Inside the worst three weeks of Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign
The Aug. 2 dinner at the home of Howard Lutnick, the Cantor Fitzgerald CEO, was a highpowered affair. Among the roughly 130 people who attended were some of Donald Trump’s wealthiest supporters, including the billionaire hedge fund financier Bill Ackman and Omeed Malik, the president of another fund, 1789 Capital.
Some guests hoped Trump would signal that he was recalibrating after a series of damaging mistakes. He did not.
Answering a question that voiced concerns about the upcoming election during a roundtable discussion, Trump said, “We’ve got to stop the steal,” reviving yet again his false claims about the 2020 election — claims that his advisers have urged him to drop because they don’t help him with swing voters.
According to two people present, Trump also brought up his remark, made two days earlier, in which he had questioned Vice President Kamala Harris’ racial identity.
It had been a display of flagrant race-baiting, and it instantly reprogrammed America’s TV news chyrons: He falsely claimed that Harris had only recently decided to identify as Black, and for political purposes.
But Trump showed no regret. “I think I was right,” he told the donors that Friday night.
The fundraiser came amid a stretch of flailing and self-harm that began after President Joe Biden’s July 21 withdrawal from the race and endorsement of Harris.
Trump has found the change disorienting, those who interact with him say. He had grown comfortable campaigning against an 81-year-old incumbent. Suddenly, he finds himself in a race against a Black woman nearly 20 years younger who is drawing large and excited crowds.
The people around
Trump see a candidate knocked off his bearings, nothing like the man who watched last month as thousands of delegates cheered him on the first night of the Republican National Convention. Then, Trump, his ear bandaged, was a living martyr after the assassination attempt two days before.
A spokesman for Trump, Brian Hughes, said that the former president “continues to run a winning campaign and has built a movement focused on making our nation great again.” Another spokesperson, Steven Cheung, insisted that Trump had put forward a “positive” vision for the country that contrasted with “the dangerously liberal policies” of Biden and Harris.
But to Trump’s close allies, that first night in Milwaukee now seems a foggy memory, as if it never happened.
Over the past two