With less than a month until the election, every hour of every day matters for a presidential candidate. Presidential campaigns are forced to make excruciating decisions about which battleground states to put most of their time, money and energy into as they seek decisive edges over their opponents.
That’s what makes former President Donald Trump’s decision to campaign in a number of blue states in these final weeks baffling. Trump is doing events in Colorado, California, Illinois and New York — states that are virtually impossible for him to win. “President Joe Biden won those states by an average of 20 points in 2020, with his 13-point Colorado win the closest,” NBC News reports. “And Colorado is the only one of those states to have voted for a Republican presidential nominee this millennium, backing George W. Bush in 2004.”
It’s possible that Trump is succumbing to his deteriorating instincts.
What is Trump thinking? As always, it’s impossible to know — or whether he even is thinking. The former president has shown signs that suggest declining mental acuity, and his rhetorical patterns are more discursive and difficult to follow. Given his tendency to surround himself with yes-men, it’s possible that Trump is succumbing to his deteriorating instincts, that his campaign strategy is becoming as elliptical as his speech — and that nobody is stepping in to tell him he’s wasting his time. Trump has boasted that he can win New York. All candidates say they’re going to win states it’s clear they won’t. But given Trump’s commitment to touring a bunch of blue states, one wonders whether he is high on his own supply.
Trump’s campaign insists there’s a method to the madness. “Choosing high-impact settings makes it so the media can’t look away and refuse to cover the issues and the solutions President Trump is offering,” a senior Trump campaign adviser told NBC News of the campaign’s blue state strategy. “We live in a nationalized media environment, and the national media’s attention on these large-scale, outside-the-norm settings increases the reach of his message across the country and penetrates in every battleground state.”
According to that theory, this very article is proof that Trump’s bizarro strategy is working. The tendency of the national press to document, comment on and question the wisdom of the strategy purportedly helps Trump garner free attention and win over voters in states he must win.








