Member Newsletter
I wanted to flag two articles to your attention, one from the Post and the other from CNN. They both cover similar ground but in different ways. The gist is that the Trump campaign has essentially given up on trying to improve voters’ impression of Donald Trump and decided the only path to victory is driving down Harris’ favorability numbers. When I first read the Post piece, it had the feel of what journalists call a “source greaser” — a favorable piece aimed at generating good will on the part of the subject and sources of the piece. The quote from GOP consultant Josh Holmes captures the tone of the piece: “I think it’s a serious paper tiger we’re dealing with here. I don’t think for 60 days they can keep the train on the tracks.”
You could read the Post piece and get the idea that Harris is essentially defenseless and that it’s just a matter of the Trump campaign deciding when to lower the boom. In this sense it seemed reminiscent of the Times piece published the day before Biden’s exit from the race in which the Trump campaign confidently informed the Times reporters they were wholly prepared, even eager to deal with a Harris candidacy and were locked and loaded with ads and messaging to destroy her campaign on the launch pad. Obviously that didn’t happen. If you were relaying this message from the Trump people, as the Post piece does, it would be good to note what I mentioned this weekend, which is that the Trump campaign has been trying to do this for more than six weeks and has made very little progress. Indeed, as we noted, public attitudes toward Harris continue to tick upward.
But there are still interesting details in the Post piece. The key one is that the campaign appears to have given up trying to get Trump to focus policy attacks which they think have traction against Harris’ campaign — mostly inflation and border policy. He wants to go with personal attacks. And they seem to have decided that’s just how it’s going to be.
The CNN piece puts more focus on the fact that while Trump’s campaign has committed to a wholly negative campaign, it actually hasn’t worked yet. There’s an early phase of defining a new candidate. And they didn’t lay a glove on her in that initial three- or four-week period. I will admit to a real degree of present surprise over this. Let’s be frank: these are accomplished and talented evildoers. Trump certainly is. And his co-campaign managers LaCivita and Wiles are seen as being at the top of their game, far more able people than Trump has had at most points in the past. The CNN piece puts Trump basically in a battle against himself. He’s resorting to an increasingly brutal series of personal attacks on Harris. And the question is whether that acceleration will actually hurt Harris or deepen and intensify the revulsion many people have for Trump.
Since I’m in the cauldron of these attacks, I see them up close. They feel ubiquitous. I see GOP influencers repeating them. I feel like they’re landing. But the favorability and related metrics is where you are going to see the impact. So far it’s just not there. You can see this implicitly in that Holmes quote above. He concedes they haven’t worked so far. But he views her as like a surfer who’s caught an amazing wave. No wave lasts forever.
I know this post might come off as “nothing can stop Kamala.” That’s not my point. I’m trying to learn what I can from the fact that they’ve had so little success so far. The people I speak to who I really feel know a lot about campaign aren’t really that worried about Trump’s antics. They’re worried that Harris may be overwhelmed by TV ads in the swing states.
I keep hearing from swing-state readers who are registered Democrats with long histories of voting straight Democratic tickets who are being overwhelmed by Trump mailers, often receiving multiple mailers a day. I don’t know whether this is evidence of a very poorly run campaign or carpet-bombing paid media at such an unprecedented scale that these misdirected examples are just a kind of marginal overflow.
There is a tendency that a number of people have recently noted: reporters sanitize or simply normalize the things Trump says. This isn’t bias, exactly. The actual things he says are often expressed in such antic and disordered trains of thought, so riddled with lies or bizarre statements, that it’s simply hard to know how to deal with them in the context of ordinary campaign coverage. A reporter has to reduce something to a politically comprehensible thing before one can address it as a reporter, at least in the normal bounds of campaign coverage. There’s something similar happening when it comes to Trump campaign strategy and particularly the gap between what the campaign’s strategy is or wants to be and what Trump’s own notional “strategy” might be.
But Trump doesn’t have a strategy. He has an impulse. And the difference is more than semantic. What we’re seeing isn’t a strategy. It’s a guy overcome by rage and acting on that rage, acting out. The part of his campaign that is him is locked into his tangle of rage and fear that seems far less directed and nimble than it was four or eight years ago. Some of that is clearly capacity. But he also has a lot more on the line. 2016 was all gravy. In 2020, other than ego, there was no big downside to losing the election. The legal exposure he faces now almost all comes from his attempt to overturn the 2020 election result. (The exception is the Stormy Daniels case and I’m skeptical that ever would have been charged if not for the way Trump’s term ended.) The stakes are now far greater. So the pressure is greater. He’s less able to deal effectively with any of it. The whole thing is a struggle between this one man’s psychodrama which exists uneasily within (ghost in the machine?) and is only partly tethered to a staff that wants to run a relatively conventional campaign against an incumbent party, if no longer the incumbent president.
As I noted above, I feel like the attacks are landing or that they should land. But the evidence we have outside of our political-obsessive bubbles doesn’t bear that out. At least not yet. To partly paraphrase that old Zuckerberg film, if they knew how to damage Harris they would have done it already. It seems harder than they want to admit. They don’t have forever to figure it out.