President Trump knows his core appeal and the message that won him election.
“If I don’t sound like a typical Washington politician, it’s because I’m not a politician,” he said to the roars of a rally crowd in Greenville, North Carolina, in mid-October. “And if I don’t always seem to be playing by the rules of the Washington establishment, it’s because I was elected to fight for you harder than any other president has ever fought.”
The line has been a staple of his stump speech as he closes out his reelection push with airport rallies from North Carolina to Nevada.
It is a reminder of the unconventional way this businessman-cum-reality TV star launched his political career five years ago by riding down Trump Tower’s golden escalator before accusing Mexico of sending drug smugglers and rapists to America and promising to build a border wall.
He delighted in ignoring political conventions, whether on the campaign trail or in the White House.
And for the best part of four years, it worked. He confounded established thinking at every turn, whether by publicly berating NATO allies until they upped their defense spending or assassinating a senior Iranian commander with little in the way of blowback, all while overseeing economic growth and installing conservative justices on the Supreme Court.
His supporters didn’t care about the failures. He never managed to repeal Obamacare and has yet to explain his alternative vision for healthcare. And “infrastructure week” remains a running joke among staffers who wince at the memory of repeated attempts to drive through a huge renewal of the nation’s roads, bridges, and airports.
Not being a politician may have been a strength for millions of voters tired of Washington’s insider games, but it was a weakness to critics who saw an administration repeatedly foiled by Capitol Hill. And for a businessman who established his brand with a memoir entitled The Art of the Deal, he had struggled to forge accommodations and agreements with Democrats at home or international partners abroad.
As polarizing as he has always been, he entered 2020 having survived impeachment and still a match for his Democratic rivals for the White House. A buoyant economy, rising wages, and record employment among minorities meant his campaign was ready to run on a “promises made, promises kept” slogan.
But his unconventional approach eventually met its sternest test in an enemy immune to his unconventional governing style of Twitter broadsides and “fake news” denialism. For weeks, Trump insisted the coronavirus pandemic would take care of itself: Warming weather would see the number of patients reduced to zero.
Instead, he approaches Election Day with a death toll of more than 200,000 people and a national strategy that critics say amounts to little more than waiting for a vaccine.
Where last time the anti-politician had a clear message to disaffected voters with promises to build the wall and drain the swamp, this time, he is trying to run as an outsider who just happens to be on the inside. This time, his speeches contain derivative nods backward. Or, as he put it in multiple speeches in the days after that Greenville appearance: “I say, make America great again, again.”
