Meet the new Trump, identical to the old Trump

Football fans probably remember Arizona Cardinals head coach Dennis Green’s tantrum during a postgame press conference in 2006. His team had just blown a 20-point halftime lead to the Chicago Bears, leading Green to uncharacteristically lash out at reporters. “They are what we thought they were,” Green shouted. “Now if you want to crown them, crown them! But they are what we thought they were! And we let them get away with it!”

This diatribe has found a place in popular culture and in the annals of all-time chess coaching. Today, Democrats might be excused for bringing up this old meme when discussing former President Donald Trump’s rambling, record-breaking 92-minute speech Thursday night accepting the Republican nomination for president. For all the talk about how Trump has changed after surviving an assassin’s bullet, for all the speculation about a “new weakness in man” and a possible drive to unify the country, Trump is who we thought he was.

“Trump 2.0 is Trump 1.0,” Cook Political Report analyst Amy Walter said in an article on X.

Trump tried. For about 28 minutes, he spoke in a calm but still meandering voice, addressing Saturday’s assassination attempt and saying he wanted to be the president of all America. “The discord and division in our society must be healed,” he said at the start of the conference. “We must heal them quickly. As Americans, we are bound by a common destiny. We rise together. Or we fall together.”

He then went off the rails and lashed out at President Joe Biden and “crazy Nancy Pelosi,” listing his grievances, denouncing the “partisan witch hunts” against him, and delivering a series of false allegations while eliciting expressions of sympathy for his teleprompter. As Axios’ Zachary Basu writes, “the old Trump came back and yelled and barked and annoyed America for 64 more minutes.”

Trump has called the United States a “nation in decline,” plagued by inflation and an influx of immigrants, and “on the brink of World War III.” He has promised that the country will quickly become a utopia under his new leadership. “No nation will question our power. No enemy will doubt our power. Our borders will be completely secure. Our economy will soar. We will restore law and order to our streets, patriotism to our schools, and most importantly, we will restore peace, stability and harmony to the entire world.”

Trump briefly touched on budget issues, promising to start paying down the national debt while cutting taxes further. He also repeated false claims that his tax cuts were the largest in history and that President Joe Biden wants to raise taxes “by four times what you pay now.”

But it’s hard to focus on such falsehoods when Trump has also asserted himself as a budding autocrat, once again raising baseless allegations that the election was stolen from him. “Iran was going to make a deal with us,” Trump said. “And then we had this horrible, horrible result that we’ll never let happen again. The election result. We’ll never let that happen again. They used COVID to cheat.”

Democrats have endured a miserable three weeks since Biden’s dismal performance in the June 27 debate, and the tide of party officials urging Biden to step aside continues to gather momentum. But Trump’s performance last night reminded them, and many voters, that he remains a deeply flawed and potentially dangerous candidate—one whose newfound conviction that he was saved by divine intervention and has God on his side could strengthen his resolve, and that of his supporters, to reshape the country and its institutions as they see fit.

But it also gave Democrats hope that Trump could be beaten. “This is the first good thing that’s happened to Democrats in three weeks,” former Obama adviser David Axelrod said on CNN. But Democrats would do well to remember the last part of the football coach’s 2006 rant, when he ranted that his game plan was right but his team had failed anyway: “They are who we thought they were,” he said. “And we let them get away with it!”