Today Donald Trump appeared at the convention of the National Association of Black Journalists, attacked the organization, disrespected the journalists interviewing him and then proceeded to claim that Kamala Harris is in fact a fake Black person who only recently decided to become Black. “I respect either one, but she obviously doesn’t, because she was Indian all the way, and then all of a sudden she made a turn and she went — she became a Black person,” he said, “I think somebody should look into that too.”
From there we went through the standard cycle of wide eyes and jaws agape, shock, horror — here we have a trainwreck in the making. What is he thinking? He’s imploding! But then a couple hours in, the second thoughts set in. It’s a play to young Black men suspicious of Harris’ biracial heritage! Harris’ media dominance is now over. We’re back to Trump 24/7! Mission accomplished! There’s a method to his madness, they assure us.
There are ten other theories I’ve heard. But they all amount to the same thing. Trump’s latest racist rant isn’t the sign of a campaign which has watched its national and swing state leads vanish in ten days and is desperate to do anything to change the subject. It’s actually an ingenious plan that more conventional political thinkers aren’t able to understand. This is the lure of Trumpian 12-dimensional chess. The belief that behind the chaos and nonsense is a clear strategy that basically can’t lose.
That’s not the case. Trump’s aim with these outbursts is precisely to kick up these storms of disorientation and confusion. That looks crazy, but is there something he knows that we don’t? There must be! … There’s not.
News moves in waves, a certain news environment works a bit like a weather system, an integrated balance of forces organized in a way that it perpetuates itself over time. Not forever. But for a while. We’ve been in one that’s working really, really badly for Trump for going on two weeks. And he’s seen his poll lead vanish. The point of this outburst is basically just a reset. It’s instinctive more than strategic. Remember that time when Trump asked why they couldn’t just drop a nuclear warhead on a fast approaching hurricane? This is kind of like that. His outburst is the nuclear warhead dropped into the Kamala Hurricane, an organized weather system that’s been chewing him up since a week ago Sunday.
Let’s also not forget that these sorts of outbursts are why normal people see these people as … well, weird. Yes, what Trump was doing today was coarse and deeply racist. But there’s a whole other level of it where people see these frantic and screechy comments and just think, who talks like that? It’s similar to why “weird” resonates about these folks.
I’m skeptical that this will work for Trump for a whole series of reasons that we’ll get into in another post. But individually we don’t have to fall into this Trump confusion matrix where we’re kind of beguiled by some mysterious, secret, ingenious plan that explains why a bizarre racist outburst that normal people look at and think “What’s wrong with him?” is actually a genius political move. It’s just an outburst and attempted reset. No more, no less.
