Donald Trump’s political endurance this year has been attributed in part to voters’ faded memories about why they denied him a second term four years ago.
The former president is doing his best to remind them.
Despite a carefully scripted week of campaign events aimed at counterprogramming the Democratic National Convention, Trump undercut much of his messaging with a series of off-the-cuff remarks, rants and blunders that threatened to stoke the kind of Republican anxiety he has spent much of the past month trying to tamp down.
On Monday in Pennsylvania, he struggled to clarify a previous comment that he believed the Presidential Medal of Freedom, which honors civilians, was “much better” than the Medal of Honor given to military members. On Tuesday in Michigan, he claimed that Vice President Kamala Harris had won the Democratic nomination after a “vicious, violent overthrow of a president” and called Chicago, which hosted the Democratic convention, “a war zone that’s worse than Afghanistan.”
He openly rejected advice from allies to limit his personal attacks on Harris and other Democrats during a speech Wednesday in North Carolina. He called the nation’s first Black vice president “lazy” during a stop in Arizona on Thursday afternoon and, that night, rambled during a 10-minute phone call with Fox News. The anchors ultimately cut him off and ended the interview, but Trump picked up where he had left off by quickly phoning into Newsmax.
And on Friday, Trump concluded his week by embracing Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in exchange for his endorsement, a move with an uncertain impact on tilting the race in his favor.
“One of the ways to win over swing voters is not by personal attacks — by nature, they don’t love partisan politics, but they’re also not thrilled about the direction of the country and the performance of the economy,” said Kevin Madden, a longtime Republican strategist who worked on presidential campaigns in 2004, 2008 and 2012. “And every day Trump isn’t talking about that is a wasted day.”
Still, several people close to Trump said they were pleased with his performance this past week. Parts of his speeches were focused on policy, and he was able to make his points about calling for tax cuts, deregulation and domestic fossil fuel production that his allies view as crucial to victory.
And the race remains neck-and-neck nationally and in battleground states, according to a New York Times polling average.
David Urban, a Trump political adviser, said the former president had showed considerable improvement this week, a sign that he was focused on the new dynamics in the race.
“It’s going to be a tough race, no doubt, but if he just talks about the big issues — the economy, inflation, immigration and crime — we win,” Urban said.
Despite the calls to focus on the issues, Trump has made it clear that he intends to keep running his campaign his way. “I think relatively to what they’re doing, and how radical they are and how in many ways how sick they are, I think I’m doing a very calm campaign,” Trump told reporters recently, adding, “I have to do it my way.”
Privately, Trump has grown more comfortable with the dynamics of the race. For the past month, he has faced a barrage of internal criticism and advice from allies, including Steve Wynn, the longtime casino magnate. Wynn paid for polling that he told the former president had showed independent voters were key to his victory — and they wanted him to stick to the issues.
Trump has told two people that he struggles to avoid making personal attacks because of how much animosity he feels for his opponents. He said that overwhelming hostility — whether it was for Jeb Bush, Hillary Clinton, Biden or now Harris — made it difficult for him not to take shots, said the two people, who insisted on anonymity to discuss private conversations.
Trump was relatively focused at the start of the week. Inside a manufacturing plant in York, Pennsylvania, on Monday, he largely hewed to his messaging on the economy. Digressions were relatively few.
But he seemed to increasingly veer into more asides as the week continued. As the Democratic convention went on, he made it clear in his remarks that he was watching, practically undermining his campaign’s efforts to downplay the Democrats on the national stage.
Trump said he had felt compelled to defend himself from criticism and attacks. Biden, he said several times this week, was an “angry man” who was “seething.” Barack Obama was “nasty.”
During Harris’ speech Thursday, Trump fired off a series of social media posts in real time, criticizing the number of people she had thanked. After she praised her late mother for instilling in her the value of hard work, Trump posted, “Kamala’s biography won’t lower prices at the Grocery Store, or at the Pump!”
Part of Trump’s struggle to stay on message could be linked to his visible lack of interest onstage when he reads his prepared speech. When Trump stuck to the script, he often sounded affectless, as if he was resigned to just getting through the remarks. But he seemed energized when he fell back on familiar habits and interacted with supporters.
“It’s just insane, but you can’t walk across the street to get a loaf of bread, you get shot, you get mugged, you get raped, you get whatever it may be — and you’ve seen it, and I’ve seen it, and it’s time for a change,” Trump said in Michigan about American cities.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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