As Trump sprints toward the finish line in his race against Joe Biden, the Democratic presidential nominee, he is waging a campaign with dual personalities. There is the concerned commander in chief, who will spend Monday assessing the wildfires that have devastated California — a state that is bound to hand all 55 of its electoral votes to Biden on Election Day — and who recently initiated a drawdown of American troops in the Middle East and took unilateral action on Sunday to lower drug prices. And there is Trump the perpetual outsider — combative and vicious as ever — who spent the weekend baselessly accusing his opponent of drug abuse, praising the fatal shooting of a murder suspect with antifa ties as “retribution,” and assuring voters that the coronavirus pandemic had “rounded a corner” even as the U.S. death toll from Covid-19 creeps toward 200,000.

The outcome is a reelection campaign caught between two worlds in the two months left before voters decide Trump’s fate. For as often as Trump has shown a desire to use the trappings of the presidency in a conventional way, he has muddled, upstaged and at times completely derailed those efforts with profoundly unorthodox tactics that most of his supporters adore…

One Trump campaign official said it was unclear where the drug abuse charges against Biden, whom the president has accused of lacking the mental acuity to hold office, originated. The same official described Trump’s comments as counterproductive ahead of the first presidential debate, on Sept. 29. The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment.