President Trump at a rally at the Phoenix Convention Center, Tuesday, Aug. 22, 2017 (Alex Brandon / AP)
"The permanent campaign has been a fixture of the modern presidency for more than a generation ... But ... Trump ... has scaled new heights," the L.A. Times' Mark Z. Barabak writes in the paper's lead story, "Trump wages a campaign without end":
- "Trump filed the paperwork establishing his 2020 reelection committee the day he took office and has already started fundraising, years before his predecessors began raking in cash."
- "He has trampled protocol and turned explicitly nonpolitical events, like the Boy Scouts' national jamboree, into replicas of his roisterous campaign stops."
- Why it matters: "Trump has transformed the bully pulpit — the president's ability to rally the country in pursuit of his goals — into a sort of vanity project, staging events not to advance any substantive agenda but to vent and, as aides admit, bask in the adulation of supportive audiences."