Large swaths of the national media believe that their job, at this moment, is to tell you how awesome the presidential and vice-presidential candidates are, instead of pointing out their records and policies. (In the case of Kamala Harris, all we have are her policy stances from her 2020 campaign and the current Biden administration policies, even though her campaign staff insists those positions from 2019 are no longer operative.) But as the going has gotten tough, Republican nominee Donald Trump has fallen to pieces, ranting about the media using AI to alter photos of Harris’s campaign events, misremembering a story about helicopter turbulence with a California politician who wasn’t Willie Brown, and offering meandering, blathering word salad when the moment calls for sharp, clear, specific critiques of his rivals. Oh, and by every useful measure, the race is tied, but Trump keeps insisting he’s winning “by a lot.”
Between now and Election Day, count the number of “news” stories you read that have a subtext of: Isn’t Kamala Harris awesome? Isn’t Tim Walz awesome? And for that matter, if you go looking in the right-of-center press, you can find stories that amount to: Isn’t Donald Trump awesome? Isn’t J. D. Vance awesome?
And if you really go looking in some of the deeper corners of the internet, you can find stories arguing that Robert F. Kennedy is awesome, and that that bear cub had it coming.
I’m not even going to pretend that there’s any significant effort to convince you that Nicole Shanahan is awesome. You can barely detect her presence in the news cycle with a mass spectrometer. There are two major-party candidates, and several minor-party candidates. (The minor-party vice-presidential nominees might as well be in the witness-protection program. Pop quiz: Have Jill Stein and Cornel West named their running mates? The answer is at the end of this post.)
Of course, the news media’s job isn’t, traditionally, to tell you how awesome a presidential candidate is. The campaigns are going to spend a lot of money telling you how awesome the candidate is. The news media is supposed to be giving you a full portrait, warts and all, of the options before you. You’re hiring this person for a four-year contract to run the executive branch and be commander in chief. That is a role with serious responsibilities.
No, Kamala Harris is not your “Mom-ala,” Tim Walz is not your dad, and Donald Trump is not your daddy.
Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of a political landscape that is a Hieronymus Bosch painting of human dysfunction is the number of Americans who have forsaken their actual relationships with their actual family members and chosen to project their personal psychodramas onto current events, casting political figures as the family they wish they had.
Last week, I asked whether Trump is even trying to win the election.
Besides picking needless fights with Brian Kemp, the Republican governor of the key swing state of Georgia, Trump is maintaining a light campaign schedule, with only one rally so far in August, and no plans for another one until after the Democratic convention ends August 22.
Trump spent Sunday afternoon raging on Truth Social that “Kamala CHEATED at the airport? There was nobody at the plane, and she ‘A.I.’d’ it, and showed a massive ‘crowd’ of so-called followers, BUT THEY DIDN’T EXIST! She was turned in by a maintenance worker at the airport when he noticed the fake crowd picture.”
If, in his press conference last week, Trump had wanted to take down Kamala Harris, he could have spoken at length about her past declaration that “an undocumented immigrant is not a criminal”; her support for decriminalizing currently illegal crossings; her belief that illegal immigrants deserve free health care; her claim that Donald Trump “manufactured” a “so-called crisis” regarding illegal immigration; her contention that a border wall is “wasteful”; her support for reparations for slavery; her support for raising the top tax rate to 39.6 percent, raising taxes by an additional four percentage points for households — not individuals, households — making more than $100,000 per year, raising the corporate tax rate from 21 percent to 35 percent, and raising estate taxes by $315 billion; her desire to restore and expand the Iranian nuclear deal; her openness to an arms embargo against Israel; her vague positions on many issues relating to China; her rejection of preemptive sanctions against Russia before the invasion of Ukraine; her longtime support for taxpayer funding for abortion; her support for partial-birth abortion, etc. . .
(Note that on Russia, China, and trade, Trump is less than an ideal messenger for some of these criticisms.)
Instead, Trump said:
I know Willie Brown very well. In fact, I went down in a helicopter with him. We thought, maybe this is the end. We were in a helicopter going to a certain location together, and there was an emergency landing. This was not a pleasant landing. And Willie, he was a little concerned.So I know him pretty well. I mean, I haven’t seen him in years. But he told me terrible things about her. But this is what you’re telling me anyway, I guess. But he had a big part in what happened with Kamala.
Trump did not elaborate on the “terrible things” about Harris that he claimed Brown had told him.
Apparently the 78-year-old Trump was misremembering experiencing helicopter turbulence with Nate Holden, a former Los Angeles city councilmember and California state senator. Holden says he believes the helicopter-ride incident was in 1990, four years before Harris and Brown started their relationship.
It’s not that Trump completely ignored everything else, it’s just that he offered a plaintive whine instead of bringing receipts:
She’s the border czar. By the way, she was the border czar 100 percent. And all of a sudden, for the last few weeks, she’s not the border czar anymore, like nobody ever said it. And I just hope that the media becomes more diligent, more honest, frankly, because if they’re not going to be honest, it’s going to be much tougher to bring our country back.
If Trump’s plan for victory requires the national mainstream media to become more diligent and honest, he’s doomed.
If Trump had wanted to take down Tim Walz, he could have pointed to the Minnesota governor declaring that he doesn’t buy into the idea that kids experienced learning loss during the year-long or longer school closures of the pandemic; his participation in an “Abolish ICE” protest; his erroneous contention that the First Amendment does not protect “disinformation” or “hate speech”; his insistence that the compulsory policies of socialism are merely “neighborliness”; his belief that the U.S. and China do not have nor need to have an adversarial relationship; his runaway spending as governor; his support for driver’s licenses and free tuition for illegal immigrants; his way-too-slow response to the George Floyd riots; or the egregious record of waste, fraud, and abuse in the Minnesota state government since he became governor.
Or Trump could have pointed to the sheer number of media reports that erroneously stated Walz “served a tour of duty in Operation Iraqi Freedom,” “served with his battalion in Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan,” “served in Afghanistan,” “served overseas during the early war in Afghanistan,” was “a veteran of Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan,” was “a command sergeant major who’d just returned from fighting the war on terrorism,” or was one of several “veterans from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq run for Congress” and referred to “those weapons of war, that I carried in war.” At absolute minimum, Tim Walz was completely comfortable with people erroneously believing he had served in a country at war.
Instead, Trump said:
If you look at your new governor from Minnesota, he’s talking about — he’s like the governor previous, the former governor.I don’t want to get him mixed up because Glenn is doing a good job, and he’s leading our — he’s leading our whole campaign in Virginia, Glenn Youngkin. But previous to Glenn, the governor, he said, “The baby will be born, we will put the baby aside, and we will decide with the mother what we’re going to do.” — in other words, whether or not we’re going to kill the baby. The Minnesota gentleman, he — this guy agrees with that.The Minnesota gentleman, he — this guy agrees with that. He is the most liberal — look, between her and him, there’s never been anything like this. There’s never been a combination, so, I’ll use the word, “progressive.” You know, they want to go progressive. They don’t like the word “liberal.” I like “liberal” better. I think it’s more appropriate because nobody knows what progressive means. But they now like to use the word progressive.But there’s certainly never been anybody so liberal like these two, or even close.
It is reasonable to conclude that Trump could not remember the names of either Tim Walz or former Virginia governor Ralph Northam.
Conservatives give Harris a lot of deserved grief for her “word salad” answers when she’s speaking off the cuff. But quite often, Trump is no better. Harris’s thought process when speaking extemporaneously is an M. C. Escher painting, doubling back on itself; Trump’s is Jackson Pollock, careening and expanding in all directions, leaving a mess.
There’s strong evidence to suggest that the three attacks on Harris that are most effective and persuasive are the ones that focus on Harris’s role as the so-called “border czar” and hold her responsible for increased illegal immigration; her support of the Biden administration’s runaway spending, which set off a devastating inflationary cycle; and her record as “a San Francisco liberal who supports radically liberal policies.” (It’s not sufficient to just call her a liberal; you have to lay out what her liberal policies are.)
The Willie Brown affair, childlessness, and “DEI hire” stuff are least effective, according to polling. But either Trump doesn’t know that or doesn’t care.
He’s a 78-year-old man who doesn’t bother to read or listen to his briefers, can’t remember details, and can’t be bothered to try. As with his convention speech, Trump just goes out there and wings it and trusts his gut, offering meandering, half-recalled stories that come across as incoherent gobbledygook to the voters he needs to persuade.
In his press conference Thursday, Trump claimed, “I’m leading by a lot.” He really isn’t, judging from all available public polling.
In national polling, head to head, Harris is narrowly ahead, 47.6 percent to 47.1 percent in the RealClearPolitics average without the minor-party candidates included. With the minor-party candidates included, Harris leads, 45.3 percent to 44.5 percent.
In the RealClearPolitics polling average in Michigan, Harris leads by 2.8 percentage points over Trump. In Wisconsin, Harris leads by eight-tenths of a percentage point. In Pennsylvania, Trump leads by eight-tenths of a percentage point.
Things are a bit better in the Sun Belt states. In Arizona, Trump leads by 1.6 percentage points. In Nevada, Trump leads by 3.7 percentage points. In North Carolina, Trump leads by 3.2 percentage points. And in Georgia, Trump leads by six-tenths of a percentage point. But it’s hard to look at any of that and conclude Trump is leading “by a lot.”
There will be some angry folks crying that I am a Trump “hater,” and that if I somehow closed my eyes and pretended that Trump was an effective communicator, then the Republicans would win the election. Much like the candidate they adore, Trump’s fanbase is full of whiners always offering excuses and blame-shifting, marinating in a victimhood-obsessed way of looking at the world, a dead-end street in which everything is so unfair and no one has any agency.
Trump could run a much better, much more persuasive, and much more effective campaign with much better chances of victory if he wanted to do so.
He just isn’t willing to put in the work.
By the way, you know who is out there, doing the work? J. D. Vance — who did interviews on ABC’s This Week, CBS News’ Face the Nation, and CNN’s State of the Union yesterday.
To answer a question from the beginning of this post: Jill Stein has not picked a running mate; she reportedly is seeking a Palestinian American. (And you thought Joe Biden’s picking Harris was a triumph of identity politics!) Back in April, Cornel West selected his running mate, Melina Abdullah, professor of Pan-African Studies at Cal State LA’s College of Ethnic Studies, and co-founder of Black Lives Matter LA.
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