Trump’s smear job climaxed prematurely — and now he’s stuck

A question occurred to me last week as I was watching a clip from the former president’s rally in suburban Minnesota: Why was the former president campaigning in suburban Minnesota? No Republican nominee has won that state since Richard Nixon in 1972, yet Donald Trump has campaigned there numerous times over the summer.

I’m told Trump's been campaigning in a solidly blue state, because he believes he could win it. At that time, polls suggested he was on course to defeating Joe Biden. He believed he could expand the electoral map. But Biden dropped out on July 21. Trump’s latest rally was last week. Why? I’m told it’s because he hasn’t adjusted to Kamala Harris yet.

Perhaps, but perhaps this, too: Trump didn’t adjust, because he never adjusts. He can’t. He does not learn from successes (the 2016 election) or failures (2020). Trump is running the same campaign he ran the last two times. The chief difference is the degree of horror. While he wasn’t openly dictatorial eight years ago, he’s now telling voters to vote this time like it’s their last time. After that, they won’t have to vote again.

I don’t have hard evidence to back up this statement. (Yes, I do pay attention to politics, but not to everything political.) I just think it’s plainly obvious. I do concede it didn’t look that way as long as Joe Biden was in the race, and it didn’t look that way because the Washington press corps had made a fetish of the president’s age. Little else could break through The Narrative, not even the plainly obvious observation that Donald Trump is running the same old campaign.

I expect things to change now that Kamala Harris is the Democratic nominee. (It was made official this weekend when she secured enough delegates to no longer be the presumptive nominee.) As voters notice he’s running the same old campaign, I hope they’ll notice something else that was hard to see as long as the president was in the running.

The Republican presidential nominee is also an old man.

It wouldn’t be unreasonable to expect voters to wake up, as they often do in the fall, to a new understanding: Oh yes, of course! Donald Trump is running the same old campaign, because he’s also an old man! (As I’m writing this, Morning Consult, the polling firm, released the results of its latest survey, showing that 51 percent of respondents said Trump is too old to be president while 12 percent (!) said Harris is. We can expect that 51 percent to climb higher as long as the question is asked.)

The Harris campaign is encouraging that view, without being obvious about it, by using normal liberal rhetoric about a “conservative” opposition that wants to take us back to a time when women and racial and sexual minorities had few legal rights. With broader awareness of Trump’s age, there’s no need to mention his authoritarian tendencies. Of course he wants to take us back. He’s an old man!

Her campaign encourages that view also by framing the election as a choice, for voters, between “freedom and chaos,” with the subliminal understanding that a campaign like Harris’ can adjust to changing circumstances for the purpose of securing greater freedoms for all while a campaign like Trump’s only flounders. It bumbles around the country, as it has for eight straight years. Of course Trump can’t let go of a blue state he has no hope of taking from Harris. He’s an old man!

We tend to forget that Trump has been campaigning against Joe Biden since 2019 when, as president, he extorted the leader of a foreign country into a conspiracy to defraud the American people. He wanted Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to say – not do, just say – his government was investigating Biden for corrupt acts while vice president. Trump wanted to smear Biden before his campaign started.

It didn’t work but, since then, Trump hasn’t really bothered trying to win elections. He hasn’t bothered trying to expand his base of support to include highly coveted swing voters who determine the outcomes of presidential elections. For 2020, instead of increasing his share of the 2016 electorate (about 46 percent), he doubled down on it, growing his stake by less than a point. Instead of trying to win, he just declared himself the winner, thus paving the way for a failed J6 insurrection.

Instead of trying in 2024, Trump did the same old same old. With the help of the GOP, right-wing media allies and, lest we forget, Russian operatives, he built an international apparatus by which to sabotage Joe Biden’s public image. Over four years, right-wing discourse became totalizing in its orientation toward smearing Biden as too old, too weak, too feeble. Trump did what he has always done and, thanks to the Washington press corps and Democrats who are vulnerable to what the press corps thinks of them, it finally worked. Biden’s public image, after June’s Disaster Debate, was so irreparable he dropped out.

But it worked too soon. You could say Trump’s smear job against the president climaxed prematurely, and now that the vice president has taken over, Trump doesn’t know what to do after so many years of doing the same old same old. There’s not enough time to establish a new context of bullshit to which the press corps can give the benefit of the doubt, and, in effect, erode Harris’ support among those highly coveted swing voters as well as from inside the Democratic Party.

Trump can’t adjust, won’t adjust. He’s running the same campaign he ran the first two times. And if you need more proof, consider this: his greatest accomplishment has been knocking Biden out of the running by mounting a massive, yearslong effort to smear him for being too old to be president. And now that the same charges are backfiring against him, what does Trump do? Nothing, except more of the same.