August 10, 2024 - 1:00pm

Donald Trump is being Donald Trump and Beltway pundits are convinced it’s killing his campaign. Trump’s problems are real, but they have nothing to do with his rambling press conferences — and it’s rather telling that journalists still don’t know why.

At an hour-long Thursday presser, Trump bragged that he’d drawn a bigger crowd to the “same real estate” as Martin Luther King Jr. on 6 January. He described Gov. Tim Walz as being “heavy into the transgender world.” (That part is at least accurate.) He marvelled at his own rapid healing abilities.

Media observers, though, acted as if Trump hasn’t sounded exactly like this for the last eight years. Politico Playbook‘s headline the next morning was “Trump’s ‘reset’ that wasn’t.” The narrative is almost a carbon copy of what media said after Trump’s appearance at the National Association of Black Journalists conference last week.

If anybody expected a Trump campaign “reset” to involve the candidate suddenly becoming a disciplined messenger, they really do not belong in the industry at this point. (See this hilariously naive editorial from the Wall Street Journal.) Trump’s coalition is people who love him and people who tolerate him. None of those voters expect Trump to start talking like Mitt Romney. They will not be surprised or moved by his rantings and ravings.

It’s true that in a close election, some voters may have a harder time tolerating Trump the more he whines about crowd sizes. But they’re already putting up with everything else in the Trump package — including J6 — so his lack of message discipline on any given Thursday afternoon is hardly a crisis.

Trump is actually making serious errors that have nothing to do with his tangents and grudges. Back in June, Matthew Stoller compared Trump’s speeches in 2016 with his speeches in 2024. “In 2016, he feuded incessantly with corporate America, telling a story about big business as part of the corrupt establishment trying to outsource jobs and replace American workers with cheap labor,” Stoller wrote. “His post-Presidential years have seen a different figure. He just doesn’t talk about corporate America very much anymore.”

On System Update earlier this month, journalists Glenn Greenwald and Lee Fang made a similar observation. “It just seems like Trump is abandoning the framework that he so successfully embraced and gave voice to in 2016, and is returning to this old, stale, archaic, partisan way of talking about politics,” argued Greenwald.

Fang pointed to the influence of senior campaign advisors Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles, the former being a conventional GOP campaign operative and the latter being a high-level lobbyist. All three — Stoller, Greenwald, and Fang — agree that the absence of Steve Bannon is conspicuous. Bannon, of course, is currently serving a brief prison sentence, but Trump’s populist instincts predated his relationship with the former Breitbart chief anyway.

This isn’t to minimise the genuine changes between Romney’s 2012 campaign and today. Trump is a candidate who got the head of the Teamsters to speak at the Republican National Convention. He’s arguing against open borders and a corrupt political system that targets its enemies. He at least doesn’t sound like a neoconservative on Ukraine and Israel. All of this explains why Trump is doing better than most Republicans with, for example, Hispanic voters.

But he lacks focus on the bigger picture. With Kamala Harris at the top of the ticket, Trump’s ability to zero in on elite corruption is even easier. Even with all the media fanfare surrounding Harris, the two are basically tied in the RealClearPolitics polling average. The real “reset” could be a post-labour day blitz on the Vice President’s ties to corrupt corporate powers.


Emily Jashinsky is UnHerd‘s Washington D.C. Correspondent.

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