GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. – This city is peak nostalgia for fans of former President Donald Trump. It’s where he held his closing campaign events in 2016 and 2020. Second gentleman Doug Emhoff arrived in Grand Rapids Sunday to convince Republicans that Trump is not the same guy he was at those rallies.
“You look at him now, he’s falling apart physically and falling apart mentally,” Emhoff said at the Grand Rapids Center for Community Transformation. “You just see it. Right now, he’s a much worse version of what he was before.”
Democrats have several closing arguments as this campaign cycle comes to an end, and new among them is that Trump is in decline, too tired and old to be effective. It’s reminiscent of the very attacks that ultimately knocked out President Joe Biden’s campaign over the course of a month this summer. Except in Trump’s case, the idea is only really taking hold weeks from Election Day.
“We should have been saying it a long time ago,” Michigan state Sen. Mallory McMorrow told NOTUS at a meet-and-greet for Republicans appalled by Trump at a brewery in Detroit over the weekend. She flipped a Republican district in the Detroit suburbs in 2018 and has become famous for potent and memorable messaging, like the time she brought a giant Project 2025 book to the dais at the Democratic National Convention.
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“The fact that we watched media pundits, nonstop, 24 hours a day, talking about President Biden and his age but letting Trump off the hook as though he’s not almost exactly the same age, it was really frustrating,” McMorrow said. “I’m glad we’re finally talking about it because that is something that I think a majority of people recognized when it was Trump versus Biden. The wide agreement, if there was one, was that we need a younger candidate.”
Trump’s rallies have become increasingly rambling. He has canceled several recent appearances, reportedly citing “exhaustion” to event organizers. At 78, he is the oldest major party nominee ever. He wasn’t at first, of course. But with Biden out and the freshly 60-year-old Kamala Harris in, Democrats are now taking some of the shots at Trump that were fired at Biden.
The image of a tired Trump is everywhere across the key battleground states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, where Democrats are banking on Republicans fed up with Trump to show up for Harris. Harris’ running mate, Tim Walz, took the line to Nebraska over the weekend.
“It takes a lot of stamina to be president, so you may be asking yourself how in the hell does Donald Trump think he’s going to do this,” Walz said Saturday.
Republican former lawmaker Barbara Comstock, who has endorsed Harris, posted last week that Trump’s performance at the Al Smith dinner showed “his brain is circling the drain and decomposing by the hour.” Harris’ rapid response director highlighted Trump canceling an event.
On Monday, Vice President Harris will zip across the three states with former Rep. Liz Cheney, trying to find those Republicans. A senior Harris campaign official suggested people see the whirlwind tour as a stark difference from a GOP nominee who has been keeping a slower pace on the trail lately.
Will it help win Republicans over? Sarah Matthews, who spent the 2020 campaign as a top communications aide to Trump before quitting on Jan. 6, 2021, said the age argument with Biden is actually different than it is with Trump. A doddering but kindly Biden raises questions about who is really in charge, but with Trump it’s about what he would do with the power, she said.
“With Trump, it’s, ‘OK, for the last 10 years we’ve been dealing with this guy.’ And it’s, ‘Do you really want to continue away from this over the next four years?’” she told NOTUS. “I think that’s more of what could be a convincing argument for voters. More so than maybe not completing the job. He’s just going to continue to get older like we saw with Biden. Do we really want to risk that with Trump? So there is an argument there.”
Mark Cuban, stumping across the battlegrounds as a proudly politically independent surrogate for Harris, loves to engage Republican voters in detailed math about the respective economic plans of the party nominees. Speaking after Emhoff in Grand Rapids, he explained to one voter how his math showed Trump’s promised 21% corporate tax rate plus his promised across-the-board tariffs would cost businesses more than Harris’ promised 28% corporate rate.
But he said the tired Trump stuff works too.
“I’m not trying to push the Democratic Party approach. What I can tell you is he has slowed down and is not the same guy I knew 25 years ago,” he told NOTUS. “You want somebody who can say what she means and be very clear about it. And you don’t get that with Donald Trump. So when Democrats say he’s worn out, hey, at 78, I think we’re all going to be worn out at some point.”
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Evan McMorris-Santoro is a reporter at NOTUS.
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