"Trump Should Be Running Away With the Election. Why Isn’t He?"

An essay by Oiver Wiseman with the above title is at The Free Press, tellingly limked at Real Clear Politics:

A lot has changed since [July 15] —most importantly Trump’s opponent—and rather than holding an unassailable lead, he is in the middle of a dogfight for the White House. What happened? Part of the story is of a Democratic Party pulling itself together, ditching its senescent candidate, and falling into line behind Kamala Harris. But the other part concerns Donald Trump himself, and the campaign he has chosen to run.

I dom't think it's a coincidence at all that Real Clear Politics likes this essay -- it chraracterizes the current campaign as a "dogfight for the White House" almost entirely bsased on the RCP poll aggregates that mix garbage polls with a few respectaable ones and come up with averages that put Kamala slightly ahead, which justifies the "razor thin" conventional wisdom about the current state of the election. If anything, current reports show visible movement in Trump's direction, on top of the near-universal observation that Trump outperforms the polls on Election Day. For instance,

Former President Donald Trump has surged three points in Pennsylvania since July, while Vice President Kamala Harris has dropped one point, according to a poll.

. . . Trump registered at 43 percent in a July Susquehanna poll conducted from July 22-28, as the Hill noted. Harris, at 47 percent in July, had a four-point edge on Trump, while independent Robert F Kennedy had seven percent of the response.

However, the lead has vanished as Trump, who was endorsed by Kennedy following the independent’s departure from the race, surges heading into the home stretch of the election.

But Wiseman continues,

And yet the presidential race is a toss-up. . . . Is it because she is getting a very easy ride from the media? Okay, that may be part of it. With only a handful of interviews and some help from a sympathetic press corps, Harris has shed her image as the most unpopular vice president in recent history and rebranded as a viable candidate.

But more to the point, Trump has allowed her to rebrand, offering no consistent critique of the country’s eminently critique-able vice president. He flopped so badly in his first debate with her he is now running scared from a rematch.

Again, we're seeing the same imputation that Trump "flopped" the debate that we saw from Sean Trende and Karl Rove, and my answer continues to be that the single memorable line from the night was Trump's:

In Springfield, they are eating the dogs. The people that came in, they are eating the cats. They’re eating – they are eating the pets of the people that live there.

This claim was immediately denounced by the same media that gave Kamala her free ride as a "hoax", while it never took up the hoaxes that Kamala herself raised in the debate, such as the Charlottesville "very fine people" hoax. But as I've been saying, the eating-the-cats meme has gone viral, for a key reason: it calls out the actual damage the surge of quasi-legal immigrants with work permits has done. This is in fact a policy issue that Trump has continued to pursue:

“Get ready to leave,” Trump told Fox News when he was asked what message he would say to the more than 1 million parole migrants. “Especially quickly if they’re criminals, get ready to leave because you’re going to be going out real fast,” he added.

"Parole migrants" covers several categories of quasi-legals who are under various types of parole or protected status but are not formally "legal".

Many of the job-seeking parole migrants fly in from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Ukraine, and elsewhere via commercial flights. These “CHNV” parole migrants get two-year visas to take jobs in the United States while separated from their families at home — much like President George W. Bush’s failed 2001 “Any Willing Worker” plan.

Many other parole migrants and families cross the southern border after getting quasi-legal approval via the “CBP One” cellphone app.

The result is a flood of hard-working, compliant, wage-cutting, rent-spiking workers into Americans’ towns and cities, such as Springfield, Ohio, and New York City.

These parole migrants will work in sweatshop conditions, forced to kick back some of their low pay to "employment agencies" that sponsor them. They're compliant, because if they lose their jobs, they'll be sent back. It appears that the parole migrant policies stem from Biden executve orders that can be canceled as soon as Trump comes into office. It should be noted, though, that a debate-team style discussion of these policies will simply put people to sleep. Wiseman seems to miss this entirely:

Instead of working hard to convince voters Harris is unfit for the top job, the Trump campaign has wasted too much time on two things: stupid stuff and bad stuff.

. . . Second, the bad. . . . Indulging an unproven, sinister fantasy about pet-eating Haitian migrants in Ohio.

Wiseman concludes,

He had the chance to . . . rise above partisanship and lawfare and political violence and occupy the center ground of American politics with a pitch focused on the economy and immigration, all while hammering Harris for her radical past positions and the fact she was likely part of the Biden cover-up, pretending he was competent enough to run for reelection.

I don[t understand. Lawfare and political violence have been tools of the other side -- Fani Willis and Jack Smith on one hand; Thomas Crooks and Ryan Routh on the other. So far, it appears that Trump has defeated both the lawfare and political violence, and as far as I can tell, he's neither unleashed federal and state prosecutors against Kamala nor dispatched assassination squads. Why suggest he's doing these things?

But by the same token, he's been making just what Wiseman thinks he ought to be making, "a pitch focused on the economy and immigration, all while hammering Harris for her radical past positions". The eating the pets meme is, after all, focused on immigration, while he's been running ad after ad showing Kamala herself advocating her radical past positions. What else could he be doing?

What seems to be at the heart of the complaints I've seen recently from Karl Rove and now Oliver Wiseman is that Trump isn't turning into Mitt Romney, some sort of boring pretty-boy non-partisan centrist. He's doing just fine as Donald Trump.