Is Trump rejecting American carnage?

Has Donald Trump lost his nerve? After months of lockdown, a serious economic downturn, and rioting on a scale unseen in this country in decades, all amid the usual omnidirectional hysteria from journalists and Democratic politicians, surely he is about to return to "American carnage," right?

There are few election-related predictions I would have made with more confidence a few months ago than this one. But if the last two weeks are any indication, I appear to have been wrong. Instead of returning to the themes of his 2016 campaign, Trump seems determined to remain optimistic. This is why he is hunkering down in his fortress at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and parroting slightly encouraging new unemployment figures instead of calling for another Tiananmen Square.

Will the sunny side of the street work for Trump, though? I am not entirely confident. This is a man whose four years in electoral politics have been given over almost entirely to rhetoric about his enemies, their perfidy and malice, and the chaos into which their nefarious plots and regrettable inaction (he is not above contradicting himself) have plunged the country.

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As I write this, things certainly look bleak for him. While the importance of national polls is often exaggerated in a country whose presidential elections are decided by state electors rather than a popular tally, it is hard to argue that a 38 percent approval rating is encouraging. Lack of enthusiasm for Trump does not necessarily translate into strong support for Joe Biden, who remains among the weakest general election candidates nominated by a major political party in decades, but you don't have to love the guy not to vote for his opponent.

I don't expect Trump to continue on this path through November, however. The conciliatory rhetoric he has employed recently (including during a bizarre press conference on Friday morning, in which he imagined the late George Floyd smiling down from heaven at the progress on race relations being made by his administration) runs entirely contrary to his instincts, if not those of Jared Kushner and other advisers who will try and fail to get him to remain positive indefinitely.

Sooner or later Trump will convince himself that the inconvenient virus (which he will simultaneously blame Democrats for and dismiss as overhyped) prevented him from talking to the American people about impeachment, and, more specifically, about his big beautiful acquittal in the Senate. This is a chance he feels he was owed, and we are not talking about a man who denies himself the things he believes are his. Eventually, regardless of what basic economic indicators suggest, Trump will start talking about how Quid Pro Joe and Low IQ Maxine Waters and Leakin' James Comey and That Woman in Michigan exaggerated coronavirus, a.k.a., Impeachment 2.0, and dragged the country down into a second Great Depression all at the behest of High Crime Nancy and Chuck Schumer (who, oddly enough, has never received a Trumpian sobriquet). He will talk again about drugs and immigration and crime. He will insist that the special counsel investigation and impeachment prevented him from building the wall and fundamentally remaking the nature of our trade relationship with China. He will give himself credit for taking a hard line with protesters that his campaign insists was actually the meekest forbearance. He will also almost certainly hold more of his trademark carnivalesque rallies, upon whose energy he seems to feed.

Trump will not abandon American carnage for the very simple reason that American carnage seems not to have abandoned him. The quasi-apocalyptic atmosphere of the last several months seems in many ways to be fulfilling the dreams of his enemies about what life would look like under a Trump administration. They will ignore at their peril the reality that at one time these were probably his ideal governing conditions as well.