Does Trump Need to Stay ‘On Message?’

Until two weeks ago, when Joe took himself out of the 2024 campaign (I’m convinced he never intended to run anyway,) the bunch surrounding Trump didn’t have to worry about anything their guy said or did because he was going to win no matter what.

Then, all of a sudden, they find themselves not only in a real campaign, but in a campaign their guy might actually lose. So, what do you do now? You tell your guy to do exactly the one thing he can’t do, which is to be someone he’s not.

Trump’s being told that if he wants to recapture the momentum he had against Joe in a competition with Kamala, he has to stay ‘on message,’ which means no more insults about her lack of intelligence, no more rants about her race, no more crazy accusations about how her campaign is using AI to doctor up all those photographs to show big crowds at her events.

I’m not even sure, by the way, that Trump understands what the acronym AI actually means, because if you want to change how a photograph looks online, just run it through an app like Photoshop, a process which has absolutely nothing to do with AI at all. But anyway.

So, Trump goes down to North Carolina yesterday to do a rally before what was charitably described as a ‘medium-sized’ crowd, and in a speech which was advertised as his plan to remake the economy, he predictably…