“What a stupid question!” Donald Trump recently scolded a journalist during a long public outburst billed as a “press conference.” The reporter had correctly observed, “You haven’t had a public campaign rally in almost a week now.” This matter-of-fact observation prompted Trump to launch into a tirade of lies. “I’m ahead by a wide margin,” he insisted. “I’m doing a lot of campaigning,” he countered. In reality, Vice President Kamala Harris is two points ahead of the former president in the national polls. And while she travels a lot, even holding multiple rallies in one day, Trump has mostly been holed up in Mar-a-Lago, holding only one campaign rally in the MAGA-safe area of ​​Montana in the last week. As Philip Bump of the Washington Post showed in a recent analysis, Trump is “holding far fewer rallies” and public appearances than he did in 2016 and 2020.

Last week’s hastily called press conference was Trump’s attempt to fake “campaigning” without leaving his house. The Washington Post reported, “When he heard that his team had summoned reporters to Florida for a briefing without him, he asked them to arrange buses to take them to his club so he could hold a press conference.” His team must do a better job of keeping secrets from his boss in this case, because this press conference, like most of Trump’s public appearances before the mainstream media, was a disaster. As Joe Scarborough noted on MSNBC the morning after, “His people just don’t want him to go out and give speeches. I’m sure they didn’t want him to go out and give the press conference yesterday, but Donald Trump is still driven by the belief that ‘I alone can do it.'”

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Trump’s campaign managers surely know that the more voters see of Trump, the more they hate him. Trump’s team attacked President Joe Biden on his age not only because it was an easy task. It was also a way to distract from the fact that their own candidate, who was never particularly convincing anyway, is rapidly decompensating due to his age and the stress of being convicted of 34 felonies. Now Biden is out, and the spotlight of the “is the candidate too old?” question is on Trump.

Republicans, however, will not follow the Democrats and change their candidate. Unlike Biden, Trump is a narcissist who will never accept the truth about his decline. And unlike Democrats, Republicans are too afraid of their leader to tell him the truth. But it’s also clear that Republicans wish they could make a change. Right now, the Trump campaign is acting as if their candidate is not the raging orange degenerate at all, but his much younger—if still pretty weird—running candidate, Senator JD Vance of Ohio.

Vance has followed Harris during her tour of swing states. His events have been a bust, with crowds “generally numbering in the dozens or a few hundred,” The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank reported. But because reporters are already in town to cover Harris’s packed rallies, Vance has been able to attract press attention. While Trump is holed up at Mar-a-Lago, Vance is the face representing the campaign. To those tuning in casually, they might think Republicans have followed the Democrats’ lead and abandoned their older candidate for a younger one. On Sunday, for example, Vance appeared on three of five major Sunday news programs – ABC News’ “This Week,” CBS News’ “Face the Nation” and CNN’s “State of the Union.”

At first glance, that doesn’t seem like such a good idea. Vance lacks charisma, isn’t half as smart as he thinks he is, and has spent so much time marinating in the world of extreme online fascism that he just seems odd. He’s a bearded doppelgänger of the equally charmless Florida governor Ron DeSantis, whom Republican voters couldn’t reject fast enough during the presidential primaries. Running a carbon copy of a man who couldn’t beat Trump in a primary seems like a uniquely stupid campaign strategy on paper. But it makes sense under the circumstances. Vance is annoying, but he can speak in full sentences and largely avoids any talk of electric sharks and Hannibal Lecter. There are also fewer logistical problems in a Vance-centric campaign. He’s decades younger than Trump, so he has the energy to travel. Even if the rumors that he wears eyeliner are true, Vance can’t need the hours Trump has to spend on hair and makeup just to be seen in public. The campaign no doubt wants a replacement candidate who would be less stressful, but Vance certainly stands up to the alternative they represent: an increasingly crazy Donald Trump.

The Harris team, in any case, believes the more Trump is on TV, the better they do. They continue to taunt him about his failures on the campaign trail. After his odd press conference on Thursday, the Harris team sent out an email with phrases like, “Donald Trump took a break from his hiatus to put on some pants and have a public meltdown” and “Split screen: joy and freedom vs. whatever that was.” The humor was entertaining, but it also served a larger purpose. By letting the news go viral, they made it more likely that an already freaked-out and jealous Trump would hear about it and respond by vetoing his campaign’s request that he shut up and retreat into the closet.

It’s a smart move, because Trump, ever a slave to his own narcissism, seems eager to get back in front of the cameras and microphones. After wisely canceling the ABC News debate scheduled for Sept. 10—which will showcase the dramatic differences in age, energy and coherence between Trump and Harris—he angrily retracted the cancellation. His team has so far steadfastly dissuaded him from scheduling any new campaign events this month, but given the regular, snarky emails from the Harris campaign team, they’re unlikely to be able to contain his hunger for attention. Redirecting Trump’s craving for rants and complaints to Truth Social, where few will ever read them, won’t satisfy him for long.

This is the small advantage that Vance’s lack of appeal offers Trump’s campaign. If Vance were witty and charming and could draw more viewers than a bowling team, Trump would be jealous. Trump is already furious that Harris draws such huge crowds. If his running mate exposed him, the older man would be untamable. Trump would book more rallies to appease the MAGA mob. But with the Harris events as a point of comparison, such rallies would draw the attention of a media landscape that has largely ignored them all year. The last thing Trump needs is for swing voters to catch him blathering on about how much he loves January 6 to a horde of bloodthirsty fanatics. The Harris campaign, however, is betting he won’t be able to resist for long.