The Republican nominee now suffers from the same problems of establishment politicians that long frustrated conservative pundits.
Observers of Donald Trump’s rallies over the past month — such as the NR Editors panel on Friday — have noticed two related problems with Trump’s rhetorical approach to taking on Kamala Harris (even aside from his ill-considered attacks, as happened when he went after Brian Kemp in Georgia). One is that Trump often goes into spin-the-oldies mode, describing his various favorite themes and grievances in a shorthand that will be familiar to his fans but is nearly incomprehensible to undecided voters who aren’t consumers of MAGA media. The other is that Trump is offering generalized swipes at Harris and Tim Walz for their records and positions but not boring into the specific things they’ve done and said that show them to be extremists.
Back during the primaries, I warned that the flexibility and freshness that characterized Trump’s campaign in 2016 was eroding because, by now, he has been in a lot of political fights and has a record, so his style sounds stale, his jabs are predictable, and he is loath to change course in ways that would amount to admissions of mistakes or failure in the past. What we’re seeing now is another side of that, and an ironic one: Trump turning into what he campaigned against in Republican politics.
What, after all, characterized the conservative and right-wing commentariat’s two big frustrations with John McCain in 2008 and Mitt Romney in 2012 and, more broadly, with establishment Republican politicians that Trump was supposed to cure? Some of the frustration was ideological (e.g., McCain’s views on immigration), and some was broken promises, but in terms of communications, there were two persistent grievances. One was that McCain and Romney were unwilling or unable to deliver the best attacks that people on their side thought they should make. Trump, by contrast, would go there. He’d never leave a weapon unused. He was attack politics personified. But now the pundit and talker class is back to fuming that Trump isn’t using the best stuff because he’s so vague and blathery that he isn’t communicating the attacks.
The other thing Trump was supposed to represent was a fresh voice in how to deliver Republican arguments to voters who were not already committed Goldwaterite conservatives. Romney, in particular, always seemed to believe that he had to go around telling rather than showing people that he was “severely conservative” and Reaganite and stood for all the stuff you’d find in a Heritage Foundation white paper or a back issue of National Review. Some of Trump’s 2016 rivals did a bit too much of the same. This contrasted with Reagan himself, who had folksy ways of delivering arguments that were conservative in substance but he would present simply as common sense.
Trump never did communicate like Reagan, but knowing nothing of the language of Republican discourse, he threw out the playbook and found his own ways to say things that reached some new people. We can argue about the pros and cons of this, but the point is that it was new and distinct and it didn’t take for granted that his audience already knew and agreed with all the conservative arguments.
Trump’s not doing that anymore. The old shibboleths are dead; long live the new shibboleths. Everything is now in Trump shorthand instead of movement-conservative shorthand. But it’s indecipherable to anybody who doesn’t know the lyrics by heart.
All of this, of course, is why it’s a bad idea to run a 78-year-old third-time candidate instead of somebody fresher.