In the final weeks of the 2020 election, President Donald Trump’s campaign surveyed likely voters in swing states about what political messages stuck with them.

Joe Biden’s message, these voters said, centered on how Trump mishandled the coronavirus pandemic and was unfit for office. But for Trump, those surveyed echoed more than a dozen different messages, including his false claims about the virus, his third Supreme Court nomination and complaints that he deserved a Nobel Peace Prize. Just 3% of the voters recalled something specific Trump had said about Biden.

Now, some Trump advisers and allies say privately they are concerned that the dynamic may be repeating itself four years later. They worry that Trump’s impetuousness and scattershot style on the campaign trail needlessly risk victory in battleground states where the margin for error is increasingly narrow.

At a time when his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, has stepped up her attacks on him as “unstable,” Trump has struggled to publicly hone his message by veering off script and ramping up personal attacks on Harris that allies have urged him to rein in.

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“When he’s good, he’s great, and when he’s off message, he’s not so great,” said David Urban, a Trump adviser. “I don’t think anyone is really changing their mind at this point, but when he distracts from his biggest, broadest messaging, it’s counterproductive because the Harris campaign uses it to turn out their voters.”

During a speech on Saturday in California, he described mail-in ballots as “so corrupt,” reviving one of his false attacks on the 2020 election results, and did a play-by-play of his internal thoughts when he watched SpaceX, Elon Musk’s spaceflight company, fly a rocket back onto its launch site.

On Sunday, in response to a question on Fox News about the possibility of foreign adversaries’ meddling in the election, he reverted to autocratic language by saying “the bigger problem is the enemy from within.” On Monday, he halted a town-hall event in suburban Philadelphia after five questions when two people in the crowd needed medical attention. He spent roughly the next half-hour playing DJ, swaying and grooving in front of his crowd to a playlist he curated from the stage. “Let’s just listen to music,” he said.

Last week, he canceled a CBS interview on “60 Minutes,” in which he and Harris were both scheduled to appear — and has not stopped talking about it. He complained about it during events in Detroit and Reno, Nevada, and again Monday in a social media post at 1:12 a.m.

At the Economic Club of Chicago on Tuesday, he answered a question about whether he would break up Google by complaining about a Justice Department lawsuit against Virginia election officials. When he was reminded the question was about Google, he said he “called the head of Google the other day” to grouse about the difficulty of finding positive news stories about his campaign on the company’s search page.

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Harris and her campaign have gone on the offensive by using Trump’s rambling against him, attacking him in ads, in speeches on the campaign trail and in interviews.

Internal Harris campaign research showed that one of the most effective ways to persuade voters to support the vice president was by portraying Trump as unstable and Harris as a steady leader who would strengthen America’s security, according to two Harris officials who insisted on anonymity to describe private data.

In the past two weeks, the Harris campaign has flooded the airwaves in battleground states with a pair of television ads to underscore these themes. One spot features warnings from Trump’s former top defense officials to paint him as “too big of a risk.” Another features endorsements for Harris from a bipartisan group of national security officials.

“Even former Trump administration officials agree there’s only one candidate fit to lead our nation — and that’s Kamala Harris,” the narrator says.

Harris said the former president was “quite unstable and unfit” during an interview on Monday with The Shade Room, a digital entertainment publication. In a second interview that day with independent Black journalist Roland Martin, Harris pointed to Trump’s false claims that Haitian migrants were eating their neighbors’ pets.

“This man is dangerous,” she said.

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Anna Kelly, a spokesperson for the Republican National Committee, which is supporting the Trump campaign, said Trump’s “message is clear and consistent: President Trump’s agenda for America’s working men and women will fix our broken economy to lower costs and secure the border to make our communities safe.”

In Prescott Valley, Arizona, on Sunday, Trump’s scripted remarks hewed tightly to the anti-immigration message that has become central to his campaign. He stayed on track for the first half-hour of the event before taking a more scenic route to the finish.

After about 25 minutes, he told the crowd he wanted to tell “one quick story” about a friend with a car plant in Mexico.

But he never finished his tale. Instead, he lost the thread one minute later as he complained that if he mispronounced one word he would be accused of being “cognitively impaired.” Then, he botched the phrase by saying President Joe Biden was the one who was “cognitively repaired” and referred to the election as 3-1/2 months away, not 3-1/2 weeks.

About 20 minutes later, Trump seemed ready to wrap up his speech. He promised the crowd would see him again soon and said he was thinking about residents on the East Coast suffering after the recent storms.

“So in closing,” Trump continued, “I just want to say Kamala Harris is a radical left Marxist rated even worse than Bernie Sanders or Pocahontas.”

He proceeded to speak for 17 more minutes.

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This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

By Michael C. Bender/Jordan Gale
c. 2024 The New York Times Company