Goldberg: Will Trump pivot to policy over personality?

Never has the GOP been more unified, and Donald Trump deserves all the credit. The issue uniting pundits, editorial boards, virtually all Republican politicians, GOP consultants, MAGA warriors and rallygoers: the need for Trump to lay aside personal gripes and grievances and to stick to the issues and attack Vice President Kamala Harris and Gov. Tim Walz on their records.

The New York Times asked former Rep. Jack Kingston (R-Ga.) what he made of Trump attacking Harris for inventing her Black identity only recently. He replied, "I would stick to the price of groceries.

"All Trump has to do is talk about his positions, like he did in 2016," insists columnist Ann Coulter.

"He's more comfortable with personality-driven attacks, rather than issue-driven attacks," Neil Newhouse, a Republican pollster, told The Times. "But given that Kamala's a relative unknown, the policy- and issue-related attacks would get more traction right now.

Conservative commentator Ben Shapiro concurs: "All he has to do is focus the attack, to dump the war chest he's accrued on this extremist ticket, to stick to a simple point: You were better off in 2019 than you are in 2024."

Even Trump campaign honcho Chris LaCivita says as much. "At the end of the day, it's really about demonstrating through her own words how dangerous, how weak and failed she really is, and it's not hard to do when you have her doing the talking," he told the Washington Post.

Obviously following this advice would be better than Trump's current approach — race baiting, election denial, whining about Biden's defenestration, attacking fellow Republicans, crowd size boasts, etc. — all of which is clearly ill-advised.

But "ill-advised" is the wrong word, because pretty much everybody advising Trump is telling him to stop. In other words, the conventional wisdom is well-advised, it's just that Trump can't or won't follow it. This is not a new phenomenon. Expecting Trump to "pivot" or "act presidential" has been a political pastime for almost a decade. It's like betting Godot will be punctual or Lucy won't yank the football from Charlie Brown.

But what's interesting to me is not the tiresome assumption that Trump can be anything other than who he is; rather it's the assumption that if he ran the focused campaign his boosters favor, it would guarantee success. It would certainly improve his chances. But as a subscriber to the view that " vibes" have supplanted substantive issues and personal character as the decisive factors in elections, I'm not so sure.

Ever since Trump came down the escalator in 2015, I've been asking my pro-Trump friends some variant of the question, "What can the next Democratic president — or Democratic candidate — do that won't make you a hypocrite for criticizing?" There are a few defensible answers to this question, but they miss the larger point. Trump has been inconsistent on so many issues — abortion, socialized medicine, transgender rights, debt, deficits, military interventions, criminal justice, etc. — that his supporters have largely given up on the idea that he should be held to a consistent position or principle. His personal character has been more consistent, but consistently wretched. The people who love his shtick like politics as a reality show. And those are the people he cares about because their adulation ratifies his own self-regard. Trump wants to believe that his awesome personality is the only thing that should matter, which is why he rejects the idea he needs to change.

The problem is he needs a majority.

Trump was narrowly beating Biden in the polls because the Biden reality show had worse vibes. His physical and mental deterioration amplified his political failings. Trump exuded strength and confidence, and that was enough, vibes-wise. At 78, by contrast with Biden, he managed to be both the "youthful" candidate and the "change" candidate.

The switch to Harris reversed all that. The vibe shift is real, as a stream of polling has shown. People were tired of the Biden show, and when the alternative was a rerun of the Trump show, they settled for that. But now a whole new series is on offer.

Trump and his enablers created the vibe petard, and now they're being hoisted on it.

Now that Trumpworld is on the receiving end of the reality show politics they helped create, they want to pivot back to issues. But what if voters, at least the ones who will decide the election, think politics-as-vibes is the new normal, particularly as Harris helpfully walks away from her most controversial positions? Trump has always benefited from the fact the rules of normal politics applied to everyone but him. Perhaps he succeeded in liberating his opponent from those rules, too.

Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast.