Donald Trump needs an intervention.
He needs his friends and political allies to lock him in a room, sit him down, look him in the eye and tell him that if he doesn’t change his ways, he’s probably going to lose in November.
They need to tell him that he’s been lucky in the past, but he can’t count on luck to carry him over the finish line once again. They need to remind him about how lucky he was in 2016, when he had the good fortune to run against a candidate many Americans saw as even less likable than Trump himself.
They need to remind him that in 2024 he got lucky again — when it looked like he would run against a diminished Joe Biden, who came off as feeble in that disastrous presidential debate.
But when Biden dropped out, Trump’s luck may have run out.
Now he’s running against a 59-year-old woman of color. She’s the new face in the campaign. Trump has been relegated to the role Biden once played of the old white guy.
“Harris,” as E.J. Dionne put it in the Washington Post, “instantly flipped the age issue against Trump. His often-disjointed screeds suddenly felt like the ravings of a grumpy old man, not entertaining breaks from politician-speak.”
Trump’s political friends, along with his pals who slobber all over him on conservative cable television, need to tell him that calling Kamala Harris “crazy” … and a “bum” … and “low IQ” … and “lyin’ Kamala Harris” — and now behaving as if he’s still in third grade by calling her “Kamabla” — may go over with supporters who are entertained by childish name-calling. But suburban women and college-educated moderate voters in general — the ones who likely will decide the presidential election — aren’t laughing.
And his friends need to tell him something else, even though it’s something he could never believe: That while he was once the glitzy star who caught the attention of voters who were tired of the same old politics, he has become the one thing that you can never be in the world of TV (where campaigns are run). They need to tell him he’s become … boring.
His act has become tiresome. How many times do we want to hear about how those evil Democrats stole the 2020 election out from under him? Voters don’t want to see the same show over and over again. Trump’s friends need to tell him that it’s not 2016 anymore, when everything he did was new and (to some, anyway) refreshing.
We’ve been through a lot this political season — a historically bad debate, a near-assassination, the departure of a sitting president from his party’s ticket and the “coronation” of his vice president. So anything can still happen. It’s possible, I guess, for Trump to get lucky again. But counting on luck is a risky bet.
After he was shot, it was reasonable to wonder if there’d be a new Donald Trump, one changed by a near-death experience. We’ve since learned that if there’s a new Donald Trump, he behaves a lot like the old Donald Trump.
He’s still griping about how he really won four years ago, about how he should never have been impeached. And at a rally in Atlanta, Trump went out of his way to call the popular Republican governor of Georgia a “bad guy” for not stopping a local district attorney from prosecuting him for trying to overturn the 2020 election results in the state. Someone needs to tell the former president that Georgia is one of those important battleground states that he needs to win in November and that bad-mouthing the governor was just plain dumb.
While Kamala Harris is talking about the future, Donald Trump is mired in the past. When luck runs out, hard work has to kick in.
The question is whether Trump is capable of hard work, whether he can focus, if he has the discipline to stay on message, to make sure voters know that Harris and her new running mate, Tim Walz, are far to the left of most American voters.
But there’s plenty of evidence to suggest that Donald Trump isn’t capable of doing what’s in his own best interest. That’s why he needs an intervention. But that requires friends who aren’t afraid to tell him what he needs to hear — and a candidate not afraid to listen.
Telling Trump inconvenient truths requires a modicum of courage. It is no secret that if he thinks you’ve turned on him, he very likely will turn on you, and in a very public way.
I’ve written before that profiles in courage are hard to come by — but profiles in cowardice are a dime a dozen. Unless Trump’s friends show some courage, there’s a good chance that 2024 will end for him the same way 2020 did.
Bernard Goldberg is an Emmy and an Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University award-winning writer and journalist. He is the author of five books and publishes exclusive weekly columns, audio commentaries and Q&As on his Substack page. Follow him @BernardGoldberg.
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