Donald Trump Is Nonetheless Operating Towards Hillary Clinton

Donald Trump is many issues, however a nimble agent of change isn’t considered one of them. To make sure, the previous president could be discovered all around the map on sure coverage questions, equivalent to a nationwide abortion ban or the shape-shifting overseas menace often known as TikTok. However in issues of deep private temperament, he stays the identical Nineteen Eighties-branded service provider of rich-guy malice he’s all the time been. He’s all the time on the heart of some unfair scheme to deprive him of his birthright within the consideration economic system; he all the time, mysteriously, hires the most effective individuals, who find yourself authoring Shakespearean betrayals of his trusting nature; and he all the time humiliates critics, harasses girls, and expresses hatred of wind vitality and fashionable plumbing.

It’s no nice shock, then, that because the Democratic Get together launched a basic shift within the 2024 election cycle by swapping out Kamala Harris for Joe Biden, the GOP standard-bearer has been left flatfooted, reciting stale anti-Democratic speaking factors from the stump whereas providing up fan-fiction situations of a Biden restoration on his Fact Social account.

But the spectacle of Trump grinding his gears through the 2024 election cycle homestretch betrays one thing greater than an ageing brand-huckster’s disorientation earlier than a brand new rival. Trump’s political message has been ossifying ever since his shock ascension to the presidency—which is why the Republican Get together has sustained a gradual run of reversals on the poll field ever since. He’s taken up and quickly discarded a slew of fictive culture-war crusades over that point, from the immigrant caravans of 2018 to the “vital race principle” panics of 2022, to no avail on the poll field. He’s wooed a rotating solid of hard-right influencers, staged a hostile takeover of the Republican Nationwide Committee, and, as of final Friday solid an alliance with conspiracy theorist/scourge of useless animals Robert F. Kennedy.

But the underlying downside in all of Trump’s frantic divagations and rebands is Trump himself. Specifically, Trump has been unable to depart from the essential template of his 2016 presidential run, the one election he’s ever gained. He’s solely, in different phrases, capable of run in opposition to Hillary Clinton, and he persists in treating all his subsequent normal election rivals as in the event that they, too, have been Hillary Clinton. In 2020, he subbed in “Sleepy Joe” Biden for “Crooked Hillary” Clinton and equipped a paint-by-numbers reprise of assaults from the earlier marketing campaign. The core message was that Biden was in waning bodily and psychological well being—the identical anti-Hillary chorus that Trump whaled away on within the 2016 homestretch, after Clinton practically fainted at a September 11 memorial ceremony in New York. Certainly, Trump’s fixation on a fantasy state of affairs the place he’s as soon as once more working in opposition to Biden is grounded within the reassurance that one key theme of his 2020 anti-Biden assault, regarding Biden’s waning acuity, has confirmed at the least partially true.

In his epic meltdown over Harris’s acceptance speech on the Democratic Nationwide Conference in Chicago—numbering 48 posts on Fact Social—you possibly can nearly hear the plaintive cry Come again, Hillary! rising up from Mar-a-Lago. As Harris began in on a direct assault on Trump’s character and file—one thing Clinton’s marketing campaign managed to tug off solely erratically and belatedly—Trump, flatly bewildered by Harris’s scorn and punching-down supply, merely posted “IS SHE TALKING ABOUT ME?” As he hit again anemically on subjects from Mission 2025 (which he once more dishonestly disclaimed any data of) to Harris’s standing as a world chief, Trump additionally launched an assault on the GOP-authored immigration Harris pledged to signal, marinated in classic (and bogus) 2016 anti-Clinton rhetoric: “The Border Invoice is among the worst ever written, would have allowed tens of millions of individuals into our Nation, and it’s solely a political ploy by her!,” he ranted. “It legalizes Unlawful Immigration, and is a TOTAL DISASTER, WEAK AND INEFFECTIVE!” It was roughly what would occur when you instructed ChatGPT to craft an anti-Hillary hate screed with out Hillary Clinton.

Within the wake of the conference, Trump once more reached for the safety blanket of the previous Hillary assaults. After he carried out badly within the second presidential debate in 2016, Trump had laid into the Presidential Debates Fee for allegedly rigging the talk system in Clinton’s favor. He complained, baselessly, that his microphone was both damaged or sabotaged, and insisted the talk fee was illegitimate as a result of it was headed by Michael McCurry, a former press secretary for Invoice Clinton. (The fee, like many institution political establishments, had a bipartisan management construction, with Frank Fahrenkopf, a former head of the RNC, as McCurry’s cochair.) Ever static in his worldview, Trump has now kicked off the week after the Democratic Conference with a equally unhinged Fact Social publish suggesting that as a result of ABC aired a section on This Week that irritated him, he might drop out of the September 10 presidential debate the community is scheduled to air. Deriding the present’s “so-called Panel of Trump Haters,” the candidate delivered this traditional chorus: “Will panelist Donna Brazil [sic] give the inquiries to the Marxist Candidate like she did for Crooked Hillary Clinton? Will Kamala’s greatest pal, who heads up ABC, do likewise.”

Standard pundit knowledge has it that Trump is once more posturing to bail out of the ABC debate as a result of he’s rattled by Harris’s extra aggressive marketing campaign and her courtroom-tested debating expertise. However as soon as extra, he’s simply doing the one bizarre trick he is aware of the way to do. That trick labored in 2016 for a number of distinctive and unrepeatable causes, beginning with the colossally unhealthy marketing campaign that Clinton herself ran. (I’m moderately certain I’m not the one one who felt a surge of dread upon encountering a spate of yard indicators and T-shirts that includes Harris’s picture alongside the recycled Hillary slogan “I’m With Her.”) However in plenty of methods, Kamala Harris is just about the alternative of Hillary Clinton as a campaigner. Even on the stage of sloganeering, “After we battle we win” is in a completely totally different populist register from the girl-boss feminist tagline “I’m along with her”—simply as “We gained’t return” and the various stump-line variations on the “Republicans are bizarre” chorus are a world away from the self-congratulatory MAGA rejoinder from 2016, “America is already nice.”

In coverage phrases as effectively, Harris’s Democratic Get together is pivoting away from the neoliberal coverage consensus that animated Clinton’s candidacy, as Nation contributor Robert Borosage has argued (regardless that it’s nonetheless unclear simply how lasting and significant this pivot proves to be). And the aggressive, momentum-seizing character of Harris’s marketing campaign bears nearly no resemblance to Clinton’s overconfident institution marketing campaign, which spent a lot of the marketing campaign cycle drafting detailed coverage briefs whereas neglecting the elemental work of mobilizing and increasing the Democratic Get together’s base down the homestretch. In the identical manner that “Comrade Kamala” is a distant, bizarrely Chilly Struggle–distorted echo of “Crooked Hillary,” Trump’s entire line of assault in opposition to his major-party rival is failing to handle the actual menace that Kamala Harris presents to him. So to reply the central, and most coherent, query Trump posed on the ultimate night time of the DNC: Sure, Donald, she’s speaking about you—however you’re nonetheless speaking concerning the mistaken her.