Donald Trump is still running against Hillary Clinton

Donald Trump is many things, but he is not a nimble agent of change. The former president is certainly fickle on specific policy issues, like a national abortion ban or the ever-evolving foreign threat known as TikTok. But when it comes to his deepest personal temperament, he remains the same ’80s peddler of rich-guy malice that he has always been. He is always at the center of an unfair plot to strip him of his birthright to the attention economy; he always, mysteriously, hires the best people who end up being Shakespearean traitors to his trusting nature; and he is always demeaning critics, bullying women, and expressing his hatred of wind energy and modern plumbing.

It is therefore no great surprise that Joe Biden, the Republican front-runner, was caught flat-footed when the Democratic Party made a major shift in course in the 2024 election cycle and replaced Kamala Harris. He recited hackneyed anti-democratic arguments from the campaign trail and told fan-fiction scenarios about reinstating Biden on his account “Truth Social.”

But the spectacle of Trump changing gears as the 2024 election cycle nears its final stretch betrays more than just the disorientation of an aging brand swindler faced with a new rival. Trump’s political message has become increasingly hardened since his surprise ascension to the presidency—which is why the Republican Party has suffered a steady streak of electoral defeats since then. He has launched and quickly abandoned a series of fictitious culture-war crusades in that time, from the immigrant caravans of 2018 to the “critical race theory” panic of 2022, to no avail at the ballot box. He has courted a rotating cast of far-right influencers, staged a hostile takeover of the Republican National Committee, and, as of last Friday, forged an alliance with conspiracy theorist and animal abuser Robert F. Kennedy.

But the real problem with all of Trump’s frantic digressions and reshuffles is Trump himself. Trump has been unable to deviate from the basic template of his 2016 presidential bid, the only election he ever won. In other words, he can only run against Hillary Clinton, and he insists on treating all of his eventual general election rivals as if they were Hillary Clinton, too. In 2020, he replaced “Crooked Hillary” Clinton with “Sleepy Joe” Biden, delivering a dead-on repeat of the attacks from the previous campaign. The core message was that Biden’s physical and mental health was failing—the same anti-Hillary refrain Trump shouted in the home stretch of 2016 after Clinton nearly fainted at a 9/11 memorial ceremony in New York. In fact, Trump’s fixation on a fantasy scenario in which he runs against Biden again is based on the certainty that a central theme of his 2020 anti-Biden attack, namely Biden’s declining effectiveness, has proven at least partially true.

In his epic breakdown over Harris’ acceptance speech at the Democratic Convention in Chicago – it included 48 posts on Truth Social – you could almost hear the plaintive cry Come back, Hillary! rising from Mar-a-Lago. When Harris launched into a direct attack on Trump’s character and record—something the Clinton campaign has been fitfully and belatedly able to pull off—Trump, baffled by Harris’s disdain and condescending manner, posted simply, “IS SHE TALKING ABOUT ME?” While he anemicly hit back on issues ranging from Project 2025 (of which he again dishonestly denied any knowledge) to Harris’s standing as a world leader, Trump also launched an attack on the GOP-written immigration bill that Harris had promised to sign, marinated in old-fashioned (and false) anti-Clinton rhetoric from 2016: “The border bill is one of the worst ever written, would have allowed millions of people into our country, and is just a political ploy on her part!” he fumed. “It legalizes illegal immigration and is a TOTAL DISASTER, WEAK AND INEFFECTIVE!” That’s pretty much what would happen if you told ChatGPT to write a hate rant against Hillary without using Hillary Clinton.

Following the convention, Trump again resorted to the old Hillary attacks. After his poor performance at the second presidential debate in 2016, Trump had attacked the Commission on Presidential Debates for rigging the debate system in Clinton’s favor. He complained baselessly that his microphone was either broken or sabotaged, and insisted that the debate commission was illegitimate because it was headed by Michael McCurry, a former press secretary for Bill Clinton. (The commission, like many established political institutions, had a bipartisan leadership structure, with Frank Fahrenkopf, a former chairman of the RNC, as McCurry’s co-chair.) Trump, always static in his worldview, now began the week after the Democratic convention with a similarly confused post on Truth Social, claiming that ABC had posted a post on This week that irritated him, he may drop out of the September 10 presidential debate that the network is scheduled to broadcast. The candidate mocked the show’s “so-called panel of Trump haters” and delivered this classic refrain: “Will panelist Donna Brazil [sic] Will Kamala’s best friend who runs ABC ask the Marxist candidate the questions like she did with the fraudulent Hillary Clinton? Will Kamala’s best friend who runs ABC do the same?”

The conventional wisdom among pundits is that Trump is again looking to pull out of the ABC debate because he’s unnerved by Harris’ more aggressive campaign and her court-tested debate skills. But again, he’s just using the one weird trick he’s mastered. That trick worked in 2016 for a number of unique and unrepeatable reasons, starting with the colossally bad campaign Clinton herself ran. (I’m pretty sure I’m not the only person who felt a wave of fear when they encountered a flood of campaign posters and T-shirts featuring Harris’s picture alongside the recycled Hillary slogan “I’m With Her.”) But in many ways, as a campaigner, Kamala Harris is pretty much the opposite of Hillary Clinton. Even at the level of slogans, “When we fight, we win” is in a completely different populist register than the Girlboss movement’s feminist slogan “I’m With Her.” Just as “We will not go back” and the many campaign variations of the refrain “Republicans are weird” are miles away from the MAGA movement’s smug retort of 2016: “America is already great.”

Politically, too, Harris’ Democratic Party is turning away from the neoliberal political consensus that fueled Clinton’s candidacy. nation Author Robert Borosage has argued (though it’s still unclear how sustained and significant this shift in policy will be). And the aggressive, momentum-grabbing nature of Harris’ campaign bears little resemblance to Clinton’s overconfident establishment campaign, which spent much of the campaign cycle crafting detailed policy briefs while neglecting the basic work of mobilizing and expanding the Democratic Party’s base in the home stretch. Just as “Comrade Kamala” is a distant, bizarrely Cold War-war-twisted echo of “Crooked Hillary,” Trump’s entire line of attack against his major-party rival fails to address the real threat Kamala Harris poses to him. So to answer the central and most coherent question Trump asked on the final night of the DNC: Yes, Donald, she’s talking about you—but you’re still talking about the wrong her.