Convention Gives Trump A Chance To Explain How He’ll Make America Great Again, Again

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President Trump speaks on the South Lawn of the White House, accompanied by First Lady Melania Trump, on July 4. He’ll deliver his main convention speech from the same location on Thursday.

SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images

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SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images

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The Trump campaign insists that will change at the convention.

«The president certainly has a very powerful and forward-looking agenda for the future,» said Steve Cortes, senior advisor for strategy with the Trump campaign. «And President Trump believes … he has the track record to prove that he knows how to create the conditions for a soaring economy, particularly for working-class Americans.»

The heart of the agenda, according to Cortes, is economic nationalism — rebuilding prosperity through more deregulation, more tax cuts and more «America first» trade deals.

But Cortes acknowledged that Trump doesn’t always focus on those goals.

«He says a heck of a lot. So sure, at times he’s made the case better than other times,» he said. «As far as messaging, though, that’s incumbent upon me and my colleagues at the campaign to do our job of messaging it to the American people and convincing the president to really stay on message.»

It’s not every day that a top campaign official admits his candidate is undisciplined, but that’s just who Donald Trump is. His economic agenda is mainly a mainstream conservative one, but it gets overshadowed by the rest of his rhetoric, including racist appeals around confederate monuments, attacks on immigrants and low-income housing and an embrace of wacky conspiracy theories.

«He is defined in some ways by all of the stylistic critiques that people have of him personally: confrontations, saying whatever’s on your mind, tweeting it at all times of the day,» said Republican strategist Josh Holmes, a former top aide to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky.

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«It’s a double-edged sword,» said Holmes. «On the one hand, you don’t get into the deeper policy issues that I think would have wide appeal across the American electorate. But on the other hand, he talks about whatever it is that he wants to talk about every day.»

And that’s for better or for worse, according to Holmes.

Marc Thiessen, a former George W. Bush speechwriter disagrees, and says Trump’s core supporters have no trouble understanding what the vision is, and it’s exactly what got him elected in 2016.

«His vision is to finally deliver for the forgotten Americans. The Democrats took them for granted and the Republicans ignored them, and Donald Trump came in and said, ‘I’m going to fight for them,'» Thiessen said. «They said, ‘Yeah, we’re hurting in this trade war with China, and we’re hurting because of the pandemic. He hasn’t brought the jobs back, but he’s fighting for us. And I get what he’s doing, and we want to reelect him.’ So he’s got that loyal base because it’s the first time they feel that anybody in Washington is speaking for them.»

That fierce devotion explains one of the mysteries of this campaign: with more than 175,000 deaths from the coronavirus pandemic and unemployment above 10%, Trump’s approval ratings have not collapsed.

Still, Trump’s base alone isn’t big enough to win the election, and this week is his chance to expand it, according to Conant.

«What he really needs to do is lay out a compelling agenda for the second term that can bring in people who don’t like his tweets, don’t like the way he’s handled the pandemic, but do like what he’s outlining he would do in a second term, especially compared to a more liberal vision coming from Joe Biden,» he said.

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