Donald Trump went back to where it all started.
After months waging an inconclusive conflict with Iran and pursuing his Washington makeover and revenge tour, Trump returned to the campaign trail Tuesday to reclaim the persona of a political prize fighter who transformed the GOP.
He chose Pennsylvania, a state dear to his heart that twice helped him win the White House and where he escaped an assassination attempt, to try to pivot away from the punishing costs of the war to a midterm election pitch.
“We’re the hottest country in the world,” the president declared.
Yet Trump’s histrionics revealed the downside of his political method. The rhetoric that stirs his base often alienates many other voters and can’t sustain his political capital as he tries to govern. And his inability to view his presidency and economic performance as anything less than stellar jars with a sour national mood and leaves Republican candidates exposed.
Bouncing off a rowdy partisan crowd, Trump was noticeably more engaged than in his drowsy recent Oval Office appearances or in a rambling news conference at the end of the G7 summit in France last week.
He unfurled his full repertoire, proclaiming that he’d saved jobs with tariffs and launched a manufacturing renaissance. He falsely claimed Democrats were election cheats; misleadingly implied transgender women were taking over women’s sports and accused “sleepy” former President Joe Biden of presiding over a migrant invasion. Trump connected with mock self-effacing humor, as cheers of “USA, USA” rocked a Mack truck plant, resonant of the MAGA crescendos in his victorious 2016 and 2024 elections.
Often at Trump rallies, supporters look like they’re having the time of their lives, underscoring how his bond with blue collar voters he lured away from the Democratic base is as much cultural — and based on vibes — as economic.
“It feels like a fight,” marveled UFC fighter Bo Nickal after he was called on stage and surveyed the febrile atmosphere, just over a week after slugging it out in a cage in the White House lawn on Trump’s 80th birthday.
Sometimes presidents, worn down by the drudgery of the job, rediscover their political identities when they take to the road. Trump’s crowds recharge his political battery and hint at something more substantive to his political project than his recent fixations, like his attempt to build a physical legacy in granite and gold with the White House ballroom project and in patriotic blue paint at the algae-clogged reflecting pool on the National Mall.
Yet, Trump’s weave of bombast, exaggeration and falsehood represents a taste only acquired by his most loyal voters. And he needs a far wider cohort of Republicans, independents and lapsed Democrats to turn out in November.
So while he recreated his political happy place Tuesday, his speech felt like the right argument for the wrong election.
Trump offers little to Americans stuck in a cost-of-living crisis
As he raged against the failure of Congress to pass restrictive election laws, Trump offered little to Americans struggling to afford their grocery bills or high housing costs. People worried about health care access might have been puzzled by his screed against alternative energy or his odd takeaway from his military adventures in Iran and Venezuela that “the ideology of the Muslims is slightly different than the ideology of the Catholics.”
The 70% of Americans in a recent CNN/SSRS poll who think he’s done a bad job on the economy are unlikely to have much patience with his claim Tuesday that he “inherited” everything that’s going wrong from Democrats.
And Trump’s promise that the end of the war means Americans’ cost of living woes will be swept away is hardly convincing, since the same economic vise was making life difficult for millions of people before he launched the war. “Prices are coming down right now at levels that you’ve never seen. And now, with oil crashing, you’re going to see something really amazing,” Trump pledged.
The president offered another sign Wednesday that he’s more concerned about his priorities than the economic forces bearing down on many Americans. He refused to sign the largest housing affordability bill in a generation that just passed Congress with rare bipartisan majorities. Trump is using the measure as leverage to try to force Republicans to pass a sweeping bill to overhaul elections — even though party leaders say the measure lacks sufficient support.
The deficiencies of Trump’s performance are especially important in places like the suburbs of Allentown, which hosted him Tuesday. If Republicans lose House seats in such swing districts countrywide, his final two years in the White House will be a miserable grind of Democratic investigations and roadblocks on whatever is left of his political agenda.
“We’ve got to win the midterms,” the president said, in one of his few direct references to the election. This is notable after an early summer in which he’s been largely absent from the campaign trail.
Trump has repeatedly frustrated Republicans and his own White House staff by mocking the concept of “affordability” that is dominating US politics and represents the Democratic Party’s best hope of a return to power on Capitol Hill — if it can overcome its own challenges in coining strong political themes.
On stage on Tuesday, the best arguments came not from the president, but from supporters selected to make the case for his policies. Sergeant Sam Elias of the Bethlehem Police Department, a father of six, testified that one of Trump’s signature policies — cutting taxes on overtime — had made life far easier. “For my family, these savings have translated to what was once a day trip to the park … is now an overnight stay at the Jersey Shore,” Elias said.
Social media and campaign ads can multiply such moments, but in a Trump rally and in the roaring wave of Truth Social invective that he spouts every day, they tend to get swamped.
Trump now looks backwards rather than to the future
The president has never been a conventional politician. In 2016, his rallies heralded an unprecedented and unorthodox political talent who tore up the textbook of presidential politics. As he rose, he watched his crowds like a hawk, using them as a vast focus group as his MAGA fans reacted to his new lines. Those that hit the spot would then be rolled out over and over again. On Tuesday, however, he was more retrospective than groundbreaking.
Still, he showed that he remains an entertainer, an outsider and a scourge of political correctness. He’s still a lightning rod for liberals and knows how to get jeers by claiming the reporters and cameras that follow him are fake news.
But from the moment he stepped to the microphone and declared “I won this state in a landslide,” Trump appeared to be in the grip of his own preoccupations.
And in his closing refrain “we will make America wealthy again. We will make America healthy again … We will make America strong again. We will make America proud again,” he was conjuring a reality that, recent polls show, a majority of citizens lack faith he will ever achieve.
Trump needs more than his base to show up in November to spare Republicans.
Simply voicing the greatest hits of 2016 and 2024 won’t be enough.
0 comments:
Enregistrer un commentaire