Editors’ Blog

It’s not easy running the Fed. For years Jerome Powell got a lot of credit for navigating the U.S. economy with an unexpectedly loose monetary policy, through the COVID crisis and with a lot of “soft landing” credit during the Biden years. But through 2024 there’s been a backdraft of criticism that, having waited a bit too long to react to the inflation surge, he’s now holding the brakes too long, even after inflation has fallen pretty close to the central bank’s target rate. Last Friday’s jobs report was interpreted as providing key evidence that the Fed had in fact waited too long and that the U.S. economy now faced a real risk of recession. Today there’s a big market sell-off apparently kicked off by fears of slowing U.S. growth.

A couple quick thoughts on this.

Here’s one thing that’s been in the back of my mind for some time and with a greater focus since Joe handed the football off to Kamala. Donald Trump is old. If you look, he’s much older than in 2016 and 2020. People say these kinds of things as part of the rather dismal “who’s older?” scuffling that’s been going back and forth all year between the two candidates. Here though I mean it in a basic descriptive sense. The difference between being 70 and close to 80 is a big one. It happens to everyone.

Trump doesn’t get held to these standards as much because his raging gives a feeling of focus and edge that Biden lacked. But just in a basic sense, he is not the candidate he was in 2016, not even the one he was in 2020. This was hidden in a way so long as Biden was the nominee and it was hidden or perhaps rendered meaningless as long as Trump was ahead. If your candidate is old but he’s winning … well, whatever. If Joe Biden had spent the last year sitting on a five point lead, the whole campaign, clearly, would have gone quite differently.

I have various people I chat with through the day to compare notes about what’s in the news. I can’t remember who the conversation was with or whether it started with me or the other person. But in one of these conversations over the last few days I got to talking about the particular dynamics of a three-month campaign, something totally unheard of and unprecedented in modern American political history. American presidential campaigns last at least 18 months. In some ways they’re perpetual. But there’s nothing in recent American history to compare to what Kamala Harris is doing right now.

The Trump campaign is obviously furious about the switch. Vance called it a sucker punch. They essentially wasted their convention on the wrong candidate. You can understand why they’re mad.

We’ve talked a lot recently about presidential politics as a series of performances of power. When I coined the phrase “bitch-slap politics” (later revised to “dominance politics”) in 2004, it was in reference to the “swift boat” campaign George W. Bush mobilized against John Kerry. In charge of the campaign was Donald Trump’s current co-campaign head, Chris LaCivita. The truth of those attacks weren’t the point. They were demonstrations of power. Bush was powerful because he could hit Kerry in a demeaning and vicious way and he would not or could not defend himself. This was an element of American political culture which Trump, a decade later, placed at the center of American political culture.

It was in this context that I saw the news, first reported by the Post, that JD Vance, at a private fundraiser, referred to the candidate switch as a “sucker punch.”