Trump: "He will tweet instead of lead."

      Trump could win by becoming more disciplined about what he says and does. An ounce of self control would deliver a pound of success. 

     This is unlikely, though.

                Liz Peek, The Hill

Click: 37 seconds

The Lincoln Project is a group of Republicans who believe Donald Trump is dangerous. 

They formed a PAC and their primary work is the creation of ads critical of Trump. In mid-May they produced an ad with a horror-film soundtrack, plain text, and this image of Trump slowly forming amid scary music coming to a crescendo. Text on the screen warned of the then-figure of "90,000 deaths and growing," millions filing for unemployment and small businesses dying. Bad things are happening and amid this Donald Trump will lie to you, it warns. He will blame others for his failures, it warns. 

And "He will tweet instead of lead."

The Lincoln Project has been known to politically engaged people for several months, but has recently entered widespread public consciousness as they pour out TV and internet ads every few days. They have been credited--and condemned--for bringing bare knuckle Lee Atwater style advertising to the effort to remove Trump. They aren't pro-Biden, except as the vehicle for replacing Trump. They are conservative Republicans who want their Party back. To do it they hammer away at what they understand to be the weak points in Trump's policies, personality, and character.

What is wrong with Trump? That is what they advertise about.

Click: Whispering about you.   97 seconds

A recent ad trolls Trump's insecurities. People dont like you, Donald, a woman's voice says. They are disloyal to you, everyone is. You are weak and you cannot control yourself. 

''They whisper about you. They leak, spin, lie. They tell the media that they’re smart and you’re out of control – that you can’t focus, that you’re mentally and physically weak, that you hide in your bunker, scared and shaky, laugh when you can’t walk down a ramp or drink water. . . ."

This doesn't work on everyone. Trump has his loyal supporters and for them Trump's late night and early morning tweets are evidence that Trump is the indefatigable warrior, beset on all sides. Reagan, the two Bush presidents, and candidates like Dole, McCain, and Romney were a certain kind of Republican; Trump is a different kind, and constant fighting with enemies is one of the characteristics of the new style populist Republican. For them, more is more.

They are not the audience for these ads. The ads are for swing voters, for the weakly partisan voters with mixed, complicated feelings about Trump. The ads go after his weak spots, re-defining tweeting as inattention and distraction, more interested in picking fights than solving America's problems. America has been behind the curve on the virus. Distraction by tweet is a simple explanation for why. 

There is a market and tailwind for this message. An Economist/YouGov poll at the beginning of June reported 63% of people say he tweets "too frequently." Only 7% said they paid "a great deal" of attention to the tweets.

Trump cannot tweet his way out of the problem. More communication now backfires. The powerful, persuasive message of angry tweets in all caps is not the content of his tweets but the very fact of them. 

Liz Peek, at The Hill, said that the irony is that theoretically this is the easiest thing to fix to boost Trump's re-election chances. The economy, the virus, what Biden does: those he cannot control, but whether or not he wakes up early to make angry tweets is up to Trump. But, she laments, it is in fact the least likely thing to change. 

Trump is who he is.