Watching Donald Trump shamble into the election’s final stretch, it’s difficult to believe he’s serious about this campaign. His pitch to voters has boiled down to nothing but racism and random tax breaks. And now he’s taken to campaigning in blue states he has no hopes of winning.
It’s the behavior of someone who believes he can’t lose, despite that he’s in the middle of what polls say is a toss-up race.
Take his chaotic campaign stop in Coachella, California, over the weekend. He dragged his supporters out to the desert in 100-degree heat in a state where Biden pulled roughly 64% of the vote in 2020, just to ramble at them for 80 minutes. Besides literally overheating his fan base to the point where several needed medical attention, Trump also stranded many of those same fans in the desert for hours.
Yes, after busing the faithful roughly 5 miles from their cars to the event, the campaign didn’t do enough to get them back when things were done. Posts on X showed hundreds of people still waiting around, vainly hoping for more buses, hours after the event ended. Trump fans speculated that the lack of buses was due to some nefarious influence from Democrats rather than the far simpler explanation: The candidate who marooned his supporters multiple times in 2020 is doing it again.
Trump is also planning a rally at New York City’s Madison Square Garden on Oct. 27, with an unnamed campaign adviser telling NBC News that this is just all part of a genius strategy.
“Choosing high-impact settings makes it so the media can’t look away and refuse to cover the issues and the solutions President Trump is offering,” the adviser said.
Because if there’s one thing Trump lacks, it’s media coverage.
That same unnamed adviser also explained that getting those media eyeballs “increases the reach of his message across the country and penetrates in every battleground state.” Sure does seem like it would be easier to just go to one of those battleground states instead.
Regular folks can attend the rally, but only the well-heeled will get the full Trump-in-NYC experience by getting to attend his fundraiser the same day. For the low price of $924,600, donors can have what the campaign is calling an “Ultra MAGA Experience.” There are several tiers of “experiences,” none of which is explained, but $5,000 is the lowest amount one can hand Trump to get in the door.
It’s not just weird that nine days before the election, Trump is holding a rally in New York, which he lost by roughly 22 percentage points to Democrat Hillary Clinton in 2016 and then did even worse against President Joe Biden in 2020. It’s also weird that nine days before the election, Trump is doing a massive fundraiser instead of stumping for votes. But he’ll need that money if he plans to win the election via post-election litigation instead of, you know, votes.
From the day after the 2020 election to Biden’s inauguration in 2021, Trump raised over $254 million for an “election defense fund.” In theory, that money was supposed to fund many of the more than 50 unsuccessful lawsuits filed to try to overturn the 2020 elections. Ultimately, Trump used at least $100 million of that money for his personal legal bills.
Just as Trump has made no secret of the fact that he plans to accept the results of the 2024 election only if he wins, Republicans haven’t hidden that they plan on wreaking havoc in court if he doesn’t. By early September, the GOP had already filed over 100 election-related lawsuits. By the end of the month, that had jumped to over 120 lawsuits in 26 states. Republicans have pretended this is to prevent voter fraud—which is largely a myth—but it’s really about sewing chaos and distrust ahead of the election. After all, this is the party that made Christina Bobb, a former correspondent for the far-right One America News Network, its head of election integrity—the same Christina Bobb currently under indictment in Arizona for her role in trying to subvert the 2020 results.
Given that nearly two-thirds of Republicans still believe that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump, they aren’t likely to find any scorched-earth tactics in 2024 problematic. Trump knows his base will throw him incredible sums of money for the effort, so why not play Coachella? Why not be in New York—a state he won’t win—only a handful of days before the election?
Trump better hope a lot of his more well-heeled supporters feel like throwing him nearly seven figures for whatever low-rent tackiness the Ultra MAGA Experience might be. He certainly doesn’t seem interested in winning this thing at the ballot box.
