By the time Donald Trump announced his 2024 presidential campaign, the idea of a “new Trump” had already become a running joke that only the most gullible reporters and the most desperately optimists among Republicans took seriously.
Then a funny thing happened: Trump seemed to be starting over. Yes, Trump was still the same candidate he always was—undisciplined, authoritarian, and mercurial—but for the first time, he had surrounded himself with a polished, professional campaign management team. The brain trust of Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita would never be able to control Trump, but they had figured out how to control everything else in the campaign. The candidate appeared less in public, which worked to his advantage, and the campaign did not try to focus everything on him, focusing instead on all the things voters did not like about President Joe Biden, who was running for reelection.
And it worked. In June, Trump seemed to be in control of the presidential race and on his way back to the White House. Wiles and LaCivita took a victory lap with my colleague Tim Alberta.
Then came one of the strangest sequences of events in modern American political history: Biden’s complete collapse of the debate, a failed assassination attempt on Trump, the nomination of JD Vance as Trump’s running mate, and the rapid replacement of Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket by Kamala Harris. Harris began to take the lead in some national polls.
In response, Trump is turning over an old page. Angry that people are reacting so positively to Harris and that her campaign is drawing huge rallies, he is again trying to make it all about himself. He is returning to the long campaign press conferences he held in 2016, including two last week. Despite the assassination scare, he plans to hold large open-air rallies again. It looks a lot like 2016 again.
Even the people are the same: Staffers from previous campaigns are creeping back. Yesterday, Trump announced that Corey Lewandowski would join the campaign as a senior adviser. Lewandowski ran Trump’s 2016 campaign before being fired during that year’s Republican primaries. In 2021, he was fired as head of a pro-Trump super PAC after allegations emerged that he made sexual advances toward a donor’s wife. “He is no longer associated with Trump World,” Trump spokesman Taylor Budowich said at the time. In a fun twist, Budowich – a Trump 2020 veteran – just joined the 2024 campaign as well, along with 2020 press adviser Tim Murtaugh.
Roger Stone, a political activist with the survival skills and personal magnetism of a cockroach, has also somehow maintained ties to the Trump campaign. Stone recently said The Washington Post that his email account had been compromised, allowing the campaign to be hacked. Stone was convicted of several crimes in connection with special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, but Trump pardoned him. He later became a key player in attempts to rig the 2020 election.
Trump had previously tried to bring back Stone’s old business partner Paul Manafort, who replaced Lewandowski in 2016, but public opposition apparently caused the plan to fail. Manafort was fired later in the 2016 election campaign. He too was convicted of several crimes during the Trump administration, but Trump also pardoned him out of gratitude for his loyalty.
These men are members of the “Let Trump be Trump” crew, which encourages him to follow his instincts. Meanwhile, rumors are circulating that Wiles and LaCivita are in the hot seat. Such rumors should probably be understood less as an immediate threat to the two – Trump is usually not so quick to fire anyone and prefers to work around them – but rather as a sign of his dissatisfaction with their strategy.
One can understand why Trump would want to return to what he thinks worked in 2016, but he faces two major challenges. First, he simply can’t pull off what he did then. The gimmick is no longer fresh; remembering why those events were so compelling back then can be difficult. He’s also eight years older, and sometimes that’s very obvious. His press conference yesterday began with a boring segment in which he read economic statistics off a page. Trump showed some energy only when he railed against Harris. “I think I have the right to make 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.”
Second, most people don’t like him, and that’s always been the case. Trump’s success in 2016 was based less on his campaign than on the fact that many voters didn’t like Hillary Clinton either. (Still, more voted for her than for him.) In 2020, Trump lost when he ran against a popular Biden. He was ahead in the 2024 polls, largely because Biden was no longer popular, but now that he’s been replaced by the more attractive Harris, Trump faces the problem of America’s permanent anti-MAGA majority. “We just have to define our opponent as a communist or a socialist or someone who’s going to destroy the country,” he said yesterday. Easy said, not so easy done—Trump can’t even seem to come up with a decent nickname for Harris.
This is a reboot of sorts, but not the switch to a kinder, gentler Trump that Republicans promised after the assassination. Meet the new Trump, who is just like the old Trump.
