The ‘new’ Donald Trump didn’t last long for sure

Carl P. Leubsdorf, Tribune News Service

It took former President Donald Trump less than a week to abandon the faux unity message his managers put on his teleprompter at the Republican National Convention and revert to his unusual disrespectful, denigrating self. “They say, ‘Sir, be nice. You just got hit with a bullet. Maybe he’s changed. Be nice,’ and I’d love to be nice,” the former president told a post-convention North Carolina rally.

“But I’m dealing against real garbage when you hear that,” he added, deriding his new opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, with pejoratives like “radical left lunatic” and “stupid.” “No, I haven’t changed,” he declared three days later in Minnesota. “Maybe I’ve gotten worse. Because I get angry at the incompetence that I witness every single day.” And though Trump initially declared his willingness to debate Harris “more than once,” he quickly abandoned that commitment too, noting Harris is not yet the official Democratic nominee, not that President Joe Biden was when they clashed June 27. But he acknowledged Monday he’d “probably” debate her. But who’s surprised?

The new Trump is as fictional a character as has walked the American political stage since Vice President Richard Nixon, political gut-fighter, periodically transformed himself into the “New Nixon” a half century ago. And likely to prove as transient. But though Trump is still the same derogatory political showman his supporters love, and his rivals deride, the 2024 presidential race has become decidedly different with Harris as the prospective Democratic standard-bearer, likely to be joined on the ticket by one of several more moderate running mates. Instead of what had become a contest over which was the spryer and less cognitively challenged of two aging current or prospective octogenarians, Biden’s forced withdrawal enabled the Democrats to make the generational contrast that has almost always previously proved politically potent.

It took Harris barely 24 hours after inheriting her party’s leadership to transform the Democrats from a dutiful team of dispirited Biden backers playing out what increasingly seemed like a losing string to an energetic and expanding brigade of Harris enthusiasts nurturing real hopes of victory. The numbers are staggering in and of themselves: The Harris campaign claimed $200 million raised or pledged and more than 170,000 new volunteers in just one week, while Harris’ poll numbers largely wiped out the gains Trump achieved from his party’s impressively united convention and Biden’s devastating debate. Trump seems to understand that things have changed now that he, not Biden, represents the status quo in this race. He groused openly about the way top Democratic leaders led by the woman he dismissively derides as “crazy Nancy Pelosi” were able to achieve a bloodless “coup” in which both victor and defeated ended up enthusiastically on the same side.

He also has shown some awkwardness in making the transition, spending as much time in Minnesota berating Biden as hounding Harris. But, of course, this is a man who sometimes this year indicated he thought he was running against former President Barack Obama or “crooked Hillary Clinton.” To be sure, the speed with which Harris backers engineered last week’s Democratic makeover shows how quickly things can change in 21 st-century presidential politics. There is plenty of time for yet another transformative moment between now and the November 5 election. For one thing, the Republicans have just begun their effort to diminish the vice president’s public image away from the buoyantly positive prosecutor whose energetic appearances make one think she might at any moment break out into FDR’s “Happy days are here again.”

The GOP view of Harris, only somewhat less strident than Trump’s, is that she is closer ideologically to Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez than to Biden. It’s based on liberal positions she took, sometimes unwisely, as a California senator and unsuccessful 2020 Democratic aspirant, including favoring Medicare for all and the Green New Deal. Harris has developed a pretty good Trump attack line by casting herself as the prosecutor she once was against him as the convicted felon he still is. But how she defends her own admittedly progressive record may prove more important in the end. That struggle is already the subject of competing ads and is likely to be a centerpiece in their inevitable televised debate — or debates. After all, this is more a moderate country, occasionally trending right or left, than one strongly favoring either extreme. Besides defining her own views, in such high-profile venues as her own convention acceptance speech and a debate, Harris has an opportunity in choosing her running mate to indicate the orientation of her prospective presidency in ways that contrast with Trump’s decision to double down with Ohio Sen. JD Vance as his vice-presidential partner. In Vance, Trump opted for more of an ideological understudy to prep for future MAGA leadership than a governing partner, given Vance’s limited governmental experience.