Former President Donald Trump’s brash speech, which catapulted him on the political scene in 2015, has only become more unfiltered in the final days of the 2024 election.
While supporters of the former president embrace his untraditional ways, some say he should ease up in order to win over swing voters.
Republican Kendra Ashwood from Kannapolis, North Carolina, said she believes Trump could take the edge off “just a little bit.”
“I think he’s being a little too headstrong right now, which we all know he is. That’s great as a businessman, and that’s what this country needs, but we also need values,” said Ashwood, who attended Trump’s rally in Concord, North Carolina. “We need to come back to our core values of the United States of America, and I think he can get us back.”
Trump spoke for 12 minutes at a Pennsylvania rally about local hero Arnold Palmer, including a reference to the golfer’s anatomy, said that Chinese President Xi Jinping knows he’s “f****** crazy,” and described his Democratic opponent as a “s***** vice president.”
“Arnold Palmer was all man, and I say that in all due respect to women, and I love women, but this guy, this guy, this is a guy that was all man,” Trump said Sunday. “This man was strong and tough, and I refuse to say it, but when he took showers with the other pros, they came out of there, they said, ‘Oh my god, that’s unbelievable.’ I had to say it.”
The Harris campaign was already working up messaging that Trump, 78, is unhinged and unstable, and the trio of vulgar utterances gave extra fuel to the fire.
“When he does speak at a rally, have you noticed he tends to go off script and ramble?” Harris said during a rally in Georgia. “And generally for the life of him cannot finish a thought. And he has called it ‘the weave.’ But I think we here will call it ‘nonsense.’ For these reasons and more, it is time to turn the page.”
Harris has argued that Trump’s behavior demeans the office of the presidency.
While Harris arguing that Trump is unfit for office is to be expected, there is some evidence that his colorful language could hurt him with the voters he needs most.
Trump appears to be gaining with black and Hispanic voters, and is on a general polling upswing where he’s leading in all seven swing states in the RealClearPolitics average. But all of those leads are by less than 2 percentage points, and Trump could be risking further losses with educated voters, independents, and women.
Republican Amy Koch, a former GOP majority leader in the Minnesota state senate, is an undecided voter this year.
“There are independents who are willing to say, ‘I don’t like the economy, don’t like what’s happening on immigration. I’m not sold on Harris as a president,’” she said. “They start flirting with the idea of Trump, and then he says something like this and they go ‘nevermind.’”
Koch will not be voting for Harris, but she isn’t sure yet whether she will vote for Trump. She may not know until she’s in the voting booth.
Both Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaigns are working overtime to reach undecided voters, with advisers for both campaigns telling the New York Times that younger voters, particularly black and Latino ones, are most up for grabs. Harris’s campaign also believes it can sway some white college-educated voters.
A plank of the Harris campaign consists of appealing to the moderate “Nikki Haley Republicans” or those who support former Wyoming GOP Rep. Liz Cheney.
“What Donald Trump represents is, in many ways, just cruel and not the kind of dignity and the kind of person that that we all want to be able to look up to,” Cheney said Monday during an appearance with Harris.
Trump counters by boasting about his gains with non-white voters. His campaign has given less attention to its status with white voters.
In a piece for National Review, conservative columnist Henry Olsen speculated that the reason why is that Harris has nearly doubled President Joe Biden’s 2020 support among college-educated whites. What’s more, those voters are overrepresented in Midwestern states both campaigns need to win in order to secure the White House.
The question for the Trump camp is whether his “unhinged” behavior is a feature or a bug of his campaign. He’s won the GOP presidential nomination three times in a row and appears to be in his best polling position ever going into a general election.
Koch agrees that Trump’s personality is a big part of his political aura. She would like to see more moments like Trump’s star turn at a Pennsylvania McDonald’s. The stop trolled Harris about her unverified claims to have worked there, which reporters shouted questions to her about Monday, and cast Trump as relatable and fun.
“I’d like to see more of that,” Koch said. “And less of rambling about things like Arnold Palmer’s junk.”
The Harris campaign is hoping to place doubt in the voter’s mind about whether this is just Trump being Trump or whether he’s beginning to slip mentally. Harris has called for him to release his medical records and unveiled an ad Sunday saying he’s unfit to serve as president.
But Trump’s supporters say he’s fine, that Democrats never seemed concerned about the advanced age of President Joe Biden, and that Harris seems too eager to deflect attention away from herself.
“Anytime she’s asked a question, she doesn’t have an answer,” said Leslie Simms, a retiree who attended Trump’s North Carolina rally on Monday. “It always goes back to ‘Donald Trump this. Donald Trump that’ because she doesn’t have any answers.”