The Trump Campaign Is Worried

Offering a cabinet post and the pardon of a drug kingpin to an opposing political party are not the acts of a confident candidate.

On Saturday, the presumptive Republican Party presidential nominee Donald Trump addressed the Libertarian Party convention.

That he spoke at all to another party's delegates was strange enough (as I explored two weeks ago). Even stranger was what he promised.

"I’m committing to you tonight that I will put a Libertarian in my cabinet and also Libertarians in senior posts," Trump pledged.

Then he added, "On day one, I will commute the sentence of Ross Ulbricht [to] time served. He’s already served 11 years. We’re going to get him home." (Ulbricht, who is serving two life sentences for coordinating one million illegal drug deals through his "Silk Road" website, has become a cause célèbre among Libertarians.)

This may look like the usual shameless pandering from Trump, but it betrays real worry from his campaign about his Election Day prospects.

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Any presidential candidate has to make some ideological appeals to minimize base voter depression. However, usually, there are limits.

For example, no Democrat has ever or would ever promise to appoint a Green Party leader to the cabinet, even after a Green Party candidate unquestionably played spoiler in 2000's paper-thin presidential election. (An argument could be made it happened again in 2016—the Green nominee's vote total surpassed Trump's margin in three states—but you can't assume every single Green voter would vote Democratic if no Green candidate was on the ballot.)

And while Democrats often campaign on criminal justice reform, no Democrat would ever make a mockery out of the criminal justice system by offering to spring a notorious drug kingpin from prison in a perverse quid pro quo for votes.

Montana and Georgia Libertarians have arguably played spoiler to Republicans in statewide races, yet we haven't seen Republicans in those states pander recklessly to Libertarians in response.

The reasons why politicians generally don't do such things are many, but one is: such moves would stink of pathetic desperation.

Trump shouldn't be desperate. After all, he's ahead in most national and state polls.

But not by much. And as Nate Cohn of The New York Times has observed, Trump's thin lead tenuously rests on unlikely voters who haven't consistently shown up on Election Day.

In going to the Libertarian convention, Trump was begging for voters who did show up in 2020, and could have swung Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin to him had they abandoned their party.

But many in the heckling crowd saw through Trump's transparent transactional pitches, noting Trump didn't commute Ulbricht's sentence when he had the chance.

Trump's pandering could have consequences. He has been running on a rough justice platform, accusing Biden of letting criminals run wild, while claiming he would let police violate civil liberties.

Yet at the same time, he has repeatedly promised to free the criminals convicted on January 6, 2021 for taking part in an insurrection (which he did again at the Libertarian convention).

And now, in a desperate ploy to flip three swing states, he has promised to free a drug kingpin just because he's beloved by a fringe political party.

Two weeks ago, I argued The Biden Campaign Is Worried. I stand by it. Biden's decision to propose early debates is a clear sign of a campaign that knows it's behind.

Now we can conclude both campaigns are worried. For good reason! They're in a close race in a closely divided country.

How the two candidates are handling their worries is telling.

Biden handled his worry by accelerating the timetable for a debate, submitting himself to an unscripted test of his political agility.

Trump handled his worry by recklessly creating fodder for that debate, fodder which Biden can use to expose his opponent's rank hypocrisy.

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Bill Scher, Washington Monthly politics editor