Politics
Donald Trump is running his campaign into the ground
Presidential campaigns usually run their get-out-the-vote operations using campaign staff and volunteers. But in this election cycle, Donald Trump’s presidential campaign made a big and risky gamble: outsourcing the bulk of its ground game to America PAC, an outside group founded by tech titan Elon Musk. That move followed the Federal Election Commission’s decision to allow campaigns, for the first time, to work more closely with outside groups on GOTV operations.
That gamble appears to not be paying off. Reuters reports that, according to people involved in America PAC’s efforts, the group “is struggling in some swing states to meet door-knocking goals and is investigating claims that some canvassers lied about the number of voters they have contacted.” And The Guardian reports that, according to people familiar with the matter and leaked data, one-quarter of the door knocks the group claims it has executed in Arizona and Nevada are “potentially fraudulent.” The reports raise the possibility that the Trump campaign is many thousands of door knocks behind its goals for contacting voters. (According to The Guardian, the Trump campaign did not respond to requests for comment and “America Pac denied it was experiencing that level of actual fraud in Arizona and Nevada and declined to comment on reporting for this story.”)
Trump’s rally strategy is approaching the level of self-sabotage.
The Trump campaign appears to be incurring the costs of bucking common-sense strategies for voter turnout operations. Usually, a campaign would want to go the proven route of working with state parties and their regional field operations and avoid delegating critical work to networks of outside organizations.
Trump’s potential own goal on voter turnout is hardly an isolated misjudgment. In recent weeks the Trump’s campaign’s decision-making has appeared to be shockingly irrational and disorganized. With these missteps, Trump could be blowing his chances of winning the election. And if he were to win, then those missteps provide a preview of a Trump term that would be even more chaotic and incompetent than the first one.
One of Trump’s biggest head-scratchers in recent weeks has been a string of event and interview cancellations. Trump abruptly canceled a virtual town hall with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Tuesday, citing scheduling changes. Which wouldn’t be that strange except that it comes after a ton of last-second no-shows. My colleague Steve Benen rounded several of them up:
-Trump agreed to appear on CBS’s “60 Minutes” before canceling.
-He agreed to appear on CNBC before canceling.
-He reportedly planned to sit down for an interview with the NBC affiliate in Philadelphia before canceling.
-He was reportedly in conversations for weeks with The Shade Room about a sit-down interview before withdrawing.
-His campaign said he’d debate Kamala Harris more than once, but he soon after scrapped those plans, too.
It’s highly unusual for a presidential candidate to withdraw from so many media appearances, particularly in the final weeks of the election. At this moment, every hour matters. Ever the compulsive self-promoter, Trump would know that every interview is an opportunity to make news, make his closing arguments and stay top of mind for voters. Which makes the cancellations appear to be self-defeating.
Similarly, Trump’s rally strategy is approaching the level of self-sabotage. As I argued last week, the former president’s baffling decision to tour several blue states — some of them repeatedly — in the final weeks of the campaign could cost him major opportunities to persuade swing state voters to cast their ballots for him.
But when he was in a swing state last week, he swayed to music for 40 minutes in what was one of the strangest displays in modern presidential campaign history. As quirky as Trump has always been, he hasn’t ever so powerfully elicited questions of whether he’s in his right mind.
What explains Trump’s streak of increasingly bizarre behavior? Theories abound, from declining mental acuity to fatigue to overzealous attempts to telegraph confidence. I’d guess it’s a combination of all of those factors. What we do know is that the behavior that Trump and his team are exhibiting makes the prospect of another Trump term concerning for reasons other than his awful policy positions and plans. Unpredictability and irrationality are extremely dangerous in a president, especially when it comes to tasks such as managing foreign affairs.
Trump’s apparent exhaustion and inability to follow through with plans makes it possible that he would be more subdued and less effective in pursuing his nationalist and authoritarian agenda. Passing laws requires a lot of work and persuasion, and Trump may be less up to the task than he would’ve been otherwise. But for the most part, Trump’s growing inscrutability is worrying. A clear, rational mind is a nonnegotiable trait for overseeing diplomacy and warfare and managing nuclear risk. And if Trump is more prone to succumb to impulse and emotion, then his commitments to using executive authority to empower himself could grow even fiercer — and more disastrous for American democracy.
Zeeshan Aleem is a writer and editor for BLN Daily. Previously, he worked at Vox, HuffPost and Blue Light News, and he has also been published in, among other places, The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Nation, and The Intercept. You can sign up for his free politics newsletter here.
President Donald Trump is blaming fellow Republicans as his endorsed candidate, Ken Paxton, appears to be in a fierce struggle for a Senate seat in Texas with Democratic challenger James Talarico in a state the GOP has long taken for granted.
Trump, in a lengthy post to Truth Social Thursday, singled out longtime Republican strategist Karl Rove and Sen. John Cornyn, the incumbent who failed to secure the president’s endorsement in a heated primary.
Rove and Cornyn, Trump said, are doing “everything possible” to make it harder for Paxton to defeat Talarico, a state lawmaker and Presbyterian seminarian who is making a suprisingly strong run for Senate in deep red Texas.
“They are hurting Texas and, more importantly, hurting the United States of America!” Trump wrote. “If Ken Paxton loses, it will be because of WEAK and INEFFECTIVE Political Hacks like John Cornyn and Karl Rove, who have ineffectively opposed me for my entire political career.”
Cornyn, a longtime fixture in Texas politics, lost his bid for reelection in a contentious Republican primary in which he and his supporters portrayed Paxton as a deeply flawed candidate. As Election Day approaches, public polling over the past two months has shown Talarico with a narrow edge against Paxton, the state’s attorney general.
Trump urged his supporters to back Paxton.
“Your favorite President (ME!) is asking all of those who supported Senator John Cornyn to UNITE, and immediately switch your support to Ken Paxton,” Trump said. “He will be a Great Senator, just like he is a Great Attorney General. “
The race has also become one of the most expensive non-presidential battles. Talarico raised $64 million this summer — the largest third-quarter haul of any Senate candidate in history. He has raised more than $134 million since launching his campaign last year.
Paxton raised $18 million in the third quarter of 2026 and last month announced a new $20 million ad buy. Earlier this month, though, a Trump operative told POLITICO that MAGA Inc. and its affiliates are could spend nearly $45 million on direct mail, TV and digital advertising in Texas through Oct. 12.
Already, $235 million has been spent by outside conservative groups and party committees against Talarico as national Republicans scramble to boost Paxton.
Some Republicans have grown concerned that the cost of the Texas race is diverting money needed in other states and have expressed frustrations with Paxton after leaked audio showed him blaming Trump for his woes.
Trump easily won Texas in 2024, winning just over 56% of the vote. But concerns about Republicans’ chances this November have surged as the president’s approval rating plummets.
Former Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels said he thinks Vice President JD Vance and other Republicans are wrong to move away from the party’s traditional embrace of free-market economics — and that their shift could create an opening for a “pro-freedom” movement.
“I think they are in error,” Daniels said in an interview when asked about Vance’s criticism of economist Milton Friedman, who championed free-market capitalism.
“I think what Vance is saying is that there are aspects to the free market which can be disruptive of culture and tradition. I mean, that’s what the free market does. It’s dynamic,” he told Blue Light News. “It’s the only mechanism, in my view, for preserving the American dream, and that’s the most important element of our culture.”
The vice president’s intra-party critics have argued that Vance has been moving away from free-market economics and toward a larger role for the government in shaping the economy in his defense of the Trump administration’s economic policies, especially its wide-ranging tariffs.
“What the president is doing is changing 40 years of a failed bipartisan consensus in Washington, D.C., that has sold out American workers and destroyed the underlying economic strength of the United States of America,” Vance said in a Fox News interview last year.
The move is seen by some as Vance testing a more populist and protectionist message as he eyes the Republican presidential nomination in 2028.
But the two men were at one point closer politically. In Vance’s bestseller “Hillbilly Elegy,” Vance described Daniels as his “political hero.” Daniels has said that Vance sought his counsel on running for office in 2018 and Daniels advised against it because it was likely to be a bad year for Republicans.
The vice president’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Daniels’ remarks.
Daniels recently released his new book, “Impatience Is a Virtue.” In it, the veteran of Indiana politics — who also led the Office of Management and Budget under President George W. Bush — detailed his career championing the free market.
Daniels told Blue Light News that President Donald Trump was both a “symptom” and “a propellant” of voters’ discontent, pointing to their “feeling of being patronized, condescended, looked down on, ignored, disrespected.” And Trump’s political success came from his ability to unite and represent these discontented voters.
Still, Daniels argued the evolution of the Republican Party under Trump has created room for a “pro-freedom party” that champions economic freedom and individual autonomy.
“Whether that is the next iteration of this Republican Party or you find some other vehicle, I don’t know,” he said. “But I think that there’s a need, and as I say, there’s certainly, I think, a market for that viewpoint waiting to be expressed by somebody.”
The former governor, now back at Purdue University as the interim president after leading the school for a decade until 2022, sidestepped a question about his party identification and another one on whether he sees Vance emerging as the “pro-freedom” candidate.
“It’s all TBD; I don’t know,” he said of Vance.
Daniels also defended his view on another 2028 hopeful, Democrat Pete Buttigieg, who was the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, during the tail end of Daniels’ governorship.
In his book, Daniels said Buttigieg is smart, but his principal asset that excites Democratic activists is his sexual identity.
Buttigieg became the first openly gay person confirmed to be a Cabinet secretary when he was tapped to lead then-President Joe Biden’s Transportation Department. A spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
“This differentiates him in a way that would be appealing to large portions of the core Democratic electorate,” he said. “Absent that, he would be a less likely national figure.”
TALLAHASSEE, Florida — Two women this week sued former GOP Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz and two others — including a former state legislator — in federal court and accused the men of engaging in an alleged sex trafficking scheme during a time when Gaetz was still in Congress.
The lawsuit, which seeks damages from Gaetz and other defendants, was filed in Orlando by two women who were in their early 20s when they first met Gaetz. The women are not named in the lawsuit. The details mirror allegations that were at the center of a House Ethics Committee probe that found Gaetz had sex with a minor, solicited prostitutes and used illegal drugs.
“The defendants collectively used their public office, power, and wealth to prey on the economic vulnerability of the plaintiffs to commit the acts outlined below,” states the 38-page lawsuit.
That House probe helped derail Gaetz’s bid to become attorney general under President Donald Trump. He resigned from his Northwest Florida congressional seat to seek the post but decided to withdraw his name ahead of a potentially messy confirmation battle in the Senate.
Gaetz, who has repeatedly denied he ever had sex with a minor, said he would vigorously contest the allegations in the lawsuit.
“I look forward to taking the plaintiffs’ depositions because much of the conduct alleged against me is false,” Gaetz said in a text message. “The lawsuit relies almost exclusively on a Congressional committee report that didn’t allow me to confront my accusers. Now I will finally have that chance.”
The civil suit is the latest development in the long-running scandal involving Gaetz, a former ally of Trump who has continuously denied any involvement in underage sex or trafficking of women after news broke in 2021 that the Justice Department was investigating him.
The lawsuit this week by Jane Doe 1 and Jane Doe 2 was first reported by the Miami Herald. It alleges that Gaetz and former Seminole County Tax Collector Joel Greenberg “coordinated the recruitment, payments, drugs and travel to obtain commercial sex acts from young women.” The lawsuit includes former Florida legislator and lobbyist Chris Dorworth because his Central Florida home was the site of a party where he allegedly “participated in the activities alleged there.”
Greenberg is serving an 11-year federal sentence after he pleaded guilty to multiple federal offenses including underage sex trafficking of a minor and wire fraud. Greenberg cooperated with federal investigators who were probing Gaetz but the U.S. Department of Justice closed the investigation without filing charges.
The lawsuit says it “arises from the recruitment and sexual exploitation” that occurred from 2017 through January 2019 and included trips to various locations such as Las Vegas, New York City and the Bahamas. It accuses Gaetz and Greenberg of making promises to help the two women financially or with college bills.
“They led her to believe they would resolve her financial needs as long as she continued to perform sexual acts for them and their associates,” the lawsuit states about Jane Doe 1. “They used the age, wealth and political power gap between themselves and Jane Doe 1 to keep her compliant and silent.”
Jane Doe 2, the lawsuit states, was “paid less” than promised and “through this pattern defendants caused Jane Doe 2 to believe she would lose her education and serious financial harm if she stopped performing sexual acts.”
Stencer Kuvin, a West Palm Beach attorney representing the two women, said in an email that federal law designed to protect sex trafficking victims has a 10-year statute of limitations “which potentially could run [out] next year based upon the allegations in the complaint.”
Gaetz, a firebrand and ally of Trump, was once seen as a potential candidate for Florida governor or attorney general. Since he left Congress, he has hosted his own show on the One America News Network and he was appointed to the board of a nonprofit charged with distributing proceeds from a settlement Florida received after the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill along the Gulf Coast.
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