Trump, still the ‘outsider’
President to accept nomination at White House tonight
After nearly four years in the world’s most powerful post, Donald Trump will formally accept the Republican nomination for president at his convention Thursday, taking a familiar stance.
As an outsider.
He’ll do that despite speaking from the South Lawn of the White House and leveraging displays of presidential power unprecedented at any other modern political convention. During his tenure, he has appointed two justices to the Supreme Court and named more than 200 judges to the federal bench. He’s issued executive orders that stretch the powers of his office.
But he still rails against what he calls a “Deep State” working against him at the Food and Drug Administration and other government agencies, even though they are headed by officials he appointed. He accuses political elites, especially Democrats, of ignoring the concerns of his core supporters. He says the news is fake and the polls showing him trailing Joe Biden are wrong. He derides the record of President Barack Obama, out of office for nearly four years. He downplays the crisis of COVID-19 and blames others for the nation’s stumbling response to it during his watch.
Being an outsider is part of Trump’s appeal. It’s also part of his problem.
Defiance is his brand, a trait that has hardened his support among his base. But a reelection campaign is typically a referendum on how the president has performed in office. Since 2016, Trump
hasn’t expanded his standing; he has lost ground. His job approval rating, at 43.9% in the RealClearPolitics.com running average, is below the 46.1% of the vote he carried in 2016.
“I’m the only thing standing between the American dream and total anarchy, madness and chaos,” he said Friday in a speech to a conservative group in suburban Virginia, striking themes he is likely to repeat Thursday night. That warning echoed one of the most memorable lines from his inaugural address in January 2017: “This American carnage stops right here and stops right now,” he said.
To a remarkable degree for an incumbent, the underdog grievances that super-charged Trump’s 2016 campaign for the White House continue to animate his bid for a second term.
“He’s using two contradictory images and hoping they both work for him,” said Steven Schier, a political scientist at Carleton College and coauthor of “The Trump Presidency: Outsider in the Oval Office.” “One is draping himself in the White House for the convention, and the other is claiming to be the insurgent, fighting against the Washington swamp.”
Even as president, and as the unchallenged leader of a party reshaped in his image, Trump remains a somewhat solitary figure – a fact underscored by who is speaking at the GOP convention and who isn’t.
The only living former Republican president, George W. Bush, doesn’t support him. The Republican nominated for president before Trump, Mitt Romney, voted to convict him in his impeachment trial. Republican senators in the half-dozen most competitive races this fall are staying away from the convention. And an unprecedented number of former Republican officeholders and appointees endorsed Biden, his Democratic rival.
The president and his allies have spotlighted his record on appointing judges, revamping trade deals and confronting China. But the economic boom he had planned to make the centerpiece of the reelection campaign has been devastated by the coronavirus. The pandemic is the most important issue on Americans’ minds.
“By the way, without the plague from China, this thing was over,” an almost rueful Trump told a friendly audience Friday. “This was over; we were sailing. But that came in, and then you have to prove yourself again. So now I have to prove myself again.”
Sometimes he even suggests, presumably jokingly, that his first term shouldn’t count toward the constitutional limit on two terms, citing a special counsel’s investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election and his impeachment trial.
“We’ll go for another four years, because you know what?” he told a crowd in Milwaukee last week. “They spied on my campaign. We should get a redo of four years.”
Under that calculation, of course, he might not really be the incumbent at all.