Trump’s Carefully Scripted Week Kept Veering Off Script

Donald J. Trump’s political endurance this year has been attributed in part to voters’ faded memories about why they denied him a second term four years ago.

The former president is doing his best to remind them.

Despite a carefully scripted week of campaign events aimed at counterprogramming the Democratic National Convention, Mr. Trump undercut much of his messaging with a series of off-the-cuff remarks, rants and blunders that threatened to stoke the kind of Republican anxiety he has spent much of the past month trying to tamp down.

On Monday in Pennsylvania, he struggled to clarify a previous comment that he believed the Presidential Medal of Freedom, which honors civilians, was “much better” than the Medal of Honor given to military members. On Tuesday in Michigan, he claimed that Vice President Kamala Harris had won the Democratic nomination after a “vicious, violent overthrow of a president" and called Chicago, which hosted the Democratic convention, “a war zone that’s worse than Afghanistan.”

He openly rejected advice from allies to limit his personal attacks on Ms. Harris and other Democrats during a speech on Wednesday in North Carolina. He called the nation’s first Black vice president “lazy” during a stop in Arizona on Thursday afternoon and, that night, rambled during a 10-minute phone call with Fox News. The anchors ultimately cut him off and ended the interview, but Mr. Trump picked up where he had left off by quickly phoning into Newsmax.

And on Friday, Mr. Trump concluded his week by embracing Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in exchange for his endorsement, a move with an uncertain impact on tilting the race in his favor.