Trump again shows his biggest obstacle to win might be himself

As Election Day grows closer and polls grow tighter, Donald Trump has spent a lot of time focusing on his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris.

But his biggest opponent right now might be himself.

On Friday, Trump addressed the Fraternal Order of Police’s National Board of Trustees fall meeting in Charlotte, N.C. — a battleground state Trump needs to win.

As one might expect, the speech was loosely themed around crime and safety, and how Trump plans to address it if elected. But, in typical Trump fashion, it was about much more than that, too — a smorgasbord of ramblings about his legal troubles, the Democratic Party “cheating,” Harris’ political career and President Joe Biden’s golf game.

Chris Cooper, a political science professor at Western Carolina University, told me before Trump’s speech Friday that the former president has a tight line to walk to appeal to both mainstream voters and his supporters without alienating either one. Currently, polls show Trump and Harris running neck and neck in most swing states and within just one point of each other in North Carolina.

“I think what resonates with the crowd who’s in the room may work really well for mobilizing them, but it doesn’t work nearly as well for persuading swing voters. And so I think that’s the quandary that Trump is in,” Cooper said. “You want to mobilize your voters and you want to persuade the small number of persuadable voters, and the same actions that get you one might lose you another.”

It’s a line that Trump has tried, unsuccessfully, to find on abortion, as he has more recently sought to distance himself from abortion bans and the overturning of Roe v. Wade, despite it being something that his evangelical supporters revere him for.

But Friday’s speech was once again a word salad threaded with hyperbole and grievances. In his speech, Trump said Harris and Democrats have “unleashed a brutal plague of bloodshed, crime, chaos, misery and death upon our land” and suggested that Americans “can’t walk outside their apartments and buy a loaf of bread without getting mugged or rapped or shot” (presumably, he meant to say raped).

He later suggested that America has been “taken over” and “conquered” by undocumented immigrants who commit violent crimes. He also seemed to plant the seeds for a potential denial of November’s election results, telling the audience of police officers, “I hope you watch for the voter fraud. … Watch for the voter fraud, because we win without voter fraud.”

It’s clear that someone is trying to keep Trump from acting too much like, well, Trump and directing him to appeal to people with policy rather than prejudice. You can tell when Trump is reading prepared talking points from a teleprompter and when he chooses to abandon it. On Friday, that happened when Trump diverged from his speech about addressing crime to informally poll the audience about whether they preferred the nickname “Crooked Joe” or “Sleepy Joe.”

Discussion of his increased incoherence has clearly rankled Trump, as he recently insisted it is actually a sign of rhetorical genius: “You know, I do the weave,” he said recently. “You know what the weave is? I’ll talk about like nine different things, and they all come back brilliantly together, and it’s like, friends of mine that are, like, English professors, they say, ‘It’s the most brilliant thing I’ve ever seen.’ ”

Trump’s speech clearly resonated with the people in the room, as many of his comments were met with applause and cheers from the crowd. But it likely didn’t do much to earn him any new voters, or silence ongoing concerns about his rambling and fraying tether to reality.

Paige Masten is a columnist for The Charlotte (N.C.) Observer.