Donald Trump is backpedaling like Primo Carnera.
Stunned and harried, he hears the blessed bell. But it’s an illusion. The fighter before him is ringing his chimes.
Who is this Primo Carnera person? Only a boxing nerd knows. The reason is that in a 1935 boxing match some well-placed blows by young Joe Louis made him irrelevant.
Carnera was fearsome – six-feet-seven, 261 pounds, a side of beef in black high tops. The mountainous Italian’s nickname: the Ambling Alp.
The former world heavyweight champ had 65 pounds and five inches on Louis, at the time a relative unknown.
Didn’t matter. Louis was quicker, smarter — and much more powerful than the lumbering Carnera anticipated. In Round 6, a right cross reduced Carnera to a heap. TKO.
Donald Trump is not extinguished, not close, but in the first moments of their presidential bout, brawlin’ Kamala Harris, the brown bomber in the tan pantsuit, has him longing to commune with a spit bucket.
Watch the plodder in the 46-inch trunks. Nickname: the Hyperventilator.
Under a rain of punches, Trump makes a move. A right. A left. Right. Left. No – that’s not blows he’s thrown. That’s the squeak of Trump’s heels kissing canvas in retreat. Ring the damn bell!
Boxing stories trend toward legend, but this story is more fact than allegory.
With lightning speed, in a matter of days, Harris has put Trump on his hind arches. She came out strong, aggressive, cunning. Early indicators: The Prosecutor has racked up marks on undecideds’ scorecards.
Harris “has put Trump in a box,” writes The Washington Post.
GOP corner men, The Post reports, frantically “try to energize him as he struggles to adapt to Harris.”
Who brought the smelling salts?
Not to take anything away from Harris’ stunning assault, but a lot of what now befalls Trump is self-inflicted, and we aren’t talking of his Micky D’s training table.
First, there’s Project 2025, the detailed-down-to-the-last-semicolon design for crushing the world’s greatest democracy – ours. It’s a 900-page-plus guidebook by which a dictator won’t have to wait until Day 2 to get started.
Bobbing and weaving, blinded by flop sweat, Trump says he has nothing to do with it except for everything.
Second, there’s the strange running-mate pick of JD Vance, a political neophyte birthed in a tech titan’s test tube. Vance’s earliest utterings upon emerging from the laboratory have enraged more than half the U.S. voting-age population — especially single female cat owners. Those are finely honed political instincts, guys.
Third, there’s what Trump’s Supreme Court empowering states to order pregnant women to gestate to term under penalty of law. Trump has dodged and ducked over this matter ever since it became clear that this was not a game conceived in Sunday School but a totalitarian-style power play that endangers women’s lives.
Fourth, there’s the border — what Trump told Republicans in Congress to do about the problem in the face of a bold bipartisan plan that would make a difference. He told them to do what he bragged to the NRA he’d done amid waves of mass shootings: nothing.
Fifth, there’s the economy. It’s a disaster, he says. Couldn’t be worse. Penniless and starving in the street — that’s us. Except that job growth has maintained historic highs. Except that U.S. manufacturing has made a stirring comeback. Except that inflation has eased to the extent that the Fed will cut interest rates.
No wonder Tomato Can Trump is in a box.
In the lead-up to Joe Louis’ whupping of big, bad Primo Carnera, the announcer said it was Carnera’s “stock in trade to maul and rough up his opponents.”
All assumed the same of Donald Trump. In this bout, curiously, the old demagogue turns out to be the easiest of combatants: a stationary target.
Longtime newspaperman John Young lives in Colorado. Email: jyoungcolumn@gmail.com.