By Nick Catoggio
Monday, September 16, 2024
Political content on social media is shocking by design,
never more so than right now. Fifty days out from a presidential election,
after one of the two candidates just escaped another
assassination attempt, is practically the
Olympics for lowbrow provocateurs.
But the most shocking post I saw this weekend didn’t come
from a Resistance lib fantasizing about Donald Trump’s violent death or a New
Right edgelord mistaking
grilled chicken for grilled cat. It came from David Frum, the very picture
of a normie center-right Republican and a Never Trumper of longstanding.
“I have an intuition that this weekend in September is
the weekend the 2024 presidential campaign stopped being close,” he wrote on Sunday
morning, before news broke about the assassination plot. He meant (I think!)
that Kamala Harris is now on her way to a convincing victory over Trump.
I was stunned.
Frum has watched this
electoral slasher movie as many times as I have. He should know by now how
it goes: Just when you think you’ve finished off Jason, that’s when he’s
standing right behind you.
He isn’t the only right-leaning intellectual to sound
optimistic about a Harris victory, though. On Friday David
Brooks reminded readers that populist eras have a cultural shelf life and
speculated that Trump is either approaching his political expiration date or is
past it. “People can be up in arms for only so long,” he wrote. “The wearier we
grow with American carnage catastrophizing, Trump seems not just monstrous but,
worse, stale.” Harris’ happy-happy-joy-joy campaign is a better fit for the
cultural shift we’re allegedly experiencing, or will soon experience, Brooks
argued, and that’ll help her on Election Day.
Which feels like the scene in the movie where a group of
teens, after fleeing in terror, finally stop running and one of them
breathlessly declares, “We’re safe now”—only to be run through instantly with a
machete.
I do not share Brooks’ and Frum’s optimism about Harris’
chances, you won’t be surprised to learn, but I do share their exhaustion with
this era and with this moment in particular. It’s understandable that they’ve
let their exhaustion lead them to optimism about the race. Any civic-minded
person should feel the urge to puke after consuming the last week or so of
campaign news; it’s a small leap from there to assuming that swing voters must
feel it too, and that November might at last produce the great cathartic barf
so many of us desire.
I’ll believe it when I see it. But the nausea is real.
Puke week.
It makes sense that old-school pundits would find the
past week encouraging for Harris. They yearn to believe that Americans are
still a basically responsible people, and responsible people reward
self-discipline and punish demagoguery in their political leaders.
The Democratic nominee was notably self-disciplined last
week while the Republican nominee and his supporters behaved notably more
demagogically than usual. Which is really saying something.
It began at the debate, where Harris threw her opponent
off-message by needling him about his insecurities. One can and should wonder
why she continues
to struggle in interviews to answer even the most predictable economic
questions coherently, but one can also see why most
viewers thought she bested Trump face-to-face. She hatched a strategy to
discombobulate him and keep him on defense, and then she executed
it to perfection. That takes intelligence and discipline—both
“presidential” qualities.
There’s evidence that she helped herself by doing so. A
new Yahoo
News/YouGov poll published on Saturday found her bouncing out to a 4-point
lead nationally among likely voters, up from a single point last month. Harris
leads by 9 points now when people are asked whom they expect to win the
election. Previously she had led by 3 on that metric.
On the other side of the ballot, meanwhile, the witch
hunt directed at Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, has become one of the
most disgraceful episodes of Trump’s disgraceful career.
Jonathan
Last isn’t exaggerating when he says it resembles a blood libel. “Haitians
are eating pets” doesn’t match “Jews are eating babies” for outlandishness, but
the point of both smears is the same: to reduce some foreign cohort to the
status of savages who deserve expulsion or worse. “You look at Haiti, you look
at the demographic makeup, you look at the average IQ—if you import the third
world into your country, you’re going to become the third world,” Donald
Trump’s son and potential political heir said last week, eliminating
whatever shred of subtlety remained in all of this.
I understand how Frum and Brooks might conclude that the
episode is too cartoonishly racist and gross even for an America that’s gotten
used to Trumpy politics, especially since Trump himself isn’t ringleading the
effort. The country may have developed a tolerance for his insanity, but it’s
unclear if that tolerance extends to his running mate, the “smart” populist in
the party who happens to be the demagogue-in-chief
in this matter.
As the claims about the Haitian immigrants and their
pet-munching ways began imploding
this weekend,
J.D. Vance turned up on the Sunday shows to declare that he regrets nothing.
“If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention
to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do,”
Springfield’s representative in the Senate boasted to CNN.
He clarified
that, in saying that he aims to “create stories,” he didn’t mean lying or
fabricating but calling attention to actual complaints he’s heard from
constituents about problems with national import, like immigration. But in this
case, that’s a distinction without a difference. The rumors of pet-eating are
baseless according to both Springfield’s
mayor and Ohio’s
governor. By promoting the rumors before confirming them, Vance served his
constituents by inciting a panic that’s led to days of threats against local
schools and officials, and which has now forced the city to cancel
an annual street fair due to security fears.
If you want to believe that Vance and Trump have hurt
themselves by pursuing such a reckless smear, there’s evidence for that too.
The new Yahoo News/YouGov poll found Americans skeptical about the pet-eating
claims, with independents splitting on whether they were probably true or
probably false by a margin of 24-51. Maybe
populist dirtbaggery found a line it’ll pay for crossing.
And if not, there was lots of other garbage piled on in
Trumpist quarters over the course of Puke Week whose cumulative weight, one
might hope, will ultimately break the backs of swing voters.
While the Haitian hysteria was raging, a second barely sourced
conspiracy theory about ABC News colluding with the Harris campaign was
born, lived, and died—literally. (That
wasn’t even the wackiest
theory circulated to explain Trump’s debate performance.) Republicans
continued to side-eye each other about their hero’s willingness to be seen in
public with a crank whom even other cranks regard
as déclassé. Trump and his running mate each stupidly kept on relitigating the
outcome of the 2020 election, reminding Americans of the pain the right has
inflicted on them once before and is prepared to
inflict again if it doesn’t get its way in November.
And then, for no particular reason, Trump declared
his hatred for the country’s most popular entertainer after she endorsed
Kamala Harris last week.
How much can one fault Frum and Brooks for digesting all
of that, reflecting on Harris’ competent debate performance, and concluding
that Americans are poised to vomit Trump out at long last? It’s too much, too
crude, and has gone on too long. Decent people are queasy and exhausted. And in
this case, exhaustion is cause for optimism.
If an enfeebled Joe Biden were still the Democratic
nominee or if we were stuck in the sort of wrenching recession that Republicans
have been pining for, one could rationalize how Trump might prevail despite
everything. But we’ve had a “soft landing” from inflation, and Biden’s
replacement is compos mentis. She’s even made some hawkish noises about
the border as she tacks toward the center. And if she’s bluffing about that,
there’s likely to be a
Republican Senate next year anyway to keep her in check.
If you’re still optimistic about America and trust the
median voter to behave more or less sensibly, you can look at all of that and
join Frum in seeing clear sailing for Harris from here.
But if you aren’t …
The puke to come.
The obvious response to rosy predictions that this race
won’t be close in the end is: Why, then, is it close now?
Right, granted, the public might have been reserving
judgment about Harris until it had a chance to see her speak at length without
a script for an extended period. Well, we’re past the debate now—and after six
national surveys taken since then, she’s gained a grand total of three-tenths
of a point on Trump in the RealClearPolitics
average. In the new ABC
News poll that was published on Sunday, her lead was precisely the same
after the debate as before.
And although she’s improved considerably on the
mid-summer performance of Joe Biden 2024, she’s still running behind Joe Biden
2020. He barely squeaked out a victory over Trump in the battleground
states four years ago despite solid polling leads across the board. This year,
Harris is in toss-up
territory across all seven.
Set Harris aside, though. If you want to know why this
election will be close, reflect on this fact and despair: Trump is about as
popular now as he’s ever been.
He inched above 45 percent in favorability in the spring
of 2022. But apart from that, the 44.6
percent rating he currently enjoys in the polling average is one of his
highest marks since entering politics. Perhaps more importantly, his
favorability relative to his opponent is among the best he’s
had across his three presidential runs.
Before the 2020
election, he trailed Biden in favorability by nearly 20 net points. On Election
Day 2016, even the deeply unpopular Hillary Clinton held a lead of 8.4 net
points over him in a losing effort. Kamala Harris’ lead in the same metric as I
write this is
8.2 points.
And that’s not because, a la 2016, both nominees are
widely disliked. Harris is net positive in favorability. Trump is keeping the
gap close this time because around 45 percent of this country continues to rate
him positively too, come what may. Indictments, insurrections, sexual abuse
civil judgments, blood libels, Laura Loomer—nearly 50 percent of the American
electorate betrays no sense of meaningful exhaustion with his demagoguery.
On the contrary, it would appear that he’s been so
normalized that a near-majority of Americans has forfeited all claims to moral
outrage with respect to anything he’s done or might do.
So what, you might think? If he locks up that 45 percent
and Harris wins everyone else, that would still produce the sort of resounding
Democratic win that David Frum is anticipating. The problem (well, one problem)
is that that 45 percent might be an undercount. As David
Freedlander noted in New York magazine:
Part of what makes Trump a
difficult opponent, ex-Biden hands say, is that even when he is saying
ridiculous things and turning off swing voters, he is able to reach voters who
do not otherwise follow politics. “Whatever else you want to say about the Trump
people, they are really good at social media, they can be really good at the
pure politics of dominating a news cycle, and they are really good at getting
in the head of the average person,” says one former senior official on the
Biden campaign.
As if to prove the point, a Trump adviser told Bulwark
reporter Marc Caputo recently that the
heat they’re taking for turning pogrom-curious toward the Haitian community
in Springfield is worth it because they’re fighting on political terrain that’s
friendly to Trump. “We talk about abortion, we lose. We talk about immigration,
we win,” the adviser said, adding of his team’s effort to blood-libel black
immigrants, “We’ll take the hit to prove the bigger point.”
Swing voters might feel mildly offended by Puke Week, but
if it leads to the GOP turning out an extra 1 percent of low-information voters
or sending undecideds into the booth on Election Day fixated on immigration,
that’s probably a net benefit to Trump and potentially a decisive one.
Even if it doesn’t, there’ll always be a few extra
percentage points of reluctant support out there for a political candidate in
the form of the so-called “double haters,” people who dislike both nominees but
prefer one over the other for whichever bottom-line reason. Contra David
Brooks, 2024 does not seem like an obvious moment to me for the “era of
indignation” to end and the era of happy-happy-joy-joy to begin: A cycle
dominated by anxiety about inflation and a barely-checked influx of millions of
immigrants feels like a formula for continued populism rather than one for a
turn back toward liberalism.
It was 2020, not 2024, that seemed to hold the secret
recipe for a return to normalcy. Trump had been saddled with a pandemic and
resulting economic calamity; four years as president had forced Americans to
live with his maddening antics hour by hour, day by day; and his opponent was a
known and reasonably well-trusted political quantity. Everything pointed to an
easy Biden victory and repudiation of Trump.
Instead, with help from the left’s “defund the police”
mania, Trump nearly pulled off another inside straight in the Electoral
College. There’s nothing in the data to suggest he’s significantly weaker now
than then. On the contrary, this year he has an opponent about whom swing
voters have real doubts and an issue set, especially concerning the economy,
that favors him. Take the 45 percent who still view him favorably and add on
another 2-3 points that he’s likely to pick up due to inflation, skepticism of Harris,
undercounting low-propensity
voters, and so forth, and how can this election not be close,
realistically?
And consider that things haven’t gotten as nasty as
they’re likely to get. One Dispatch colleague wondered this weekend what
sort of sludge about Kamala Harris—true or, probably, false—Trump is holding in
reserve until October. If he falls behind this fall, he won’t coast to a
gentlemanly defeat with prison waiting. He’ll say what he needs to say to keep
the race tight and make Harris deny it, as any loyal National Enquirer reader/contributor
would.
The disillusionment to come.
Frum and Brooks are a bit older than me (although only a
bit) and therefore have longer memories of America than I do. And so logically
they might be more inclined to interpret the current populist mania as a
“phase” the country is going through. This era is a deviation from the civic
norm, the theory goes, a remarkably successful con by a remarkable con artist;
but, eventually, sense will prevail and America will be the America they’ve
always known.
I hope they’re right. Because if Trump ends up winning
this election in spite of everything, a lot of otherwise patriotic Americans
are going to have a hard reckoning with long-held assumptions about the
character of their country.
Trump critics are properly attuned to the risk of
authoritarianism if he returns to the presidency, but many of us have
underrated the degree of disillusionment that will be felt in the center and on
the left if his relentless cretinism is rewarded with power again. One
can dismiss his surprisingly strong showing in 2016 as a populist experiment
driven by Clinton’s unpopularity, or his surprisingly strong showing in 2020 as
an artifact of incumbency and a backlash to progressive excess.
But we’re out of excuses in 2024. America knows what it’s
getting this time. No one’s being conned anymore.
The fact that this race remains close even after
Democrats dumped their Biden albatross is itself a bracing indictment of what
the American people have become. But if Trump were to win after attempting a
coup the last time he lost, riding grotesque smears about undesirables eating
pets to victory, many of us will rescind whatever benefit of the doubt remains
for our countrymen’s decency and respect for shared civic values.
Were Americans conned or is this the leadership they
actually want? We’re seven weeks away from knowing.
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