Trump’s 2024 campaign strategy is savvy, gentle and crazy

Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign has two sides.

Viewed from one angle, the move looks confusingly competent and normal: The Republican candidate veers toward the center on a variety of hot-button issues and tries to broaden his base by making symbolic gestures to traditional Democratic voters.

From another angle, it looks like a very weird, slightly fascistic reality TV star cult of personality — because it is.

The tension between these tendencies was highlighted this week in Republican National Convention.

At the behest of Trump and his allies, the Republican National Committee approved a New Republican PlatformThe Republican Party’s official agenda also promises to abandon cuts to Medicare and Social Security, including raising the retirement age. All of these positions contradict long-standing goals of the conservative movement, and all three put the Republican Party in a difficult position. Closer Alliance and public opinion.

Meanwhile, Trump used some of the prime-time time at the Republican National Committee to express sympathy for non-white voters, young Americans and union members. Give a speech It’s prompting young, traditionally liberal voters to rethink their skepticism of Trump and his party. “The fact is, the media lied to us about Donald Trump. I know this because for a long time, I believed those lies,” Rose declared, explaining that she eventually realized, “Donald Trump and his supporters don’t care if you’re black, white, gay or straight. They’re all about love. That’s when it dawned on me. They are my people.”

The Republican National Committee has been more concerted in its outreach to union voters. On the first night of the convention, Teamsters President Sean O’Brien got the most visible speaking opportunity. The union leader did not actually endorse Trump, and Most of his speeches The tirade against corporate greed did not gain much traction in the room.

Yet O’Brien’s status as a keynote speaker belied the fact that, to all but the most attentive audience, he had no formal endorsement: By all appearances, the head of one of the nation’s largest unions vouched for Trump’s commitment to workers’ interests.

Overall, the four days of television ads produced by the Republican National Committee for Trump’s Republican Party were more professionally planned and more palatable than their predecessors in 2020 and 2016, which often seemed to be made by and for Fox News fans.

Yet other aspects of the convention exposed the strange, illiberal, and authoritarian character of Trump’s politics. As well-managed as the Trump campaign has been so far, it cannot escape the inherent flaws of the man it is trying to sell.

Not all of these factors are unstrategic. No Republican candidate other than Donald Trump would have given up prime-time Republican National Convention speaking time to Hulk Hogan or Ultimate Fighting Championship CEO Dana White. Their appearances did not go well—at one point, Hogan called the Republican candidates “Donald Dick J. Trump” — But the Trump team hopes to consolidate its clear advantage Young voters with less informationit might be wise to convey a spirit of irreverence and fun.

Likewise, the conference’s message on immigration Extremely hateful yet popularIn his nomination acceptance speech, Trump reiterated one of his favorite and most hilarious lies: that the influx of immigrants into the United States is driven not by political instability and economic challenges in some Central and South American countries but by a vicious conspiracy by those countries to ship all the most violent villains across the U.S. border.

“The greatest invasion in history is happening right here in our country,” Trump declared. “They’re coming out of prisons. They’re coming out of jails. They’re coming out of mental hospitals and insane asylums.”

The message of this frenetic rhetoric, one hopes, is: “I’m a liar and I think you’re stupid.”

But Trump’s comments are also likely to reinforce the impression that he will not let any sympathy for asylum seekers stop him from taking a tough approach on border security. American public sentiment is now more local than it has been in decades. In April, Axios investigation A Harris Poll found that 51% of Americans support “mass deportations” (a policy promoted by Republican convention attendees holding signs that read “Mass Deportations Now”). This month, for the first time since 2005, Gallup It found that a majority of Americans (55%) said immigration to the United States should be reduced.

Yet Trump’s ineradicable eccentricities and other manifestations of illiberalism are also political liabilities.

One of those was the Republican nomination of JD Vance as the vice presidential candidate. The Ohio senator is an unaccomplished, largely untested politician who has publicly taken positions on a variety of extreme and unpopular issues.

Vance won the Senate seat by just 6 points in 2022, a year when the national popular vote was about 3 points in favor of Republicans. For comparison, in 2020, when Joe Biden won the popular vote by 4 points, Trump won Ohio by 8 points. So Vance underperformed Trump significantly in an election cycle that was more favorable to their party. This is the only time Vance has campaigned, and he is a successful candidate. Memoirist and businessmen, who once operated.

Meanwhile, Trump’s running mate A letter signed in 2023 Two years ago, Vance asked the Justice Department to stop distributing all abortion pills, a controversial interpretation of a little-known federal law. debate Even victims of rape and incest should not be allowed abortions because “two wrongs do not make a right.”

In recent weeks, Vance has distanced himself from those comments but has not outright denied them. Meeting the media Earlier this month, the Ohio senator said “the Supreme Court has ruled that the American people should have the right” to get mifepristone under current federal law, and he supports respecting that ruling.

he still Tell Fox News’ Sean Hannity said this week that “Donald Trump is the leader of the Republican Party and his views on abortion will be the dominant view of the Republican Party and will drive the party forward,” so he supports leaving abortion rights to the states for the foreseeable future. In both cases, though, Vance characterized his moderate stance as deference to another authority. He did not say that he personally believes abortion should be an inviolable right in certain circumstances, nor that the federal government should not restrict access to abortion pills.

Vance also suggestion Far-right conspiracy theorist (and Sandy Hook truther) Alex Jones is essentially correct about the American power structure, namely that “transnational financial elites control what goes on in our country,” and that these elites “hate our society” and “are probably also sexual deviants.”

Most importantly, Vance is The most open dictatorship Republicans in Washington. He said he would Help Trump overturn the results of the 2020 election, To raise funds January 6 rioterscalling on the Ministry of Justice to initiate Criminal Investigation Targeting anti-Trump Washington Post columnist, praising Consolidation of presidential power He expressed anger at the federal bureaucracy and argued that Trump should ignore any court orders that impede his seizure of power.

Presidential candidates traditionally choose vice presidents to calm potential concerns among swing voters or to balance the vote demographically. Vance’s selection, by contrast, exacerbates Trump’s biggest political liability: the perception that he is an authoritarian extremist whose election would threaten abortion rights.

Nonetheless, Trump chose him precisely because Vance’s current ideology is so similar to his own. Tim Alberta of The AtlanticThe Trump campaign initially planned to pick a moderate, nonthreatening running mate, such as North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum, but Trump was eventually persuaded that he needed a populist with equally strong convictions to help him achieve his most far-reaching ambitions.

Yet the most politically damaging display of Trump’s eccentricity and authoritarianism at the Republican National Convention came in the candidate’s own speech.

The Republican candidate’s acceptance speech was the longest ever and covered 92 weird and boring minutesSuch excesses speak directly to the authoritarian nature of Trump’s campaign for the presidency. Candidates for a healthy Democratic party must balance their own narcissistic desire for attention with the interests of the various constituencies they represent.

Trump, who has solidified the cult of personality’s grip on the Republican Party, faces no such constraints. His speech was not lengthy because of its rich content but because Trump allowed himself to pepper nearly every paragraph with pointless and tiresome ad-libs after he detailed his near-assassination experience.

A less eccentric and authoritarian Republican candidate might also incite fear about undocumented immigrants. But they probably wouldn’t pause in the middle of such inflammatory rhetoric to ask the crowd, “Has anyone seen The Silence of the Lambs?” and then, uncharacteristically, “The late, great Hannibal Lecter.”

Trump’s endless, self-indulgent rants are alienating enough in themselves. Even more unsettling is the fact that increasingly bored audiences are finding it increasingly difficult to entertain their dear leader with increasingly strained enthusiasm.

The 2024 Trump campaign is a highly professional operation led by Two of the most accomplished consultants In Republican politics, many of the members of the Republican National Committee have embodied their savvy. But no matter how cleverly you package Trump, the flaws in the basic product remain.

The Republican candidate is unpopular, eccentric, authoritarian, and easily defeated. Democrats frustrated by their standard-bearer’s shortcomings should not embrace defeatism; Find a normal and age-appropriate candidate.