A day before the Democratic National Convention, with Vice President Kamala Harris swinging through one of the key battleground states where she recently turned the polling tables on him, Trump embarked on a Truth Social posting spree.
The former president posted or reposted his own content more than 25 times to his Truth Social account on Sunday, flooding his followers’ feeds with familiar rants, false claims, and A.I.-generated images of Taylor Swift fans backing his campaign.
“I accept!” he wrote above the screenshots of the fake Swifties, apparently in reference to their bogus support.
The images were originally posted to X on Friday and Saturday by a pair of popular right-wing accounts, one of which mixed the artificially generated images with real photographs of a blonde woman wearing a “Swifties for Trump” shirt at a rally. (The phrase briefly trended on the platform on Friday night, but there is no evidence a larger such movement exists.)
He also shared an image—generated by the same X account earlier this weekend—of a New York Post front page showing Harris speaking in front of a communist symbol. Over on X , where he recently began posting again after months of silence, he shared an A.I. image of Harris speaking before a crowd of communists at the Democratic convention, which doesn’t start until Monday. The image’s origin was unclear.
Reached for comment by CNN about the second altered image, a Trump campaign spokesperson replied with the first’s headline, the portmanteau “Kamunism.”
Trump kept tapping away well into the afternoon and early evening. Another post centered around one of his favorite current fixations: rally crowd sizes.
“We had to turn away lots of people yesterday in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, but Comrade Kamala Harris’ Social Media Operation showed empty seats, long before the Rally started, early in the afternoon when, in actuality, we had to turn away 11,500 people!” he wrote in part. “She’s a Crooked Radical Left Politician, and always will be!”
Ammar Moussa, Harris’s director of rapid response, replied on X with (real) photos showing the sparse turnout at Trump’s Pennsylvania rally.
“Donald Trump really does not anyone knowing that he spoke to an empty arena yesterday,” Moussa tweeted. “Do not say that. Seriously. Don’t.”
Jeff Timmer, the former executive director of the Michigan Republican Party and current senior adviser to the Lincoln Project, also noticed Trump’s attempts to cope.
“Looks like someone woke up on the gibbering barking panicked side of the bed today,” he tweeted .
Trump also took a break to lace into Van Jones , apparently furious that the CNN commentator praised Harris’s economic platform in a broadcast earlier this week.
“Thank goodness we’re finally hearing from a Democrat aggressively on price gouging,” Jones said in a Friday appearance on The Situation Room , according to The Hill . He also praised Harris for her “strength” and “politics of joy.”
Over a screenshot of a writeup of those remarks, Trump posted, “Lightweight Political commentator Van Jones begged me, while in the Oval Office and with tears flowing from his eyes, to help get Criminal Justice Reform approved by the United States Senate.
“I got it done, with Conservative help, and this lowlife, Jones, never once called to thank me, or the others that helped, for what we had done,” he groused.
Trump went on to remind his followers that he did more for Black Americans while in office than any other president—with one possible exception.
“Along with Opportunity Zones, the long term funding of HISTORICALLY BLACK COLLEGES AND UNIVERSITIES, and much more, I’ve done more for our black population than anyone other than, perhaps, Abraham Lincoln!!! Sorry, but that’s the way it is!!!”
The claim is an old talking point of his, something he’s repeated in tweets , at campaign rallies, and, most recently, at the National Association of Black Journalists convention in Chicago. (Experts told The Washington Post in 2020 that the list of presidents who have done more for Black civil rights than Trump includes: Lyndon B. Johnson, Ulysses S. Grant, Harry Truman, and Barack Obama.)
Jones on Monday observed that Trump appeared to be wilting from the downtick in media coverage he’s received in the weeks since President Joe Biden announced he would not seek re-election, clearing the way for Harris’s run and a reinvigoration of Democratic hopes.
“He’s failing and flailing. Listen, they’re saying that these are the worst three weeks of his campaign,” the CNN contributor told Anderson Cooper . “That’s what the press is saying.
“This is the year in which he got indicted, convicted, and shot at—and actually hit—by a bullet and none of that to him is as bad as possibly not getting as much attention as Kamala.”
Surveys published by The New York Times and Siena College this weekend found Harris had pulled 4 points ahead of Trump in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania; 5 points ahead in Arizona; and 2 points ahead in North Carolina. (Trump maintained a 1-point lead in Nevada and a 4-point lead in Georgia.)
Harris also, for the first time, overtook Trump on a national level, with a Sunday poll from ABC News, The Washington Post , and Ipsos showing Harris in front by 3 points among registered voters in a race where third-party candidates, such as Robert F. Kennedy Jr. , are included. In a head-to-head matchup between Trump and Harris alone, she pulls even further ahead, standing at 49 percent to his 45 percent.
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