When I left Donald Trump after our interview, I was somewhat startled to pass eight men in full riot gear, marching toward his Trump Tower office.
It was a stark reminder of the two assassination attempts. Trump was about to fly to Pennsylvania, and these guys were locked and loaded.
I’d been told that he would use the old Reagan line that Saturday night: Are you better off now than you were four years ago?
How long, I wondered, before he goes off script?
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Trump had told me he was going to Arnold Palmer’s hometown in the Keystone State.
What I didn’t know was that he would describe the late golfer as "all man" and marvel at the supposed size of his male endowment. He also used the S-word to describe Kamala Harris. So much for sticking to the script.
Critics, including the vice president, have been describing Trump as exhausted, based on one second-hand quote, but he didn’t look tired to me at all. If he was speaking in a softer voice, that’s because we were practically knee to knee in the tower’s library room.
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This was my second sitdown with the former president in a few months, and I pushed him on a wide range of topics. How could he call Jan. 6 a "day of love" when police were being attacked? Why, despite the "60 Minutes" editing fiasco on the Kamala interview, would you try to yank CBS’s license? How can you call your political opponents "the enemy within"? Would you engage in retribution? Will you admit the falsehood of "they’re eating the dogs, they’re eating the cats?"
He dug in, even on that last one.
Whether you like or dislike Trump, "'Morning Joe' producers and other producers that watch us and all the producers that watch us – this is not just rhetoric," Steve Bannon said. "You cannot have a constitutional republic and allow what these deep-staters have done to the country."
Kash Patel says "we will go out and find the conspirators, not just in government but in the media… We’re going to come after you, whether it’s criminal or civilly," but only based on the facts and the law.
Now here’s the sense I’ve gotten from my reporting.
With just over two weeks to go, Trump has settled on his closing message. It’s immigration and the economy. He may digress by cooking fries at McDonald’s, as a way of doubting Kamala’s teenage stint there, he may use more profanity, but the final appeal is based on those two issues, period.
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The Trump camp believes that one ad that has moved the numbers is Harris’ past embrace of taxpayer funding for federal inmates to get gender-reassignment surgery. That seemed questionable even to Charlamagne Tha God in their interview. Harris says she simply followed the law in the same way Trump did.
The former president is trying to rebrand his effort by promising a New Golden Age. That seems a clear response to Harris touting a New Way Forward. Both are claiming the mantle of the "change" candidate with most voters seeing the country as on the wrong track–the incumbent vs. the former incumbent.
Trump did get off a funny line with me about Kamala moving to the center. "She’s become MAGA. I’ll send her a hat."
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But Trump and his strategists are mystified by what they see as the vice president’s lack of a closing message and failure to win over as many Black supporters as Joe Biden had. There’s an emphasis on abortion rights, of course, and loud warnings about Trump being unstable and unhinged. But is there anything that ties it all together?
Trump has a longtime habit of asking everyone around him, including makeup artists, what they think, as a kind of focus group. "Are you confident?" he’s been asking lately. "Are you confident?"
The answer he’s been hearing: Yes, but you’ll win narrowly.
