Former President Donald Trump doesn’t like being called a “freak,” but the emails released by members of the Trump-Vance campaign in recent days could at least be described as peculiar.
Among other questionable claims, emails have been circulating since Sunday claiming that even in the hefty of a national campaign, the two candidates had time to call little-known voters by name and profess their love for them — before asking for money.
Trump’s campaign was on a roll after his June 27 debate with spectral President Joe Biden. But since Trump picked the Ohio senator, he has struggled to find his footing. JD Vance as his vice presidential running mate July 15th.
Biden dropped out of the race a week later. Vice President Kamala Harris quickly consolidated support to succeed him, reviving flagging Democratic hopes when she did so.
Republicans already had problem with women — especially since Republicans nominated US Supreme Court justices in 2022 ended national abortion protection under the Roe v. Wade ruling.
It didn’t assist that a week after Vance was elected, an interview from 2021 resurfaced in which attacked Harris for not having biological children. He claimed that the country was run by Democrats and that they “a bunch of childless cat people who are unhappy with their lives and the decisions they’ve made, and they want the rest of the country to be unhappy too.”
Then last week, Trump appeared at a black journalists’ convention and called ABC’s Rachel Scott, who is black, “disgusting” and “hostile” for confronting him with some of his earlier racist statements. Then Trump was furious falsely stated that Vice President Harris misled voters about her ethnicity. He claimed that she had only recently accepted her black heritage and suggested that she did so only to gain political advantage.
Harris’s mother is Indian, her father Jamaican. She attended a historically black college and joined a historically black student organization, so Trump should at least have known that the claims he made to black reporters were false and that many in the audience would find them offensive. His appearance dominated the news cycle.
Among these and the news about more controversial statements by Vance, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, a Democrat, who began calling Trump and Vance “weird.”It caught on.
Trump responded by saying he has never been called weird — in response to being called that.
“They are the weird ones,” he said.No one has ever called me weird. I am many things, but I am not weird. And I am forthright. And neither is he, I’ll tell you. JD is not at all. They are.”
Harris gave Walz a name vice president candidate on Tuesday, so the debate over who is weird and who isn’t will likely continue.
Meanwhile, the Trump-Vance campaign kicked off the weekend by sending out a series of emails that seemed a bit odd.
“President Trump and I love you, *****,” read the subject line of an email Vance sent to an unsuspecting reader at 8:12 a.m. Sunday. It named someone Vance had never met but had passed on a Cincinnati sidewalk — once.
“It would be a great honor for President Trump and I to have an endorsement from YOU, *****,” the email read, before promising to do things like “DESTROY the Deep State” and “EXPOSE the dangerous liberal agenda.”
It included three buttons that took you to a donation page where you could donate amounts such as $20.24 or $47. “IF YOU THINK TRUMP IS THE GREATEST PRESIDENT OF ALL TIME!”
And he quotes Trump as saying, “I am Donald J. Trump. DON’T BE AFRAID! I will always love you for supporting me. Unity. Peace. Make America Great Again.”
The recipient of this email may already have been flattered by the personal attention he or she received from two such essential figures, but it didn’t end there.
At 6:42 p.m. Sunday, Vance sent another email with the subject line: “Just got off the phone with President Trump—he had great things to say about you.”
“*****, you were HIGHLY RECOMMENDED by President Trump himself,” Vance said in an email, addressing the same person he had never met. “So now, as I recruit the strongest MAGA Republicans to my Official Vice Presidential Advisory Board, I want to extend you my FIRST invitation!”
As if that wasn’t enough, on Monday morning at 8:13 I received an email from the essential guy himself.
“The MAGA revolution will not be televised — *****, I will not defeat the deep state without you,” the message’s subject line read, again naming someone he and his fellow vice president love but have not met.
“ARE YOU STILL VOTING FOR ME AFTER THE DEEP STATE kicked Joe out of the election and replaced him with the dangerously liberal Kamala?” he asked in italics, before adding: “I’m SICK of listening to the cruel lies from the FAKE NEWS MEDIA.”
Which was odd, because the recipient — who Vance and Trump supposedly love — is a representative of these news media outlets.
