Will Trump Blow It?

Despite being handed the election on a silver platter, MAGA seems bent on trolling their way to defeat

Photo: Kamil Krzaczynski/AFP via Getty Images

If you’re a news junkie, you’ve no doubt heard the cliché repeated ad nauseam for as long as you’ve been paying attention: ‘a [time interval] is a lifetime in politics.’

Unoriginal as it sounds by now, it’s true. Think back to June 27th, when Joe Biden melted into a puddle onstage against Donald Trump at the first Presidential debate. Even liberal pundits like Van Jones and Chuck Todd wasted no time afterwards suggesting - and in DC-speak, to “suggest” is to insist - that Biden withdraw his candidacy.

At first, Biden refused, and Trump’s margins in the polls grew slightly from an already commanding lead to a virtually insurmountable one. Then, on July 13, Trump’s defiant fist-in-the-air photo op after a would-be assassin’s bullet grazed his ear all but put the election on ice. Surely, with the Democrats in shambles and Trump fighting through gunshot wounds in broad daylight, the momentum of the race seemed irreversible.

Until it didn’t.

Under immense pressure from permanent party bosses like Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama, Biden announced on July 21 that he would not seek re-election, and quickly endorsed his Vice President Kamala Harris, who secured enough delegate support by the following day to become the party’s presumptive nominee in November.

This of course came as welcome news to two-thirds of Democrats who told pollsters post-debate that Biden should pass the torch. Kamala received a predictable jolt of momentum, including a record-breaking 24-hour fundraising haul following Biden’s concession. Democrats, alas, were back in the game. They had a candidate who at the very least could go through the motions of running a campaign without the main story after every event being whether or not said candidate collapsed at the podium. And sure, they forewent a legitimate primary process and anointed her in the eleventh hour - defenders of democracy that they are - but their reliably subservient base didn’t seem to mind. And so, Kamala fever was on!

But despite the Democrats’ moment of optimism, the fundamentals of the race were still squarely in the Republicans’ favor. The incumbent Democrat - under whom Kamala currently serves - has a dismal approval rating hovering 40%. A July opinion survey by YouGov showed Trump with huge polling advantages on the handling ofcritical issues like inflation and immigration - 18 and 20 points, respectively. Not to mention, Kamala has a known record of dismal failure as a national candidate who quit before Iowa in the 2020 Presidential primary to avoid a humiliating defeat.

If Republicans could stay focused and on message, Kamala’s honeymoon period as the Democrats’ savior would likely be pitifully short.

Key word there: if.

With an old boring white man like Biden at the top of the ticket, Republicans were more or less forced to run on meat and potatoes issues like the border and the economy, both of which favor them lopsidedly. But within days of Kamala’s coronation, it was clear that conservative Twitter and right wing media simply couldn’t resist the newfound opportunity to switch gears and rejigger their campaign as an epic troll against a childless black woman who slept her way to the top.

On July 22, Republican Congressman Tim Burchett attacked Harris as a “DEI hire.” The following day, TV commentator Larry Kudlow added, “her whole history is DEI.” Then on July 25, a Fox Business panelist called Kamala the “original Hawk Tuah girl.” Most recently, Donald Trump himself thought it wise to litigate her identity as a black woman at a Chicago event for black journalists, where he mused:

“I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn Black and now she wants to be known as Black. So, I don’t know, is she Indian or is she Black?”

To be fair, defenders of this strategic pivot point to some fairly obvious facts in their defense:

First, Joe Biden promised in advance of choosing Kamala Harris as his Vice President that he would select a black woman as his running mate.

Second, it’s true that from 1994 to 1995, Kamala Harris dated California assemblyman and soon-to-be mayor of San Francisco Willie Brown, a man more than 30 years her senior. Brown then appointed Kamala to two state commissions, evidence to support the theory that their love wasn’t exactly pure as the driven snow.

Third, while Kamala has identified as black throughout her life, she has also, at various points, touted her Indian heritage. Her White House biography boasts that she is both “the first Black American, and the first South Asian American” to be elected Vice President.

So having laid out those three points, what’s the issue with Republicans’ new line of attack? Their arguments aren’t entirely without merit. And besides, opposition research, digging up dirt on political adversaries, painting them in as negative a light as possible - these are all standard practice during every campaign season. Why, then, is this change of approach so ill-advised?

For one, it’s off-message. Again, Republicans have nearly insurmountable polling leads on the major issues of the day - therefore, any time spent not hammering on those issues is time spent losing. That’s the simple, nuts-and-bolts, blocking-and- tackling, Politics-101 answer. But it isn’t the whole answer.

Recall Hillary’s famous retort to Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan in 2016: “America is great because America is good.”

Of course, this is nonsense, as America is neither great nor good. What America is, however, is nice.

Americans, generally speaking, are nice people; honest, humble, friendly, folksy people who mostly mind their own business and don’t say anything if they’ve got nothing '‘nice’ to say.

And nice people that we are, we generally don’t enjoy the kinds of excessively personal character assassination crusades now underway against Kamala Harris.

Remember 1998, when Hillary the feminist’s husband was caught soliciting oral sex from an infatuated young intern and lying about it under oath. The scandal dominated headlines that entire year from January through election day. The results: Democrats fought Republicans to a stalemate in both the Senate and Governor’s races. They actually gained five seats in the House, marking the first time the President’s party had gained House seats in a midterm since 1934.

Clinton had been caught in a truly despicable act and an even more despicable cover-up. Still, the Republicans’ constant dragging him through the mud led to an electoral midterm backlash unprecedented in the modern era. Despite having both objective truth, and - in most peoples’ minds - morality and decency on their side as it pertained to the facts of the case, Republicans overplayed their hand in a way that too many Americans in too many states and Congressional districts found gratuitous and mean-spirited - and they paid dearly at the ballot box that November.

The GOP is charting a similar course today. Polls have tightened significantly since Biden’s withdrawal:

Demographically speaking, these attacks on Kamala also put Republicans at risk of alienating the very communities whose shift towards Trump is what put them in such a dominant position to being with heading into 2024. Through this point, they’ve made significant inroads with black voters and women voters - more particularly, with black women voters, who were fleeing Biden to the tune of 28% as of June:

Now I’m no expert, but it seems to me that branding your black female opponent a DEI Whore - which is basically what conservatives have done - is a great way to undo the gains you’ve made with black females these past four years.

Just a layman’s hunch.

And perhaps more importantly than polling data, as these numbers account for shifting momentum dynamics, betting markets have registered a dramatic increase in Kamala’s odds in the first two weeks of her candidacy, from a 29% chance of victory on July 21 to a 44% chance at this writing.

Yes, for the time being, Donald Trump is still the favorite in the race. He has Democrats spread paper-thin across the all-important electoral map. His leads in Georgia, Arizona, and Nevada have put tremendous pressure on Kamala to both mount a comeback in at least one of those states and then run the table almost everywhere else. This is far from an easy task, and at the moment, it’s likelier she’ll fail than that she’ll succeed.

But there’s no question that the trajectories of the respective campaigns have reversed, and wind is now at the Democratic Party’s back. Given that the macro-dynamics of the election still overwhelmingly favor the GOP, it can be no coincidence that as Republicans have gone negative, so have their poll numbers.

It would behoove Trumpworld to do a proper gut-check right about now, before their knee-jerk impulse for trolling and mockery snatches defeat from the jaws of victory. What makes for good Twitter game doesn’t necessarily win elections - and in this example, it could very well cost them the whole ballgame.

They’ve been served this election on a silver platter. If they run against Kamala just as they’d have run against Biden - laser-focused on inflation and immigration - they can’t lose. If, on the other hand, they get pulled off message and troll their way to defeat, they’ll have no one to blame but themselves.