His attacks on the Clintons aren’t the only effort at baiting the base that runs a high risk of backfiring, either. One of the stranger moves that Trump has taken this week has been race-baiting his opponent Ted Cruz. “In all fairness, to the best of my knowledge, not too many evangelicals come out of Cuba, OK,” Trump said at a campaign rally in Iowa. “When you’re casting your ballot, remember.”

Cruz’s polling success in Iowa is assumed to come from the evangelical base, so this attempt to sow doubt that he’s really evangelical is a clear-cut case of thirstiness. But this runs a high risk of backfiring. Trump isn’t wrong to assume that the “evangelical” identity is tied closely in the conservative mind to whiteness. But what he fails to understand is that this is why so many conservative Christians like Ted Cruz. As with Ben Carson, the handful of non-white evangelical figures on the scene offer “proof” that the white evangelical identity is so desirable that it draws converts. Cruz himself knows this, which is why he highlights his background instead of minimizing it.

There’s a similar trying-too-hard quality to the way Trump spokeswoman Katrina Pierson acts. It’s not just that she wore a bullet necklace on CNN, but the way she defended herself when people made fun of her for it.

Maybe I’ll wear a fetus next time& bring awareness to 50 million aborted people that will never get to be on Twitter https://t.co/UTomoyYXLK

— Katrina Pierson (@KatrinaPierson) December 30, 2015

Oh, will they also be holding little Confederate flags while singing “Proud to Be an American”? The pretense of sincere concern for fetal life is all but abandoned here. The fetus–like the gun or the flag–is reduced to a bit of jewelry, a sad posturing to indicate alignment with the fetus fetishist tribe whose votes Pierson’s hustling desperately to get.

But perhaps the saddest grasping from Trump comes from this ad that Trump posted on Instagram. “WE ARE IN A SERIOUS WAR,” the title reads, before running a reel of coverage of the Paris and San Bernardino attacks. But then it cuts to Obama making a joke about “Star Wars,” suggesting that his willingness to spend a couple of hours out of his busy week seeing a movie is what lies between us and bringing an end to the threat of Islamic terrorism.

The whole thing is preposterous, but it’s hard to even get mad, it’s so pathetic. For one thing, we are not actually in a war, and stating otherwise has a strong whiff of hoping you can make it true simply by saying it. But there’s something particularly pitiful about wanting Obama to make a pointless gesture in refusing to see “Star Wars.” What’s the argument here? That if Obama refuses to see “Star Wars,” ISIS will be so impressed by his sacrifice that they’ll lay down their arms? That seeing a movie somehow removes his ability to make important military decisions? That if he would just stand in an empty room yelling, “Damn you, ISIS!” for two hours instead of watching a movie, we would defeat our enemies?

This insistence on empty gestures over meaningful action, of course, sums up the entire Trump campaign. This is a man whose foreign policy proposals amount to arguing that if he just puffs his chest out big enough, all other world leaders will immediately do everything he wants. But the utter silliness of this ad, with its assumption that Obama can meaningfully effect world change by not seeing a movie, highlights the vapidity of the Trump campaign poignantly. Vote for Trump, and he will miss entire blockbuster movies for no reason whatsoever, just for you! The man is clearly desperate.