On Monday, the president is scheduled to visit a lab facility in North Carolina’s Research Triangle, and on Wednesday he’ll be in Texas for a fundraising lunch, a roundtable of supporters and a tour of an oil rig—not exactly MAGA rallies.
“It’s constrained what he can do and what kind of energy and enthusiasm and the like that he can generate,” Jesse Ferguson, a Democratic strategist who was a senior spokesman for the Clinton campaign, told me—going so far as to compare the contrast to dueling images of Trump gliding down the gilded escalator in Trump Tower to announce his candidacy and then his much-discussed “sort of sad descent” of that ramp at West Point last month.
Republican consultant and former John Boehner and Jeb Bush aide Michael Steel likened it to the difference between going to see Bruce Springsteen in the mid-‘80s versus catching him a generation later on Broadway. “Same performer. Same basic set list. Energy level is a hundred percent different.”
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