Today, Donald Trump pivoted to the general election.
It's no joke. Primary Trump held court in his gold-appointed offices adorned with pictures of himself, magazine covers featuring himself, and trophies to himself. General election Trump just held a speech in front of a literal pile of garbage. For a candidate whose campaign was often compared to a dumpster fire, the motivational message was clear: We'll give you the dumpster part, America, but as you can plainly see here—we are not on fire.
Primary Trump roiled the race and the Republican party with made-up-on-the-spot speeches making bizarre claims and premised entirely on his own greatness. General election Trump gave an oddly petulant speech that sounded like someone had put the least interesting lines of old George Will columns into a burlap sack and pulled them back out again in no particular order.
He obviously didn't write it; it wasn't his cadence, it wasn't his content, it had approximately zip to do with any of his other speeches or with his central election theme of everybody but Donald Trump being "stupid" and "losers." Instead, Donald Trump talked in vague, ghostwritten wisps about the TPP. Donald Trump obediently talked about NAFTA. Donald Trump dutifully read both things off of the teleprompter with all the charisma of a child giving a book report based on someone else's notes.
What Donald Trump's new handlers have decided, apparently, is that if Donald Trump is going to not embarrass the party he's going to have to read speeches prepared by someone else, read in locations Donald Trump would ordinarily not be caught dead in, all delivered after someone spiked his lunchtime drink with enough animal tranquilizer to drop a bull elephant. To say the resulting speech was low-energy would be an understatement—the audience responded with all the enthusiasm of mall shoppers wandering by a vacuum cleaner demonstration.
Yeah, this is going to last about three days before Donald Trump rips someone's head off. This is going to be outstanding.