Trump's Tone Problem

Every candidate, every officeholder, every leader talks in a certain way when they are just being themselves — when they’re not thinking about how they sound, but when they’re just comfortable. They give off a certain aspect and a certain demeanor.

In Trump’s demeanor, under almost all circumstances, if you like him, is confidence. If you dislike him, is arrogance. And what drives Trump’s confidence slash arrogance is an innate belief that he understands politics and government better than people who’ve been in politics and government for a long time.

Now, in the late 20th century, American voters decided to embrace outsiders. They decided that people with political experience were less desirable than people who were coming into the system to change the system. And since then, over the last half century, with the exception of George Bush Sr. and Joe Biden, we have elected outsiders as presidents, starting with governors and becoming progressively more outsiderish.

Trump got elected, as Bernie Sanders might have, in 2016, by running as strongly against the system as any candidate we’d seen in quite some time.

And now, 10 years later, as the country is facing challenges like affordability and inflation, like wars in Ukraine and Iran, and most ominously, or most promising, the challenge and opportunities that come with artificial intelligence, the idea of running against the experts might not seem quite as appealing as it once did.

And while we certainly don’t trust those experts — we certainly don’t trust the leaders of Anthropic and OpenAI and Meta — what we’re seeing right now is the American people deciding who they’re willing to trust on these really big decisions.

And Trump, who is attractive to almost exactly half of that electorate for over 10 years now, is no longer coming across in quite as credible a way as he did in 2016 and 2024. And you can see how much that’s frustrating to him, because he is reaching into his longtime reliable bag of tricks. He’s trying all of the tactics that have worked for him so effectively in the past. And they’re not working.

And he’s got five weeks to figure out either something new, or how to make something old work better than it has for the better course of this midterm year.