A Trump campaign in which Trump is secondary

One of the strengths that allows Donald Trump to overcome his huge weaknesses enough to be a viable national candidate his ability to monopolize attention. This allowed him to break the Party Decides model in the 2016 primaries, and in the general election, the only time Clinton got more coverage than Trump — including during the DNC — is when 1)James Comey was falsely implying that she was a crook or 2)the media concluded that she was about to die.

A Democratic candidate attracting more attention for non-scandal reasons is something new under Trump’s orange sun:

The momentum of Vice President Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign helped push the ratings for the Democratic National Convention past the Republican festivities for former President Trump.

Nielsen data showed that Harris’ well-received acceptance speech was watched by 29 million viewers across 15 networks.

The figure is 14% higher than for Trump’s speech, which scored 25.4 million viewers July 19. Harris also drew substantially more than the 24.6 million viewers who watched Joe Biden’s acceptance speech at the convention in 2020 and about the same as the 29.8 million viewers who tuned in to Hillary Clinton in 2016.

Harris helped herself by keeping her speech to 37 minutes. Trump’s 90-minute-plus stem-winder went on well past midnight on the East Coast.

Incidentally, relative brevity is an underrated asset for a public speaker — Harris reacting intelligently to losing in 2020 by taking too much bad advice continues to pay off.

If this can cause Trump to go on tilt, all the better:

Even some of Donald Trump’s supporters are now asking the question that was the undoing of Joe Biden: is the former president fit for office?

But while Biden’s run for re-election was largely sunk by a single disastrous televised debate before a national audience, Trump is ramping up doubts with each chaotic, disjointed speech as he campaigns around the country.

While rambling discourse and outrageously disprovable claims, interspersed with spite and vitriol, may seem nothing new to many of Trump’s supporters and critics alike, the former president appears to have been driven to new depths by suddenly finding himself running against Kamala Harris a month ago.

Trump has only grown more infuriated as his poll lead over Biden evaporated, with Harris opening up a clear, if narrow, lead. The vice-president’s tactic of mocking Trump more than arguing with him appears to have incensed him further.

I think there’s a non-trivial chance that Trump actually uses the n-word during the debate at this point.