Former President Donald Trump in his Wednesday trip to Ohio briefly channeled the populist energy that distinguished his 2016 campaign from Hillary Clinton and over a dozen Republican rivals.
Trump visited East Palestine to show support for a community afflicted by the toxic train derailment as President Joe Biden, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, and other administration officials have come under scrutiny for the federal response to the disaster.
“Get over here,” was Trump’s terse, three-word response to a reporter’s question about what he would tell Biden.
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The Buckeye State blitz wasn’t perfect, with a strange self-promotional reference to Trump water.
But it was otherwise a vintage Trump performance the 2024 candidate should like to bottle.
There are legitimate questions about the Trump administration’s record on railway safety, which the White House was quick to raise on Wednesday, as well as whether the former president was there to help East Palestine more than his future political prospects.
Nevertheless, Trump has been obsessed with his grievances about the 2020 presidential election, the disloyalty of Republicans who dare to run against him in next year’s primaries, and perhaps even the meatball consumption habits of some of those GOP rivals.
Trump’s campaign has seemed lethargic since he announced this third bid for the White House in as many election cycles, as he seeks to become the first president to serve nonconsecutive terms since Grover Cleveland.
Even on Wednesday, there were grim reminders of Trump’s complicated legal situation, which could throw further roadblocks before his path to the Republican nomination.
For a few hours in Ohio, at least, there was a return to form of Trump the television performer filling a perceived void left by the Biden team in front of a crowd that largely supported him.
Trump won Ohio, usually seen as a battleground state, fairly easily in both 2016 and 2020. He carried the areas surrounding East Palestine by even bigger margins.
Not only did Trump visit East Palestine before Biden or Buttigieg, but he did so while his successor was returning from Europe. Some Republicans, most of them supportive of Trump, have sought to argue the Biden administration is more eager to help Ukraine defend itself against Russia than aid his own constituents.
The Biden administration won’t long leave that message uncontested, and its current control of the levers of the federal government gives it the power to deliver tangible results.
Biden is already trying hard to outflank Trump on protecting U.S. manufacturing jobs and make inroads among blue-collar voters ahead of what figures to be yet another competitive presidential election.
“That’s why we’re building an economy where no one is left behind,” Biden declared in his State of the Union address earlier this month. “Jobs are coming back; pride is coming back because of choices we made in the last several years.”
Trump’s Ohio visit was reminiscent of past public relations wins like his pre-presidential intervention in Indiana’s Carrier plant move. There, too, the details subsequently proved much more complicated, but the initial coverage was favorable to Trump.
In the last few years, Trump’s fixation on personal vendettas has dulled the sharp, gut-level political instincts that enabled him to defeat 17 more experienced office-seekers from both parties en route to the biggest upset presidential victory in living memory.
Despite the economic devastation and high death toll wrought by the pandemic, Trump came within 43,000 votes in three states of doing it again.
But since then, there has been the GOP’s loss of the Senate in a pair of Georgia runoffs as Trump sowed doubt about election results, the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, a second impeachment, a midterm election in which Trump-endorsed candidates blew Republicans’ chances of taking back the Senate, and a campaign sequel in which the former president has seemed out of new material.
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Trump briefly looked like he had a second act on Wednesday.
Whether it was but a fleeting glimpse at his final one remains to be seen over the next several months.
