On a Saturday in late July, Rudy Giuliani was having lunch with Donald Trump at the president’s golf course in Virginia. Both men were in unusually good spirits. Giuliani, the president’s sometime lawyer who is representing Trump in negotiations over the presidential debates, was happy again to have regular face time with the president after months of coronavirus-related isolation.

Trump, who has been glum about the still-raging pandemic that has killed nearly 160,000 Americans, the subsequent economic collapse, polling that suggests he’s headed for defeat in the fall and his inability to arrest the slide, was buoyed by a good round on the links. “He did very well at golf,” Giuliani said in a lengthy interview with POLITICO over the weekend. “So that might have been why he was in a good mood.”

Naturally the conversation turned to the general election and how Trump might turn things around. Republicans have been bombarding Trump with advice, arguing that his insistence on stoking the same divisive issues — white resentment of minorities, the culture wars and “LAW & ORDER” — which worked so well for him in 2016, now appeals to only the Trump die-hards and have turned off a broad majority of the country.

“It used to be that he would do five rallies a day and say whatever came off the top of his head and he thinks that won him the election,” said a senior GOP congressional aide, echoing the sentiments of a still-intact class of Republicans appalled by Trump and how he is turning vast swaths of Republican-leaning suburbs into Democratic territory. “It’s like when a 25-year old gets drunk and shows up at a family engagement. That can be cute. But if you’re a 50-year-old and you show up at the gathering drunk and embarrassing, that just hits a little differently. It’s not cute anymore.”

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