Trump Has Turned Over an Old Leaf

By the time Donald Trump announced his 2024 campaign for president, the idea of a “new Trump” had become a running gag, taken seriously only by the most credulous reporters and most desperately optimistic Republican officeholders.

Then something funny happened: Trump seemed to pull off a reset. Yes, Trump was still the same candidate he’d always been—undisciplined, authoritarian, and capricious—but for the first time he had surrounded himself with a polished, professional campaign operation. The brain trust of Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita would never be able to control Trump, but they had figured out how to manage everything else about the campaign. The candidate wasn’t out in public as much, to his benefit, and the campaign didn’t try to make everything about him, instead focusing on all the things voters didn’t like about President Joe Biden, who was running for reelection.

And it was working. By June, Trump seemed to be in control of the presidential race and on a path back to the White House. Wiles and LaCivita took a victory lap in conversation with my colleague Tim Alberta.

[Tim Alberta: Trump is planning for a landslide win]

Then came one of the strangest sequences of events in modern American political history: Biden’s complete debate collapse, a failed assassination attempt against Trump, the selection of J. D. Vance as Trump’s running mate, and the rapid replacement of Biden atop the Democratic ticket with Kamala Harris. Harris started taking the lead in some national polls.

In response, Trump is turning over an old leaf. Infuriated that people are responding positively to Harris and that her campaign is drawing huge rallies, he’s back to trying to make everything about him. He’s returning to the lengthy campaign news conferences he held in 2016, including two in roughly the past week. He’s planning to restart big open-air rallies, despite the assassination scare. It’s starting to look a lot like 2016 again.

Even the people are the same: Aides from campaigns past are creeping back in. Yesterday Trump announced that Corey Lewandowski would join the campaign as a senior adviser. Lewandowski managed Trump’s 2016 campaign before being fired during that year’s Republican primary. In 2021, he was fired as the head of a pro-Trump super PAC after allegations arose that he made sexual advances toward a donor’s wife. “He will no longer be associated with Trump World,” the Trump spokesperson Taylor Budowich said at the time. In a fun twist, Budowich—a Trump 2020 veteran—also just joined the 2024 campaign, along with the 2020 press aide Tim Murtaugh.

[David A. Graham: Trump is suddenly running scared]

Roger Stone, a political operative with the survival skills and personal appeal of a cockroach, has also somehow maintained ties to the Trump campaign. Stone recently told The Washington Post that his email account was compromised, allowing a hack of the campaign. Stone was convicted of several crimes stemming from Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, but Trump pardoned him, and he later became a key player in attempts to steal the 2020 election.

Trump previously tried to bring back Stone’s old business partner Paul Manafort, who replaced Lewandowski in 2016, though public blowback apparently scuttled the plan. Manafort was fired later in the 2016 campaign. He, too, was convicted of several crimes during the Trump administration, but Trump also pardoned him in gratitude for loyalty.

[David A. Graham: America has an anti-MAGA majority]

These men are members of the “let Trump be Trump” crew, who encourage him to indulge his instincts. Meanwhile, rumors have begun to circulate that Wiles and LaCivita are in the hot seat. Such whispers are probably best understood less as an imminent threat to the pair—Trump is usually slow to fire anyone and prefers to just work around them—than as a sign of his discontentment with their strategy.

One can see why Trump would want to go back to what he feels worked in 2016, but he faces two big challenges. First, he just can’t pull off what he did then. The shtick is no longer fresh; remembering why these events were so riveting back then can be hard. He’s also eight years older, and sometimes that is very apparent. His news conference yesterday began with a tedious stretch of him reading economic statistics from a page. Trump showed some energy only when fulminating against Harris. “I think I’m entitled to personal attacks,” he said. “I don’t have a lot of respect for her. I don’t have a lot of respect for her intelligence.”

[David A. Graham: Why Kamala Harris’s politics are so hard to pin down]

Second, most people don’t like him, and they never have. Trump’s success in 2016 was less about his campaign than about the fact that many voters also didn’t like Hillary Clinton. (Even so, more voted for her than for him.) In 2020, running against a well-liked Biden, Trump lost. He was polling ahead in 2024 largely because Biden was no longer popular, but now that he’s been replaced with the more appealing Harris, Trump faces the problem of America’s durable anti-MAGA majority. “All we have to do is define our opponent as a Communist or a Socialist or someone who’s going to destroy the country,” he said yesterday. Easily said, not so easily done—Trump can’t even seem to pin a decent nickname on Harris.

This is a kind of reset, but not the change to a kinder, gentler Trump that Republicans promised after the assassination attempt. Meet the new Trump, same as the old Trump.