Quick Hit: Trump's Closing Argument is "All I Need Is You"
With poll after poll showing bad news for the Trump campaign, debate (or dueling timeslot) disasters, and story after story of bad news for the incumbent, Team Trump is settling in with what seems like the only real remaining strategy for the legitimate side of their campaign operations in the homestretch.
To wit: nobody likes us, everybody hates us, guess we’ll go eat worms.
Of course, wailing in despair would hardly be a winning strategy, especially for a candidate whose brand is that he’s a popular, successful winner. As McEnany’s tweet above shows, they are combining self-effacement with flattery: it doesn’t matter how many powerful forces and institutions are against us, Dear Working America, because we have YOU, and YOU are MIGHTY.
Obviously, as evidenced by the lengths Rudy Giuliani is going through to ratfuck Joe Biden with planted stories and leaked texts, this isn’t their whole strategy. But even allowing for direct electoral manipulations, they can’t pull off a credible win if no one is voting for them. This is their strategy for keeping the base engaged and energized in the face of what for all the world looks like a crushing loss is shaping up.
Don’t get me wrong! They still could pull it off. They haven’t given up, which means we shouldn’t get cocky. Even with record early voting, November 3rd is still very likely to be the single biggest day of voting, which means there’s still two more weeks in which anything could happen to change the game.
But! Even from the upper echelons of the Trump messaging team (to the extent that there is one), the message just now is as much about managing expectations as it is trying to win.
That’s a good sign, one good sign among many.