On the one hand, pollster Frank Luntz goes round telling people I am a strategic and messaging genius who was key to what he calls the greatest political campaign of his lifetime, New Labour’s first win in 1997. Too kind, sir.
On the other hand, this American political junkie warns me I am suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome. He says it is preventing me even from thinking rationally about how best to counter Donald Trump’s politics and messaging which, because America is America, carry weight well beyond the USA. And after a week there, I am beginning to wonder if he has a point.
In the past, I was accused of having “Boris Derangement Syndrome”, too. To that I plead not guilty. Loathe Johnson though I do, I could kind of understand a certain appeal to a certain constituency, at a time when Labour were being led through the Corbyn wilderness. But I also believed that if enough people kept telling the truth about him, eventually he would pay the price for his lies and incompetence. Which he has.
Trump is different. He has told many more lies than Johnson. He has been convicted of serious crimes and misdemeanours. Yet whereas Johnson is finished, Trump is still in with a shout of returning to the White House. For all the joyous mood surrounding the Democratic National Convention, and a shift in the polls from Trump towards Kamala Harris since Joe Biden stood down as the Democratic presidential candidate, that remains the case.
“This is the best it is going to be.” So said a long-time Democrat strategist and friend the day after vice-president Harris closed the convention. “From now on it is going to be absolutely brutal. Everyone here loves her. The Republicans will do anything and everything to make swing voters in swing states absolutely despise her.”
I also found a big Trump supporter at the convention, David Urban, a former adviser to the hopefully never again US president, who still speaks to him regularly, and who acts as a rare pro-Trump commentator on CNN. He made a similar point.
“The crowds here have gone wild for her and for the messages they have been landing. But you have to think about the guy in Wisconsin who is struggling to feed his family, and thinks nobody listens to him. Did he hear anything here that helps him with that? I am not so sure.”
What both men tried to explain to me is that if you fail to see beyond the Trump lies, the chaos and narcissism, you fail to understand why people might vote for him in the first place. Which is that a lot of them do at least think he listens to them, and speaks their language. And if you don’t understand that, you can never win them over.
Luntz argued that what we did under Tony Blair was to listen to, and understand, the views of people who did not support us, and then tailored our messaging and language to give us a chance of getting them to change their vote. Yet, his chastising goes on, if you fail to see how ANYONE can think Trump is a suitable person to be president, what earthly chance do you have of turning those red voters blue?
Luntz will not be far off the mark when he says he has probably done more focus groups, chatting to small groups of voters, than anyone alive. If I read him right, he is saying that Harris, having done a brilliant job firing up the party and showing herself to be smart, charming and presidential, now has a different challenge: to find language and policies to show undecideds tempted by Trump that she understands why they feel so despairing of the ability of politics to make their lives better that they might be willing to put their faith in a convicted felon who wants to blow up the whole system.
The passage in her speech where Harris talked about being a president for all Americans was perhaps an indication that she understands the point Luntz and Urban were making better than I do. Whereas I may have a touch of Trump Derangement Syndrome, she does not, and it ought to help her carry her message and grow support.
Happily for her, Trump does appear to be suffering from Harris Derangement Syndrome. I think any psychologist reading his outpourings last week would suggest she was 24/7 inside his head, in a way that he is not inside hers.
The sheer nastiness of elements of the Trump cult, as with the far right in the UK, occasionally crosses from nasty to utterly inhumane. So it was with some of the reaction to Tim Walz’s neurodivergent son Gus’s emotional “That’s my dad” exclamation as the vice-presidential candidate bathed in rapturous applause. I won’t dignify the inhumanes by naming them, or repeating what they said, other than to say they are sick as well as sickening.
But good usually comes from bad, and it did in two ways; first a public reaction indicating most decent people, including many Republicans, were disgusted. Second, others coming out to speak with pride of their own children who face similar challenges to Gus. Like journalist Tina Brown, who wrote of her 38-year-old son Georgie’s inability to tell anything but the truth.
“Once, as my husband, Harry Evans, and I left a pretentious social gathering in the Hamptons, Georgie told the host sunnily: ‘Thank you very much. No one spoke to me really, so it was a very boring evening. The food was OK. I doubt I will come again.’
“I have never been prouder of you in my life!” shouted my husband in the car. How many times have all of us wanted to say that as we gushed about the fabulous time we just hadn’t had? Then there was the moment he went up to Anna Wintour at one of my book parties and asked if she was Camilla Parker Bowles. And the time at the intake meeting for a supported work programme, when the therapist asked Georgie, “Has anyone ever molested you?” “Unfortunately not,” he replied.
If it is not too Trump Derangement Syndrome to say so, I’d take Gus and Georgie over the disabled-mocking MAGA cultists any day of the week.
The rumours that Beyoncé and/or Taylor Swift would appear in Chicago turned out to be wrong. Now, I cannot claim to have much expertise in the showbiz reporting world, but I did pick up that the Democrats remain hopeful they will both get involved at some point during the campaign. However, the political persuasions of Mr Swift Senior may be getting in the way.
I faced a major dilemma one night in the hotel. Trying to sleep, I was thwarted by an unbelievable row going on in the next bedroom. A couple shouting, screaming, swearing, hurling all sorts of abuse and objects at each other.
The dilemma? Obvious… to intervene or not? I decided not, buried my head under four pillows, and shut my eyes.
But on they went, rage unrelenting, and sleep was impossible. I put on some clothes, went and knocked on their door. The woman opened it. “Sorry to disturb you,” I said, heart racing as I spotted the angry man behind her, “I am next door and I wonder if you would mind keeping the noise down. It is very hard to sleep.”
“Oh,” she said. “I’m so sorry. We were just having a bit of a dispute. We’ll get to bed now. Thank you.”
People can surprise you sometimes. There wasn’t another peep.
