Don't buy the public bravado. Former President Trump's advisers are deeply rattled by his meandering, mean and often middling public performances since the failed assassination attempt, Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei write in a "Behind the Curtain" column.

• They're pleading with him to adopt a new "hard-hitting" stump speech to define Vice President Harris as liberal and weak, advisers tell us. And praying he'll stop the recidivistic pull to simply improvise haphazardly.

Why it matters: Trump, who looked and felt like a clear front-runner heading into last month's Republican convention, has fumed, stewed and stumbled in private and public ever since.

• Advisers are telling him Harris will grow her lead coming out of the Democratic convention, which begins a week from tomorrow — especially if they don't define her better, faster. Then just a week after the convention, it's already Labor Day.

What we're hearing: Republican sources close to Trump tell us he realizes he needs to bring new focus to a message that can be meandering and self-indulgent. But it's Trump. So a new script is often fictional wishfulness.

• Trump "is struggling to get past his anger," a top Republican source tells us.
• Trump's aides know he won't change. So they're focusing "not on the need for him to change but on the need to adapt his message to win," the source said. "But he has to convince himself to leave the other garbage behind."

"President Trump knows he's the only one who can end the media's honeymoon with Kamala Harris," a top Trump ally tells us, "and he sees a significant opening to do so with Harris' inability to defend her record on inflation and the border."

• "To get past the media force field protecting Harris, however, he knows he needs to be very specific with his policy contrasts and is planning on debuting a hard-hitting stump speech very soon."

🖼️ The big picture: Three weeks after President Biden left the race, no longer does it look like Trump could win every swing state. No longer does he hold the advantage on crowd size and base fervor.

• 📊 New polls by The New York Times and Siena College show Harris up by four points among likely voters in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania (50% to 46% in each state) — quite a momentum shift after Trump spent eight months before Biden's exit tied or ahead in most battlegrounds.

This past week, the Cook Political Report reset its ratings to "toss-up" for Georgia, Arizona and Nevada, after earlier moving them to "lean Republican." Those states rejoin Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania as the six toss-ups, with North Carolina leaning Republican.

• Amy Walter, publisher and editor-in-chief, writes that the campaign has gone from "Trump's to lose to a much more competitive contest," with Democrats "united and energized" and Republicans "on their heels."

💰 In addition to the new speech, look for a Trump ad blitz. Trump's campaign and the biggest Trump-aligned super PAC spent four times as much on TV ads in Georgia in the two weeks after Biden left the race than in the rest of 2024 combined, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported.

• On Friday, the Trump campaign placed $37 million in new ad buys (nearly two-thirds of it in Georgia) — the most he's reserved on TV ads in a single day this cycle, the tracking firm AdImpact found.

⚡ The latest: The Trump campaign said yesterday that its internal email had been hacked, with documents "obtained illegally from foreign sources hostile to the United States, intended to interfere with the 2024 election and sow chaos throughout our Democratic process."

• Steven Cheung, the campaign communications director, warned reporters in a statement: "Any media or news outlet reprinting documents or internal communications are doing the bidding of America's enemies and doing exactly what they want."

🔎 Behind the scenes: A New York Times article over the weekend (the one that says Trump has repeatedly called Harris a "bitch" in private) vividly captures the former president's foul mood, pettiness and stubborn refusal to change. Among the revelations:

• At an Aug. 2 dinner in the Hamptons, "rattled donors" hoped Trump "would signal that he was recalibrating after a series of damaging mistakes." Instead, he invoked the "stop the steal" claims about 2020 that his advisers have urged him to drop. And Trump said of a race-baiting comment to the National Association of Black Journalists, where he questioned Harris' identity: "I think I was right."
• Trump stunned one of his wealthiest patrons, Miriam Adelson, widow of casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, on July 25 "by having an aide, Natalie Harp, fire off a series of angry text messages to Mrs. Adelson in Mr. Trump's name," complaining about people running Mrs. Adelson's super PAC, Preserve America, into which she's pouring millions to support Trump.

The bottom line: Put the Times piece and this column in a time capsule. If Trump loses, you'll understand why.

News of a reported cyberattack on the Trump campaign is likely just the beginning of what promises to be a hectic, unpredictable cybersecurity run-up to November's election, Axios cybersecurity expert Sam Sabin reports.

• Why it matters: Since 2016's Russian-backed pilfering of the Hilary Clinton campaign's private emails, the specter of foreign meddling in U.S. elections has returned every four years, fueling mistrust in the political process.

Politico reported yesterday that over the past few weeks, beginning July 22, a person with an AOL account and identifying themselves as "Robert" began relaying what appeared to be internal communications from a senior Trump campaign official — along with a 271-page vetting report, dated Feb. 23, about Trump's running mate, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio.

• The Washington Post later reported that on Thursday, "Robert" used an AOL account to send the Vance dossier, which "highlighted potential political vulnerabilities" but was based on "publicly available information, including past news reports and interviews."

🔭 Zoom out: Microsoft released a report Friday warning that Iran-backed hackers had targeted a high-ranking political campaign official via a spear-phishing email.

• Microsoft hasn't drawn a connection to Trump. But his campaign pointed to the report yesterday in a statement confirming the hack.
• The U.S. intelligence community assessed late last month that Iran was pushing influence operations to undermine the Trump campaign.

💬 "Buckle up," Chris Krebs, former director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, tweeted yesterday.

• "Someone is running the 2016 playbook, expect continued efforts to stoke fires in society and go after election systems."

State of the art: More nation-states are using Russia's 2016 playbook to spur chaos and confusion through whatever means they can — including hack-and-leak schemes and social-media-based disinformation campaigns.

• China and Iran are both already using AI in their online disinformation campaigns.

Between the lines: Even a report of a cyberattack targeting a political campaign — verified or not — is enough to stoke voter skepticism in the current political environment, Jake Braun, a former White House official and a national deputy field director for the 2008 Obama campaign, told Axios.

• "This stuff is what's actually going to undermine confidence far more than some deepfake that comes out," he said yesterday on the sidelines of the DEF CON hacker conference in Las Vegas.

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PARIS — With all the noise made about Imane Khelif at the Paris Olympics, it's easy to imagine that gender controversy is a new thing. But, as author Michael Waters points out, battles over gender are as old as the modern Olympics themselves, Axios' Ina Fried writes.

• "You can actually draw a line from what we're seeing today all the way back to the early 20th century," says Waters, whose new book, "The Other Olympians," explores some of the earliest gender bending and gender policing at the games.

Waters harkens back to 1936, when American sprinter Helen Stephens won gold and was criticized for her deep voice and large biceps.

• Waters says that from the beginning of women's sports, there was a push "to promote this specific notion of femininity and especially white femininity."
• "The anxieties we see today are really traced back to just that fixation on the bodies of women athletes," he said.

Between the lines: Tests to determine chromosomes, hormone levels and other biological factors are all imperfect. Any attempt to neatly divide the sexes inevitably collides with a biology that includes intersex athletes, whose bodies are more complicated than traditionally male or female.

• "We've learned and then, if you look at today, seemingly unlearned those lessons over and over," Waters told Axios.

Transgender women, he said, went from being able to participate in the Olympics so long as they reduced their testosterone below certain levels, to being all but banned.

• More of Ina's coverage.

Steph Curry had only five 3-pointers in his first four games of the Paris Olympics combined. And then came the medal round, AP's Tim Reynolds writes.

• The NBA's all-time 3-point king found his stroke, making 17 3-pointers in the last two games, against Serbia and France, to help lead the U.S. to its fifth consecutive gold medal with a 98-87 win.

The last four of those 3-pointers came in the final 2:46 of the gold-medal game — an unforgettable display.

• Watch the video.

Above: LeBron James dunks in Paris yesterday.

Above: The Team USA women's 4x400-meter relay team — Alexis Holmes, Gabrielle Thomas, Shamier Little and Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone — celebrates gold in Saint-Denis, France, yesterday.

President Biden, after attending mass yesterday in Rehoboth Beach, Del., when asked his message to Iran:

• "Don't."

Faced with still-high inflation, many consumers are opting out of theme parks — in some cases, for trips abroad.

• Why it matters: "Doing Disney" is now so pricey that cruises or even a European vacation look attractive, travel experts tell Axios' Ivana Saric.

Disney, Universal and Six Flags were all hit by lower second-quarter earnings for their theme parks.

• Both Disney and Comcast executives conceded during recent earnings calls that theme parks are competing with other experiences like international travel, The Wall Street Journal reported.

🎢 What we're hearing: Theme parks aren't doing the thing most likely to attract visitors — building new rides, Len Testa, the president of the trip-planning website Touring Plans, tells Axios.

• The average cost of a vacation to Florida's Walt Disney World— for a family of four, over four days — has gone up nearly $1,000 since 2019, "no matter which hotel you stay at," Testa said.

🇮🇹 Testa's clients increasingly find they can go to "the real Italy" for what it'd cost to visit Disney's "version of Italy at Epcot."