Donald Trump Is Still Running Against Hillary Clinton

Donald Trump has accomplished a lot, but being an agile change agent is not one of them. To be sure, the former president has many views on certain policy issues, such as: Nationwide abortion ban Or change shape The Foreign Threat Known as TikTokBut on the underlying issues of his personal temperament, he remains the same 1980s merchant of rich malice. He is always at the center of some unfair scheme to rob him of his birthright in the attention economy. He always, mysteriously, hires the best people only to end up crafting a Shakespearean betrayal of his trusting nature. And he is always insulting his critics, harassing women, and expressing hatred for wind energy and modern plumbing.

With Democrats introducing radical change by replacing Kamala Harris with Joe Biden in the 2024 election cycle, it is not all that surprising to see the Republican standard-bearer caught off guard and reciting hackneyed anti-Democrat talking points. From the stump While dedicating Biden resurrection fan fiction scenario On his Truth Social account.

But the spectacle of Trump grinding his gears in the closing stages of the 2024 election cycle reveals more than the confusion of an old brand-seller facing a new rival. Trump’s political message has ossified since his sudden ascension to the presidency. That’s why the Republican Party has been steadily flipping over at the ballot box ever since. He’s meanwhile taken up and quickly discarded one fictitious culture war crusade after another, from the 2018 migrant caravan to the 2022 “critical race theory” panic, to no avail at the ballot box. He has alternately courted far-right influencers, mounted a hostile takeover, and Republican National CommitteeAnd last Friday, he allied himself with conspiracy theorist and scourge of animal death, Robert F. Kennedy.

But the problem underlying Trump’s desperate deviations and readjustments is Trump himself: He has not been able to break away from the basic template of the 2016 presidential election, the only election he won. In other words, he could only run against Hillary Clinton, and he continues to treat his subsequent general election rivals as if they were Hillary Clinton, too. In 2020, he With subtitles Trump replaced “Sleepy Joe” Biden with “Crooked Hillary” Clinton, faithfully repeating his attacks from the last campaign. The core message was that Biden’s mental and physical health was declining, the same anti-Hillary refrain he repeated late in the 2016 campaign after Clinton nearly fainted at a September 11 memorial in New York. Indeed, Trump’s insistence on the fantasy scenario of a second run against Biden is based on his belief that one of the central themes of his 2020 anti-Biden attacks — Biden’s declining acuity — has proven at least partially true.

In his epic poem Meltdown There are 48 posts on Truth Social about Harris’ acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago that almost elicit a plaintive cry. Come back, Hillary! Harris rising from Mar-a-Lago. As Harris began to directly attack Trump’s character and record (an attack the Clinton campaign was only able to execute erratically and belatedly), Trump was completely taken aback by Harris’s dismissive and condescending tone, posting, “Is she talking about me?” Trump also launched an attack on the Republican-sponsored immigration bill that Harris had promised to sign, while ineffectually refuting everything from Project 2025 (which he also disingenuously denied knowing anything about) to Harris’ status as a world leader. Classic (and false) anti-Clinton rhetoric of 2016“The border bill is one of the worst bills ever made and will allow millions of people into our country, but it’s just her political ploy!,” he ranted. “This bill will legalize illegal immigration and is a total disaster, weak and ineffective!” This is pretty much what would happen if you told ChatGPT to write a long anti-Hillary hate article without Hillary Clinton.

After the convention, Trump again fell back on his old safe bet: attacking Hillary. After his terrible performance in the second presidential debate in 2016, Trump denounced the Commission on Presidential Debates, Manipulation of the discussion system Trump baselessly complained that microphones were broken or obstructed in Clinton’s favor, and claimed the debate commission was illegitimate because it was headed by Michael McCurry, Bill Clinton’s former press secretary. (The commission, like many other establishment political organizations, has bipartisan leadership, with former Republican National Committee chairman Frank Fahrenkopf serving as McCurry’s co-chair.) Despite his perennially fixed worldview, Trump, in an equally insane Truth Social post the week after the Democratic National Convention, claimed that ABC airing Clinton’s show was enough to discredit him. this week It has so annoyed him that he may miss the Sept. 10 presidential debate that the network plans to air. The candidate used his signature phrase to poke fun at the show’s “so-called Trump-hating panel.” “Panelist Donna Brazile said, [sic] Will they question the Marxist candidate as they did Hillary Clinton? Will Kamala’s best friend at the helm of ABC do the same?”

Conventional pundits have it that Trump, shaken by Harris’ more aggressive campaigning and her court-tested debating skills, is once again poised to back out of the ABC debates. But once again, he’s just using the weird trick he knows best, a trick that worked for a number of unique and unreplicable reasons, starting with Clinton’s own extremely bad campaign in 2016. (I’m sure I’m not the only one whose fears have spiked after encountering that series of campaigns.) Garden sign and T-Shirts (It features an image of Harris and repurposes Hillary’s slogan, “I’m with her.”) But in many ways, Kamala Harris is the polar opposite of Hillary Clinton as a campaigner. Even at the level of a slogan, “We Fight and We Win” is a very different populist expression from the girl boss feminist catchphrase, “I’m with her.” Similarly, the many campaign-speak variations on “we’re not going back” and “the Republican Party is weird” are a far cry from the self-congratulatory MAGA retorts of 2016 that “America is already great.”

On policy, Harris’ Democratic Party is shifting away from the neoliberal policy consensus that animated Clinton’s candidacy. Country As contributor Robert Borosaj argues (though it remains to be seen how long-lasting and meaningful this shift will be), the aggressive, momentum-grabbing nature of Harris’ campaign bears little resemblance to the overconfident establishment campaign of Clinton that dominated most of the campaign. Developing a detailed policy brief Meanwhile, the basic work of mobilizing and expanding the Democratic base has been sidelined in the final stages. Just as “Comrade Kamala” is a distant, strangely Cold War, warped echo of “Crooked Hillary,” Trump’s entire line of attacks on his major party rivals fails to address the real threat that Kamala Harris poses to him. Thus, the answer to Trump’s central and most coherent question on the final night of the Democratic National Convention is, “Yes, Donald, she’s talking about you. But you’re still talking about the wrong her.”