“Trump is Tony Soprano: He’s ultimately only gonna trust the family, and they have no idea what they’re doing,” Stevens said. “The whole campaign reminds me of somebody goes to a cocktail party, has some drinks, drives home safely, and decides that alcohol helps you drive.”

Stevens explained that Trump and his team have learned all the wrong lessons from his narrow 2016 victory.

“On a basic level, Trump won because he ran in a year in which a Republican could win with 46.1 percent of the vote, when third-party votes increased, and the non-white vote declined for the first time in 20 years. Trump has always had a very small margin that they took as a mandate and they never tried to expand their electorate,” he said, adding that the massive Black Lives Matter protests that have swept across the country could also be considered get-out-the-vote rallies for Biden, particularly since Trump is running as a “white grievance candidate”.

Trump’s Tulsa debacle, he said, shows the folly of running a campaign based more on mechanics — large rallies, data collection, digital metrics, turnout operations — than on message.