By Jim Geraghty
Monday, August 12, 2024
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 today’s newsletter.)
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.
Trump Flails and Fumbles the Moment the Race Gets
Difficult
Last week, I asked in that other place 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.)
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.”
Trump walks around in a fog of inaccurate memories,
inaccurate perceptions, and excessive self-regard just as much as Joe Biden
does.
The comments section below will be aflame with furious
cries 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 today’s
newsletter: 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.
ADDENDUM: I wonder how Joe and Jill Biden
feel, knowing that the entire Democratic Party is ecstatic without them.
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