The Trolling Election

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, October 31, 2024

 

This election has given new meaning to the phrase “trash talk.”

 

In the waning days of this campaign, America’s two major political parties have condemned Americans to litigate which party’s voters are, in aggregate, a bigger pile of festering “garbage.” In an effort to put that debate to rest, Donald Trump’s creative campaign put the candidate in a class 2 high-visibility safety vest and sent him off to a photo-op driving garbage truck.

 

Calling it his “big, beautiful Make America Great Again garbage truck,” Trump twisted the knife Joe Biden absentmindedly plunged into his former running mate’s back. “This truck is in honor of Kamala and Joe Biden,” he said.

 

This sideshow, if it is to be remembered at all, will be evaluated in retrospect after Election Day. If Trump emerges victorious, political observers are likely to regard this as a deft exploitation of Biden’s gaffe and an overture toward the working-class voters who are likely to make an outsized contribution to his triumph. If he loses, it will be seen as a display of reckless hubris. It’s hard to think of something that would tempt the fates more than riding around in your own personally branded waste-disposal unit. A vengeful deity would be hard-pressed to ignore a metaphor for failure like that.

 

For the time being, however, the event represents a superlative example of the tactic both campaigns have deployed with abandon in this election cycle: trolling.

 

Kamala Harris and her campaign are not above being gratuitously provocative themselves. The Democratic presidential nominee has sought to drive Trump to distraction by calling the former president’s rallies boring, questioning size of his audiences relative to her own rallies, and alleging that Trump’s rally-goers can increasingly be seen leaving the proceedings early out of sheer boredom.

 

We’re not just talking about rhetoric. The vice president’s campaign has invested resources in the effort to irritate Trump. In September, the campaign released a spot it called “The Best People,” which featured clips of former Trump officials reflecting on the risks associated with his reelection, and previewed their intention to air it in places like New York City and West Palm Beach — two locales with limited electoral upside for the Democratic Party, but which maximize the potential for Donald Trump himself to see the ad.

 

It wasn’t the first time the Harris campaign committed capital to its effort to get inside Trump’s head. “We thought it was important for Donald to see how much voters hate his Project 2025 plans to control their lives, seek revenge on his enemies, and rule as a dictator on day one,” said one Harris campaign spokesperson following the placement of a similar ad in Trump’s backyard.

 

“Donald Trump is an anti-union scab,” read the yellow banner that flew over Detroit’s Comerica Park in early October ahead of a Tigers-Guardians MLB playoff game. “Vote Kamala!” Given this message’s limited reach and purpose, the press interpreted it as an effort to generate organic earned media if and when Trump himself reacted negatively to the allegation that he and his movement are not as pro-union as they so often claim.

 

Harris’s allies have tried to trigger Trump by remarking on his “spray tanning” habit and making what the New York Times described as “a notably suggestive gesture” designed to call into question the size of his manhood. The vice president’s team even went so far as to invade Trump’s proprietary social-media venue, Truth Social, to publish incendiary posts about the degree to which the Democratic Party’s nominating convention beat the GOP’s in the ratings.

 

An amusing Newsweek article probed a variety of political scientists about the utility of this exercise, many of whom mused about the potential for the campaign to reach persuadable Republican-leaning voters where they live. Nonsense. The goal was, as it so often seems to be, to drive Trump crazy.

 

Still, the most you can say for the Harris camp’s needling of Trump is that it is a poor imitation of the practice Trump and his allies perfected.

 

What was Donald Trump’s brief stint as a McDonald’s worker but an attempt to call into question the veracity of Harris’s claim to have worked at the restaurant in college? “I’ve now worked for 15 minutes more than Kamala,” Trump told reporters after the event, reading what was the already rather obvious subtext aloud.

 

Trump’s vice-presidential nominee, J. D. Vance, has mocked Harris with some proficiency. He artfully lampooned one of Harris’s favorite verbal ticks when he described himself as actually being raised in a middle-class family (as opposed to Harris’s upper-middle-class upbringing). He’s mocked her “over-correcting” laugh, and he’s savaged her apparent inability to navigate even friendly interview settings. “The problem, of course, with a softball interview is that you’ve still going to be able to hit a softball,” he said to the laughter of rally-goers in Reno, Nev.

 

The Trump campaign sought to highlight the paucity of concrete policy proposals emanating from the Harris campaign by creating its own website, “Kamala2024Policies.com,” supposedly highlighting the vice president’s policy preferences. The website promoted the candidate’s desire to “set murderers free,” “abolish the border,” and “eliminate private health insurance.”

 

All told, the Trump campaign’s more ham-fisted attempts to get under Harris’s skin have been fewer and farther between. Maybe that’s because trolling is less a strategy for the former president and his allies than a lifestyle. The Harris camp is more overt in its efforts because the vice president is consciously trying to throw Trump off his game. “Ridicule makes him weaker,” the New Republic’s Michael Tomasky wrote. “We should also mock him mercilessly because it drives him nuts.” But the strategy doesn’t seem to have achieved its desired effect.

 

What it has done is present voters with a choice between two gratingly flip campaigns that are consumed with frivolities. As Dan McLaughlin observed, the time for persuasion is behind us. We’re in the home stretch now, and the difference between victory and defeat can be measured in the number of partisan base voters who describe themselves as “enthusiastic” to vote. But if victory can be measured in dishonest “LOLs” and spiteful “tears of joy” emojis deployed with reckless abandon on social media, the advantage has to go to Trump. We’re fortunate that this is not how we determine electoral success . . . at least, not yet.