If This Continues, Kamala Harris Can Take It Easy

The Musk interview was supposed to be liberating, but it was just the opposite. The former president seemed depleted.

Never mind that Elon Musk wants to fly to Mars in the near future but cannot even guarantee a few hundred thousand listeners a reliable audio conference. Never mind that the richest man in the world’s fawning adulation for a convicted criminal who holds his country in contempt never met any of the criteria for an interview. And never mind that the banal talk never went beyond the level of a conversation between two narcissists sitting at a bar.

The air is getting even thinner for Donald Trump after his appearance full of blunders and embarrassment on his richest fan’s social media platform some 80 days before the presidential election in America. What was thought to be a liberating move to break the momentum of Kamala Harris, who in three weeks has turned the presidential election on its head with charm and charisma, turned out to be a boring flop.

The former president with falling poll numbers failed to clearly define his rival for voters who remain undecided. Otherwise, he would not, in his skewed perspective, have compared a “radical left lunatic” with his wife, Melania, and characterized a new magazine cover featuring California’s Harris as proof of who is more beautiful. Nor was the 78-year-old former president able to deflect the precarious dynamic of an election that has clearly turned in the Democrats’ favor, and offer the American people a new, more interesting version of himself.

Trump Doesn’t Just Seem Old, He Seems Spent

Trump has been swimming in the same stale soup of resentment, banalities, distortions and fabrications for nine years; this was the sobering realization on watching this unnecessary evening. He doesn’t just seem old and depleted, he speaks like it too: mumbling, lisping, constantly repeating himself, increasingly without making sense or with any intelligence. He seriously advised Tesla’s boss, who incidentally leads his own private ministry of disinformation with X, to install solar panels on his electric cars, for example.

Trump’s biggest problem is still the same: He is his own greatest enemy. Driven by a relentless desire for revenge against the Democrats, he can’t spread or sustain a political message with any discipline. How would Trump lower the inflation still plaguing millions of Americans in a socially acceptable way, stem the constantly lamented illegal immigration in a judicially sound way and constructively untie the geopolitical knots from Ukraine to Gaza? Other than platitudes and pretensions, he has no answer.

Instead, there are a series of small-minded denigrations, conspiracy theories and distortions directed at Harris that are disgusting a large part of America. Rupert Murdoch’s media empire once bravely backed Trump, but recently he has lambasted “Trump fatigue,” long evident at Trump rallies, and called upon Trump to correct course, so far without success.

Observers are increasingly of the view that if the former president keeps this up, Harris can take it easy and watch her opponent self-destruct in peace.