The Age Issue Now Haunts the Trump Campaign

By Noah Rothman

Friday, August 09, 2024

 

If the press conference Donald Trump called yesterday was designed to contrast his accessibility with his opponent’s stage-managed exclusiveness, that was achieved the moment he approached the lectern. As a tactic, it was a savvy move. And yet, it’s hard to say the press conference was a success. In the new dynamics of the 2024 presidential race, the age issue that once favored Trump has become his Achilles’ heel.

 

It was clear from the outset of Trump’s press conference that the whole point of the exercise was to hold one. He emerged from the bowels of his Florida country club to first deliver a statement about nothing in particular. But as he rattled off a list of the “bad things coming up” for this country — a litany that ranged from “a depression of the 1929 variety” to “a world war” — he managed to summon none of the passion that should accompany such dire warnings. He was enervated and breathy. He appeared to lose his train of thought mid sentence. He struggled to find a period that would signal the conclusion of a coherent observation.

 

Trump appeared to recover some of the energy that once defined his political persona when reporters began asking questions. And when the press exhausted inquiries relating to their true passion — the electoral horse race — journalists veered into the realm of policy, which was edifying and valuable. But no honest spectator could fail to admit that Trump’s fatigued comportment underscores the relatively youthful exuberance on display at Kamala Harris’s carefully orchestrated events. Trump hasn’t appreciably declined, but public perceptions of him have. Merely by virtue of his new opponent, voters increasingly believe he is in declining health and “too old” to be president.

 

This must be a jarring reversal for the Trump camp. It was not all that long ago that the former president’s campaign could boast that their candidate was holding more campaign-trail events than Joe Biden. They made the most of his New York–based trial by organizing “guerrilla-style” impromptu rallies on the streets of the Bronx — when it wasn’t putting on set-piece events in both swing states and outliers like New Jersey and Virginia. The Republican candidate was everywhere. Joe Biden was back home in Delaware. And when the president would reemerge on the trail, the funereal atmosphere suffocating his candidacy accentuated Trump’s vivacity and showcased his voters’ genuine fervor for their candidate.

 

That’s all gone now. The Harris campaign has reinvigorated the Democratic Party, and it is now competing with Trump on his turf. Democrats may be more enthused than Republicans about their candidate, a reversal of a dynamic that favored the GOP throughout 2024.

 

The Harris campaign is flooding rallies with attendees who are drawn to those events by the Billboard-charting musical acts with whom the vice president surrounds herself. The Democratic campaign and their mythmakers in media drive Trump to distraction by goading him over this measurement of his declining celebrity.

 

Harris and Tim Walz alike read the stage directions by highlighting the “joy” that surrounds their enterprise — dispensing with subtlety in the effort to cultivate a happy-warrior affect that is traditionally subtextual. But it’s no contrivance. Harris, Walz, and their fan base are genuinely enjoying themselves. Trump, by comparison, has been deflated by Biden’s exit from the race. He looks and sounds worn out.

 

Many have pondered what Kamala Harris needs to do if she is to reintroduce herself to a general electorate that is far less progressive than she has made herself out to be. Fewer have entertained the notion that the Trump campaign, too, could use an overhaul.

 

There are weaknesses in the Harris campaign’s efforts to lean into adolescent effervescence. Her campaign is dragging its candidate into a “very online” place that is alien — indeed, embarrassing — to the more seasoned voters who will make up the bulk of the electorate in November. But the Trump camp can’t count on Harris to make its argument for them.

 

In the abstract, the counter to immaturity is sobriety. Candidates facing down a more energetic opponent do so successfully by making the wisdom that accompanies life experience into a virtue. Given the grave challenges the former president warns are ahead for this country, an air of solemnity would wear well on Trump if he could muster it. But that seems like a stretch. Sagacity, composure, and severe earnestness are not among the former president’s attributes.

 

The Trump campaign and its principal are willing to engage on matters of real weight in ways the Harris campaign, so far, is not. That’s a strong point. A serious (though not somber) posture would expose the frivolity that surrounds his opponent’s campaign. “Joy” does not make for a governing platform, and you can’t service the interest on your mortgage with “unicorn sprinkles.” But the Trump team must first acknowledge that the playbook they deployed against the Biden campaign is obsolete.

 

Everyone can see that Trump is on the back foot, and he has been since July 21. He projects bitterness and bewilderment, neither of which dispels the perception that Trump, too, is entering his senescence. His campaign must now make their candidate’s age-related deficits into advantages. They must transform brittleness into battle-scarred, weathered into worldliness. The Trump campaign is nimble enough to pull that off, but it’s a strategy predicated on the assumption that their candidate can change. And the aged aren’t much for changing.