The following is presented as part of The Columbian’s Opinion content, which offers a point of view in order to provoke thought and debate of civic issues. Opinions represent the viewpoint of the author. Unsigned editorials represent the consensus opinion of The Columbian’s editorial board, which operates independently of the news department.
It took former President Donald Trump less than a week to abandon the faux unity message his managers put on his teleprompter at the Republican National Convention and revert to his disrespectful, denigrating self.
“They say, ‘Sir, be nice. You just got hit with a bullet. Maybe he’s changed. Be nice,’ and I’d love to be nice,” the former president told a post-convention North Carolina rally.
“But I’m dealing against real garbage when you hear that,” he added, deriding his new opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, with pejoratives like “radical left lunatic” and “stupid.” “No, I haven’t changed,” he declared three days later in Minnesota. “Maybe I’ve gotten worse. Because I get angry at the incompetence that I witness every single day.”
But who’s surprised?
The new Trump is as fictional a character as has walked the American political stage since Vice President Richard Nixon periodically transformed himself into the “New Nixon” a half-century ago. And likely to prove as transient.
Though Trump is still the same derogatory political showman his supporters love and his rivals deride, the 2024 presidential race has become decidedly different with Harris as the prospective Democratic standard-bearer, likely to be joined on the ticket by a more moderate running mate.
Instead of what had become a contest over which was the spryer and less cognitively challenged of two aging current or prospective octogenarians, Biden’s forced withdrawal enabled the Democrats to make the generational contrast that has almost always previously proved politically potent.
It took Harris barely 24 hours after inheriting her party’s leadership to transform the Democrats from a dutiful team of dispirited Biden backers to an energetic and expanding brigade of Harris enthusiasts nurturing real hopes of victory.
Trump seems to understand that things have changed now that he, not Biden, represents the status quo in this race. He has shown awkwardness in making the transition, spending as much time berating Biden as hounding Harris. But, of course, this is a man who sometimes this year indicated he thought he was running against former President Barack Obama or “crooked Hillary Clinton.”
To be sure, the speed with which Harris backers engineered the Democratic makeover shows how quickly things can change in 21st-century presidential politics. There is plenty of time for yet another transformative moment between now and the Nov. 5 election.
For one thing, the Republicans have just begun their effort to diminish the vice president’s public image away from the buoyantly positive prosecutor whose energetic appearances make one think she might at any moment break out into FDR’s “Happy days are here again.”
Harris has developed a pretty good Trump attack line by casting herself as the prosecutor she once was against him as the convicted felon he still is. But how she defends her own admittedly progressive record may prove more important in the end.
Besides defining her own views, Harris has an opportunity in choosing her running mate to indicate the orientation of her prospective presidency in ways that contrast with Trump’s decision to double down with Ohio Sen. JD Vance as his vice president.
In Vance, Trump opted for more of an ideological understudy to prep for future MAGA leadership than a governing partner. The choice reflected his camp’s belief — and his usual predilection — that he doesn’t need to broaden his appeal to win. But Vance’s rough rollout is giving Republicans some second thoughts about that.
In making her choice, Harris needs to recognize the fact that she lies on the left side of the country’s ideological center and needs to broaden her coalition toward the center as much as is logically possible.
That is the opportunity Trump has given her by making clear the unchanging nature of himself and his candidacy.
Morning Briefing Newsletter
Get a rundown of the latest local and regional news every Mon-Fri morning.
