Former Trump aides claim Donald is in 'meltdown' and 'feels the election is slipping from him'... so is 'lighting up the campaign'
Donald Trump is 'lighting up' his campaign staffers as he hunkers down at Mar-a-Lago, two former aides have claimed.
The former president's reported meltdown comes from two staffers who worked in the White House under the former president and have since turned on him, as polls show the race with Kamala Harris is getting tighter by the day.
'I think that he feels this election slipping away from him, and that’s where you’re beginning to see him spiral,' Sarah Matthews, a former Trump spokeswoman told MSNBC.
Republicans and top donors are worried about Trump's flailing strategy as he continues to launch vicious personal attacks on Harris and obsess over her personality instead of core policy issues such as the border, the economy and crime.
Anthony Scaramucci, who claims he maintains close ties with the ex-president's inner circle after an 11-day spell as his communications director, revealed that Trump isn't barnstorming across swing states because 'he's p*ssed'.
Donald Trump is lighting up his campaign staffers as he hunkers down at Mar-a-Lago after his 'terrible' decision to pick JD Vance as VP, insiders have revealed
Trump is due to speak in North Carolina, one of the key swing states, on Wednesday. And he is expected to tour more battleground states next week.
'He picked Vance - he knows Vance was a terrible, terrible pick,' Scaramucci said on the podcast The Rest is Politics.
'He's lighting people up inside his campaign right now about picking Vance.'
The former White House staffer said this is typical behavior from Trump - when things go awry, he starts firing people.
Scaramucci himself was fired as communications director after just ten days in 2017 over an obscene tirade.
Matthews, a Trump aide who quit immediately after the Capitol Riot, has said the U.S. can't survive a second term from her old boss and has refused to support him.
In August 2016 Trump had a similar meltdown, according to Scaramucci, and 'blew everybody out'... which is when he brought in Kellyanne Conway and Steve Bannon as advisors.
While Trump is lying low in Mar-a-Lago and trying to shift the blame for his downward spiral in the polls, his new opponent is striding around swing states with her freshly picked vice president in tow.
The New York Times has however reported that Trump has not lost any confidence in Vance and has been impressed with how he has performed on the campaign trail.
The former president even described his VP pick as a 'political athlete'.
'He picked Vance - he knows Vance was a terrible, terrible pick,' Anthony Scaramucci said. 'He's lighting people up inside his campaign right now about picking Vance'
Not long before Harris took center stage, the former president was riding on a wave of success following his heroic survival of an assassination attempt.
Trump triumphantly entered the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee as he soared in polls and popularity, and more importantly, as Biden's campaign further plummeted into a point of no return.
It was no great surprise to anyone that Biden pulled out of the race - and less surprising still that his own vice presidential pick, Kamala Harris, became the name on the ticket.
But after building a campaign strategy around proving that Biden was unfit to serve a second term, Trump and his advisors were not prepared for what would happen when the 81-year-old actually pulled out of the race.
The campaign was thrown into turmoil when Harris soared in popularity - raising $200 million in donations in just her first week of campaigning and continuously rising in polls.
Trump is reportedly talking to his confidantes about firing his campaign managers Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles (pictured)
Harris quickly gained momentum with the liberal media and Gen Z voters.
Her honeymoon phase in the media has been ongoing since she entered the race - but it was further drawn out by her pick of Minnesota's beloved Governor Tim Walz as VP.
The Harris hype will likely be re-energized yet again in light of the Democratic National Convention, which begins on August 19 in Chicago.
Meanwhile, a top Trump ally told Axios, 'President Trump knows he's the only one who can end the media's honeymoon with Kamala Harris, and he sees a significant opening to do so with Harris' inability to defend her record on inflation and the border.'
'To get past the media force field protecting Harris, however, he knows he needs to be very specific with his policy contrasts and is planning on debuting a hard-hitting stump speech very soon.'
However, despite Trump's alleged awareness of the messaging he needs to adopt to cut Harris's premature victory lap short, instead of doing so he has been shooting low blows at the current VP.
In one disastrous interview with a group of black journalists in Chicago on July 31, Trump claimed that Harris 'happened to turn black' a few years ago, saying that 'all of a sudden, she made a turn' in her identity.
After going at Harris for her race - he then bizarrely called her 'the most beautiful actress ever to live' in a chaotic 'trainwreck' livestream interview with Elon Musk on Monday.
He has described Harris as 'vicious and dumb' and continues to insist that her rally crowds don't exist at his own rallies and on Truth Social, which is a blatantly false claim.
Even fellow Republican Nikki Haley, whom many were hoping Trump would pick as his VP, has called for an end to the ridiculous barrage of insults against Harris.
Haley called for Trump to make a 'serious shift' in campaign strategy in an interview with Fox News on Tuesday.
'I want this campaign to win. But the campaign is not going to win talking about crowd sizes. It's not going to win talking about what race Kamala Harris is. It's not going to win talking about whether she is dumb. You can't win on those things,' Haley said. 'The American people are smart. Treat them like they're smart.'
Despite urges from Republican voices to stop the crazy messaging, 'Trump is struggling to get past his anger,' according to a top Republican source.
On the podcast, Scaramucci says Trump should stick to talking about crime, socialism, border and economy to prove the Democrats are 'the wrong people for America'.
But, according to a Republican source close to Trump, 'he has to convince himself to leave the other garbage behind' in order to get behind the script.
Republican pollster Frank Luntz suggested that Trump has 'the issues' on his side - but his 'persona' is contributing to the drop in polls.
'If it's about issues, Trump is much more likely to be successful. If it's about attributes, Harris is much more likely to be successful, because quite frankly, people like her more than they like him,' Luntz said over the weekend in a CNN interview.
'It's something that, if he's watching this right now, his head is exploding — and that's part of the problem.'
Other Republican sources have said Trump's age, 78, has now become a factor in his own demise - with some even calling him the Biden of the 2024 campaign.
Several join the speculation that Trump might be on the brink of a breakdown.
While Harris's campaign has certainly seen improvement compared to Biden's catastrophic polling numbers, she and Trump are still neck and neck.
New polls from DailyMail.com show Trump up by two points in the race for the presidency.
Where other recent polls show the vice president surging ahead, our survey of 1001 likely voters found that 43 percent would vote for Trump if the election were tomorrow, compared with 41 percent who would vote for Harris.
However, last week the Cook Political Report reset its ratings to 'toss-up' for Georgia, Arizona and Nevada after earlier labeling them as 'lean Republican'.
These states join Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania as the six toss-ups.
