Jonah Goldberg: Trump turned politics into reality TV. Now Harris is the show to watch

Never has the GOP been more unified, and Donald Trump deserves all the credit. The issue uniting pundits, editorial boards, virtually all Republican politicians, GOP consultants, MAGA warriors and rallygoers: the need for Trump to lay aside personal gripes and grievances and to stick to the issues and attack Vice President Kamala Harris and Gov. Tim Walz on their records.

The New York Times asked former Rep. Jack Kingston, R-Ga., what he made of Trump attacking Harris for inventing her Black identity only recently. He replied, “I would stick to the price of groceries.

“All Trump has to do is talk about his positions, like he did in 2016,” insists columnist Ann Coulter.

“He’s more comfortable with personality-driven attacks, rather than issue-driven attacks,” Neil Newhouse, a Republican pollster, told The Times. “But given that Kamala’s a relative unknown, the policy- and issue-related attacks would get more traction right now.”

Obviously following this advice would be better than Trump’s current approach — race baiting, election denial, whining about Biden’s defenestration, attacking fellow Republicans, crowd size boasts, etc. — all of which is clearly ill-advised.

But “ill-advised” is the wrong word, because pretty much everybody advising Trump is telling him to stop. In other words, the conventional wisdom is well-advised, it’s just that Trump can’t or won’t follow it. This is not a new phenomenon. Expecting Trump to “pivot” or “act presidential” has been a political pastime for almost a decade. It’s like betting Godot will be punctual or Lucy won’t yank the football from Charlie Brown.

But what’s interesting to me is not the tiresome assumption that Trump can be anything other than who he is; rather it’s the assumption that if he ran the focused campaign his boosters favor, it would guarantee success. It would certainly improve his chances. But as a subscriber to the view that “vibes” have supplanted substantive issues and personal character as the decisive factors in elections, I’m not so sure.

Ever since Trump came down the escalator in 2015, I’ve been asking my pro-Trump friends some variant of the question, “What can the next Democratic president — or Democratic candidate — do that won’t make you a hypocrite for criticizing?” There are a few defensible answers to this question, but they miss the larger point. Trump has been inconsistent on so many issues — abortion, socialized medicine, transgender rights, debt, deficits, military interventions, criminal justice, etc. — that his supporters have largely given up on the idea that he should be held to a consistent position or principle. His personal character has been more consistent, but consistently wretched. The people who love his shtick like politics as a reality show. And those are the people he cares about because their adulation ratifies his own self-regard. Trump wants to believe that his awesome personality is the only thing that should matter, which is why he rejects the idea he needs to change.

Now that Trumpworld is on the receiving end of the reality show politics they helped create, they want to pivot back to issues. But what if voters, at least the ones who will decide the election, think politics-as-vibes is the new normal, particularly as Harris helpfully walks away from her most controversial positions? Trump has always benefited from the fact the rules of normal politics applied to everyone but him. Perhaps he succeeded in liberating his opponent from those rules, too.