Monday, September 16, 2024

Loom(er)ing crisis

This is a funny story, but it might be considerably more than that.

 



Last week, Josh Marshall laid out his theory of the Trump campaign, or more accurately, the Trump campaigns.

First, there’s Donald Trump, the guy we saw in the debate, the guy we see at the rallies and the guy Trump is, mostly, on social media. (People like Dan Scavino tweet for him sometimes. But even then it’s more an impersonation of feral Trump.) This persona was really the entirety of the campaign in 2016 because there just wasn’t any campaign infrastructure around, though a bit was built up in the last couple months. This campaign is mostly about Trump’s anger and grievances and shows all the signs not only of his longstanding degeneracy but his cognitive and personal decline over the last decade. Let’s call it the Trump campaign. But then there’s an entirely distinct and relatively traditional campaign being run by Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles. That campaign wants to talk about inflation and the southern border. That campaign is running a vast and complex TV air war across all the swing states. Let’s call this the “Trump” campaign.

Obviously, these operations are related. The folks running the “Trump” campaign want him to be President and they know what he’s like. His singular, final-battle-line focus on the southern border is what he shoved into the center of American politics back in 2015. They’re following innovation there. They’re just trying to do it with daily message focus. They’re part of that now decade-long story of trying to take an idea of what Trump represents and make it efficient and successful. And that means keeping the focus on the things that will win Trump the election — specifically, many people’s instinctive belief that their economic life was better before mid-2020 than it’s been since. And then, secondarily, the desire to (depending on who you are) either bring some order to the southern border or close it to all immigrants and deport everyone here.

...

You and I live in the national media conversation where Trump himself is the dominant story — his tirades, lies, chaos. But in the swing states it’s different. That’s where the “Trump” campaign is at least trying to and may be able to hold sway. There it’s all about the 30-second ads and other kinds of paid messaging. (That’s one of the reasons I’m so interested in the mailers. Keep the reports coming in.) When I speak to people running things in the swing states, that’s their worry: that the “Trump” campaign may simply bury Harris in 30-second ads, knocking down her favorability and making her seem too risky a choice, regardless of what Trump himself might be doing on any given day.

Mind you, I’m not saying they think that is going to happen necessarily. And it’s not like Harris’ campaign and it’s allied super PACs don’t have money of their own to run 30-second ads. But that’s where they see the threat.

It’s seemed to me for a while that there is something increasingly like an arranged marriage between these two Trump campaigns. They can’t control each other. They’re both living their own lives. And that’s just how it is. You do your thing; I’ll do mine. No reason to break up. It would just upset the kids.

Even if things were to remain stable, the two campaign strategy faces serious challenges. It is an approach better suited for a candidate with a comfortable lead. That's not the case here. The Harris campaign is at least slightly ahead and in some cases is trending upward based on pretty much every metric from polls to voter registration to fund raising to crowd sizes and enthusiasm. While it is certainly possible that the Trump campaign will be successful, it is difficult to overtake even the smallest of leads while trying to keep your candidate away from the general public.

But of course, things are not likely to remain stable. There are huge inmate tensions in the situation, and as Marshall points out, it is very difficult to effectively compartmentalize these two campaigns so that messaging for one does not leak into the other. This is especially true since the two audiences are largely operating under entirely different views of reality. For people inside the bubble, immigrants are committing atrocities in the street, newborns are being killed, and, despite widespread cheating on the other side, Trump easily won the debate. More importantly, they believe that people outside of the bubble are either in denial or have been corrupted by the deep state. For those on the outside, the people in the bubble are crazy.

This is not an easy alliance to maintain under the best of circumstances, but when you start adding outside players, things can get very bad very quickly. Enter Laura Loomer.

Loomer is a product of the far right, not the diluted, Nazi-curious form represented by people like Marjorie Taylor Greene but the real thing. Greene herself called out Loomer for offensive racist  comments, and while Greene may have had some ulterior motives, Loomer really is far more extreme than any prominent Republican to date.





[Fun side note: I'll need to check the dates, but Tim Poole may have already been on Russia's payroll when he recorded this.]



I didn't expect to be retweeting Maher, but this one is certainly in his wheelhouse.

 

 

As usual, the press is divided into opposing camps over whether to go all in on baseless speculation or to avoid acknowledging even the most obvious of facts. Taking a position somewhere in the middle it is safe to say that Trump and Loomer are close, they spent a great deal of time together, they are physically affectionate, and he appears to trust her.




The details of this relationship only matter in the sense that the closer they are, the greater the risks to  the campaign. The danger is not in Loomer telling Trump crazy things; it is in her telling him not to listen to the people trying to get him to stop saying crazy things. She is very likely giving him that common but often terrible advice, "be yourself."

Assuming her enemies don't manage to lock her out, the presence of Loomer greatly increases the chances that the two campaigns described by Marshall will come into open conflict, which would probably result in multiple high-level defenestrations and the kind of chaos that can set off cascading failure with conflicting messaging, donors fleeing, and political allies backing away, all of which leads to more chaos.

Given this (and the fact that, even in 2024, most Republicans are still uncomfortable with Nazis), the conservative establishment hates this woman.




Listen to the tone of this congressman's voice as he tries to downplay Loomer's role. He does not want to be having this conversation.

I'm not saying it's going to happen or even that Loomer will still be riding Trump 1 in another week, but there's a possibility that a political career that started with reality television will be ended by an Internet troll. That might seem a bit on the nose, but this season's writers are not known for their subtlety.


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