While Donald Trump’s interactions with the ABC reporter at the NABJ conference Wednesday were highly entertaining, they were also quite damaging to his campaign, and cause for great concern for those of us who believe it is vital that he win the election. Trump’s gratuitous questioning of Kamala Harris’s racial identity was especially damaging, even though what he said is undeniably correct.
Trump’s main weakness as a candidate is self-discipline, or the almost complete lack thereof. He simply lacks the ability to resist the impulse to spend almost all of his time riling up his base at the expense of doing that he needs to do to attract independent voters. That base, while somewhere in excess of 40% of the electorate, remains inadequate to actually win in November.