Opinion: Trump’s alarmist campaign is focused on the wrong voters

OAKS, Pa. — Donald Trump’s “town hall” rally in this Philadelphia suburb Monday night careened from worrisome to deeply weird, even for a politician always more enamored with spectacle than policy.
This was the latest stop on the Republican presidential nominee’s doom-and-gloom tour. You know the drill by now. In Trump’s vastly oversimplified version of America, President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris are the authors of our nation’s decline.
He again offered his promise to somehow boost America’s economy by deporting millions of people and encouraging more drilling for oil.
But back-to-back emergencies at the rally ‒ two people packed into a large hall appeared to suffer from heat exhaustion and required medical attention ‒ punched a 20-minute hole in the event. South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, serving as moderator, appeared flummoxed about how to proceed.
The former president took over, calling on his staff to fill the room with recorded music, as if he were just some a guy at home asking Alexa to play Luciano Pavarotti, Elvis Presley and others.
”Would anybody else like to faint?” Trump asked as the second person was carried out of the hall and the crowd started to thin. He then stayed on stage, bopping about to the tunes, while some lingered to watch.
Monday’s slap-happy approach to campaigning came even as Trump has shifted into darker and darker rhetoric.
The campaign’s vibe feels zeroed in on voters already on his side, at a time when most presidential candidates are trying to expand their reach to undecided and persuadable voters.
Harris knows this, and her campaign has been working to beef up what had been some pretty bare bones policy proposals that she offers to voters. She held a far more traditional rally in Erie, on the other side of Pennsylvania, Monday evening.
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Trump has never been capable or interested in offering detailed plans about anything. He campaigned for nearly a decade on a slogan about destroying the Affordable Care Act. But when pressed during a debate last month about what he would replace it with, he embarrassed himself by meekly offering that he has “concepts of a plan.”
Trump’s simplistic playbook says now is the time to ramp up appeals to fear and hatred, to sow division while improbably also offering himself up as the only solution to those maladies.
Will that kind of rhetoric work again for Trump, as it did in 2016? Or will it drive away the very undecided voters he should be appealing to, like in 2020?
Let’s do a quick debunk for the lies Trump trots out the most during his rallies, including this town hall before it went so weirdly off the rails.
He paints a country under siege from wave after wave of illegal immigration. To make that as vivid as possible, Trump is willing to cast wildly inaccurate aspersions about people in places like Springfield, Ohio, and Aurora, Colorado, even as Republican officials in those areas plead with him to stop misleading people.
The truth: Apprehensions of migrants at the southern border fell again last month, matching levels seen during Trump’s one term in office.
He also blames Biden and Harris personally for inflation, with a focus on groceries and gas prices.
The truth: Inflation hit a three-year low last month.
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And Trump insists that any economic woes experienced by Americans can be cured with his simple and silly “drill, baby, drill” mantra.
The truth: U.S. oil production is at an all-time high during Biden’s presidency.
So these scraps that Trump offers as plans crumble when examined up close. No wonder he hates fact-checking.
Trump sounds scared of late, lashing out with three weeks until the election. It’s all about designed distraction.
He drew attention and criticism for backing out of a CBS News interview with “60 Minutes.” On Thursday, Trump blew a gasket on his social media site Truth Social, claiming Harris “should be forced to concede” the election” because “60 Minutes” edited some of her responses.
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Harris, who turns 60 next week, on Sunday hit swing state North Carolina, where she criticized Trump, 78, for being less than transparent with his health records.
And where was Trump? On Fox News, responding to host Maria Bartiromo’s question about the potential for violence in the election by blaming “radical left lunatics” who should be “very easily handled by, if necessary, by the National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military.”
Trump has good reason to be scared. He’s already been convicted on 34 felony counts in New York for running a business rife with fraud. He faces a federal trial in Washington for his attempts to overturn the 2020 election. Jack Smith, the special counsel running that case, is also attempting to revive a separate federal indictment charging Trump with keeping and refusing to return classified documents.
Those federal cases fold if Trump is president and his pick for attorney general is calling the shots. They keep on coming if Harris holds the White House.
So, during a campaign trip to Aurora on Friday, he declared that Harris is a “criminal” because of how the Biden administration deals with migrants and the southern border.
Listen to Trump long enough and you can hear what scares him most. You just have to understand that he projects that fear onto others, sort of how his campaign projected an odd and eclectic playlist across a dwindling rally to distract from how weird it all was.
Follow USA TODAY elections columnist Chris Brennan on X, formerly known as Twitter: @ByChrisBrennan
(This column has been updated to fix a typo.)