It’s been a rough go of it lately for Donald Trump. The Democrat he was beating in polls dropped out. The one who replaced him on the ticket reenergized the party, amassed a massive war chest, and shot out to a lead in some recent polls. Meanwhile, his campaign has sputtered amid an awkward rollout for his running mate, JD Vance, and a number of unforced errors of his own. “If the election were held today, I actually believe Kamala Harris would beat Donald Trump,” the veteran GOP pollster Frank Luntz said Wednesday. “That’s how much things have changed over the past two weeks.”

For the former president’s allies, it’s a sign that their candidate needs to “stick to the price of groceries,” as former GOP Representative Jack Kingston put it to the New York Times—that is, zero in on the issues voters care about. “They are a target-rich environment,” the right-wing commentator Ben Shapiro added to the Times, referring to Harris and running mate Tim Walz. “All [Trump] has to do is focus the attack.” But neither “focus” nor “issues” are strong points for Trump, who is instead appearing to grow frustrated—with his campaign, with the crowds Harris is drawing, with the new reality of a toss-up race that just weeks ago he believed he was running away with. “It’s unfair that I beat [Joe Biden],” Trump told an ally in a phone call last weekend, according to the Washington Post, “and now I have to beat her, too.”

The Trump campaign has denied any internal turmoil, with spokesman Stephen Cheung telling the Post that it has “never taken anything for granted” and will “beat the brakes off the dangerously liberal Kamala-Walz ticket.” But Trump’s efforts to that end have so far mainly consisted of mocking her name, questioning her racial identity, and daydreaming about Biden jumping back into the race. Trump wrote on Truth Social this week, “He feels that he made a historically tragic mistake by handing over the U.S. Presidency, a COUP, to the people in the World he most hates, and he wants it back, NOW!!!”

Will his campaign steady itself? Maybe. Trump could get his luck back as quickly as it ran out on him. This is still a polarized country after all—with an Electoral College system that favors Republicans—and Harris will face her own hurdles; just over the last day, Trump allies have begun attacking the vice president’s campaign as too tightly choreographed and raising questions about how Walz has represented his military service, while Democratic divisions over the war in Gaza bubbled back up to the surface at a Harris campaign rally in Detroit.

But any Republicans hoping the ex-president will focus on the issues, nearly a decade into their dalliance with Trump, are doing so in vain. Trump has never been preoccupied with policy so much as vibes. And with three months to Election Day, those vibes have changed.