It’s not clear what Trump does and doesn’t know anymore. His rally in Texas revealed this dilemma

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WWhen you’re a Republican president with a month to go until the midterms and you have to campaign in Texas, you know something is wrong. Or at least you should. But we don’t know exactly what Donald Trump is doing and he doesn’t know it anymore.

At a rally in San Antonio on Wednesday night, the president lobbed the usual insults at James Talarico — the man who polls show could be poised to become the first Democrat to win the entire state of Texas in more than 30 years — and then directly threatened people who might vote for him. He also told strange and twisty stories about veganism and his wife Melania, during which he (presumably) falsely said Melania called him “sir.”

After a long rant intended to attack Talarico’s masculinity – he doesn’t eat manly, manly meat! He is not as masculine as Trump, a man who wants to kill people by firing squad! It’s a “weak, courageless, self-hating, transgender-promoting freak show”! — Trump added that his wife corrected him on the pronunciation of vegan (at the heart of his claims about Talarico is that he is a closeted vegan who only talks about liking ribs to get votes.) “You know, my wife, she said to me, ‘Sir, it’s not vay-gan, it’s vee-gan,'” he said. Because of course, someone like Donald is so masculine he wouldn’t even know how to pronounce that word.

The idea that Melania could call her husband “sir” is indeed confusing. And it was a small mistake in the grand scheme of things – there had been some weirder ones in the Oval Office the day before – but it was telling. Because Trump often seems to lose his train of thought mid-sentence these days, and the fact that he doesn’t seem to realize that he had concocted an anecdote about his wife and one of his lackeys in the space of a few seconds is not encouraging. Then again, maybe he just likes being called “sir” in all areas of his life.

Trump’s insults used to hit hard, but now they’re becoming a little half-baked. His repeated claims during the rally that Talarico was going behind a tent to vomit after eating barbecue during campaign events was stupid and desperate. And while the “you’re not man enough” slogan in Texas is a Republican favorite, it hasn’t done much to tilt the election in Republican Ken Paxton’s favor.

While the Paxton campaign has run ads claiming that Talarico is “too low a T for Texas” and promoted an old clip of Talarico saying that God is non-binary, Talarico’s single response — that it’s all just a red herring to cover up Republican “corruption” — appears to have been more convincing to Texans. He shrugged off the attacks, called his own past comments “cringy” and said wryly that people his age don’t really worry about low testosterone. Meanwhile, almost every poll — including Fox News — shows Talarico in the lead.

To make matters worse, Trump called for a public debate between Talarico and Paxton. This might be a smart move, if Paxton wasn’t the least charismatic man ever seen on a podium.

If Trump’s rally-style campaign, full of rage and chest-thumping, has run its course in red Texas, that’s bad news for MAGA Republicans across the country. Indeed, the San Antonio rally hosted an unusual number of protesters, visible enough that Trump withdrew from the microphone at one point and numerous enough that police escorts had to be called twelve times. This kind of regular interruption really puts a damper on a rally.

San Antonio is a majority-Hispanic city and a working-class city, and those are two intersecting demographics where Trump won a big victory in 2024. But now his support is at an all-time low among Hispanic voters, particularly working-class ones, driven by concerns about the economy and immigration. Those worries weren’t going to go away when they saw the president standing next to a bunch of flags and making jokes about Talarico’s barbecue. Who cares if your candidate eats “a little lettuce” when gas prices are skyrocketing?

Trump’s line of attack against Democrats in general – that there will be “a depression” if they take office and that they will “destroy the economy”, which relies on people buying into his illusion that the economy is doing just fine and that attacking Iran was worth it – is also unfathomably weak. And his threatening assertion at the San Antonio rally that he will “never forgive you” if you vote for Talarico doesn’t do much to shake things up either.

Yes, we’ve seen Trump take petty revenge against members of his social and political circles in recent years, but what are the “unforgiving” Texans like for a man in the last two years of his last presidential term? Nothing very significant, that’s for sure.

In the middle of Wednesday’s rally, the president also reiterated that he would give $5,000 to every American citizen if Republicans retained the House and Senate after the midterms. He claimed it was something he could do because the economy was doing very well, but of course it was really a tacit admission that people are currently suffering from untenable living conditions. It’s also generally a bad idea to brazenly offer bribes for podium votes. Ethics aside, and whether or not your supporters applaud the idea, it can’t help but make you look weak.

And yet Trump’s plan to campaign personally across the country — perhaps every day until the midterms, based on what we’ve heard from Susie Wiles — is based on his idea that he’s so popular that he can turn the tables for some floundering Republican candidates. He told people to imagine it’s him on the ballot when they go to vote. And he seems pathologically incapable of considering that this is what people already imagine, and perhaps the reason why Republicans across the country aren’t doing very well in the polls.

When you show up to try to save the show as the show’s most unpopular member, you really have to have something better to say than the fact that you just approved an execution by firing squad. Even the most ardent defender of Second Amendment rights will not change their vote on this basis. You should consider that maybe the people of Texas don’t care. that a lot about veganism and they don’t even care much about transgender scaremongering.

If you decide to move forward with all of this because you just can’t help it, then you really, Really If you want to keep one of those voters who quietly broke up with you last time, at least remember that your wife doesn’t call you “sir.”