The 2022 version of Trump is less fun and less interesting than the person who rode the golden escalator seven years ago.
People
have long predicted that Donald Trump would lose currency as a politician when
he lost his capacity to outrage.
It is
true enough that, like an overused narcotic, the effect of
did-he-really-go-there rhetoric and norm-shattering behavior wears off after a
while. It is true also that Trump has been more innovative than many imagined
possible in forever finding new lines to cross.
There is
another way that is less appreciated — perhaps even by the candidate himself —
of how Trump and his movement will lose steam. It is when Trump loses his
capacity for delight.
It used
to be that even people who found his politics and character repellent could
still find something enlivening in his performance. Trump in earlier days was
often funny. He knew it, and he used it. At a minimum, there was never a doubt
that he was vastly entertaining himself.
On the
week that he announced his third presidential campaign, there is ample reason
to doubt. Trump is a master of demagogic arts. But in his long, numbing speech
at Mar-a-Lago this week, something in the potion was off. What was it?
One
place to search for an answer is in the original speech that got the whole
thing started — now seven years and five months ago. People often invoke his
iconic ride down the gold escalator at Trump Tower when launching his first
presidential campaign in June 2015. But they may not remember much about what
he actually said.
I
watched the speech in full again this week, testing several hypotheses, and
fully expecting that some or all would prove true.
Has the
76-year-old Trump aged in startling ways? Not really. If anything, he seemed a
trifle trimmer this week and not notably more infirm.
Has his
message become more scattered and less coherent? To the contrary, it was the
2015 speech that was more marked by random riffs and narrative excursions as
different thoughts popped into his head. This week, he was reading from a
teleprompter much of the time, which plainly sapped his energy. But it also
meant that large parts of the speech (certainly not all of it) made an
identifiable argument that could be followed in a linear way from one paragraph
to the next.
Has his
message markedly changed, in ways that show he does not actually care about any
issues but is purely an opportunist who grabs at whatever fits his purposes?
No, or at least no more so than the average politician. There was ample
consistency between the two speeches: The competitive threat posed by China,
the claim that other nations are laughing at American decline, the swampiness
of the Washington lobbying culture.
The most
significant change — it is dramatic — was that in 2015 Trump was self-evidently
having fun and good-naturedly inviting his audience to have fun with him.
Yes,
there were lines in 2015 that stirred outrage — his assertion that a flood of
undocumented immigrants included many “rapists” — but the dominant tone was one
of almost adolescent ebullience.
“I’m
really rich!” he exclaimed, adding that his purpose was not to boast but to say
he couldn’t be bought. Then he boasted: ”I’m really proud of my success.”
Rather
than the scathing insults we now associate with Trump, he claimed of his
Republican candidates, “I like them,” even as he mocked them as ineffectual and
clueless at deal-making. He talked about how much he hoped then-President
Barack Obama would play golf at one of his country clubs (“I have the best
courses in the world”).
He
described America as “a brand” that needed to be marketed and promised to be
upbeat national “cheerleader.”
He
talked about winning at Manhattan real estate even though the father he
idolized was skeptical. “I gotta build these big buildings, I gotta do it,
Dad.” Of his reputation for brutal professional combat, Trump commented, “I
think I am a nice person.”
In
short, for all the raucous braggadocio, there was a human dimension to Trump in
2015 that was barely evident in the heavy, heaving, hectoring tone of this
week’s announcement.
The
contrast is not incidental to calculations about whether Trump could return to
the presidency after leaving the presidency, as only Grover Cleveland has done
previously in American history.
No one
would get rich (least of all me) off my Trump predictions over the years. Even
so, I’m staying on the limb I climbed out on two years ago, after Trump lost
the 2020 election but before the Jan. 6 riot: Trump is quite unlikely to
reclaim the White House.
When he
first sprang on the presidential stage, Trump was not actually quite as exotic
a figure he seemed. The noisy, flamboyant outsider — shooting to prominence by
condemning elites as effete and disconnected from the real concerns of
hardworking average citizens and promising to demolish a corrupt establishment
— is a familiar type in American politics. A benign example is Ross Perot. More
malignant manifestations would include George Wallace, Joe McCarthy or Huey
Long. Trump is unique only in that he reached the White House. These figures
typically streak across the sky, cause conventional politicians in both parties
to quake, but do not have staying power.
In his
2022 incarnation, Trump is no longer a familiar American type. He is instead
proposing to import a kind of Juan Peronism onto soil that has never in 240
years supported that kind of thing. The poor showing of election deniers in the
midterm elections suggests the United States remains hostile ground to true
authoritarianism.
“Every hero,” Emerson wrote some 170 years ago
of Napoleon, “becomes a bore at last.”
Perhaps
every villain, too. At least that’s the case for CNN, where for years
journalists took pride in opposing and exposing Trump even as, on programming
grounds, the network was in a symbiotic relationship with him. On Tuesday,
anchors cut away from his speech in the middle for roundtable analysis. No
doubt they were responding to scolding from journalistic priests who warn about
illegitimately amplifying Trump’s bombast and deceptions. But the real reason
was that listening to Trump’s speech was a bit of a slog.
Unfortunately,
listening to analysts describe it as low-energy and full of falsehoods was also
a bit of a slog.
Deep
down, Trump is too much of a natural performer not to know the truth. He is no
longer having fun. When he is boring even to himself, it’s going to be very
hard to keep his audience.
***John
Harris is founding editor of Politico. His Altitude column offers a regular
perspective on politics in a moment of radical disruption