In the 2016 campaign, Trump time after time made clear that in his view, the greatest sin a politician could commit was boring the audience. How many times did he refer to a rival as “putting people to sleep”? Trump’s own speeches wandered all over the place as he tried to keep the crowd entertained. His staff’s efforts to get him to read a prepared text from a teleprompter almost always ended in failure.

Trump always said reading from a teleprompter was the kind of thing boring politicians do, in part because it is easier than the high-wire act that he puts on.

“That would be so much better,” he said in a speech in Dallas in September 2015. “We read a speech for 45 minutes. Everybody falls asleep, listening to the same old stuff, the same old lies. So much easier.”

At another point in the Dallas speech, Trump began to go into the details of the case against Hillary Clinton.

“There are many,” he said, “I just don’t want to bore you with too many of these things.”

The worst thing a candidate could do is bore the audience.

But now Trump is in danger of doing just that, because of his obsession with the 2020 race. He can’t stop talking about it. Yes, his supporters think the election was stolen from him. But it is clear that crowds react more enthusiastically to Trump’s bashing of Biden, the new villain in the story, than to his 2020 stories.