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This morning on Twitter, Tim Murtaugh, a former Trump campaign spokesman, concluded a tweet attacking Harris by writing: “Her whole vacant message sounds like it’s from a party that’s out of power. But they’re her messes.” Through the spittle and frustration you can see him making a point which quite understandably has Trump’s campaign angry and bewildered. Harris has made Trump into the incumbent with her as the challenger running on a campaign message to turn the page. Whether this is fair or true or any number of other descriptors you might come up with, there’s little doubt that it is an accurate description of the campaign we are in the midst of. The Trump campaign itself is telling us this, almost in spite of itself. And it’s worth taking a moment to consider how exactly this manages to be the case. Since Harris is not only a member of the incumbent party. She’s literally the incumbent Vice President.
I can’t explain it entirely myself because I haven’t been able to completely understand it. But I can point to several key parts of the puzzle.
One big driver of all of this is the blitz campaign, something that never could have been planned or executed in advance. It had to be as big a surprise to the team executing it as the team getting steamrolled by it. It’s important to remember that barely a month ago the Trump campaign ran a four-day convention aimed at a man who has now retired from politics if not yet from elective office. The central theme of their convention was Trump’s miraculous deliverance from an attempted assassination which barely anyone can even remember. For both those reasons, Trump gained zero forward momentum from his convention and was basically idling in neutral when the Harris juggernaut hit them. The Harris campaign has moved so fast that Trump’s hasn’t been able to reposition or retool or reconceptualize the race before she’s off to the next thing. It’s an illustration of the concept of OODA loops which we’ve used before as a tool to understand campaign dynamics and which helped explain why Trump’s 2016 campaign dispatched opponents so rapidly.
Harris’ campaign has essentially redefined the last eight years as the Trump Era, or perhaps the Trump-Biden Era, if you will — the first four years dominated by Trump’s malignant degeneracy and the second by the looming fear of Trump’s return. The fact that she’s been able to do this while centering praise for Joe Biden’s accomplishments and even his heroism is a testament to the campaign’s ability. But there are some reasons it’s been possible. The first and most obvious is the simple fact that if we look at this as the Trump-Biden Era, it has been very much a kind of death match between two old men. Not equal, of course — one man trying to destroy the republic and the other to save it — but still a wearying and grueling match and one that, albeit in very different ways, almost everyone whose vote is at all on offer for a Democratic candidate is ready to turn the page on. Perhaps if you’re telling this as a story, Biden is the one who could strike the first blow against Trump but couldn’t turn the page on his malignant reign over American politics. That required someone else. Harris’ message is that she’s that person. The fact that she’s a generation younger counts in that regard far more than the mere nimbleness and quickness of a woman in late midlife who actually comes off as much younger, which is a contrast in itself.
But there’s another paradoxical way that Trump himself laid the groundwork for this campaign, and made it possible for Harris to turn his own political heft against him. The centerpiece of Trump’s post-presidency is the wicked conceit that he never stopped being president at all. At the most basic level he never admitted that he lost the 2020 campaign. His most ardent supporters believe he is the legitimate president and some of the most febrile actually believe in a funhouse mirror, QAnony way that he still holds secret reins of power. But much of it is more immediate and open. He still calls himself president. He demands and universally receives that billing from his followers. He moves through the country with the trappings and insignia of the presidency. He continues to meet with foreign heads of state, not as an elder statesman but as though he never left office. He even argues that national secrets and presidential documents are his personal property. This has been an open, weird and much-discussed feature of Trump’s post-presidency since the first weeks after leaving office. If Trump and his toadies are now complaining that Harris is treating him like the incumbent it is because in ways vast and small he has acted like one and demanded to be treated like one for almost four years. She’s taken his most perverse and vainglorious conceit and turned it into a massive liability.
The policy agenda matches this. A challenger talks about a new future. Trump hasn’t done that at all. In a way that’s natural and inevitable. At its most innocent MAGA sees the Biden presidency as an illegitimate interregnum and Trump’s second term as a restoration. But it goes beyond that. Trump’s entire platform is retribution — retribution for his 2020 defeat, which he lacks the character to recognize, and retribution for what he considers his mistreatment during his term as president. While Project 2025 really was authored by Trump’s top advisors as a second-term guide to governing, most of the stuff in it Trump couldn’t give a crap about. The parts he really cares about are the parts that allow him to take revenge on those he blames for his first-term ego injuries and to coerce fealty more effectively in his return to power. Most of us have been horrified by this possibility. We’ve recognized the severe threat it represents to the American republic. But at the most basic level it’s about the past, relitigating, being mad about, wanting to fix things that happened in 2017, 2018, etc. Trump’s true second term agenda is undoing and getting even for what he’s mad about from the first term.
Murtaugh’s big gripe is that Harris isn’t taking responsibility for inflation. Of course actual inflation is back down to the historical norm. It’s done. What’s true though and what continues to make it a potent political weapon is that inflation being back to normal doesn’t mean the prices of ordinary goods and services are back to what they were in 2019. But really the inflation surge of 2021 and 2022 was an artifact of the COVID pandemic. It may have been elevated by relief spending. But it’s a global first-world phenomenon. Harris’ campaign is essentially taking everything that happened since 2015, the whole long parade of horribles, blaming it all on Trump — mostly true — and saying let’s turn the page and put all that behind us. That has Trump’s campaign steaming mad. But they laid the groundwork for it. Trump himself meanwhile is too tired and probably too old to gin up a new story. And the truth is that the country is ready.