Folks, I think Vice President Kamala Harris has broken Donald Trump.
I mean, it’s fair to say he was already broken – in all ways, really – but since Harris became the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee July 21, the GOP’s favorite felon and presidential nominee has been crumbling before our eyes.
Following up his leaning-hard-into-racism moment at last week’s National Association of Black Journalists convention, where he bizarrely suggested Harris only recently “happened to turn Black,” Trump held a Saturday rally in Atlanta that was a festival of ranting and raving, arguably the worst display of Trump’s snarling id we’ve seen in some time.
Kamala Harris has already reduced Donald Trump to a quivering pile of hate and insults
He called his opponent – a woman who is the sitting vice president of the United States, an accomplished prosecutor and a former U.S. senator – “Crazy Kamala” and a “lunatic” and “a radical left freak.”
He said, falsely, “She happens to be really a low-IQ individual,” and then added, without a hint of self-awareness: “We don’t need a low IQ.”
Then he babbled this gem: “The two words are ‘Merry Christmas.’ She doesn’t want anybody saying Merry Christmas.”
At a 2017 news conference, after then-President Trump announced he was ending Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) for children brought here illegally, then-Sen. Harris said: “And when we all sing happy tunes, and sing Merry Christmas, and wish each other Merry Christmas, these children are not going to have a Merry Christmas. How dare we speak Merry Christmas. How dare we? They will not have a Merry Christmas.”
Trump went so far off the rails at his Atlanta rally that he started attacking Republicans
And then he aimed his drunk-uncle-inspired rhetoric at Georgia’s popular – and Republican! – governor, Brian Kemp, whom Trump hates because he wouldn’t help him overturn the state’s election results in 2020.
“Atlanta is like a killing field, and your governor ought to get off his a— and do something about it,” Trump boomed.
Will Trump and Harris debate? Trump supporters want him to debate Kamala Harris. They told me why.
He attacked Kemp’s wife, saying she once thanked him for endorsing her husband but has now turned on Trump.
“Now she said two weeks ago that I will not endorse him because he hasn’t earned my endorsement,” the former president said. “I haven’t earned her endorsement? I have nothing to do with her.”
Then Trump went back to bad-mouthing Kemp who, two years after Joe Biden won Georgia, beat Democrat Stacey Abrams soundly: “He’s a bad guy, he’s a disloyal guy, and he’s a very average governor. Little Brian, Little Brian Kemp.”
It’s clear Harris is in Trump’s head
Vice President Harris, what have you done to this already very unstable man? The cheese has somehow slid farther off his cracker.
Trump is so shook that he backed out of a planned Sept. 10 presidential debate on ABC News, instead demanding a Sept. 4 debate at his network safe space – Fox News – with “a full arena audience.”
It’s the presidential candidate equivalent of throwing a temper tantrum before taking your ball and going home.
Trump and his campaign have wholly lost the air of inevitability
In the summer weeks before Harris’ ascension, after President Biden’s disastrous presidential debate performance, Trump and his campaign were riding high, and the candidate himself was being, by his standards, normal. He was almost quiet.
Then came the horrifying assassination attempt on Trump that he thankfully survived, and the promises that he was a changed man, devoted to unity. Republicans rode that into the Republican National Convention, projecting a sense of inevitability. Trump even picked hardcore MAGA tush-kisser JD Vance as his vice presidential nominee, ignoring advice to choose someone who might broaden the ticket’s appeal.
Then Biden dropped out and endorsed Harris. And people started to realize that Vance is a weirdo. Since then, the wheels have come off the GOP’s wagon, and Trump has backslid into a somehow worse version of the Trump whom voters sent packing in 2020. He’s panicked and flailing. Quicker than ever to default to the racism that has always undergirded his worldview.
The man has been Kamala-cized.
Biden’s departure swung the spotlight on Trump – and it hasn’t been pretty
Harris has turned on Democratic voters’ enthusiasm, as evidenced by her surge in the polls and an impressive uptick in fundraising. By stepping aside, Biden did away with the national hyperfocus on his age and allowed voters to refocus on Trump.
Trump is weird: Democrats have decided to publicly label Donald Trump ‘weird’ and it’s about time
What the refocused voters are seeing – what they saw in the Atlanta rally and in the rambling interviews he has been doing – is a man who let an opponent switch up and short-circuit his brain.
Is this because Harris is polling so much better than Biden was? Is it because Trump is intimidated by her? Is it her race and ethnicity? Her gender?
Who knows?
A lot of time remains before the election, but Trump is running scared
There’s plenty of time for Trump and his campaign to regain footing or for Harris to make missteps that swing things back in the Republicans’ direction.
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But it’s clear that Trump is rattled, and that his usual tricks of hurling insults and invective aren’t working. In fact, the smiling calm of the Harris campaign is making Trump’s cruelty look worse than ever. That’s why the label “weird” has been sticking. For many, it’s all getting a bit tiresome.
And that just makes Trump angrier, and worse.
We have a long way to go until November, folks. But where we stand here and now, Trump looks like he’s broken. Broken and running scared.
Follow USA TODAY columnist Rex Huppke on X, formerly Twitter, @RexHuppke and Facebook facebook.com/RexIsAJerk
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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Harris is getting to Trump so much he’s attacking fellow Republicans
