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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.”
This was a fascinating and I think unintentionally candid admission. A sucker punch is by definition something you feel is unfair. But more than that, it’s a painful blow that catches you unprepared. Fair isn’t really a meaningful metric in presidential politics. If anything, invoking it signals a kind of weakness. But it’s getting caught unawares and getting hurt that really comes through here. The day before Joe Biden announced his departure from the 2024 race the Times published an article based on interviews with top brass on the Trump campaign which reported that Trump was prepared to destroy any Harris campaign on the launchpad, including an avalanche of banked TV ads, oppo research and more. It would be some mix of Willie Horton and Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, just with more velocity and power.
As they usually do with the Trump campaign, the Times reported the campaign’s bluster as simple fact. But at the time I found this threat quite credible. Not that I necessarily thought they would annihilate Harris before she even took flight as a candidate. But were they ready and willing? How could they not be? A Harris candidacy has been a distinct possibility quite literally for years. As we’ve endlessly discussed, Biden, like Trump, is an old man. It would be no actuarial surprise if he’d simply dropped dead during the campaign. It’s the most obvious thing to plan for. But we saw the reality just the next day. The Trump team was caught entirely unprepared and flat footed by the switch. And they still haven’t gained their footing.
We’re just one week into a 15-week sprint. So they not only may but certainly will regain their footing. But Vance’s candor tells the story. They were unprepared. They got hurt. And for the moment they’re unable to respond. It’s very low energy, as Trump would say. And along with Trump’s continuing refusal to agree to debate Harris, these visible demonstrations of weakness are not only reactions to Harris’s momentum, they are also fueling it.
We’ve spoken about OODA loops before, the military theory concept of getting inside and disrupting an adversary’s decision-making process, primarily by situating and acting quickly enough that you’re changing realities before an opponent can react to them. Harris got inside the Trump campaign’s OODA loops starting on the 21st and she’s stayed there ever since.
One example of this is the “weird” push we talked about yesterday. In American English “weird” can mean many things. It has good meanings and bad ones. One TPM reader told me yesterday about his mixed feelings and pain watching this current moment because that was a word that dogged his son, who has Autism Spectrum Disorder, through his teenage years. I’ve seen others arguing that this is just participating in a way of marginalizing difference with fetishized ideas of weirdness and normality. The most sage comment I’ve seen on this comes from Never Trumper David Frum, who said this:
I don’t think this is the entirety of what’s being captured by weird. I think it’s also the weird brawny superman imagery of Trump, the cultish devotion, the weird mix of stunted emotional (and often sexual-emotional) development, of the kind that made Ron DeSantis’s ads land with such a thud, and the kind of creepiness that is right next to menace. But David describes at least half of it and likely more. And those other things I mention are at least adjacent to what he describes. He gets to the essence of it when he notes that they’ve struggled to respond because they don’t really get why the barb is resonating. Their main response is to hit back with “We’re not weird. YOU’RE weird” and include a bevy of photos with this or that Democrat with a trans person. In other words, while anti-trans politics unquestionably has some traction in U.S. campaigns, their punch back is basically more evidence of the original charge.
The reason this cuts so hard is that MAGA types are usually perfectly happy to lodge hostile attacks on female power and autonomy and get reactions that launch into discussions of female autonomy. MAGA Republicans are happy to make racist dog whistles and get into arguments about implicit or systemic racism. This usage of “weird” captures the whole story, without any need for explanation and with a broad swath of the population. Everybody gets it. And rather than perversely pumping them up, it cuts them down: exposes them as small and pathetic. It’s difficult to respond to it effectively because to a broad swath of the population it’s so obviously true. Maybe you think that getting married and having kids is the proper default life path. But why are they so obsessed with it? Why are they so angry about it? Again, how do they defend themselves against that when they clearly are obsessed and are angry?
Since I’ve now devoted two posts to “weird” in as many days, I suspect some of you are asking, is this really going to be the whole campaign theme? Is there going to be a big “weird” in thirty foot tall letters at the DNC? I certainly hope not. I hope it is merely the first example of going on the attack in a way that understands the role of performances of power in presidential campaigns. You have JD Vance, low energy and with his own orchestra of sad trombones in tow, telling donors, “They bitch slapped us really hard and if anyone has some idea of what we can do about it please tell me because at the moment we’re feeling pretty sad.”
That’s good. You may not like the phrase. We say “dominance politics” now. But he’s just being disarmingly honest about what they’re dealing with right now.