Why Trump was so successful in 2016 – and why his...

With time running out almost as fast as there is little money left in his campaign coffers, Trump has decided to end his second (and perhaps last) presidential campaign wrapped in the warm hug of the crowds that have been his often noisy rallies ever since packed 2015.

Trump crossed the country at breakneck speed, spoke to voters at nine different events on Saturday and Sunday and performed his signature act at five o’clock yesterday with the last “Make America Great Again Victory” – half speechless, half improvisational rally “was exactly what it was where it last took place four years ago in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

At a nightly rally in Grandpa-locka, Florida, on Sunday, Trump caused cheers and chants as he shouted out about all of his usual targets – Biden, Clinton, former President Barack Obama, Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer, and even that National Institute of Allergy and the Director of Infectious Diseases, Dr. Anthony Fauci, who Trump proposed to let go after the election after the crowd broke into a chant of “Fire Fauci”.

The 2020 edition of Trump’s signature rallies is a far cry from how he used his 2016 closing events to make a disciplined, conclusive argument against the more reactive and disorganized Clinton campaign in the final days of the race. However, alumni and seasoned political watchers say the president’s penchant for ignoring or downplaying the country’s troubles in order to deliver complaint, boasting, and bombastic red meat to his most ardent fans has made him an ineffective ambassador for the kind of political conviction has what it takes to win. They fear that because of this behavior, he was unable to formulate a case for a second term, putting his campaign in the same position as Clinton’s four years ago.

“He’s Cleopatra, Queen of Denial,” said Anthony Scaramucci, founder of Skybridge Capital and Trump Booster in 2016, who served as White House communications director for 11 days before becoming a vocal critic of the president.

“He denies Covid-19, he denies the economic impact, and he runs a Hillary Clinton loop in his head when it comes to campaigning.”

A former Trump campaign official who worked on the 2016 race said Trump’s frequent boasting and claims of leading the country to economic success sound hollow among all but the most dedicated supporters, as many of his supporters are most strongly influenced by those of the The economic consequences of the pandemic were affected.

“I saw him on the stump today when he was holding a rally in Michigan and he says, ‘I’ve brought all these factories back. “But the only problem with that is that half of the people at the rally – 75 percent, I would say – are currently unemployed,” the official said. “It’s pretty ridiculous to convince them he brought all these factories and all these jobs back when they stand there trying to find out if they have enough gas in their gas tank to bring them home from the rally. ”

The former Trumpworld insider, who asked for anonymity over threats and Trump’s litigation, added that Trump’s lack of performance in office is evident to voters who overdid him last time, many of whom voted for Obama and Biden in 2012.

“One of the reasons we won is because we convinced people what we were going to do and that he didn’t have a record to run on,” they said. “But now we know from his own track record that due to his lack of experience in what they call the swamp, he was unable to navigate the swamp or defeat the swamp monsters.”

Trump not only claimed to have solved all of the economic and trade problems he fought against in 2016, but also made it the centerpiece of his blunt speech to deny the severity of the pandemic and label it as a democratic or media joke. He has often claimed without evidence that Biden “will turn America into a prison state” by following the advice of scientists on public health measures to stop the spread of the coronavirus. He has done this while constantly reporting complaints against the press, officials who participated in the investigation into the Special Envoy, led by former FBI Director Robert Mueller, and other obscure people often discussed on Fox News’ opinion programs, pronounced.

Jennifer Mercieca, professor of communications at Texas A&M University and an expert on political rhetoric, said Trump’s blunt speech – which began four years ago with both appeals to voters’ fear of change and promises like bringing a businessman’s sensibility to Washington would bring, was filled – this time is hardly coherent.

“He’s talking in code … about a reality that only exists in Fox News, OAN, right-wing Twitter, and other social media feeds. And that leaves out a lot of people who aren’t immersed in that content all day, ”said Mercieca, author of Demagogue for President: The Rhetorical Genius of Donald Trump.

Mercieca stated that the complaining and boastful speeches Trump made at most of his campaign rallies could still motivate his most stubborn supporters by making them more and more outraged (though she noted that such a strategy also sparked Biden’s base ). But there are limits to such a strategy, she warned, because of Trump’s decision to submit papers to begin his re-election bid on the day he assumed the presidency – and his decision to make his signature a permanent presence throughout his nearly four-year tenure – made it useless for the purpose of persuasion.

“If there were a word cloud for American political discourse on Trump last year, it would be” pretty exhausted “and” exhausting “a big term in that cloud,” said Mercieca. “In an attention economy like ours, outrage is a really well-calculated strategy for getting attention. But at the same time, you have exhausted people, and people can only bear to be exhausted and exhausted until they finally say, “Can we just get rid of this exhausting guy?”

In contrast, she said the Biden campaign took advantage of Trump’s focus on fueling his base’s anger by making the former vice president almost act as a substitute president during the pandemic.

“In times of national crisis or national stress, we see the president as the national figure who can call the nation together to talk about our values ​​and how our values ​​will guide us through the crisis,” she said, comparing Biden’s use of his campaign rhetoric. to fulfill what she called the “priestly role of the presidency,” similar to what George W. Bush did after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.

“Trump wasn’t good at it – he’s not good at articulating American values. He was just never good at playing the priestly role. And when you think of his Charlottesville speech, it certainly isn’t one that made people feel uplifted, however [with Biden] Here is a guy who really understands the best of America and sees how this best version of us is going to help us through these troubled times. Trump doesn’t have those words, but Biden and his entire campaign … was just one repetition every day he played the priestly role of president. ”

Another flaw in Trump’s closing argument for 2020 compared to the one he made against Clinton is the synergy between his paid media and his rhetoric.

Tad Devine, who served as senior advisor to John Kerry’s 2004 campaign against George W. Bush, said Trump’s ads largely missed the focus they had in 2016.

“If you look at the paid media, the final weeks of the Trump campaign four years ago were very disciplined. It was a strong business populist message that resonated, he was a very powerful ambassador for it, and it was about issues that affected people’s lives, especially economic issues, ”he said. “We don’t really see that this time. It’s just a mixture of complaints, complaints, and a denial of reality. ”

If Biden emerges victoriously elected president from today’s election, Devine says the ex-vice president and his team deserve full credit for running a campaign that appears to be perfectly tailored to the particular circumstances of a pandemic against an adversary who is against the President running, running for president refusing to give up the spotlight for even a minute.

“They don’t get the credit they deserve to find a strategy that would work. There were a lot of complaints in the Democratic Party in many areas, for example in the spring when Trump decided to go and be Biden had the same thing to do, hold a press conference every day and be in front of the cameras all the time, “said he. “But the campaign had the wisdom to realize that this was a lost strategy, that it was Trump who made them play his game, and they didn’t. This decision not to do so is, in my opinion, one of the biggest and best strategic decisions of the campaign. ”

Another Democratic strategist, Michael Starr Hopkins, largely agreed, calling Biden’s 2020 effort “the most disciplined campaign a Democrat could have imagined”.

“You stayed on notice. They stayed away from taking the bait when it came to Trump in his daily tweets and messages. And they’ve stayed true to Joe Biden, which I think got resonance because they didn’t try to turn him into something he isn’t – they didn’t try to go hard to the left or overcompensate and become more moderate “Said he said. “You just let Joe be Joe and be in the moment.”

Hopkins said the dynamics of the campaigns had reversed this time. While Clinton’s campaign was responsive to every news cycle and was often disciplined on Defense and Trump’s 2016 campaign, Biden’s campaign remained disciplined as Trump tried to win every news cycle rather than thinking long term: “In many ways, he was the perfect candidate for Biden, that you can compete against because … when you compete against Trump, all you really have to do is get out of the way and make him your worst enemy. ”