This is an adapted excerpt from the Aug. 13 episode of "All In with Chris Hayes."
The Republican Party is stuck with Donald Trump.
Now, they won’t say that publicly and they didn’t feel that way three weeks ago when many Republicans were talking about winning New Jersey and thinking about what jobs they would have in the second Trump administration. But a lot has changed since Vice President Kamala Harris replaced President Joe Biden on the Democratic side of the ticket. Trump is now losing a race that he was clearly winning before.
Let’s not overstate things. Trump is behind in the national polling lead and he’s behind in the key swing states but all of the leads are narrow. The race is still — because of the nature of American politics — close. As we have just seen in the last three weeks, things can change radically very quickly.
One of the themes of former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley’s short-lived presidential campaign still rings prescient. Haley frequently said that most Americans did not want a Trump-Biden rematch. She even predicted, “The first party to retire its 80-year-old candidate is going to be the party that wins this election.”
Remember that line? There was some real insight there. And it’s transferred to what you see in the polls. Trump is now the oldest man to run for a four-year term as president. He’s older today than Ronald Reagan was when he left office.
And Trump has been doing the exact same shtick since 2015. He is very obviously deteriorating in terms of his capacity and his energy — as we saw in his glitchy, rambling, difficult-to-understand audio conversation with Elon Musk on Monday.
During that conversation, Trump delivered important public policy messages to the American people like:
“Kamala wouldn’t have this conversation. She can’t because she’s not smart, you know. She’s not a smart person, by the way. She can’t have this conversation. And Biden, we don’t even have to talk about it. I mean, he couldn’t have this conversation. He, he would have given up on the first half of a question. He would have walked out.”
That appearance was the culmination of a three-week stretch in which Trump still attacked Biden, who, remember, is no longer running against him. He spread downright ludicrous and comical conspiracy theories falsely claiming the Harris campaign faked the size of its crowds with artificial intelligence. He suggested she only became a Black person recently, which is a racist lie, but also a weird product of a brain that’s been scrambled like eggs.
Trump is the same guy he’s always been. Yet, Republicans still think he’s capable of being someone else entirely.
I have, personally, covered seemingly hundreds of “new tone for Donald Trump” news cycles over all those years. Most recently, we heard it after he survived a genuinely terrifying assassination attempt in Pennsylvania. In the lead-up to the Republican National Convention, we heard that he’d changed. He’d mellowed. He was all about unity.
As one convention delegate told reporters, “The real estate salesman, I think, is a different person. ... It’s a good thing. Humility goes a long way in politics and it attracts far more people ... I think he’s seeing God.”
Sound familiar? Haven’t we been hearing this stuff for the better part of a decade?
Like when CNN’s Van Jones praised Trump’s first address to a joint session of Congress in 2017, claiming he “became president of the United States in that moment, period.”
Seven years. We’ve been doing this for seven years. At this point, it’s like Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner.
And yet, if you listen to what Republican insiders are still telling reporters, they want Trump to do a pivot. They want him to be more disciplined. They want him to be more presidential. And this time, it will be for real.
This week, former Speaker Kevin McCarthy said Trump should stop questioning the size of Harris’ crowds at rallies and focus on the issues.
Fox Business host Larry Kudlow and former Trump aide turned Fox News contributor Kellyanne Conway shared a similar sentiment, practically begging the former president to stay on message.
And former Vice President Mike Pence had to remind his party that they can win “at every level by speaking the truth to [voters] respectfully.”
“I have some familiarity with that; I did it for four years,” Pence said.
The former vice president was threatened with hanging for it, but yes, he kept it respectful. Pence of all people should know you can’t change Trump. Yet people keep falling into the same old trap.
Even the people who joined the Trump 2024 bandwagon at its peak right after the convention. Some of those supporters showed up to a Trump fundraiser earlier this month on Long Island, including billionaire hedge funders like Bill Ackman.
According to The New York Times, at the dinner that evening:
“Harrison LeFrak, the scion of a New York real-estate family, whose father is an old friend of Mr. Trump’s, asked how Mr. Trump planned to take the narrative back from Democrats, and what his positive vision for the country would be. It appeared to be a request for reassurance. Mr. Trump provided none. Instead, he criticized Ms. Harris on a range of fronts, before adding: ‘I am who I am.’”
I’ll say this for Trump: He has more awareness about himself than a shocking number of people in Republican politics. He won’t change.
Do you know who else understands this? Voters. Like the ones in a focus group held after Trump’s first joint address to Congress and the nation as president in 2017. The one that pundits like Jones called so “presidential.”
One voter told CBS News, “That is no way the real Donald Trump. The real Donald Trump will surface in probably less than two hours.” Another said the next thing Trump needed to do was “delete his Twitter feed.”
When asked if they did not like the way Trump behaved on Twitter, almost the entire room raised their hands.
In advance of Monday's Twitter show with Musk, Trump got back to posting on the site. You know, the platform he was kicked off of for inciting an insurrection at the Capitol.
Meanwhile, the Democrats have something new — an open horizon in front of them as they enter a convention united, with a popular energetic ticket and a messaging opportunity that we have not seen in our lifetimes.
The Republicans? They have the same horse they’ve been riding since 2015.
Join Chris Hayes, Rachel Maddow and many others on Saturday, Sept. 7, in Brooklyn, New York, for “MSNBC Live: Democracy 2024,” a first-of-its-kind live event. You’ll get to see your favorite hosts in person and hear thought-provoking conversations about what matters most in the final weeks of an unprecedented election cycle. Buy tickets here.
This article was originally published on MSNBC.com
