Great White Flail: Trump's Lounge Act Looks Increasingly Washed Up

If Donald Trump was going to get rid of the "weird" label that Democrats had effectively pasted on him in the days leading up to the Democratic National Convention, the endorsement from Robert F. Kennedy Jr. that Trump procured by promising Kennedy a job if he won did not advance the mission. Kennedy, who claims that worms invaded his brain, walked off with a dead bear cub in order to skin and eat him and then used its body to stage a prank in Central Park and insists that "Covid-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and Blacks" to benefit Ashkenazi Jews and the Chinese, hardly infuses Trump's sagging campaign with a badly needed sense of normalcy.

What each man has said about the other doesn't exactly help. Here was Trump about Kennedy not long ago: "His views on Vaccines are FAKE as is everything else about his Candidacy." The feeling is mutual: Kennedy has called Trump "a terrible human being" and "probably a sociopath."

They're both right. It is, to paraphrase Yenta in "Fiddler on the Roof," a perfect match: two weirdos who despise one another.

Stung by the blow-out enthusiasm generated by the newly emerged Harris-Walz ticket and the sharp reversal in the polls it has triggered, Trump was in full flail, scrambling for a way to look less like a tired lounge act and more like someone who anyone could possibly want near the nuclear codes. The intensified intentional mispronouncing of Kamala Harris' name was one gambit, but one that only has seemed to work with kindergarteners. Then there is the clever "Comrade Kamala" alliteration, for those already disposed to view the former prosecutor as a Marxist-Leninist subversive. There are problems with that line of attack, not least of all the pretty indisputable fact that it is Trump himself who is the Kremlin's chosen candidate, while Harris pledges to continue the Biden-Harris administration's commitment to rolling back Vladimir Putin's very Stalin-like invasion of Ukraine.

Frantic for attention after several weeks of rapturous media coverage of Harris, Trump called into Fox News after the Democrats' convention, looking for love. He didn't find much, in part because he kept accidentally hitting the buttons on the keypad of his phone while rambling for 10 minutes before Fox hosts Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum told him that they really had to go. Ever the cool, collected one when treated with less than perfect reverence, Trump angrily denied that he needed Fox or anyone to help him. "I don't have to make calls to go on TV -- or anything else!" Trump posted about the embarrassment. "They call me! It's called Ratings, I guess, and I'm the 'Ratings Machine.'"

The Ratings Machine seemed to be particularly concerned about how the nullification of Roe v. Wade, for which he has gloatingly taken credit, and his party's assault on women's rights are poised to be electoral chickens coming home to roost this November, and not in a way favorable to him. Trump's social media platform is truly The Home of the Whopper, and Trump has been whopping crazily in recent days. "My Administration will be great for women and their reproductive rights" is one newly minted classic. "I am very proud that we are a LEADER on I.V.F." is another.

As Labor Day approaches, Trump's case against Harris seems focused largely on her ... laugh. His problem is: Americans like her. And they also like her running mate, who is the neighbor, uncle and high school teacher that anyone in their right mind would want to have. It was a reflection of how desperate the Trump campaign seemed to be to stop its opponents' momentum that its allies mocked Tim Walz's 17-year-old son for proudly exclaiming, "That's my Dad!" during his father's speech accepting his party's nomination for vice president.

Donald Trump's political career has been founded on the hope that Americans aren't fundamentally good. But mocking someone's young son for being proud of his father? We're not perfect, but we sure ain't awful.

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Jeff Robbins' latest book, "Notes From the Brink: A Collection of Columns about Policy at Home and Abroad," is available now on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple Books and Google Play. Robbins, a former assistant United States attorney and United States delegate to the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva, was chief counsel for the minority of the United States Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. An attorney specializing in the First Amendment, he is a longtime columnist for the Boston Herald, writing on politics, national security, human rights and the Mideast.