The Old Man and the Tweet: Trump World Holds Its Breath as He Returns to X
The ‘Hemingway of 140 characters’ is now trying to script his own campaign reset. Just don’t call it a reset.
DONALD TRUMP’S FULL-BLOWN RE-EMERGENCE on X on Monday, after a hiatus of more than three-and-a-half years, was the latest indication that he is unsettled by the state of the presidential campaign and fears his chances could be slipping away.
But the posts, along with a highly publicized interview with the platform’s owner, Elon Musk, also reignited one of the fundamental debates undergirding the campaign: Just how much Trump is, politically speaking, too much?
In recent weeks, aides to the ex-president have found themselves in a place familiar to many veterans of Trump World: hoping to more finely curate the public appearances of a man incapable and unwilling of staying tightly on message.
One plan—to hold so-called “messaging events” that revolve around specific topics—will be test-driven by the campaign Wednesday in Asheville, North Carolina, where Trump is slated to discuss the economy. It’s a top issue for voters, and one on which Trump was handily beating President Joe Biden—but recent polls show Vice President Kamala Harris is cutting into Trump’s margins on the issue. Advisers hope events like this will serve as mini-rallies and effectively truncate the loquacious ex-president’s stemwinders (Trump’s speech at his Saturday rally in Montana went on for nearly an hour and forty minutes).
Trump’s return to X and the mini-rally plan are part of a larger effort to try and reset the campaign as Harris continues to gain steam, troubling the Trump campaign and its supporters. In Trump’s broad circle of longtime advisers, confidants, and former campaign and White House staffers, the ex-president is seen not just as the cause of his current problems but also the antidote to them.
“The media narrative is all pro-Kamala, so if you want to call anything a ‘reset,’ the [former] president is resetting that in his own voice,” one Trump adviser said of his decision to start posting Monday on X. “This is his campaign. We work for him. He sets the message.”
The problem for the campaign is that the message is often strange, nonlinear and, at times, incoherent.
Last Thursday, Trump’s team sought to reframe coverage of the campaign by hosting a background briefing with legacy media and conservative press. But Trump decided to maximize coverage by turning it into a press conference. The plan going into the event was to contrast Trump’s ability to face questions with Harris’s refusal to do the same up until that point. He was supposed to clearly define the vice president as “dangerously liberal.”
Instead, Trump gave meandering stream-of-consciousness answers that included a record 162 lies and distortions, according to an NPR analysis. The affair ended up renewing criticisms about the 78-year-old’s mental fitness. The Saturday before, Trump gave a similarly directionless 90-minute rally speech in Georgia where he attacked the swing state’s popular Republican governor, Brian Kemp, and his wife, earning saturation coverage in local media.
AIDES HOPED TRUMP WOULD REMAIN more firmly on message even prior to Harris shaking up the race. Trump’s high-profile speech at the Republican National Convention was drafted to focus on the assassination attempt he had survived just a week before, as part of a larger address that would eschew sharp political jabs against his then-opponent, Biden. Instead, Trump spent about 19 minutes on his near-death experience before he left the teleprompter to make off-the-cuff non-sequiturs that left even supporters scratching their heads. His speech lasted 92 minutes in total, the longest convention address ever.
“I said what they wanted me to say. Then I said what I wanted to say,” Trump told one insider when asked why he didn’t stick to the script.
But Trump’s restlessness and inscrutability has clearly worsened amid Harris’s rise, with him openly expressing frustration with her tendency to stay on message. On Saturday, during his 100-minute speech in Bozeman, Montana, Trump spoke derisively of the VP for delivering a stump speech and contrasted that with his own style.
“Kamala gives the exact same speech over and over again. Over and over. The same exact words. . . . I don’t do that. I gotta give you a little bit of variety, right? I change all these damn speeches,” he said as the crowd laughed along.
“But we don’t like to read teleprompters, right? It’s not as much fun. It’s not as exciting. And somehow, it’s never as good, is it? Nah,” he said, predicting what would happen if he gave the same speech all the time: “You know what would happen? You’d start walking out,” Trump said.
Trump teased a return to X, formerly known as Twitter, for a fundraising pitch last year when he posted his mugshot taken in an Atlanta jail—but this time aides say he’s likely to stay. In addition to his return to that platform, an even more freewheeling Trump may be on the way. As part of the campaign reset, the campaign is considering whether to hold more press conferences like last Thursday’s and more local press interviews as well.
For the better part of a year, the Trump campaign largely did not have to worry about how unscripted the ex-president should be. Trump was, to a degree, stuck in a courtroom, removed from the campaign trail. And when he did hold rallies, his own performance was regularly overshadowed by persistent questions about Biden’s poor health and standing.
But that has all changed with Harris’s emergence atop the Democratic ticket and her historic money hauls.
Trump campaign advisers insist the race’s “fundamentals” haven’t changed—that Harris’s numbers will fall back to earth as the campaign defines her “dangerously liberal record” and as the “honeymoon” of her positive press coverage ends with the close of the Democratic National Convention on Aug. 22.
But one former Trump campaign adviser who still speaks with the former president acknowledged that Trump “cannot get past his anger” at the assassination attempt, the decision by Biden to step aside, and Harris’s media coverage. Trump is “unsettled,” the adviser said, adding “he probably needs friends around him on the plane. He needs to just bro-out and relax and get his bearings again.”
The sense of unsteadiness around the campaign has been fed, in part, by some outside advisers who have trashed the campaign’s current leadership. And compounding the restiveness: Right-wing activists who have blanketed Trump’s Truth Social feed with calls for a shakeup, which Trump has refused.
“My team is doing a great job despite the constant 8 year obstacle of dealing with the Fake News and low self esteem leakers,” Trump posted Sunday on Truth Social.
Campaign insiders say Trump’s running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, has been a stabilizing agent. He helped drive two of the campaign’s most-important messages last week on Sunday political talk shows: Harris’s press-avoidance and the misstatements that her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, has made about his military record.
According to eight people who have regularly spoken to Trump, the former president solicits advice from nearly everyone, but he only listens to those who know how to package the information in such a way that it jibes with his sensibilities. Those who succeed have a way of delivering otherwise-unwelcome advice in a friendly and constructive mode that doesn’t set off his hair-trigger temper. It’s more of a nudge than a push—and even that can be risky.
“Nudge is what I do and then haul ass,” said one.
To that end, the campaign and candidate are in regular contact with some of his more trusted confidants, friends, and former aides, some of whom may come aboard in the closing months. The campaign has also begun beefing up its rapid-response team by hiring two new staffers.
BUT TRUMP’S CAMPAIGN ALSO FACES some major structural and strategic decisions in the weeks ahead. Under the penny-pinching leadership of co-managers Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita, Trump had reduced the number of rallies he held relative to his past campaigns. Wiles and LaCivita previously described it as a good way to save money. What they didn’t say was the smaller number of rallies also reduced the frequency and blast radius of his off-script remarks, and it helped pace the 78-year-old candidate to ensure he finishes strong through Election Day.
Trump, at the Thursday press conference, said he would increase his pace of travel after the Democratic convention. And his desire to host big rallies now looms as a drain on campaign coffers, one that provides no measurable boost of support for him beyond the adoring fans who show up and were going to vote Trump anyway. In addition, mainstream media doesn’t televise the speeches because they’re too long, too incoherent, and too filled with falsehoods. Whatever press coverage comes from the rallies usually stems from his extemporaneous comments that lead to negative headlines.
Still, Trump’s campaign plans a rally in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania this coming Saturday.
With less than three months left in the campaign, the campaign must weigh how much to indulge a candidate who insists on holding these events—if they have any option of pushing back at all.
“He loves the rallies and there’s nothing anyone can do about it because he believes he owes it to his people to give them a show,” said one longtime adviser, adding that Wiles and LaCivita would be powerless to stop him and foolish to try. “Trump can’t have rallies in the same way that fish can’t have water.”
And he apparently has found it impossible to stay away from X, too. Having once boasted that he was the “Hemingway of 140 characters,” Trump’s return to the platform was cheered by his diehard fans as the equivalent of a championship boxer stepping back in the ring.
But Trump unplugged on X also amplifies what many dislike about him. He has 7.5 million followers on Truth Social compared to 88.2 million on X, a platform from which many reporters have decamped—meaning his messages are more likely to generate more general attention and negative press coverage. Still, advisers say there’s almost no way to talk him out of posting what he wants and no one really tries unless it’s absolutely necessary. They don’t think in terms of the boxing metaphor so much as they do a dietary one: Trump the candidate insists on big rallies and social media posts in something like the way that a man with dangerously high cholesterol keeps eating cheeseburgers: They’re tasty treats, but they’re bad for him.
“Look, I love Trump on Twitter,” a confidant said. “But one of the advantages on Truth Social was that nobody was on there and he could say basically whatever he wanted and a lot of the problematic stuff just didn’t get seen. Now we’re back to old times.”
I for one am truly tired of the euphemisms. He isn't inscrutable.
He is deeply mentally ill. Full stop.
In the ideological world of "make America great again"...I've not heard anyone point out what made America great in the first place...immigrants. This whole country is based on immigrants (after the colonists displaced the indigenous population). If you cut off the immigrants, you cut off the lifeblood of how we currently operate. All the Christian Nationalists have no interest in filling the jobs that immigrants are willing to do, and there are more immigrant entrepreneurs (by percentage) than American citizens. This drum needs to be beaten.