Donald Trump didn’t sound any different, not really, during the debate than the way everyone knows him to be. He didn’t sound any different on Friday afternoon, either, at his post-debate rally in Chesapeake, Va. The world around him convulses and Mr. Trump pretty much stays the same.
There are different ways a candidate could play an event like that, hours after a major campaign moment — like the catastrophic debate — goes badly for his opponent. In a parallel universe, with a different kind of nominee, the candidate might use the rally to frame the next few years as a new era, opening up a conciliatory front to the independent or even Democratic-leaning voter, to talk about cohesive policy visions and the voter’s life.
With Mr. Trump specifically, the way people talk about him like he’s the sly fox, there’s a version of this post-debate rally where he really deviated from the norm — went shorter, did something slightly different, to shape how people viewed last week.
In politics, there’s a rule about not getting in the way of an opponent’s crisis, but in that parallel version of Friday’s rally, perhaps Mr. Trump would pursue some news-making surprise to press the advantage. Or maybe he’d give into the base emotion people expect from him and try to knife Joe Biden further with an expansive commentary on the night before — Mr. Trump the destroyer onstage before a jubilant crowd, running through this and that moment from the debate, reliving it.
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.
There’s an impulse with Mr. Trump, to hear something like what I’m describing and respond, “well, actually, here are the facts.” But by the time a person has finished pointing out the facts of the case to themselves, it’s like Mr. Trump is so overwhelming and fluid that his depictions of the facts — and his often cavalier descriptions of other people’s lives — are already communicated to people who take them seriously or not seriously enough. And then people react to those people’s reactions, and everyone’s moved beyond the original point and onto a different plane that facts cannot touch.
The Trump perspective is to never apologize and always subsume what’s gone wrong into his next move. It can never just be about the economy and what people say they like; for him, it also has to be about absolving himself of Jan. 6 or the realities of ending Roe v. Wade, and retribution, and what people say they don’t like. So everything that has come before with Mr. Trump is now part of our present and potential future, awaiting some clear and decisive response, or else folding into the way people view American politics.
The Trump experience is overwhelming like that, especially the closer you are to him or the more power he has. The raison d’être of Mr. Biden’s presidency was to prevent Mr. Trump from staying in office, to respond to Mr. Trump on a moral level, to deal with these things. Those opportunities to respond to Mr. Trump on an equal level don’t come around so often.
And take a step back, as we keep limping through the Trump era, there is a sometimes sort of soundless response. A lot of Republican Trump critics are gone from office or politics; populism’s rolling in parts of Europe. Even Mitch McConnell has had to concede he will not be majority leader again while he tries to hold on with Ukraine, and there is that declining sense that any one person, in government or in media, has the ability to shape events back toward stability and clarity. That Mr. Trump can’t leave behind the parts of himself that are bad for him and the country has been a central thing keeping this election close. But how long can everyone else hold out?
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