Donald Trump Has Nothing Else

Donald Trump spent his weekend talking about something he just can’t let go: his 2020 election loss. During an Atlanta rally, he attacked the state’s top Republicans he claims let it all happen. “They want us to lose,” Trump said of Georgia Governor Brian Kemp and Brad Raffensperger, the secretary of state he tried to pressure into “finding” him enough votes to defeat Joe Biden that cycle. “Atlanta is like a killing field” under their leadership, Trump said. “The state has gone to hell.”

For some of his Republican supporters, the taunts mostly renewed worries that the former president’s preoccupation with the last election could hamstring him. “My focus is on winning this November and saving our country from Kamala Harris and the Democrats,” Kemp responded. “Not engaging in petty personal insults, attacking fellow Republicans, or dwelling on the past. You should do the same, Mr. President.” For Democrats and Republicans not on the Trump train, his grievance-filled rally was simply another data point demonstrating how played out this man is—how consumed he and his party are by his personal resentments. “This is now starting to not be Donald Trump’s problem,” Geoff Duncan, Georgia’s former Republican lieutenant governor, who is supporting Harris in November, told CNN on Sunday. “This is starting to be the Republican Party’s problem.”

To be clear, Trump and his grievances have been the GOP’s problem for a while now; this is, after all, a party that has spent much of the last decade under Trump’s spell, excusing the inexcusable over and over again as they named him their standard-bearer for three consecutive cycles. But Harris’s rise and the surge of Democratic energy following Biden’s decision last month to pass the baton seem to have inflamed Trump’s sense of desperation and bitterness—and left his allies scrambling to recapture the momentum they were trumpeting just a few weeks ago at the Republican National Convention. At the time, Republicans were unified and bullish about November. A supposedly “changed” Trump said he wanted to “unify” the country after surviving an assassination attempt at a Pennsylvania rally. Biden was in quicksand following a lousy debate performance in June. Democrats appeared to be in disarray. Days later, everything flipped: Biden dropped out; Democrats united around Harris; and Trump—whose post-shooting rebirth was always greatly exaggerated—quickly reverted to who he’s always been.

In fact, as Trump himself acknowledged at a July 28 rally, he may have “gotten worse”—an assessment driven home by a racist, misogynistic appearance at a National Association of Black Journalists conference last Wednesday that was shocking, even by Trump’s standards. “She was Indian all the way,” Trump said of Harris in a roomful of Black journalists in Chicago. “All of a sudden, she made a turn, and she became a Black person.” It’s a line even his supporters have warned him against: “Every day we’re talking about her heritage, and not her terrible, dangerous liberal record throughout her entire political life is a good day for her and a bad day for us,” Lindsey Graham said on Fox News Sunday. But Trump has only doubled down, mocking her name during his Atlanta rally and even reviving the racist birtherism he began spewing against Barack Obama more than a decade ago.

Birtherism, loyalty demands, obsession with crowd sizes—we’ve heard all this before. The question, as always, is: At what point will Republicans finally decide they’ve heard enough? “He’s a felonious thug who walks down the street and throws sucker punches at people like Brian Kemp, like African American journalists, like John McCain, and the list goes on and on and on,” Duncan said on CNN Sunday. “And the Republican Party is content sitting across the street watching it happen and not calling him out, not jumping into that fight and saying, ‘You are wrong for us.’”