It’s hard to imagine Donald Trump’s presidential campaign without the rallies he’s held all over the country. We’ve seen Trump don a hardhat and pretend to shovel coal in West Virginia, attract surprisingly large crowds in Massachusetts, speak as riots unfolded in California and gruffly demand that protesters be ejected everywhere.
“Hey, is it fun to be at a Trump rally?” the businessman asked an approving audience in Baltimore before Maryland’s primary. “Think this happens with lyin’ Ted Cruz?” These raucous events are part of what he’s talking about when he says he doesn’t want to get too presidential.
“I can tell if you if I go too presidential, people are going to get very bored,” Trump told Fox News in April, adding that he didn’t want his supporters to “fall asleep.”
Now that Trump is the presumptive Republican nominee, however, it’s worth asking if the rallies are doing more harm than good. Consider the headlines after Hillary Clinton’s bad news cycle over her State Department email practices.
“Donald Trump defends tweet blasted as anti-Semitic,” blared CNN. “Trump defends ‘anti-Semetic’ Clinton tweet and praise for Saddam Hussein,” read a headline in the Guardian. “In a defiant, angry speech, Donald Trump defends image seen as anti-Semitic,” said the New York Times.
The Times went on to describe Trump’s Cincinnati rally, which also happened to be his first campaign event with possible running mate Newt Gingrich, as a “striking display of self-sabotage” that “underscored the limitations of Mr. Trump’s approach.”
Few of these were Trump-friendly outlets, to be sure. But might they have a point? Following FBI Director James Comey’s statement on Clinton’s emails, Trump actually has attacked “Crooked Hillary” on that front many times. In Cincinnati, for example, he even read aloud from Comey’s bill of particulars.
Trump has also made some appeals beyond his base. “The first victims of [Clinton’s] radical policies will be poor African-American and Hispanic workers who need jobs,” Trump said recently. “They are also the ones that she will hurt the most by far.” He has begun talking not just about the economic problems in coal towns and the Rust Belt, but also inner-city Detroit.
He has also begun to more frequently give prepared speeches, read directly from a teleprompter, in a subdued fashion with few ad-libs.
Yet Trump himself has admitted he can’t stay on-message for a whole rally. Too boring. He tends to use these speeches to friendly audiences to blow off steam and hit back at critics in politics and the media.
All that is why he revisited Saddam Hussein and the “Star of David” tweet on an evening where he was supposed to be pounding Clinton: He was lashing out at people who criticized him. It perplexes Republicans who have seen glimpses of Trump on-message.
Rep. Dave Brat, R-Va., told the Washington Examiner‘s Joel Gehrke that Trump “nailed” his meeting with 200 GOP House members, adding, “The bigger subtext was just, look, you’re winning over everyone in the room right here, you’re saying all the right things, this is a great meeting, and it was just like — can we count on you to stay on that narrative and keep nailing it like that.”
Trump’s meeting with Republican senators, which was at times contentious, suggests the answer might be no. But the rallies that helped him bond with supporters and flood the airwaves are now virtually guaranteed to produce headlines he’ll regret.
“He shouldn’t stop doing them,” a GOP strategist told the Examiner. “He is going to have to find a way to dial them back.”
