Politics
The former president’s age and the media’s full-court press conspire against him.
Roughly a year ago, I attended a pricey fundraiser for Ron DeSantis in Southampton. Our host, a highly successful Italian-American lawyer, introduced the governor by saying that his main motivation for getting involved was that he did not want to see Kamala Harris president of the United States. He didn’t have to make it explicit; the premise understood by all there was that Donald Trump, for all his undoubted strengths, would not fare well against a candidate twenty years his junior.
Even then it was becoming clear, surprising as it initially seemed, that DeSantis did not have the political juice to shake Trump’s hold on the MAGA base; Trump remained undisputed king of it, and he had grown that base big enough to hold off comfortably any challenge from the Bush/Cheney/McCain wing of the GOP, attractively represented by Nikki Haley.
If the polls have shown anything consistently since then, it is that a wide swathe of voters and probably wider percentage of elites did not want a Biden-Trump rematch, and that choice between a visibly senescent and rapidly failing 81 year old and 78 year old election-denier with legal problems was not the best choice Americans could have in a perilously troubled time.
In a stunning two weeks, the Democratic Party has acted with surprising coherence and ruthlessness to retire forcibly Joe Biden and unite around Kamala Harris. What seemed a very likely Trump victory a fortnight ago—and the former president had been leading significantly in swing state polls for months before Biden’s debate disaster and Trump’s miraculous escape from assassination—now seems anything but certain. Indeed, I would put it as less likely than not.
Harris might be objectively a weak candidate, but the traditional and time-tested ways through which that weakness would be exposed to voters—a press reporting on her positions, rivals probing at her vulnerabilities throughout months and months of competitive primary process—have been effectively short-circuited by the Democratic elite decision to unite behind her. One day we will have reporting on what roadblocks might have impeded this coronation and how they were effectively circumvented. As it was, her path to her party’s nomination seems as seamless as Charles becoming King of England after his mum’s death. Harris is receiving the kind exuberant across-the-board media support that hasn’t existed since LBJ swamped Goldwater. That kind of media is worth what—five points in the polls? Ten?
By comparison with Hillary, on stage in debate and almost every televised media report, Trump seemed more vigorous, humorous, and strong. By comparison with Biden, such differences were startlingly obvious to every Democrat. By comparison with Harris, Trump will seem old and overweight, a contrast which could be mitigated and overcome if he were able to present himself as wiser, more reassuring, and statesmanlike. That is likely to be, for Trump, a difficult ask.
The one factor in Trump’s favor is that Harris is a genuinely radical left candidate—more so than any of her competitors (who had soundly bested her in the polls before the 2020 voting started), more so even than Bernie Sanders, whom the party establishment united against in March of that year. Sanders’s two generations of experience with American voters gave him a fairly realistic sense of how socialist the country could become by democratic means—not very. He had seen the collapse of a Soviet Union he once admired, he had lived through decades of very real debates about socialism (which was intellectually quite popular when he was young) and had undoubtedly learned a lot.
To hear Harris talk again and again of “equity,” as she has in countless speeches, is to hear a fourth-grade version of these debates—why not make all economic outcomes equal? That ignores everything about the actual history of socialism, of economic incentives, and of actual differences between people. The media, thoroughly on her side, proclaims Harris only ran like this to occupy the left lane during the Democratic primaries. But she continued to push her woke viewpoints after her campaign fell apart: months after lack of voter support drove Harris from the 2020 race, she was at it during the George Floyd riots, urging people to support a bail fund for the rioters in June even as the New York Times had noted that the “protests” were growing out of control.
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Later in the month she went on national television, had noted the riots were “a movement” which is “not going let up” and “should not.” Trump ads have already pointed to Harris’s comparison of likening ICE to the KKK and her positions favoring free healthcare for illegal immigrants. These and other examples of Harris’s embrace of radically woke positions are well chronicled in an important Andrew Sullivan column. Sullivan, it should be recalled, is a centrist who has supported the Democratic nominee in (at least) the past four presidential election cycles.
Under normal circumstances, a candidate of Harris’s beliefs would stand no real chance. But of course things are not normal: The enthusiasm for her today has the same energy of the George Floyd riots, and something of a similar psychological basis. The tremendous relief of Democratic and media elites feel from not being under the burden of having to lie about Joe Biden has parallels in the relief millions felt in having a socially permitted reason to escape covid lockdowns.
The media is a political superpower, and so far at least has indicated it will do virtually anything to advance her candidacy. The chance that Trump can actually help himself in a debate with Harris seems, to me, very small. She on the other hand has before her a convention where she will be paired with any one of able and fairly appealing (white male) running mates. I don’t doubt she will be leading in the polls by Labor Day. Trump and J.D. Vance will then have before them the task of conveying the truth about Harris in a very brief period of time with the major communication outlets of the country dedicated to preventing the truth from emerging. It took more than a year for centrists and conservatives to even begin to effectively debunk the myths that had grown up around the police, Black Lives Matter, and the rest of the dishonesty which permeated summer of 2020. Trump, Vance and their allies don’t have anywhere near that amount of time.
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