Opinion Trump seems to forget it’s not 2016 anymore. And he’s frustrated. (E.J. Dionne, Jr., Washington Post, August 4, 2024)

I agree.  TRUMP sounds like a broken record. A warped, frustrated, mean old man.  From The Washington Post: 

Opinion 

 Trump seems to forget it’s not 2016 anymore. And he’s frustrated.

After nine long years, his old way of campaigning just isn’t going to cut it.

Former president Donald Trump adjusts the microphone at a campaign rally in Harrisburg, Pa., on Thursday. (Joe Lamberti, AFP/Getty Images)

By E.J. Dionne Jr.

August 4, 2024 at 6:30 a.m. EDT

Why is 2024 now so very different from Donald Trump’s earlier campaigns? To answer that question is to understand why Trump is so desperate to find new angles for attacks on Vice President Harris, even if some of them seem wild, outrageous and counterproductive.

Trump’s success in 2016, and his ability to retain control over the Republican Party since, have rested on his mastery of oppositional politics and his skill at using abnormal behavior to prove to disaffected voters that he’s no mainstream politician.

Until President Biden withdrew from the contest, both strategies still had juice. The oppositional approach worked when a majority of voters seemed prepared to reject Biden. The president’s approval ratings hovered in the 40 percent range, and even Biden sympathizers worried about his age.

As for Trump’s breaks with customs and norms, it was hard to find a more conventional, system-revering politician than Biden. These were useful virtues for Biden in 2020, when most voters were fed up with Trump’s chaotic presidency and his erratic handling of the pandemic. But by early 2024, memories of what had been exasperating about Trump faded. The 78-year-old’s acrimonious displays made him seem more energetic than Biden, and enough voters were sufficiently angry about high prices and immigration to welcome his spleen.

Enter Harris, 59, who instantly flipped the age issue against Trump. His often-disjointed screeds suddenly felt like the ravings of a grumpy old man, not entertaining breaks from politician-speak. Trump had always fed on the energy of his crowds. “Low energy” is a favorite Trump epithet against his foes. Now Harris has the energy, and her audiences seem positively rapturous.

Harris was not afraid to put aside a decorousness that came naturally to Biden, first elected to the Senate in 1972. She has gone after Trump hard, thrilling her crowds even more. “I know Donald Trump’s type” became a T-shirt-worthy battle cry for Democrats weary of feeling like punching bags. Worst of all, from Trump’s point of view, Harris shoved him out of the lead spot in the campaign news. She was new, and her identity as a biracial woman excited many constituencies, especially younger voters who had been checking out of politics before her arrival.

It’s no wonder, then, that Trump used his appearance before the National Association of Black Journalists last week to go straight after that identity and Harris’s authenticity. “She was always of Indian heritage, and she was only promoting Indian heritage,” Trump said. “I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn Black [and] she became a Black person.”

Of course the statement was everything its critics said it was — racist for starters, and an outright lie, too. Harris has always spoken proudly about both sides of her heritage. But Trump seems to know he must derail Harris’s upward trajectory somehow, and he was desperate to get back into the mix.

The ugly and deceitful attack did a lot of work for him, which is why his campaign has stuck with it in increasingly revolting ways. First, he finally dominated the news again. He reminded voters who might harbor prejudices of Harris’s racial and ethnic background. He sought to sow doubts among Black voters about how Harris thinks of herself. And he raised questions about her genuineness by suggesting — again, it can’t be stressed enough, falsely — that she’ll redefine herself in whatever way might be politically advantageous. The whole thing was intentional, and insidious.

But here is why 2024 may be Trump’s undoing: We have been here for nine long years. When Trump went after Hillary Clinton in 2016, the media didn’t know what to do with him, and Democrats did not know how to respond. Journalists debated for years over whether Trump’s lies should, in fact, be called lies. (Pretty much all outlets finally decided a lie is a lie.) In 2016, Democrats underestimated Trump right to the end. There’s none of that now.

Trump was so novel and such a viewer-magnet that his harangues were often shown in full on cable television. Sometimes, the media preferred showing empty lecterns anticipating Trump’s arrival to broadcasting the words of his foes in either party. And, for a while in 2016, the media occasionally rationalized their decisions by blaming Clinton for not being interesting enough. That’s not happening anymore. Or, at least, not to the same degree because Trump’s act has grown tired and often boring, as his Republican convention speech showed.

Since election night 2016, the greatest fear in the guild of political analysts has been writing off Trump prematurely again. And, yes, the polls show a tight race. But you can’t explain Harris’s surge or Trump’s distemper unless you acknowledge that the world has not stood still since the showman first came down that escalator. Trump and the media will make a big mistake by fighting and covering the last war.

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Opinion by E.J. Dionne

E.J. Dionne Jr. writes a twice-weekly column for The Washington Post. He is a professor at the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. His latest book, with Miles Rapoport, is “100% Democracy: The Case for Universal Voting.” Twitter