris, from policy statements to her prosecution record.
Yet most of Trump’s top advisers have urged the campaign and the candidate to focus on the economy, immigration and crime– issues on which Trump’s message resonates powerfully with the so-called persuadable voters they are targeting.
Trump has done this at times. He has n’t done that many times.
His advisers have urged Trump to portray Harris as someone who frequently changes her positions, some of them recalling how successfully President George W. Bush used that strategy against John Kerry in the 2004 presidential race.
Trump has referred to her as “fake,” but in self-defeating ways, such as reiterating Harris ‘ identity.
Trump has also been called in to warn him of the political peril of continuing to carry those kinds of attacks. Kellyanne Conway, who managed his 2016 campaign, recently told Trump to stick to policy contrasts, rather than personal attacks, and to treat Harris as a formidable adversary, as he had Clinton.
That recommendation was ignored. Trump once more attacked Harris as “nasty,” denigrated her intellect, and said she was “very disrespectful” to both her Black and Indian heritages at his press conference on Thursday in Palm Beach, Florida.
Trump’s mood improved a little in recent days, people who have spoken with him said, after Harris named Walz her running mate. He had come to the conclusion that Gov. Pennsylvania’s Josh Shapiro, and how Shapiro could assist her in carrying a state that needs to win. On” Fox and Friends”, Trump called Walz” a shocking pick”, adding,” I could not be more thrilled”.
Not Staff, but Gripping About Circumstances
Trump’s campaign leadership was replaced in June 2016 and again in August 2016 as a challenging election year. In July 2020, he fired his campaign manager.
Trump has privately praised his top advisers despite his current woes, but it seems unlikely that any changes to his team will occur right now.
According to three people with knowledge of the meeting, Trump met with his daughter-in-law Lara Trump, who he had appointed as co-chair of the Republican National Committee, and with Conway at his Bedminster, New Jersey, on August 2, before the Hamptons fundraiser. Lara Trump, reached by phone, said there was no discussion of replacing any senior aides. Conway said she was there to discuss policy, strategy, and how to defeat his new, female rival, but that she had not personally spoken with any of him. She added that she had not discussed any personnel.
Trump disputed that he was making any changes to his team in an enraged phone call to a New York Times reporter on Friday afternoon, claiming to be” thrilled” with his top advisers, Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita, and denying that he would even want to.
( In the same call, Trump threatened to sue the Times over a story about his description in Thursday’s news conference of a near-death experience on a helicopter ride with Willie Brown, a former California politician. Brown and Trump have never been on a helicopter together.
One of Trump’s campaign’s most ambiguous variables is his own behavior.
And after years of holding only a few rallies a month and still managing to play plenty of golf, while Biden held very few campaign events, Trump now has an opponent who is outworking him politically.
The most obvious indication of how unwillingly Trump is to allow public debate to take place on his terms was a week ago when he abruptly stated in a midnight social media post that he would only debate Harris on Fox News, which he had agreed when Biden was running.
Trump’s fear of a confrontation with Harris was widely mocked.
On Thursday, he reversed himself, declaring in his news conference that he would, indeed, show up for the ABC debate– and proposing two others.
