Donald Trump has never avoided the spotlight. Mugging for the cameras his entire life, he plastered his name on steaks and vodka, colleges and hotels, books and board games. He turned a presidential campaign into a vortex that no media attention can escape.
So, it is curious that Trump has become something of a wallflower in the final days of his presidential campaign.
He ducked out of a rematch debate with Kamala Harris even though a majority of Americans want to see one. He was too afraid of another in-person showdown—even on the friendly, fact-checking-free turf of Fox News. He declined a primetime interview on 60 Minutes and its enormous national audience, letting Harris own the spotlight again before whining about the interview and threatening to revoke CBS’ broadcasting license for making standard edits for brevity. He has, of course, continued to hide medical records, even after Harris made hers public and explicitly taunted him to show his.
With in-person voting only a few weeks away and over 4 million votes already cast, Trump hasn’t done a mainstream media interview in over a month, limiting himself only to far-right media and increasingly unhinged rallies.
Harris, meanwhile, has been on offense, from pop culture podcasts to big traditional media to an interview on Fox News. Harris and Walz also have a much more aggressive campaign schedule in the battleground states, appearing at more rallies in more places than Trump and Vance. The Republican nominee has been reduced to griping to his devotees on Truth Social about how Fox News will go easy on his opponent.
Trump advisors must believe that the more normie voters see of their boss, the less they will like him or be persuaded to his cause. Harris, by contrast, is trying to get in front of as many voters—of all stripes—as possible. Her team is convinced that the more people see and hear from her, the likelier she is to win.
Recent polling from Gallup seems to confirm this: Harris leads Trump on likeability, honesty, and character by significant margins. Sixty percent of Americans in the poll believe Harris is “likable” compared to Trump’s 38 percent; she leads by 13 percent on “has strong moral character, 8 percent on who is “honest and trustworthy, and by 5 percent each on “cares about the needs of people like you” and “Is someone you would be proud to have as president.” No wonder Trump’s campaign is keeping him out of the limelight.
This is reflected in each candidate’s field strategy. Harris is running a largely traditional ground game, albeit of unprecedented size and scope: persuading the most frequent voters on the center and center-right, mobilizing heavily to turn out left-leaning voters who cast ballots less reliably, and pushing to register as many new friendly voters as possible. Trump’s strategy is different and untested. Once Trump took over the Republican National Committee, he fired the GOP’s experienced field staffers and, as my colleague Bill Scher has noted, turned his operation over to organizations run by inexperienced players like Charlie Kirk and Elon Musk—with predictably incompetent results.
Whatever their effectiveness, Trump’s allied groups’ strategy is less to persuade frequent voters tuned in to the issues or to turn out Republicans who don’t always vote but to persuade people who do not pay attention to politics or vote to turn out often for the first time. Right-leaning organizations have assembled lists of infrequent voters who may be Trump-sympathetic (typically younger men) to persuade to vote. Trump’s team believes, based on past performance, that his traditional voters will show up with little extra effort needed.
Trump’s final pitch to voters doubled down on rhetoric that can only be described as racist, authoritarian, and even fascist. He has been telling women at his rallies that they won’t need to worry about abortion or equal rights because he will be their “protector.” At a rally in Scranton, Pennsylvania, he said in a speech reeking of chauvinist paternalism: “You will no longer be abandoned, lonely, or scared. You will no longer be in danger…You will no longer have anxiety from all of the problems our country has today. You will be protected, and I will be your protector.”
On immigration, Trump calls the United States “Occupied America” and declared on his social network that November 5 will be “liberation day” and that he will rescue “every town that has been invaded and conquered” by “vicious and bloodthirsty criminals.” The ex-president vows he will invoke the 1798 Alien Enemies Act that was previously used as justification for Japanese internment camps.
This is not rhetoric designed to win the votes of normal Americans, nor is it used in places everyday Americans typically watch or read about. Its purpose is to enrage a disaffected authoritarian mob so extremely far right that it rarely even participates in the electoral process.
If Trump wins the electoral college with this gamble on extremism, these are the people to whom he will be most loyal and accountable. He just doesn’t want you to know about it until it’s too late.
