Trump lashes out at NYT, says ‘BOFFO’ rallies show campaign isn’t floundering

For Donald Trump, a man who once promised on the campaign trail in 2016 that, “We're going to win so much. You're going to get tired of winning,” things are looking are pretty grim politically. More than 206,000 Americans have died from the coronavirus, and the Trump campaign is down over 10 percent in some national polls. But the president, whose brand of politics has always been a somewhat contradictory mix of self-pity and gold-plated triumphalism, says everything is great and criticized the New York Times on Twitter for a recent story suggesting some in his inner circle aren’t so sure.

The president pointed to “BOFFO” rallies and early voting, which often he condemns as a scam, as proof of his sky-high chances.

(Boffo, according to the Merriam-Webster dictionary means “extremely successful;" leave it to a born marketer to introduce such synonyms to greater the public.)

The comments are in response to a recent story from the Times, which reported that his inner circle seems to be preparing for the possibility of a defeat and “has returned to a state of recriminations and backbiting." It reported that Trump campaign manager Bill Stepien has told senior Republicans the path to a victory is somewhat narrow, and that mid-level staffers are looking around for jobs on Capitol Hill in case they get thrown out in November.

It also noted that even close Trump allies like Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina recently told Democrats, “Y’all have a good chance of winning the White House.”

The president, for his part, maintains that he’s going to clobber his opponent on election day. At a rally last week in Georgia, he called Democratic nominee Joe Biden “the worst candidate in the history of politics” and joked he’d been too ashamed to stay in the country if he lost to him anyway.

Perhaps seeking to revive momentum, the campaign has tried a sort of 2016 email scandal redux, seizing upon emails from Mr Biden’s son Hunter which Republicans allege contain evidence that he tried to leverage his family ties for financial gains while he was on the board of a Ukrainian energy country at the same time his father oversaw Ukraine policy for the Obama White House.

The Bidens deny any impropriety and that any meeting took place. “We have no idea where this came from, and certainly cannot credit anything that Rudy Giuliani provided to the NY Post, but what I do know for certain is that this purported meeting never happened," Hunter Biden’s attorney said. Top diplomats say there was never any meeting or attempt to schedule one with the Vice President. Independent analyses of the emails, obtained somewhat dubiously by the president’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani, who said Hunter left his laptop in a computer repair shop, haven’t been able to confirm their accuracy.

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