I just noticed a write up on Trump stumbling into saying there’s lots you can do in terms of cutting Social Security and Medicare. The Biden campaign and other Democrats were promptly all over those comments, as you’d expect. But it raises a point that is too little discussed in the campaign dialog. Trump has two big advantages right now. The first is simply that he’s not Joe Biden and Biden’s approval has been low since the fall of 2021. The other is a general sense that things were better before the pandemic. You might say, wait, the pandemic happened on his watch and the worst of it took place during his presidency. But that’s not really the public memory. In any case, those are his two big advantages. And they could get him elected.
What this has tended to obscure, however, is that politically he is very, very rusty. Even in Trumpian terms his speeches these days are disjointed, weird, discordant. And again – not in some abstract sense of who you would ever want within a mile of the Oval Office. I mean, even in terms of Trumpian politics. He’s not the same.
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