The Republican Party has never been more united and Donald Trump deserves all the credit. affair joining experts, editorial boardsvirtually all Republican politiciansRepublican consultants, MAGA warriors and rally attendees:the need for Trump to put aside his personal grievances and complaints and stick to his principles. he affairs and attack Vice President Kamala Harris and Governor Tim Walz for their records.
The New York Times asked Former Rep. Jack Kingston (R-Ga.) asked him what he thought about Trump attacking Harris for fabricating her black identity recently. He responded, “I’d stick with the price of food.”
“All Trump has to do is talk about his position, like he did in 2016,” insists columnist Ann Coulter.
“He’s more comfortable with personality-based attacks than issue-based attacks,” Neil Newhouse, a Republican pollster, told The Times. “But since Kamala is a relative unknown, policy- and issue-based attacks would be more powerful right now.”
Conservative commentator Ben Shapiro agrees: “All he has to do is focus the attack, pour the money he has accumulated into this extremist candidacy, and stick to one simple point: you were better off in 2019 than you are in 2024.”
Even Trump campaign manager Chris LaCivita puts it this way: “In the end, it’s about proving in her own words how dangerous, weak and a failure she really is, and that’s not hard to do when she’s the one talking,” he told the Washington Post.
Obviously, following this advice would be better than Trump’s current approach (racial incitement, election denial, complaining about Biden’s ouster, attacking fellow Republicans, bragging about crowd sizes, etc.), all of which is clearly ill-advised.
But “discouraged” is the wrong word, because practically all To advise Trump is to tell him to stop. In other words, the general opinion is well advisedIt's just that Trump can't or won't follow through. This isn't a new phenomenon. Hoping that Trump will “pivot” or “act like a president” has been a political pastime for nearly a decade. It's like betting that Godot will be on time or that Lucy won't take the ball away from Charlie Brown.
But what I find interesting is not the tired assumption that Trump can be anything other than what he is, but the assumption that if he runs a campaign as focused as his supporters prefer, that would guarantee success. It would certainly improve his chances. But as a supporter of the view that “vibes” have supplanted I am not so sure that substantive issues and personal character are decisive factors in elections.
Ever since Trump came down the escalator in 2015, I’ve been asking my Trump-supporting friends some variation of the question: “What can the next Democratic president—or Democratic candidate—do that won’t make you a hypocrite for criticizing him?” There are some defensible answers to this question, but they miss the main point. Trump has been inconsistent on so many issues—abortion, socialized medicine, transgender rights, debt, deficits, military interventions, criminal justice, etc.—that his supporters have largely abandoned the idea that he should be held to a consistent position or principle. His personal character has been more consistent, but consistently miserable. The people who love his act love politics like a reality show. And those are the people he cares about because their adulation affirms his own self-worth. Trump wants to believe that his amazing personality is the only thing that should matter, so he rejects the idea that he needs to change.
The problem is that you need a majority.
Trump was narrowly ahead of Biden in the polls because Biden’s reality show had worse vibes. His physical and mental decline amplified his political failings. Trump exuded strength and confidence, and that was enough, in terms of vibes. At 78, unlike Biden, he managed to be both the “young” candidate and the “change” candidate.
The shift in attitude toward Harris reversed all that. The shift in attitude is real, as a series of polls have shown. People were tired of Biden’s program, and when the alternative was a rehash of Trump’s program, they settled for that. But now there’s a whole new set on offer.
Trump and his enablers created the environmental trap, and now they are being exploited by it.
Now that Trump’s world is suffering from the reality-show politics they themselves helped create, they want to refocus on the issues. But what if voters — at least the ones who will decide the election — think that politics as a vibe is the new normal, particularly now that Harris is kindly backing away from her most controversial positions? Trump has always benefited from the fact that the rules of normal politics applied to everyone but him. Maybe he managed to free his opponent from those rules, too.
