Subject: Re: What is Trump Doing?
1. Nobody pays attention to the Presidential campaign until after Labor Day. It seems maddening now, but Trump is keeping his powder dry.

The risk with this is that early voting in Pennsylvania starts in September(!) and he runs the risk of voters having made up their minds already.

That's rather the point. This is a truncated campaign - fewer than 100 days to Election Day, and fewer than 50 days to the beginning of voting. Unlike any other August, Harris is still putting together her campaign and getting everything in place - she literally just took over three weeks ago. It's a unique opportunity for the Trump campaign to try to define her negatively before the campaign infrastructure is really in place....and Trump is choosing to stay off the campaign trail for the next two weeks? It just seems like a weird choice.

This new level of media covering for a candidate is something we've never seen before. Even when Obama was a candidate they at least would ask him question, albeit softball ones. With Harris they won't even do that.

Which is absolutely the right choice for a campaign which is, again, only three weeks old. In the very earliest stages of a campaign, you're just starting out. The candidate almost certainly isn't ready to start speaking extemporaneously on every single issue that might come up - she's only been the candidate for three weeks! And she probably doesn't have, and won't have, the time to do that until after the convention. She's been very busy compressing literally months of campaign preparation (hiring people, formalizing position papers, setting campaign strategy) in to the space of days. And unlike a normal primary campaign, where fielding questions in September the year before the election offers a candidate an opportunity to refine themselves with relatively low stakes during pre-season, we're already in the fourth quarter of the finals.