Trump’s Campaign Has Lost Whatever Substance It Once Had
5 min read
Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign was, among other things, one of the most impressive displays of branding on a large scale, in a short time, ever. There were hats. There were flags. And above all, there were slogans.
“Make America Great Again.” “Build the wall.” “Lock her up.” And later, “Drain the swamp,” which Trump conceded on the stump that he’d initially hated. No matter: Crowds loved it, which was good enough for Trump to decide that he did, too.
One peculiarity of Trump’s 2024 campaign is the absence of any similar mantra. At some recent rallies, neither Trump nor the audience has even uttered “Build the wall,” once a standard. Crowds are reverting instead to generic “U-S-A” chants or, as at a recent Phoenix rally, “Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit!,” which has a winning simplicity but doesn’t have the specificity and originality of its predecessors.
In their place, Trump’s stump speech has become dominated by grievances about the wrongs he believes have been done to him and his promises to get even for them. It doesn’t quite create the festive atmosphere of eight years ago, when many attendees were clearly having a great time. Where the new, more prosaic feeling lacks the uplift of the past, though, it has still managed to generate enough enthusiasm that Trump leads in many polls and could return to the White House in a few months.
Even Trump seems to acknowledge the hollowness of his latest run. “In 2016, we had a great campaign and it was mostly about the border,” he said recently in Nevada. “And I did such a good job that in 2020, where we got millions of more votes than we did in 2016, but I couldn’t talk about the border.”
The lack of catchy slogans might not matter if they were just slogans. But in 2016, they were a symbol of Trump’s willingness to talk about things that other candidates, including other Republicans, shied away from. When Trump promised to build the wall, he was demonstrating that he wasn’t beholden to the somewhat centrist immigration-reform tendencies of the rest of the Republican Party and didn’t care about political correctness. When he was attacked for the slogan, he smirked, “The wall just got 10 feet higher.”
The focus on the wall also showed that he was willing to deploy (putatively) “commonsense” ideas that other politicians weren’t. This helped Trump to appeal not just to Republicans but to disaffected voters of all stripes. He had several such policy positions, including breaking with the bipartisan consensus on free trade, pledging to protect Social Security and Medicare, and claiming to have opposed the Iraq War from the start.
Once Trump was president, only a small portion of the wall got built, and Mexico didn’t pay for it as Trump had promised. But although Trump likes to say at his rallies that he constructed 571 miles of the wall (an exaggeration), he isn’t now vowing to finish the job. In fact, Trump is emphasizing fewer big transformational ideas compared with 2016. His promises are a scattershot collection of ideas targeted at particular segments of the electorate: ending taxes on salary earned from tips, defending TikTok (a platform he once tried to ban), declassifying files on John F. Kennedy’s assassination, rolling back fossil-fuel regulations. Although he promises to clamp down on the border and deport undocumented immigrants, you won’t catch a “Round ’em up” chant at his rallies. And Project 2025, his allies’ proposal to overhaul the federal government by massively expanding political patronage, doesn’t lend itself to a bumper sticker.
On other issues, he seems to be grasping for a position that aligns with public opinion rather than offering his own bold proclamations. Where Trump once trumpeted his appointment of justices who overturned Roe v. Wade, he is now fumblingly trying to formulate a position on abortion that doesn’t alienate either his base or swing voters, mostly relying on ambiguity. Regarding the war in Gaza, he has criticized Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and called for the conflict to end quickly—but on Israel’s terms. This may not be realistic, though it probably aligns with many voters’ basic desire.
Taking the place of all of this in his stump speech are dark warnings about President Joe Biden and talk of retribution for his political adversaries, including the current president. Trump allots a great deal of his stump speech to mocking Biden as incoherent and senile (sometimes awkwardly) while also warning that Biden’s administration has made the United States a failed nation, and that his reelection could be fatal to the country. The disconnect between the images of Biden as doddering fool and as evil schemer is one that Republicans have struggled to reconcile but that Trump has concluded doesn’t need resolving.
Grievance is not a new note at Trump rallies, but four and eight years ago, he used to talk about other people’s grievances and promise to redress them. Now the grievances are largely his own, stemming from the legal cases against him and his loss in the 2020 election, which is so painful that he still won’t recognize it. For some of his die-hard fans, this may resonate as proof of his claims that he is their champion: He tried to stand up for them, so the powers that be came after him. (This is absurd if you actually reflect on the cases against him.) Even so, this just serves to rile up the base, rather than speak to an imagined silent majority, as he did in 2016.
In a strange sense, Trump’s campaign resembles the one that his rival Hillary Clinton ran in 2016. One big problem for Clinton was the criticism that she had no compelling goal for her candidacy other than that she wanted to be president. Trump’s campaign now is about nothing so much as his desire to be president. He’s running because he feels that the presidency was stolen from him in 2020 and because it will afford him a desperately needed legal shield. Even Project 2025 is about the accumulation of executive power itself, rather than any particular policy goal. Just like for Clinton, this might be enough to win Trump a majority of the popular vote; unlike for her, it might carry him to the White House. But it doesn’t offer a great deal of inspiration or fun.
