When President Donald J. Trump takes the stage Wednesday afternoon at Harrah’s Cherokee Center, Asheville, North Carolina, watch to see if the president delivers a focused, tight set-piece on economic policy and inflation—signaling his pivot back to his pre-Butler form—or will Trump continue to struggle barely a month after the attempt on his life?
The speech’s topline theme is the economy, with a special emphasis on battling inflation. It will be delivered in front of a smaller audience than a typical Trump rally. The Thomas Wolfe Auditorium, which is also the home of the Asheville Symphony Orchestra, has a maximum capacity of 2,431, which is a rounding error on the tally of previous Trump events.
Trump’s campaign already paid $82,247.60 for a two-day rental and security and other services.
Going to Asheville, the home of a University of North Carolina campus and other schools, takes Trump into the deep, dark heart of western North Carolina’s leftwing resistance.
If the Trump staff and the president successfully execute this phase of their campaign, this speech will be the beginning of a series of serious policy addresses. The president will concentrate on policy and his Agenda 47 while his running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-OH), continues to follow and harass Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Timothy Walz.
Central to the Trump campaign strategy is creating a steady drumbeat of substance, which creates a contrast with the lack of substance in the opposition.
The 2024 Republican Party Platform was a short document compared to other platforms, but behind the scenes, the campaign has hundreds of pages of policy analysis and proposals that will be released in the next 80 days.
In the platform, which is still the definitive Trump agenda, Chapter 1 is “Defeat Inflation, and quickly bring down all prices.” The third chapter is “Build the greatest economy in history.”
In addition to policy speeches, the Trump campaign plans to host reporter conference calls with its policy experts. These calls are expected to feed serious political reporters meat and potatoes, with surprise visits from the president and Vance to spice up the content.
Trump World is convinced Harris and her policy shop will not be able to keep up.
One Month Later
Trump has joked that everyone said after the July 13 shooting in Butler, Pennsylvania, that people think he has changed, but he claimed it is not true.
It is easy to see that the president might not be aware of how the shooting affected him.
There are reports that the president has been difficult with donors and staff, which is all to be expected in a man who had an extraordinary near-death experience.
Americans are used to Trump being Trump, but there is a human context that cannot be ignored.
What happened to Trump was not just like when a guy gets caught in the riptide or slips and almost tumbles down the stairs.
When the rooftop shooter fired off eight shots, one hitting the president’s right ear, Trump was in one of the safest cocoons imaginable. Surrounded by 150 federal and local law enforcement agents and officers and thousands of his adoring supporters, Trump was shot live on TV—the first time CNN decided to take a rally live in years.
Simply put: Trump is dealing with a near-death experience combined with the realization that it was not an accident. It was an assassination attempt.
That realization needs to be processed, but instead of taking time to process, Trump went directly to Milwaukee and the hoopla of the Republican National Convention, along with all of the obligations on his time and his need to make others feel better about what happened to him.
The Butler shooting also had to take a toll on the Trump campaign staff.
Yes, almost immediately the world saw that Trump was safe and pumping his fist with: “Fight! Fight! Fight!” However, for the friends and loved ones of the campaign staff, there was also news that people were injured, and one of them was dead—was it their mother, son, or husband?
No one knew. Everything was about Trump, so people waited, and that trauma needed to be processed.
Then, there is the campaign staff. The advance team, the traveling package, the staff in Florida — all the people who have put their lives on hold to help Trump return to the White House. While the Nation came within an inch of a possible civil war, the Trump campaign staffers came within an inch of becoming professional widows.
No one had time to process anything, but the calendar is ticking like a clock. Election Day is Nov. 5 with early voting in September.
There is an Old English phrase: “And te tide and te time þat tu iboren were, schal beon iblescet,” which Gary Martin translated to modern-day English: “The tide abides for, tarrieth for no man, stays no man, tide nor time tarrieth no man.”
This brings us back to today.
The Pivot Is Today, or It Is Not
The goal of the Trump campaign leadership is to get back to the disciplined and policy-focused enterprise they were running between the June 27 debate with President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and the July 13 shooting.
When Trump takes the stage, he will be looking at prompters with a shorter script dedicated to bringing down prices and rebooting the economy.
The plan is to follow up the speech so that it has a longer tail than previous one-off attacks.
Regardless of the day-to-day numbers, which can be spun as improving, the Biden economy is still burdened by the 20 percent loss of buying power in the last three years and the high interest rates spurred by the Federal Reserve trying to rein in those prices.
Biden’s successor as the Democratic presidential nominee, Harris, speaks in Raleigh, North Carolina, Friday, giving her own address on the economy. This was not by design because Harris is delivering a speech she canceled because of Tropical Storm Debby, so it is the case of two campaigns bumping into each other.
That does not mean that North Carolina is not in play.
The Real Clear Politics moving average poll has Trump leading with 48 percent compared to Harris with 45 percent.
If the Harris momentum is sustained, it will be reflected in those secondary battleground states, like North Carolina, so we find out tonight how Trump meets that challenge.
