Donald Trump is many things, but a nimble agent of change isn’t one of them. To be sure, the former president can be found all over the map on certain policy questions, such as a national abortion ban or the shape-shifting foreign menace known as TikTok. But in matters of deep personal temperament, he remains the same 1980s-branded merchant of rich-guy malice he’s always been. He’s always at the center of some unfair scheme to deprive him of his birthright in the attention economy; he always, mysteriously, hires the best people, who end up authoring Shakespearean betrayals of his trusting nature; and he always humiliates critics, harasses women, and expresses hatred of wind energy and modern plumbing.

It’s no great surprise, then, that as the Democratic Party introduced a fundamental shift in the 2024 election cycle by swapping out Kamala Harris for Joe Biden, the GOP standard-bearer has been left flatfooted, reciting stale anti-Democratic talking points from the stump while offering up fan-fiction scenarios of a Biden restoration on his Truth Social account.

Yet the spectacle of Trump grinding his gears during the 2024 election cycle homestretch betrays something more than an aging brand-huckster’s disorientation before a new rival. Trump’s political message has been ossifying ever since his surprise ascension to the presidency—which is why the Republican Party has sustained a steady run of reversals at the ballot box ever since. He’s taken up and rapidly discarded a slew of fictive culture-war crusades over that time, from the immigrant caravans of 2018 to the “critical race theory” panics of 2022, to no avail at the ballot box. He’s wooed a rotating cast of hard-right influencers, staged a hostile takeover of the Republican National Committee, and, as of last Friday forged an alliance with conspiracy theorist/scourge of dead animals Robert F. Kennedy.

Yet the underlying problem in all of Trump’s frantic divagations and rebands is Trump himself. Namely, Trump has been unable to depart from the basic template of his 2016 presidential run, the only election he’s ever won. He’s only, in other words, able to run against Hillary Clinton, and he persists in treating all his subsequent general election rivals as if they, too, were Hillary Clinton. In 2020, he subbed in “Sleepy Joe” Biden for “Crooked Hillary” Clinton and supplied a paint-by-numbers reprise of attacks from the previous campaign. The core message was that Biden was in waning physical and mental health—the same anti-Hillary refrain that Trump whaled away on in the 2016 homestretch, after Clinton nearly fainted at a September 11 memorial ceremony in New York. Indeed, Trump’s fixation on a fantasy scenario where he is once again running against Biden is grounded in the reassurance that one key theme of his 2020 anti-Biden attack, concerning Biden’s waning acuity, has proven at least partially true.

In his epic meltdown over Harris’s acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago—numbering 48 posts on Truth Social—you could almost hear the plaintive cry Come back, Hillary! rising up from Mar-a-Lago. As Harris started in on a direct attack on Trump’s character and record—something Clinton’s campaign managed to pull off only erratically and belatedly—Trump, flatly bewildered by Harris’s scorn and punching-down delivery, simply posted “IS SHE TALKING ABOUT ME?” As he hit back anemically on topics from Project 2025 (which he again dishonestly disclaimed any knowledge of) to Harris’s standing as a world leader, Trump also launched an attack on the GOP-authored immigration Harris pledged to sign, marinated in vintage (and bogus) 2016 anti-Clinton rhetoric: “The Border Bill is one of the worst ever written, would have allowed millions of people into our Country, and it’s only a political ploy by her!,” he ranted. “It legalizes Illegal Immigration, and is a TOTAL DISASTER, WEAK AND INEFFECTIVE!” It was roughly what would happen if you instructed ChatGPT to craft an anti-Hillary hate screed without Hillary Clinton.

In the wake of the convention, Trump again reached for the security blanket of the old Hillary attacks. After he performed badly in the second presidential debate in 2016, Trump had laid into the Presidential Debates Commission for allegedly rigging the debate system in Clinton’s favor. He complained, baselessly, that his microphone was either broken or sabotaged, and insisted the debate commission was illegitimate because it was headed by Michael McCurry, a former press secretary for Bill Clinton. (The commission, like many establishment political institutions, had a bipartisan leadership structure, with Frank Fahrenkopf, a former head of the RNC, as McCurry’s cochair.) Ever static in his worldview, Trump has now kicked off the week after the Democratic Convention with a similarly unhinged Truth Social post suggesting that because ABC aired a segment on This Week that irritated him, he may drop out of the September 10 presidential debate the network is scheduled to air. Deriding the show’s “so-called Panel of Trump Haters,” the candidate delivered this classic refrain: “Will panelist Donna Brazil [sic] give the questions to the Marxist Candidate like she did for Crooked Hillary Clinton? Will Kamala’s best friend, who heads up ABC, do likewise.”

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Conventional pundit wisdom has it that Trump is again posturing to bail out of the ABC debate because he’s rattled by Harris’s more aggressive campaign and her courtroom-tested debating skills. But once more, he’s just doing the one weird trick he knows how to do. That trick worked in 2016 for a host of unique and unrepeatable reasons, starting with the colossally bad campaign that Clinton herself ran. (I’m reasonably sure I’m not the only person who felt a surge of dread upon encountering a spate of yard signs and T-shirts featuring Harris’s image alongside the recycled Hillary slogan “I’m With Her.”) But in a number of ways, Kamala Harris is pretty much the opposite of Hillary Clinton as a campaigner. Even at the level of sloganeering, “When we fight we win” is in an entirely different populist register from the girl-boss feminist tagline “I’m with her”—just as “We won’t go back” and the many stump-line variations on the “Republicans are weird” refrain are a world away from the self-congratulatory MAGA rejoinder from 2016, “America is already great.”

In policy terms as well, Harris’s Democratic Party is pivoting away from the neoliberal policy consensus that animated Clinton’s candidacy, as Nation contributor Robert Borosage has argued (even though it’s still unclear just how lasting and meaningful this pivot proves to be). And the aggressive, momentum-seizing character of Harris’s campaign bears almost no resemblance to Clinton’s overconfident establishment campaign, which spent much of the campaign cycle drafting detailed policy briefs while neglecting the fundamental work of mobilizing and expanding the Democratic Party’s base down the homestretch. In the same way that “Comrade Kamala” is a distant, bizarrely Cold War–distorted echo of “Crooked Hillary,” Trump’s whole line of attack against his major-party rival is failing to address the real threat that Kamala Harris presents to him. So to answer the central, and most coherent, question Trump posed on the final night of the DNC: Yes, Donald, she’s talking about you—but you’re still talking about the wrong her.