President Trump’s hat is in the ring for 2024. Lying with it on the canvas is a speech full of President Carter-style malaise and lamentations, an address dwelling on yesterday launching a campaign that’s supposed to be about tomorrow. 

The speech went on for an hour, a lifetime in television terms, in which most sitcoms are 22 minutes. On the left, MSNBC ignored it. On the right, Sean Hannity of Fox News Channel dropped out around halfway, bringing in guests to talk about the former president’s remarks before he’d finished making them.

Such programming decisions were possible because this episode was a rerun with dialogue so familiar, fans could quote it right along with the man on screen. Even the “Make America Great Again” banners seemed like props dragged out of the attic, leftover from a long-canceled show with a tired Lee Greenwood theme song.

 Mr. Trump used the past-tense verbs “was,” “were,” and “had” about 160 times. Absent was the phrase “has been,” but in Rhode Island, where I watched the speech, voters who had supported Mr. Trump before now saw him as just that.

Mr. Trump cast himself as above partisan politics and a salve to Americans. “We love them all and we love both sides,” he said. “We’re going to bring people together. We’re going to unify people.”

Along those same lines, he added, “[W]hen people say Republicans or Democrats or liberals or conservatives, I say, ‘We can all get together.’” This struck me as out of character, like J.R. Ewing from “Dallas” declaring his love for windmills and solar.  

“I don’t like to think of myself as a politician,” Mr. Trump said, “but I guess that’s what I am,” a wistfulness for the days when he was the fresh thing on the menu, an outsider untainted by Washington, a celebrity beloved for name checks on “Cheers,” cameos in films, and star turns for a dozen commercials. 

The former president benefited from his usual lucky timing, however, taking the stage just after Republicans clinched control of the House of Representatives. “I do want to point out that in the midterms,” he said by way of taking credit, “my endorsement success rate was 232 wins and only 22 losses.”

This glossed over the fact that triumphs in GOP districts failed to cancel out the losses of marque candidates in key Senate races, such as Dr. Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania. Besides, everyone from Republican officeholders to conservative pundits spent months promising a red wave that never washed ashore.

Except in Florida, where Governor DeSantis just re-elected in a landslide. According to a poll by Club for Growth, Mr. DeSantis leads Mr. Trump by 11 points among Republicans in Iowa, 15 in New Hampshire, 26 in Florida, and 20 in Georgia.

There will be more polls like these, demonstrating why TV show reunions never quite work. The actors are seen to have put on pounds and years, robbed of the Dorian Gray effect of film, so fans of a series are never guaranteed to tune in for a reboot.

Conservatives will always appreciate Mr. Trump’s accomplishments and care about the issues he raised on Tuesday night; he’ll still draw crowds because former presidents always do, never lacking for people who miss the good old days.

But if a candidate like Mr. DeSantis offers better programming, voters will change the channel to watch. After all, as both MSNBC and Fox News Channel showed on Tuesday night, viewers seem to have their fill of Trump Show reruns.