Excellent argument from Josh Marshall, at TPM — “Has Ol’ Man Trump Lost His Touch?”:
… [P]olitically [Trump] is very, very rusty. Even in Trumpian terms his speeches these days are disjointed, weird, discordant. And again — not by the standard of who you might want within a mile of the Oval Office. I mean even in terms of Trumpian politics. He’s not the same.
I suspect some of that is his age. Some of it may be that he’s just out of practice, despite basically campaigning from the moment he left office. Trump used to have a very clear eye for what people wanted and what they didn’t. Plausibly or not, back in 2016 he was very clear that he had no interest in touching Social Security or Medicare. Why? Because people like them. Trump wants love and he wants power. The way to get those is to make people happy, to give them what they want or at least tell them you’re going to give them what they want. He was very down on Obamacare. But that is because back in 2016 the word if not the program was still not very popular. A politician like Trump is never in the business of convincing anyone that it’s important to do something that doesn’t sound fun and immediately appealing.
Once in power, of course, Trump essentially delegated most of his policy agenda to the GOP. The only thing that seemed to really animate him was trade policy or using domestic trade subsidies to reward supporters — which amounted mostly to the same thing. But in most respects Trump’s entire presidency amounted to taking office with the assumption that being President meant unlimited power and unlimited love. That quickly turned out not to be the case and much of his subsequent presidency and post-presidency became a mix of grievance and payback for that not being the case.
There is a key difference here that is important to understand. Trump’s 2016 campaign’s success stemmed in large part from channeling the cultural and social grievance of middle aged white American men. His 2024 agenda is heavily focused on his personal grievances and doing away with all the restraints on the presidency that hobbled him and led to ego injuries in during his first term — Trump Unbound, as it were. (Think back to 2016 and consider where the “Deep State” or unbridled marxist civil servants would have figured into anything he was talking about.) His enemies are your enemies and he’s going to kick all of their asses. We know all this. It’s the essence of most of his speeches, threats, and so forth. To execute on this he’s surrounded himself with a cast of ideologues who have created a program for him. The folks making the plans are unsurprisingly hard core right-wingers who support a lot of very unpopular things. That’s why Project 2025, the Trumpian government blueprint assembled by a group of Trump administration alums under the aegis of the Heritage Foundation, looks like such a juicy target for Democrats. The people around Trump now know how to write out the plan, how to plug it into the various departments and agencies, and whatever other right-wing stuff that goes along with it is fine with him because it all means power and retribution in his hands…
I’ve thought for some time that Trump shows a lot of the signs of the kind of rage dementia that often eludes detection because the energy of the aggression gets read as focus and executive function rather than cognitive deterioration. What’s been harder for me to read is what part of this is the psychic pressure of the 2020 defeat combined with the accumulating legal peril and what is the accumulated impact of going from 69 years of age to 77. Whatever the precise mix, it also impacts his political agility and feel for the popular mood. It leads to stuff like this wholly unforced social insurance goof. This probably won’t be the only example. It hasn’t gotten much attention yet because even though Trump gets coverage, he hasn’t been in the mix of an actual campaign in years. We’ll see more of it because, again, he ain’t the same.
Trump on Social Security: weapons grade gibberish—-> pic.twitter.com/WvPQKb2CeW
— Charlie Sykes (@SykesCharlie) March 12, 2024
Wednesday Evening Open Thread: <em>Has Ol’ Man Trump Lost His Touch? </em>Post + Comments (106)