Former Insider Says Trump’s New Strategy Will End in Disaster

A former aide to Donald Trump doesn’t predict good things coming out of his campaign’s latest strategy.

In an effort to keep the Republican presidential nominee from making more childish ad hominem attacks against Vice President Kamala Harris and her crowd sizes, the Trump campaign has reportedly discussed holding smaller “messaging events.” Those will replace his boisterous, multi-hour rallies, which he won’t resume until after the Democratic National Convention, Trump spokesman Steven Cheung told CNBC .

But although the intention of the micro events is to keep Trump focused on the issues that actually matter to voters, former Trump press secretary Stephanie Grisham believes that the events will be short-lived as the campaign discovers Trump doesn’t thrive in smaller crowds.

“I imagine he will do some of them, and maybe for a week he’ll, you know, attempt to stay on message,” Grisham said on a CNN panel Tuesday. “It depends on how tough his staff is being with him, but he will get bored. He doesn’t like those small events; he never has. And he will be demanding to do a large rally sooner rather than later.

“They want him to be a fake version of himself,” she added. “Donald Trump is a bombastic narcissist, and he loves attention.”

Conservatives have been less than enthused about Trump’s performance in recent weeks, as the typically bombastic populist had floundered to find an appropriate political response to Harris’s nomination outside of mocking her race, her personality, or her intelligence. Even some of Trump’s most ardent supporters have abandoned ship. Last week, notorious white supremacist Nick Fuentes announced a “groyper war” on Trump’s social media platform, Truth Social, believing that Trump’s current campaign staff are setting the party up for a “catastrophic loss.”

Gun rights activist and charged Kenosha, Wisconsin, shooter Kyle Rittenhouse publicly withdrew his support from Trump earlier this month, announcing in a video statement that he felt Trump wasn’t a true champion of the Second Amendment and that he intended to write in former Representative Ron Paul. (Though less than 12 hours after making the post, Rittenhouse was approached by Trump’s team and subsequently changed his tune.) And users on Trump’s social media platform, Truth Social, got the hashtag “#TrumpIsACoward” trending after the Republican nominee backed out of a prearranged September 10 debate with Harris on ABC News. (Trump has since agreed, again, to the debate.)

But despite Trump’s inability to adapt and change to the new race, Grisham doesn’t believe he’ll be able to keep up the mini rallies—even if they’re for the good of his campaign.

“Look, we did this a million times,” Grisham told CNN. “We did it in 2016. We did it throughout our time in the White House. We were all trying to keep him on message. Everybody was frustrated all the time.”