Democratic political strategist David Axelrod said on Saturday during an interview on CNN that former President’s Donald Trump‘s political and legal “life is flashing before his eyes” now that his opponent is Vice President Kamala Harris in this year’s election.
Harris replaced President Joe Biden as the Democrats‘ presumptive presidential nominee after Biden announced he was stepping aside from the race and offered Harris his endorsement on July 21. In contrast to Biden, who generally trailed Trump in polls and among oddsmakers, Harris has gone on to outperform Trump in more than a dozen polls and has become the favorite to win in November with multiple bookmakers.
Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, is seeking a second term as a convicted felon after being found guilty in May on all 34 counts in his New York hush money trial. Judge Juan Merchan is due to hand down his sentence to the former president in September.
In addition, Trump is still facing three other major legal challenges in the Georgia and federal election interference cases, along with the Mar-a-Lago classified documents case. And while U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, a Trump appointee, dismissed the classified documents case in July, the Department of Justice‘s (DOJ) special counsel Jack Smith is appealing that dismissal. The former president has maintained his innocence in all cases.
If Trump wins reelection November, many estimate that he will direct the DOJ to dismiss the federal charges against him in the classified documents and federal elections interference cases.
During Saturday’s interview, CNN‘s Michael Smerconish told Axelrod, a former key adviser to former President Barack Obama, that he receives calls to his radio show asking if Trump was “trying to tank” or lose the presidential race. Smerconish answered his own question by stating, “My response is, his own liberty interest is on the line…for his own freedom and financial reasons, he needs to win this race.”
Axelrod replied: “I think that’s part of the problem. The stakes for him are so much larger than any normal candidate. The consequence of a defeat is that he’s going to face the bar of justice. He thought he had beaten it. When we were in Milwaukee [for the Republican National Convention], the talk was of landslide, and it felt like they were talking about the ‘terms of surrender’ they were going to demand. He felt very serene that he had beaten this. Now, all of a sudden, his life is flashing before his eyes, and I think it’s one of the things that’s unsettling him.”
Newsweek has reached out to the Trump and Harris campaigns for comment Saturday morning via email.
Meanwhile, a state appeals court on Wednesday rejected a request by Trump’s lawyers to delay proceedings in the former president’s racketeering and election subversion case in Georgia until 2025.
Trump also owes more than $100 million in liabilities linked to his legal troubles in New York as shown by his latest financial disclosure report released on Thursday. The document showed the former president owed between $1,000,001 and $5 million in liabilities linked to E. Jean Carroll‘s first civil lawsuit against him, which Trump lost in May 2023 when a jury found him liable for sexually abusing and defaming the New York columnist. Trump was ordered to pay Carroll $5 million.
Carroll’s second civil lawsuit against him, which said Trump had ruined the writer’s reputation and harmed her professionally, was listed in the financial disclosure report in the largest category for liabilities: more than $50 million. Earlier this year, a jury found Trump guilty of defaming Carroll and awarded the writer $83.3 million.
On Saturday, Axelrod added that the key for Trump is painting Harris as “the incumbent” instead of the “turn the page” candidate.
“He wants to link her to Biden in a way that will make her the incumbent. That’s what the press conference [Thursday] was all about, but instead, he spent 10 minutes talking about his legal problems and lashing out in other places and overwhelmed the purpose of his press conference,” he said. “He’s not a competent candidate right now. Is that the guy who is going to step on the debate stage? If it is, then they’ve got a world of hurt.”
Speaking at his Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, New Jersey, on Thursday, Trump told reporters that he feels “entitled to personal attacks” on Harris because he does not “have a lot of respect for her” or “her intelligence.”
In a series of posts to X, formerly Twitter, Axelrod compared Trump’s display to “a rattled old boxer” desperately attempting to attack a younger fighter in the form of Harris.
“‘I think I’m entitled to personal attacks.’ Trump seems like a rattled old boxer,” he wrote. “Trapped in the corner by a younger, agile fighter, and flailing wildly.”
“This is really something,” Axelrod added in a subsequent post. “It is like watching someone have a nervous breakdown in public. He can’t control himself.”
