This is the worst thing that could have happened to Donald Trump

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Donald Trump is in uncharted waters.

Ever since he descended from the Trump Tower heavens on that golden escalator to announce his presidential run in 2015, he’s created his own centre of gravity in American politics. Everyone else lived within it.

He started out as a novelty-act candidate, like someone had dared the universe to make a Mad Libs come to life. As president, he was a never-ending source of global chaos, with entire economic markets, geopolitical events and news cycles hot-glued to his moods and whims.

Then, he was the election loser in denial who could commandeer a marauding army at will. Most recently, he was the increasingly inevitable vengeance candidate with a just-add-water autocracy kit in his back pocket.

Through it all, nobody talked about what Mr. Trump and his opponents or detractors would do, as if both sides were autonomous actors on equal footing. It was about how everyone else would cope with Mr. Trump, as though they were livestock cowering on an open plain and he was a weather system blowing through.

Grabbing and holding attention has always been Mr. Trump’s everything: his medium as an artist, his fuel as a machine, his weapon, his talent, his one true superpower and the thirstiest need of his soul all in one.

But now, suddenly, the spotlight has dimmed. Or it’s turned elsewhere, which is the same thing but much worse.

For weeks on end, what sucked up all the oxygen was President Joe Biden and the paralyzed drama about whether and when he would step aside. Then he did, and all the interest stampeded over to Democratic nominee Kamala Harris and her vice-presidential pick, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz.

Now the polls are turning on Mr. Trump – that may be a sugar high, but with the Democratic National Convention kicking off in Chicago on Monday, it’s destined to spike further before it subsides – and the electricity around the Democratic ticket keeps feeding on itself.

But Mr. Trump’s unravelling is about something more profound than his historically weak opponent being replaced by one who’s proved more adept than anyone predicted. It’s not so much what has happened as how it’s unmoored him and exposed weaknesses in his political persona that were hidden before.

Now that he’s being deprived of attention, he’s acting out to try to regain his rightful place, questioning when Ms. Harris “turned Black,” writing fanfic about Mr. Biden stomping into the DNC to reclaim the nomination, insisting that the raucous Democratic rallies are packed with human special effects.

All of this makes Mr. Trump look like something he has never been before, something that undercuts everything that’s made him mesmerizing: he looks like he’s trying. Worse, he looks like he’s trying and it’s not working.

The Donald Trump experience has always been about extreme, unapologetic, undiluted Trumpiness. It’s why his fans worship him as their truth-teller and freedom fighter, and why his haters loathe him as he refused to bow to their mewling loser energy. It’s why nobody could look away.

A Donald Trump who craves notice doesn’t make sense, because the entire point of him is his total indifference to other people. Punk rock does not care if you find it rude and loud; that’s why it’s punk rock.

All of that is an unstoppable force as long as it works. But the moment it runs into an obstacle or adversary that requires a different approach, it becomes a crippling weakness. The problem with being so thoroughly, unrepentantly yourself is that you are all there is. There is no other gear available when the you-ness stops working.

Political analysts keep talking about how Mr. Trump has struggled to find a consistent line of attack against Ms. Harris, but that isn’t quite it. Mr. Trump keeps lobbing his vintage Biden attacks at her – sleepy, dumb, crooked – because they’re what he knows. He’s trying to mash his new opponent into the silhouette of the old one because that’s what works for his repertoire.

Mr. Trump seems to know this on some flailing level, though he doesn’t seem aware of how thoroughly he’s exposing his soft, pale undercarriage every time he publicly yearns to still run against Mr. Biden.

The Trumpiness that got him this far manifests in another way that’s kneecapping his ability to respond to this moment, too. When Mr. Trump is doing what he wants and having himself a time, he’s incandescent – seeing him work a rally or a speech in that state is like watching a boxer in the zone.

But when he’s handed an assignment or curtailed in any way, he mails it in. He goes on work to rule. Whether by will or instinct, he turns off the lights.

The first 15 minutes of his speech at the Republican National Convention was magnetic as he recounted, in lurid detail, his brush with an assassin’s bullet days earlier. But the hour of lethargic verbal meandering that followed came courtesy of the calmer, more measured Trump his advisers had spent the week promising.

He stood at the prow of a monumental, glowing stage in Milwaukee, with 100,000 balloons suspended above him and a sequin-festooned sea of adoring Republicans unfolding at his feet, and he managed, somehow, to be both bored and boring. This is what happens when someone tries to script a different Donald Trump.

But now, because of how the entire game board flipped over when Mr. Biden withdrew, all Mr. Trump has available is a command performance. He has to pivot somehow, but doing so means being something less than a 100-proof version of himself. That makes him miserable and leaves him with only a greatly diminished echo of his political gifts.

Everything that got Mr. Trump here as a politician – the exact qualities that made him a star, a movement deity, a force of nature – now make it impossible for him to handle this political moment.

It’s easy to imagine that Mr. Trump might really like to have a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade balloon in his own likeness. But now, he’s trapped inside the thing, yanked around by someone else’s weather system.