That’s not, really, what it was like. Once he got on the stage near Virginia Beach, it was more his normal, discursive, expansive routine. Mr. Trump is inescapably himself.
The campaign, and the promise of the second presidency, inescapably begins with Mr. Trump’s voice. It’s probably why he’s still rolling on, dominating opponents and politics itself, and it’s certainly why through virtually any eventuality, the polling numbers of this race barely move: what powers him also limits him. He keeps everything close.
In Chesapeake, Mr. Trump covered everything from his untrue claim that almost all the jobs created the last four years have gone to undocumented immigrants to his kind of funny thoughts about Camp David to telling the crowd that the Supreme Court had issued a technical ruling most likely overturning some Jan. 6 rioter convictions, which morphed into a “U.S.A., U.S.A.” chant from the crowd while he talked about freeing the J6 prisoners. He talked about the debate some; he, of course, was brutal about Mr. Biden, at one point throwing out a blithe, cutting, “We don’t want you.” Yet Mr. Trump’s enthusiasm for talking seemed to outlast the crowd; even the giant American flag behind him got slightly tangled into a cross-like shape in the scaffolding that held it.
Mr. Trump keeps being the person we know — statically supported by somewhere between 44 and 49 percent of people on any given day, with or without enthusiasm, and the main influence on American politics for close to a decade now. He can seem calmer, like on Thursday night, and his campaign is more professional, but he hasn’t undertaken an effort to rebrand his politics, or shift away from the past, for this to be a new era. He’s still him.
During the debate, he said totally wild stuff about Jan. 6 and immigration and what happened during his presidency. He said, essentially, that Jan. 6 was Nancy Pelosi’s fault. At one point, he was asked a question about child care costs and responded by continuing a thought about firing a general. He said Evan Gershkovich would be freed during his presidency, something that, at this rate, nobody can promise.
