For much of 2023, Donald Trump’s political campaign was defined by the criminal charges he faces in four jurisdictions. Republicans reacted, the former president went to arraignments and the coverage on television was often wall to wall.

The cycle of events created a sense of motion for a front-running Republican candidate seeking another term in office who was, in fact, speaking fairly infrequently in public compared with his previous campaigns. That impression cushioned him from, bluntly, himself — limiting the self-inflicted wounds he made by giving relatively few interviews and holding relatively few rallies.

But as Trump has moved closer to becoming the Republican nominee, such a cushion has become harder to maintain. There is barely a primary race for him to disappear behind. And as the race shifts to a new phase, he is creating hurdles his allies wish he would avoid.

Take his recent comments about mail-in voting and early voting.

“If you have mail-in voting, you automatically have fraud,” Trump said to the Fox News host Laura Ingraham this week. When Ingraham pointed out that mail-in voting exists in Florida, a state where Trump lives and which he won, he pressed again. “That’s right, that’s right. If you have it, you’re going to have fraud,” he said.

It’s a message he delivered again in Nashville before an audience of Christian broadcasters on Thursday night. Mail-in voting is rife with fraud, he insisted.

“We no longer have Election Day, we have election periods, some of them last for 45 days,” Trump said ominously. “And what they do during those 45 days is very bad. A lot of bad things happen.”

That’s completely in keeping with his repeated false claims that he lost the 2020 election because of widespread fraud, despite the fact that dozens of judges have ruled against his perspective and his claims were never substantiated.

But it runs counter to efforts by both Trump and his aides, around one year ago, to soften his attacks on mail voting. At the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington in March 2023, Trump said it was time to “change our thinking” on early and mail-in voting, a reflection that the party needed to start banking those kinds of votes in order to win.

That’s a message that people like the all-but-certain outgoing chairwoman of the Republican National Committee, Ronna McDaniel, has been espousing for many months. So has Trump’s daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, whom he has endorsed to be the next co-chair of the national party.

Appearing at this year’s CPAC, Lara Trump said this week that embracing early voting is an imperative for Republicans.

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“The truth is, if we want to compete with the Democrats, we cannot wait until Election Day,” she said. “If we want to compete and win, we must embrace early voting. The days of waiting to vote until Election Day are over.”

A more familiar Trump re-emerges

Since being indicted, Trump has not appeared interested in adhering to that message. His attacks on mail-in voting have distressed top Republicans since mid-2020, when the coronavirus pandemic prompted changes in what various states allowed in terms of absentee ballots and mail voting.

At the time, the House Republican leader, Representative Kevin McCarthy, said he had tried to warn Trump that he was damaging himself with his attacks.

“You know who is most afraid of Covid? Seniors. And if they’re not going to go vote, period, we’re screwed,” McCarthy told Axios, recalling a conversation he had with Trump.

There have been other reminders of a less disciplined Trump along the way. When he declared that he wanted to work on repealing the Affordable Care Act, it caught his advisers by surprise, especially given the law’s popularity and his own disastrous efforts to unwind the health law before. Democrats immediately highlighted the statement.

Then there is the issue of Trump moving toward becoming the de facto Republican nominee, and his political world expanding in the process.

On Friday, an ally of Trump announced a new super PAC that is going to be supported by the former president’s friend — Ike Perlmutter, the billionaire and former chief executive of Marvel Entertainment. It will air ads in the general election. Trump has blessed the new group, even though it isn’t clear how it will function alongside the existing super PAC that has been backing him for months.

So far, Trump’s campaign has been professionalized and disciplined, controlling what it can and generally doing its best to limit the things it cannot.