Is Who He Is

“I have been the best president for the Black population since Abraham Lincoln.”
Donald Trump. 31 July, 2024

The idea that anything that Donald Trump did during his term in office comes close to signing the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1968 is laughable on its face. Yet he repeats the claim over and over. So I have the same question today that I had beck in 2016 when Mr. Trump would talk about all of the things that he would do for Black people: Who is he talking to?

And this is emblematic of the way that Mr. Trump speaks when he's not in front of a friendly audience, because that's the only audience that he every really talks to. Everyone else, he talks about. I suppose it comes with being in a position where he doesn't really have to listen to anyone, because any competent campaign manager, or even staffer, would have told him to actually attempt to address the audience in front of him, just as he would at a rally. But this has never really been Mr. Trump's style, and I think that his surprise upset of Hillary Clinton in 2016 reinforced for him the idea that it didn't need to be.

It's odd, because I suspect that Mr. Trump could be as popular with the public as a whole as he appears to want to be, and tells people that he is. But that would mean giving up attempting to play various groups off against one another. And I think that's simply too central to who he is.