Trump’s Blank Vision for a Second Term

For a president who narrates his fleeting thoughts, Donald Trump has been conspicuously silent about one looming question: what he might do in a second term. There’s civic value, of course, in telling voters how he might dig out of the current economic calamity or end a pandemic that’s worsening by the day. But the emptiness of Trump’s message is an important reason his reelection prospects have soured. Trump has one imperative in the November election, really only one way to win. He needs to make the race a choice between himself and Joe Biden, rather than an up-or-down verdict on his own performance and persona. And he’s not doing that.

Strip out the hyperbole and boasts, the theatrics and insults, and not much is left in Trump’s campaign messaging to guide the undecided voter who might wonder how the president’s second term would stack up to Biden’s first. This week, a friendly interviewer asked in the gentlest of terms what Trump has