Trump's campaign emails more panicked during his Manhattan trial

President Biden and Donald Trump are trying to win over two very different publics with their respective campaigns. What story is President Biden telling in his fundraising and other campaign emails? Biden’s emails are calm, reasonable, factual and emphasize actual policy achievements and a positive vision while still communicating the historic nature of the 2024 election. Given Biden’s temperament, experience and mature leadership, such an approach is to be expected and makes sense.

And in what is almost a parody of the nice, sane, and normal politics that President Biden is modeling for his voters and other supporters, he recently announced a contest where one of his donors could win an ice cream date with him and First Lady Dr. Jill Biden.

Biden’s respectable communications style is both a strength and a weakness: his campaign emails are often so calm that they risk not communicating the extreme dangerousness of Dictator Trump and what will happen if he and his MAGA movement take power in 2025. President Biden sometimes raises his metaphorical voice in his campaign emails, but he needs to be screaming much louder and much more frequently. Ice cream dates will likely be no match against an opposition that is offering a political version of a steel cage death match and the terror dome.

To that point, what story is Donald Trump telling his voters, donors, and other supporters?

His fundraising and other campaign emails are a relentless onslaught designed to create fear and terror about a doomed and ruined America that is being destroyed from within by “vermin” i.e. the Democrats, liberals, non-white people, Muslims, George Soros, the Deep State, “woke”, “Black Lives Matter,” President Obama and Hillary Clinton, those who are not White Christians, the evil “news media” that are in league with nebulous forces to turn the country into a Stalinist-Maoist-Communist hellhole equipped with gulags and prisons where the MAGA people, "real Americans” (meaning White people), and their Dear Leader Trump will be imprisoned.

Compared to President Biden and the Democrats, Trump’s emails are thrilling, exciting, and a type of horror movie made real. Trump and his spokespeople know their supporters’ anxieties and pain points and are adept at triggering them.

With the beginning of Trump’s first criminal trial in New York, his emails have only become more extreme – and will only continue to – as the 2024 election and potentially three other criminal trials are closing in on him.

For example, in this recent fundraising email, Trump declared that he is being held “hostage”:

Trump’s claims of being a hostage are part of a much larger pattern of victimhood: at his rallies and other events he has elevated his Jan. 6 MAGA terrorists to the level of political prisoners and hostages as well.

On Monday, Trump told his followers that “All Hell Will Break Loose” from the court hearing in Manhattan that Judge Juan Merchan convened in response to the corrupt ex-president’s repeated threats against the judges, their family members, jurors, witnesses, and the other people who are trying to hold him accountable for his alleged crimes under the law.

In this recent email, Donald Trump says his constitutionally guaranteed right to free speech is being taken away:

In a post on his Truth Social disinformation platform, Trump made similar claims.

Instead of an ice cream date, Donald Trump is inviting his most loyal MAGA people to some type of love festival/support group at his Mar-a-Lago resort headquarters to meet with him before President Biden and the Democrats have him locked away:

Of course, Donald Trump is lying. There is no substantive evidence to support his fabulist conspiratorial delusions-fantasies of persecution and other harm. The corrupt ex-president is in no way a victim, except perhaps of his own apparent sociopathy if not outright psychopathy, and other parts of his obviously diseased mind.

As I am writing this essay, Donald Trump sent out another fundraising email. This time, Trump is (again) threatening President Biden with jail for committing the “crime” of opposing him and the neofascist MAGA movement: