Donald Trump is deeply threatened by Kamala Harris – and desperately flailing

Kamala, you’re fired!” shouted Donald Trump. Then he pleaded: “You’re fired. Get out. Get out. Get out, Kamala!” The crowd cheered at his rally on 26 August in Glendale, Arizona, as though approving his order. But the invocation of the magic words he recited at the climax of every episode of The Apprentice failed to make her phantom disappear.

Trump’s advisers sneak policy material into his stump speech that he must read as it scrolls on his teleprompter. They want to channel him into speaking about “the issues”. But he has revolted against them and “the issues”. “They always say, ‘Sir, please stick to policy, don’t get personal,” he complained to a rally. He turned to his Maga masses to give him license. “Should I get personal, or should I not get personal?” The crowd cheered as he knew it would. It was the poll result he wanted. “My advisers are fired!”

Trump’s narcissism is his grand strategy. No adviser trying to calibrate him to polls can dislodge it. Both Kamala Harris and his advisers constrain and threaten him. He views the vice-president’s presence as an injustice. He had beaten Joe Biden. His withdrawal and her emergence were the implementation of the far-right replacement theory. The entire scenario has left Trump on the stage in a play for which his only new lines added to the script are that he is transparently faking it to be sort of for abortion before he is against it as he always was. He announced he will vote to uphold a ban after six weeks in Florida and against the state’s abortion referendum to overturn it. He cries that he is the victim, as he is always the victim when he does not get his way. His irrepressible impulse is to trash the woman. The advisers who seek to tamp him down are his adversaries.