It’s been a constant theme for Donald Trump’s backers: “Trump just needs to …” — be more disciplined, be more professional, think ahead, be positive, etc. etc. In other words, if Trump wasn’t Trump, he would be unbeatable.
But Trump is not going to change, ever.
And it’s the main reason why his comeback, while not impossible, is highly improbable.
Still, his acolytes and even his campaign team are vainly trying to create a “new” Trump. Mark Lewis in Townhall offered an 8-point plan, the first four points of which included adopting a lower profile for a few months, stop talking about the 2020 presidential election, talk less about himself, and stop berating Republicans he doesn’t like. While that is sage advice, Lewis might as well advise Trump to stop breathing.
When Lewis concluded with the advice that Trump should “show some humanity, compassion, humility, wisdom, fortitude, and positiveness,” I figured that Mr. Lewis must be trying to turn Townhall into National Lampoon.
The idea that Trump will stop raging at his enemies, real and perceived, is ludicrous. He can’t even take off for Christmas. Trump has not let a week go by without complaining about losing in 2020. To be fair, it is hard to believe that Joe Biden could beat anyone for president. But Trump’s complaints raise a philosophical question: Is it more humiliating to lose to a fumbling Biden, or to have the election stolen?
Trump’s own “insiders” within his campaign are leaking their own plans for “New Trump” that rival the inadvertent humor found in Townhall. Among their ideas is to have Trump eschew rallies in favor of small policy-focused meetings with real voters. Really? The over/under for Trump listening to an Iowa farmer talk about the ethanol RINs market is about 5 seconds (take the under). There is no chance Trump would sit through more than two such meetings.
Trump’s whole brand is big, grasping, loud, proud and unbounded. Shrinking Trump will never work. Not only would it not be credible, but Trump would never accept it. Trump’s silly NFT scheme? That was on-brand.
Trump’s campaign team and loyalists correctly recognize that the combination of his antics, bad judgment and narcissism have led to a series of major political defeats and a conservative base that is growing tired of his act.
The big polling problem for Trump is not just that his numbers are eroding and he is trailing Biden in approval consistently. No, the BIG problem is that he is trailing when he should be ahead — even far ahead. Both the Morning Consult benchmark and the YouGov benchmark have most Americans believing the country is on the wrong track.
Morning Consult has 70 percent of respondents thinking the country is on the wrong track, including 77 percent of independents. YouGov has a 56 percent wrong-track number (which rises to 59 percent among independents). In Morning Consult polling, 69 percent think the country is in recession; that number is 56 percent for YouGov.
With the economy dominating voter concerns, these numbers should not just drag down Biden, they should boost Trump. Yet, Trump lags Biden in approval — if narrowly. Morning Consult has Trump with a net disapproval of 55 percent, while Biden is slightly better at 54 percent. YouGov has Trump at a 42 percent to 51 percent deficit with Biden at a 46 percent to 49 percent deficit. The Suffolk Poll has Trump at a disastrous 30 percent approve to 62 percent disapprove.
In the most recent ballot tests, both Morning Consult and YouGov have Biden beating Trump — narrowly, but Biden is still ahead. In December, only the consistently Trump-friendly Harvard-Harris poll and Trump’s own pollster, McLaughlin and Associates, had Trump leading Biden. Meanwhile, Suffolk, EPIC, Fabrizio (for The Wall Street Journal), Echelon (a GOP-oriented firm), Morning Consult and YouGov all have Trump trailing.
Within the GOP, Trump has now fallen behind Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-Fla.) consistently in YouGov polling, now lagging by 8 points. The much less Trump-friendly Suffolk Poll has Trump down to DeSantis, 56 percent to 33 percent. Republicans are less and less interested in Trump running at all, with just 49 percent in support of a Trump candidacy in the YouGov poll and 47 percent in Suffolk.
Team Trump is stuck with a candidate who has no discipline, who will not take advice, and who has become a broken record. Worse, the polling environment should be about as good as it gets for a potential opponent to Biden.
Richard Nixon, a man left for dead after his disastrous 1962 loss in the California gubernatorial election, managed to reinvent himself in 1968. “New Nixon” finished off his transformation by becoming the 37th president. For Nixon, it was a patient five-year effort by a supremely disciplined, intelligent, experienced politician. Nearly two years into his own comeback, Trump has proven that he lacks any of Nixon’s qualities. “New Trump” is just old Trump and always will be old Trump. To get back to the White House, he is relying completely on his opponents making mistakes — mistakes big enough to overwhelm Trump’s own buffoonery. That’s a pretty tall order, even for Biden.
Keith Naughton, Ph.D., is co-founder of Silent Majority Strategies, a public and regulatory affairs consulting firm. Naughton is a former Pennsylvania political campaign consultant. Follow him on Twitter @KNaughton711.