This boy is exhausted
By 
Trance dance Don’s cognitive difficulties are beginning to break containment, Axios!
Former President Trump’s planned appearance at a National Rifle Association event next week was cancelled Thursday, the latest in a slew of scuttled public appearances and interviews by the former president in recent weeks.
Why it matters: With only 17 days to go until Election Day, the spate of cancellations gives voters fewer chances to hear from Trump before heading to the polls in a coin toss race.
Vice President Kamala Harris, on the other hand, has been on a media blitz after enduring criticism from Republicans about a perceived lack of interviews.
In the appearances he has made, Trump’s rhetoric has grown more violent and nativist. In recent weeks, he has decried his critics as the “enemy from within” and fanned the flames of false conspiracy theories about migrants.
“Trump’s handlers are preventing him from making all but the most tightly controlled public appearances because he is losing any inhibition when he doesn’t stop speaking entirely” is just a straightforward story, but there have been all too many stages of the Trump saga when it wouldn’t be reported that way. Harris going on Fox in this context was especially shrewd.
Even the famously wired-for-Trump Politico Playbook can’t avoid the obvious:
A ONE-TWO PUNCH — With 18 days left until Election Day, VP KAMALA HARRIS will be hitting the road with the two most popular members of her party: BARACK and MICHELLE OBAMA.
A senior Harris campaign official says that two separate events are set for next week. Harris and the former president will rally together in Georgia on Thursday. The former first lady and Harris will be together in Michigan on Saturday. Both events will be held at early-voting sites.
This will be the first time Harris appears with either during the election — and it’s also the first time Mrs. Obama has hit the road for the Harris campaign.
[…]
NO SHADE — Recently, it’s become something of a pattern: Trump is scheduled for an interview with a neutral media outlet, the date nears and then … things fall apart.
It happened just this week to planned Trump sit-downs with NBC in Philadelphia and CNBC’s “Squawk Box” — and that’s on the heels of him backing out of a “60 Minutes” episode earlier this month.
Why does this keep happening? Playbook has learned that yet another outlet was given an explanation by Trump’s team for why their own interview wasn’t coming to fruition: exhaustion.
The Trump campaign had been in conversations for weeks with The Shade Room about a sit-down interview. The site, which draws an audience that is largely young and Black, hosted an interview with Harris just last week.
But as no interview materialized, Shade Room staff began feeling that feet were being dragged inside Trump’s campaign. No date was ever set, we’re told, but the intention was to try and work toward a sit-down.
In a conversation earlier this week, when describing why an interview hadn’t come together just yet, a Trump adviser told The Shade Room producers that Trump was “exhausted and refusing [some] interviews but that could change” at any time, according to two people familiar with the conversations.
To make up for a lack of a Trump interview this close to the election, those two people say Trump-supporting rapper WAKA FLOCKA FLAME was offered up as an alternative.
I don’t know if the Tough Energetic Kamala v. Exhausted Old Newsmax Grandpa narrative will affect any late-breaking voters, but having lived through 2016 it sure beats the alternative.
…further compare and contrast:
On Saturday, Vice President Harris will be joined by Lizzo in Detroit for a get out the vote event and, later that day, by Usher in Atlanta for a rally. @NBCNews— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) October 18, 2024
My guess is Trump’s staff has realized that the old man is cuckoo bananas and are doing everything possible to prevent persuadable voters from seeing him. https://t.co/kwIapmEi6S— Jon Favreau (@jonfavs) October 17, 2024