Trump the optimist?

There was no "Send her back" at President Trump's first rally since the infamous chant first rang out. In fact, there was no "her," at least not if that pronoun is supposed to refer these days to Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota. Instead, the crowd seized upon a passing reference to Hillary Clinton in order to revive an old favorite: "Lock her up."

This was the only real throwback in what was otherwise a very 2020-oriented evening in Cincinnati. Trump is looking ahead, and he is also sounding upbeat. Almost all of what we heard on Thursday night was positive. Jobs? Trump has created 6 million of them. Energy, i.e., "the incredible gold"? He has given us "the finest coal in the world." Health care? "We will," he solemnly assured the audience, "be curing childhood cancer very shortly." His friend Larry? "Nice tie, I like Larry's tie." Heck, Trump is even "starting to like Mexico." Everything is sunshine and rainbows. Is this the script Republican voters want?

It is hard to imagine a starker contrast from Trump's dark 2016 campaign. But this is what it means to be a sitting president running for re-election. He has to run on his record, and like any politician, he insists that his is one of uninterrupted success at home and abroad. This presumably is why his speech ended with his promise to "Keep America Great." Should we start calling them KAG hats?

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Instead, Democrats supplied most of the doom and gloom. Trump says that he watched the "so-called debate" on Tuesday and Wednesday evenings and was astonished to hear the candidates spend "more time attacking Barack Obama than they did me." He denounced what he called "the bizarre worldview of the third and hard left." (Don't ask what the first and second lefts were.) He made jokes about "Sleepy" Joe Biden ("No idea what the hell he's doing") and vowed to prevent America from becoming Venezuela. He said that he would never send "planeloads of cash" to Iran. He also made fun of the press.

At times he sounded remarkably out of touch, even by the standards of a geriatric white billionaire president. He spoke at length about the plight of African Americans in our "inner cities," using the sort of language one would expect from a network news broadcast at the height of the Clinton-era "welfare queens" scaremongering. Nowadays one associates "inner cities" with IPA brocialists spaced out during their Deadspin podcasts, while urban poverty is being pushed out into suburbs.

Trump also claimed that American energy production is superior to that of "the Soviet Union." Applause followed. Then he paused for roughly one second. "Formerly. Remember the Soviet Union? When it was all together, the Soviet Union, when it was all together, before they decided we gotta call ourselves Russia, when it was all together they wanted to be, it was always their dream to be the biggest in the world, then it became Russia. And you know what? They've done a good job with energy." This is doing Sleepy Joe proud.

The president received standing ovations only twice over the course of remarks that went on for an hour and 20 minutes. The first time was when he spoke out against abortion, invoking the recent infanticide controversy in Virginia. The second time was when he made a reference to the national motto.

What does this tell us? For one thing, it suggests that red-state audiences care far more about social issues than they do about GDP statistics or paeans to unprecedented stock market growth Trump spend much of the night singing. They are happy to clap along when he tells them that they've never had it so good because their 401(k)s, assuming they have them, are through the roof, but that doesn't mean they believe it.

If this really is the case and Trump cannot convince the GOP base that his economic policies alone have earned him their support, how is he going to fare with the thousands of moderate voters scattered across the post-industrial Midwest and Pennsylvania he needs to win again in 2020? The social issues script probably isn't going to work. The optimism one certainly won't. Sooner or later Trump is going to have to acknowledge that his agenda — on trade, infrastructure, immigration, and many other issues — has been more or less effectively thwarted by congressional Democrats. And he's going to have to get mad about it.

This is the downside to winning the White House as a prophet of doom. You don't get to keep it by being John Denver.