The real Trump is back. It could cost him the White House.

• Donald Trump has shown he's the same man who cost himself the presidency.

• Republicans had a playbook to defeat Vice President Kamala Harris.

• Instead, the former president has harkened back to the ugliest moments in US history — and his own.

Don't call it a comeback. Donald Trump has been this way for years.

Trump had the greatest summer of his political life. After years of jokes about Republican infighting, the Democratic Party was truly in disarray as panic spread about President Joe Biden's fitness to lead the ticket.

National polls showed that Trump was in the best position of any Republican presidential hopeful in more than two decades. Many Democrats were worried about a blowout. And to top it all off, Trump finally got the raucous convention coronation he craved. During the lovefest, his two former primary foes, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and the former UN ambassador Nikki Haley, urged the party to unite around Trump.

In the middle of it all, Trump survived an assassination attempt. Some thought the moment would change the 78-year-old. It did not.

Less than 100 days before the presidential election, Trump can't seem to accept the reality that this race has fundamentally changed.

After Biden made the virtually unprecedented decision to quit the race, Democrats have rallied around his vice president, Kamala Harris, to become his successor. Trump's team now appears nervous about defending North Carolina, a state Republicans have carried in all but one election since 1980.

And with a series of unforced errors, he is once again showing that for all his political talent, he has an uncanny ability to inspire breathtaking opposition.

On Wednesday, Trump showed he is who he always has been. At a conference of Black journalists, the former president questioned if Kamala Harris was truly Black. He didn't focus on the litany of progressive positions Harris has backed away from or try to tie her to an unpopular president. Instead, he harkened back to ugly moments in US history and, frankly, his own.

"He did crap the bed today," Scott Jennings, a Republican political strategist, told CNN after Trump's appearance at the conference. "The only question is if he's going to roll around in it or get up and change the sheets."

After all, this is the real-estate developer whose career practically began by getting sued by Richard Nixon's Department of Justice over accusations of racial housing discrimination. Years later, Trump laid the cornerstone for his modern political career by pushing the racist conspiracy that President Barack Obama wasn't a US citizen. Now, the entirety of that record will be thrown into sharp relief.

Trump is showing that this wasn't some gaffe. At his rally Wednesday night, his team projected the image of an old Business Insider headline that highlighted Harris' historic 2016 election as the first Indian American senator — the implication being that Harris chooses her racial identity based on political convenience.

But as Semafor's Dave Weigel pointed out, the article was just an example of how journalists highlight firsts. Harris was the second Black woman to be elected to the Senate. The daughter of Indian and Jamaican immigrants, Harris has spent her life identifying with and drawing from both cultures. And if the old headline wasn't enough, Trump on Thursday morning posted an old photo of Harris embracing her "Indian heritage."

I previously wrote that Harris' best hope was that Trump would self-self-immolate in the face of her historic candidacy — much like he had when he attacked other powerful women. I didn't expect it would happen so quickly.

Trump has hurt himself in other ways

In selecting Sen. JD Vance of Ohio as his vice presidential nominee, Trump violated the one rule of running mates: to do no harm. Now, even the former president hopes that the man he positioned to be his MAGA heir apparent won't really matter that much.

Trump has survived countless missteps and scandals that would have doomed other politicians. He insulted Holy Communion at a gathering of conservative Christians, attacked John McCain after the iconic senator died, feuded with Gold Star families, offered praise for Charlottesville protesters, and mused about unproven cures during a global pandemic. After leaving office, he dined with an avowed white supremacist and antisemite. There's a reason in the closing days of the 2016 campaign, Trump had to tell himself out loud to "stay" on message.

This is exactly how Trump lost in 2020

Still, the constant churn of outrage surrounding Trump turned off enough voters to push him out of office in 2020.

The former president has benefited from a relatively disciplined campaign in 2024. The bar was extraordinarily low.

Trump's first 2016 campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, was accused of assaulting a reporter. Trump's first 2020 campaign manager, Brad Parscale, faced unflattering headlines over his spending habits that suggested he left the campaign cash-strapped in the heat of the race.

Trump's 2024 team spent months emasculating and embarrassing DeSantis, ending his candidacy with a historic rout in the Iowa caucuses. And until Biden dropped out, they had managed to make the president's age the biggest factor in a contest that featured the first former president to become a convicted felon.

Many have hoped that Trump would grow and change, but we've learned rather quickly that he will not. Thanks largely to his own missteps, Trump's summer of luck has run out. And if he doesn't change course, he'll fall back on hard times.

Read the original article on Business Insider