Meet the New Trump, Same as the Old Trump

Football fans likely remember an angry postgame press conference rant by Arizona Cardinals Head Coach Dennis Green in 2006. His team had just blown a 20-point halftime lead to the Chicago Bears, leading Green to an uncharacteristic blowup in front of reporters. “They're what we thought they were,” Green shouted. “Now if you want to crown them, then crown their ass! But they are who we thought they were! And we let 'em off the hook!”

The rant earned a moment of pop culture prominence and a spot in the annals of all-time coaching meltdowns. Now, Democrats could be excused for busting out that old meme in discussing former President Donald Trump’s rambling, record-long 92-minute speech Thursday night accepting the GOP presidential nomination. For all the talk of Trump being changed by surviving an assassin’s bullet, for all the spin and speculation about a “new softness to the man” and a potential push to unify the country, Trump is who we thought he was.

“Trump 2.0 is Trump 1.0,” analyst Amy Walter of the Cook Political Report said in a post on X.

Trump tried. For about 28 minutes he spoke in a subdued yet still meandering fashion, recounting Saturday’s assassination attempt and claiming that he wants to be president for all of America. “The discord and division in our society must be healed,” he said early on. “We must heal it quickly. As Americans, we are bound together by a single fate and a shared destiny. We rise together. Or we fall apart.”

Then he went off script and off the rails, attacking President Joe Biden and “Crazy Nancy Pelosi,” listing his grievances, decrying the “partisan witch hunts” against him and delivering a slew of false claims while eliciting expressions of sympathy for his teleprompter operator. As Axios’s Zachary Basu writes, “the old Trump returned and bellowed, barked and bored America for 64 minutes more.”

Trump called the United States “a nation in decline,” plagued by inflation and a flood of immigration and “teetering on the edge of World War III.” He essentially promised it would quickly become a utopia under his renewed leadership. “No nation will question our power. No enemy will doubt our might. Our borders will be totally secure. Our economy will soar. We will return law and order to our streets, patriotism to our schools, and importantly, we will restore peace, stability and harmony all throughout the world.”

Trump touched on fiscal issues briefly, promising to start paying off the national debt even as he cuts 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’re paying now.”

But it’s hard to focus on any such falsehoods when Trump also confirmed himself to be an autocrat in waiting, again raising baseless claims that the election was somehow stolen from him. “Iran was going to make a deal with us,” Trump said. “And then we had that horrible, horrible result that we’ll never let happen again. The election result. We’re never going to let that happen again. They used Covid to cheat.”

Democrats have had a miserable three weeks since Biden’s feeble debate performance on June 27, and the stream of party officials urging Biden to step aside has continued to gain force. But Trump’s performance last night reminded them, and many voters, that he remains a supremely flawed and potentially dangerous candidate — one whose newfound belief that he was saved by divine intervention and has God on his side could reinforce his determination, and that of his supporters, to remake the country and its institutions as they see fit.

Yet it also gave Democrats renewed hope, showing that Trump could be eminently beatable. “This is the first good thing that happened to Democrats in three weeks,” former Obama adviser David Axelrod said on CNN. But Democrats would be wise to remember the last part of that football coach’s rant in 2006, as he fumed that his game plan was right, but his team failed anyway: “They are who we thought they were,” he said. “And we let 'em off the hook!”