Trump once mocked Biden for campaigning from home. Now he’s sticking to his safe spaces

On Thursday, former president Donald Trump attempted to — yet again — recalibrate his campaign, this time with a press conference at his property in Bedminster, New Jersey.

The appearance at his beloved golf course comes exactly one week after Trump tried to put the spotlight back on himself amid Vice President Kamala Harris’s surging poll numbers, with a press conference at his Florida home of Mar-a-Lago. He used the event to grumble over crowd sizes, at one point stating incorrectly that his speech before the January 6 riot at the Capitol had more attendees than Martin Luther King’s 1963 March on Washington.

It’s noteworthy that both of these “press conferences” happened at his own properties — the safest of spaces for the former president.

In the last two weeks, only two of Trump’s major public appearances, his stops in Pennsylvania and North Carolina, have taken place in states where he’ll actually need to campaign, a curious choice given Harris’s continued momentum and aggressive campaign schedule in several key battlegrounds.

Last weekend, Trump held a rally in Montana, where he quickly proceeded to mock Senator Jon Tester, the incumbent Democrat running for re-election against Trump’s hand-selected candidate, Tim Sheehy, for having “the biggest stomach I have ever seen.”

It was a somewhat unorthdox campaign stop. Yes, the Montana senate race is an intensely personal one for Trump, not just because a Democrat holds a seat in a state he won, but because Tester, as the top Democrat on the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee, helped sink the nomination of Ronny Jackson, the former White House physician, to lead the Department of Veterans Affairs.

But while Tester is indeed in trouble and Republicans need to flip