Last month represented the political nadir of President Trump’s three and a half years in office, thanks to self-inflicted wounds as he played to his base and missteps by a fractured campaign.
Last Saturday night, over dinner at the White House, Bernard Marcus, a top Republican donor, told President Trump he was alarmed at Mr. Trump’s plummeting poll numbers and Jared Kushner’s stewardship of his father-in-law’s re-election effort.
Mr. Trump sought to assuage Mr. Marcus’s concerns, assuring the billionaire Home Depot founder that his political fortunes would soon change in part because he was bringing in “good people” to steady his campaign, according to a person briefed on their conversation.
The next morning, before setting off for a round of golf, the president tweeted a video from a Florida retirement community that featured a Trump supporter yelling, “white power,” setting Mr. Trump’s aides on a scramble to reach him on the course and have him delete the message.
As Mr. Trump heads to Mount Rushmore on Friday to spend the Independence Day holiday in the carved presence of presidential greatness, he is suffering through the most trying stretch of his administration thanks in large part to his self-inflicted wounds. June represented the political nadir of his three and a half years in the Oval Office, when a race in which he had been steadily trailing, but faring respectably, broke open and left him facing the possibility of not just defeat but humiliation this fall.
The disconnect between the surge in coronavirus cases and Mr. Trump’s dismissive stance toward the pandemic has been particularly pronounced, mystifying Democrats and Republicans alike; this week, as some states halted their reopening because of a record-setting number of new cases, the president predicted the virus would “just disappear”
Yet as demoralizing as June was for many Republicans, what was less visible were the frenetic, and often fruitless, attempts by top Republicans to soothe the president and steer him away from self-sabotage, while also manipulating him to serve their own purposes.
One Republican official who is in frequent contact with the campaign expressed incredulity at how some aides willfully distort the electoral landscape to mollify Mr. Trump, recalling one conversation in which they assured him he was faring well in Maine, a state where private polling shows he’s losing.