Donald Trump is looking like a loser again

Donald Trump’s chances of beating Kamala Harris are getting smaller. Picture: AFP.

We need to talk about Donald.

We can complain all we like, as I have, that the coronation of Kamala Harris by deceitful Democrats and a complaisant media is depriving voters of any understanding of what they are being asked to vote for in November. But we can’t ignore the giant Republican problem either: None of us are in any doubt what we are being asked to vote for on the Republican ticket.

I watched in its entirety and then, perhaps hoping that the written version might yield hidden intelligence not evident to the ear, read the transcript of the press conference Donald Trump held at Mar-a-Lago last week. Houston, we have a problem.

Mr Trump does deserve credit, as some have said, for showing up to meet the press, unlike his opponent — and in his case, facing brickbats from an almost universally hostile crowd, unlike the softballs that will doubtless be lofted Ms. Harris’s way when she eventually deigns to grant them an audience.

But, with apologies to Woody Allen, it isn’t true that 90% of being presidential is just showing up. Being impressed at the readiness merely to take questions is, if feminists will forgive me, a little like reacting in the way Samuel Johnson did when he saw a woman preach— “like seeing a dog walk on its hind legs. It is not done well but you are surprised to find it done at all.”

Donald Trump at an election campaign rally in Bozeman, Montana. One third of his remarks fall into three categories: false, obtuse and lunatic. Picture: AFP.

By my calculation, about one-third of Mr. Trump’s remarks fell into three categories: false, obtuse or lunatic.

I’m not even talking here about the usual grotesque hyperbolic assertions or baffling verbal manufactures, the finest of which last week was surely the description of “people dying financially because they can’t buy bacon.”

I am talking about things like these:

• The argument that he must have won Georgia in 2020 because he easily won Alabama and South Carolina, suggesting he thinks that Georgia — which has two Democratic senators, and which two Democrats have carried in the last eight presidential elections — is politically indistinguishable from states that no Democratic candidate has carried since 1976.

• The claim that the crowd at his Jan. 6, 2021, rally was as big as the one at Martin Luther King’s “I Have A Dream” speech in 1963.

• The assertion that everyone in America agreed that Roe v. Wade needed to be overturned.

We can add to this his failure to identify Gov. Tim Walz, Ms. Harris’s running mate, by name, but warning that this anonymous figure was “heavy into the transgender world,” a pregnant remark that conjured up an image of a slightly pudgy 60-year-old Minnesotan showing up for affairs of state in a tutu.

False, obtuse, lunatic. Often, like those Venn diagrams Ms. Harris is fond of, the remarks combined two of the three. On at least one occasion — Mr. Trump’s detailed recounting of an imaginary helicopter ride he took with Willie Brown, the former mayor of San Francisco — we got the full triple intersect.

Kamala Harris speaks during a campaign rally in Las Vegas, Nevada. Picture: AFP.

This is all of a piece with his recent behaviour — from his claim that Joe Biden will be back as the Democratic candidate to his insistence that the crowds at Ms. Harris’s rallies are enhanced by artificial intelligence.

We need to be clear about the problem. It isn’t, as some have suggested, that Mr. Trump has been wrong-footed by the Democrats’ switch from Mr. Biden to Ms. Harris. Nor is it a reflection of accelerated degeneration. The Trump of the past few weeks has looked and sounded more or less exactly like the Trump of nine years ago.

This is the problem. It is this Mr. Trump who lost the presidency in 2020. It is this Mr. Trump who lost the House in 2018 and the Senate in the Georgia runoff election in January 2021.

Why did he win in 2016? Because he was new and up against the most tediously familiar and disliked politician in America. Even then, he only squeaked past Hillary Clinton by a total of fewer than 90,000 votes in the three decisive states.

Supporters hold up signs at a Donald Trump rally. Picture: Getty Images via AFP.

All this explains where we are now. This is the same old Mr. Trump, but this time he is up against something the American people are being sold as new. Those of us who have paid attention may know that Ms. Harris is a seasoned hard-liner with extreme views, but most voters don’t. They see a blank slate onto which they are being invited to project anything they like.

Mr Trump’s performances as he traipses around the country again are reinforcing the illusion of that choice. Instead of telling them consistently and repeatedly what they are actually getting if they vote Democrat, he is merely reminding them what they will get again if they vote Republican.

Mr Trump has unusual political skills. I don’t disdain the voters who have backed him as the way to express their disgust at a rotten, complacent political establishment — on both sides — that has dominated Washington for too long. I commend them.

But, if things don’t change, the ranks of those voters won’t be enough to outweigh others who simply can’t face another four years of the Trump show and will back even a party hack concealing her real politics simply to escape it.

The Wall St Journal