Convicted felon former President Trump’s campaign team are just about at full freak-the-fuck-out mode and warning their invincible God-Titan that he’s got the next seven days before the DNC starts next Monday to “adopt a new ‘hard-hitting’ stump speech to define Vice President Harris as liberal and weak,” in order to regain the initiative against the surging Veep, Axios reports.

“Advisers are telling him Harris will grow her lead coming out of the Democratic convention, which begins a week from tomorrow – especially if they don’t define her better, faster. Then just a week after the convention, it’s already Labor Day,” Axios printed on Sunday and lol we still can’t get over this “defining” shit. We get it’s not a fresh buzzword – for example in the lead-up to the 2022 midterms white collar scumbag and then-NRSC chief Rick Scott confidently told The Hill “We’ve defined [Arizona Dem Senator Mark] Kelly,” just days before Republicans lost that – along with every other swing state Senate race – and Scott got fired from that role. Labeling your opponent as this or that is both essential and often effective for every candidate in every election. But the actually smart, experienced folks in politics will tell you that it takes many months, often years, of effort, that Obama labeling Romney as a plutocrat, Trump labeling Hillary as more corrupt than him, Dubya labeling Kerry as weak and tying Gore to Clinton scandals, etc didn’t just happen on their own.

That the concept of “defining” (“labeling” is a better, if less malleable term) broke through into so much coverage like this is a consequence of the abrupt change of Democratic nominee – and the fact that Team Trump is simply frustrated as fuck over it, that the explosion of enthusiasm and the media attention drowned out their screams of “BORDER CZAR” and “SHITTY 2019 CAMPAIGN!”

And boy does it show in Axios’s reporting, with one minion describing the fat bastard as “struggling to get past his anger” over the situation while his sycophants all try to focus “not on the need for him to change but on the need to adapt his message to win, but he has to convince himself to leave the other garbage behind.” Another echoed – and Baghdad Bobbed – this, claiming Donald “knows he’s the only one who can end the media’s honeymoon with Kamala Harris and he sees a significant opening to do so with Harris’ inability to defend her record on inflation and the border. To get past the media force field protecting Harris, however, he knows he needs to be very specific with his policy contrasts and is planning on debuting a hard-hitting stump speech very soon.”

Funny story about that: On Sunday we were working on this breakdown of Axios’s piece when a notification from Truth Social popped up saying “@realDonaldTrump just posted.” And that’s when we dropped everything to slap together our article on his fucking unhinged rant claiming the crowd at Harris’s Detroit rally was generated by AI. It was a little under an hour after Axios painted a gruesome picture of a Trump who “has fumed, stewed and stumbled in private and public” over the past three weeks while his underlings also expressed hope he can “convince himself to leave the other garbage behind,” that the fat fuck propagated arguably the most unhinged and plainly desperate shit he’s posted in months if not years. And claimed it as grounds for disqualifying Harris.

So it’s gotten to the point where none other than Kevin McCarthy himself giving free political advice on Fox News, possibly because all his calls to Trump are going straight to voicemail.

But we also saw this morning, in what we guess is his own way of trying to show his minions that he’s at least trying to take their “stay focused on policy” advice seriously, Trump posting “KAMALA HARRIS IS STRONG, FOR YEARS, ON OPEN BORDERS, NO FRACKING, DEFUND THE POLICE, AND MORE. LETS SEE HER FLIP-FLOP ON THOSE ‘LITTLE’ LIFELONG POLICIES OF HERS!!! A COMPLETELY FRAUDULENT CAMPAIGN!!!” His campaign also set up what’s billed as “remarks on the economic hardships created by the Harris-Biden Administration” in North Carolina (that state’s not supposed to be on the map for Dems) and a rally for this Saturday in Pennsylvania, even though Trump said he wasn’t hitting the road again until after the Democratic convention.

We’ll see how this “mini-campaign reset” goes (already again he’s posting bullshit like “A Major, and highly respected, Pollster: ‘Don’t let the embargo of other polling fool anyone – Democrats are in real trouble.’ Fake Polls are changing their methods and standards from 3 weeks ago,” lol), but for now we’ll stick with Axios’s conclusion to the lengthy rundown from those dwelling inside the Orange Pharaoh’s palace, emphasis theirs in one of their signature bullet points, “The bottom line: Put the Times piece and this column in a time capsule. If Trump loses, you’ll understand why.”

On that, it’s hard to escape the feeling that was the whole point of them writing and printing the piece, the actual useful reporting just a means to that end. This isn’t to say it wasn’t actually good copy or enjoyable to read. It also reeks of an unwillingness to supplicate to two masters.

Or, to be less euphemistic, these fucking weasels would. They would. You know it. Of course they see Trump’s future in politics darkening and are quick to capitalize on it, with all the spine of a jellyfish arching against the tide. Months and years of getting dogwalked into absolute abject embarrassments by their sources in the MAGA-GOP establishment and donor class – buying into the pathetic obsession with anointing douchebag Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin as the inheritor of the party’s crown, laundering the vaporware that was House Republicans’ “Biden impeachment inquiry,” blithely reporting “sources” feeding them the horseshit fantasy that Nikki Haley was going to win the “veepstakes,” that fucking fluffy “eccentrism-washing” of Trump’s insane malevolence pictured above, and last but not least, the masturbatory glee with which they quoted some House Dem as saying “We’ve all resigned ourselves to a second Trump presidency,” a day after the shooting at his rally (they printed that less than a month ago) – all of that now gone.

The king is dead, long live the Queen – and please don’t behead the royal scribes.

Look, we wouldn’t source from Axios uncritically if they actually sucked at reporting. They’re pretty goddamned good and we link their stories all the time. They have the resources to do what we don’t and we lowly aggregators owe them a debt of gratitude for their work. In a vacuum we would have reprinted these quotes happily and called it a day. But this demon, the things about them we don’t like, particularly their cuntishness at key junctures, needs to be acknowledged.

That demon ain’t exorcised yet. Not until the orange one is gone and Axios helps. This is a start.