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The more Donald Trump targets Kamala Harris with personal attacks, the more Republican officials try to convince the former president to try a more substantive and constructive course. So far, he has ignored the suggestions.
But those hoping to steer him in a smarter direction keep trying anyway. The New York Times reported:
Gov. Chris Sununu of New Hampshire, a Republican who has criticized Trump but is now supporting him, expressed frustration that Trump was attacking Harris’s intelligence instead of her economic proposals. “Almost any other Republican candidate would be winning this race by 10 points,” he said on CNN. “If you stick to the issues, if you stick to what matters, this should be an easy race for Donald Trump. It really should.”
Around the same time, Sen. Lindsey Graham appeared on NBC News’ “Meet the Press” and delivered a similar line. “President Trump can win this election. His policies are good for America, and if you have a policy debate for president, he wins,” the South Carolina Republican told host Kristen Welker. “Donald Trump the provocateur, the showman, may not win this election.”
The intraparty pitch is entirely straightforward: Trump has a substantive advantage, the argument goes, so if he can show some message discipline and stick to policy, his candidacy will benefit accordingly.
And why, pray tell, is the former president ignoring this advice? There are a few reasons, actually.
Trump doesn’t care about governing. In fact, he never has. (I wrote a book about this four years ago, exploring the problem in more detail.) There’s a reason the GOP candidate delivered a speech on economic policy last week that largely ignored economy policy: This guy just isn’t interested in talking about substantive issues, no matter how many people urge him to care.
Trump doesn’t know how to talk about policy. Even if Trump could be convinced to pretend to care about governing, he’d quickly run into a related problem, which is even more serious: He can’t fake it well. Indeed, one of his signature issues is trade tariffs, and whenever he tries to talk about them, the Republican reminds the public that he still doesn’t understand his own idea at the most basic level.
Trump almost certainly knows his ideas are unpopular. The former president has some goals he’s interested in pursuing, but they’re not exactly the sort of things that win over swing voters. Among Trump’s priorities are tax breaks for the wealthy, pardons for politically aligned criminals, abortion restrictions, and the creation of a temporary American “dictatorship.” Even if one were inclined to put aside the radioactive unpopularity of the Project 2025 agenda — written in large part by members of Trump’s own team — the GOP nominee’s own stated ideas are political losers, too.
As Dan Drezner, a professor of international politics at Tufts, summarized last week, “This explains why Republicans in general and Trump in particular have become so flummoxed. The larger Republican party is keenly aware that Trump’s personal attacks on Harris will not redound to the GOP’s benefit. But neither can they talk about their actual policy platform because most of it is hideously unpopular.”
No wonder Republicans seem so anxious about the ticket’s messaging.