“This Is So Unfair to Me”: Trump Whines About His COVID-19 Victimhood as Campaign Flails
Raging at campaign manager Brad Parscale and Joe Scarborough, Trump attempts a campaign reset. But “Trump can’t pivot to a different strategy,” says an adviser. Because he’s the problem.
As he headed into Memorial Day weekend,
Donald Trump complained that he was COVID-19’s biggest victim. “He was just in a ****ing rage,” said a person who spoke with Trump late last week. “He was saying, ‘This is so unfair to me! Everything was going great. We were cruising to reelection!” Even as the death toll neared 100,000 and unemployment ranks swelled to over 38 million, Trump couldn’t see the pandemic as anything other than something that had happened to him. “The problem is he has no empathy,” the adviser said. Trump complained that he should have been warned about the virus sooner. “The intelligence community let me down!” he said.
The White House declined to comment.
Trump’s outburst reflected his growing frustration that, at this stage of the race, he is losing to
Joe Biden. According to a Republican briefed on the campaign’s internal polls, Trump is trailing Biden by double digits among women over 50 in six swing states. “Trump knows the numbers are bad. It’s why he’s thrashing about,” the Republican said.
Even those closest to Trump have been privately worried the election is slipping away. According to a source,
Melania Trump warned the president during their trip to India in February to take the virus response seriously. “He totally blew her off,” the source said. Melania later told people that Trump “only hears what he wants to hear and surrounds himself with yes-people and family,” the source added.
The first lady’s office did not respond to a request for comment.
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