Since the Republican primary debate on September 16, 2015, when he attacked senator Rand Paul’s looks – “there’s plenty of subject matter right there” – Donald Trump’s trademark has been the crude, offensive but often adhesive nicknames he has devised for his opponents.
We have had “Crooked” Hillary Clinton (not to be confused with “Crooked” Joe Biden), “Low Energy” Jeb Bush, “Pocahontas” Elizabeth Warren, “Crazy” Nancy Pelosi, “Birdbrain” Nikki Haley, and Ron “DeSanctimonious”. What Trump lacks in governing ability, he makes up for in playground bullying.
Yet, to his visible irritation, Kamala Harris has so far left him stumped. We all know, of course, the broad outline of what he would like to say about this Black and Indian American woman, and it isn’t pleasant. But even Trump knows there are some quiet parts you can’t say out loud.
He gave “Dumb as a Rock” a whirl to describe the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee. But that didn’t land. He then proceeded to call her a “bum”; “real garbage”; “Lyin’ Kamala”; “Crazy Kamala”; and “a dopey stiff”. He is flailing, and he hates it.
This sudden malfunctioning of Trump’s infantile superpower – trash talk – reflects a more significant political reality. Since Joe Biden stepped down as his party’s candidate, Harris has reframed the 2024 presidential race entirely.
At the quasi-religious Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, declaring his survival of an assassination attempt a sign of divine intervention, Trump had defined his battle with Biden as a contest between “strength” and “weakness”. But with the incumbent president no longer seeking re-election, he faces an entirely different electoral challenge.
In a remarkable 17-minute speech last Tuesday (also in Milwaukee), Harris launched three big campaign themes. First, prosecutor versus felon: as district attorney of San Francisco and attorney general of California, she had taken on “perpetrators of all kinds – predators who abused women, fraudsters who ripped off consumers, cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain. So, hear me when I say, I know Donald Trump’s type”.
Second: she presented herself as the forward-facing candidate, pitted against a reactionary vandal. The cult of MAGA depends upon fear, hate and a nativist nostalgia for a mostly fictional past. In her brief speech, Harris sought to make Trump look as obsolete as a VHS cassette, unveiling her slogan: “We’re not going back”.
Third, and most importantly, she framed the race as a fight between freedom and tyranny. It was deft of Harris to include abortion rights under this rubric, promising to restore a constitutional liberty abolished after almost half a century. Americans do not like having their freedoms taken away, and Harris knows it.
Also on the credit side of the ledger: the velocity and panache with which she has entered the race is galvanising Democratic networks and grass-roots operations; she is a TikTok sensation; she has raised more than $200m in the first week of her campaign.
Yet none of this is enough to secure victory on November 5. It fell to James Carville, Bill Clinton’s chief strategist in 1992, to deliver a reality check to Democrats last Thursday. “I have to be the skunk at the garden party. This is too triumphalist, OK?” he told MSNBC. “If I had to write a play about what I think, it’d be titled The Icepick Cometh, OK? Get ready, they’re coming.”
They certainly are. Trump may not have settled on a nickname for his opponent, but his staff and their unofficial affiliates are already hard at work on the nastiest, most brutal campaign in the history of democracy.
They know that to reconstitute Biden’s winning coalition in 2020, Harris needs to win back Black, Latino and young voters. Trump, on the other hand, has to get out the demographic group that most conspicuously and unexpectedly deserted him four years ago: white men.
This means that, at every turn, the forces of MAGA will caricature Harris as a Californian radical who embraces social justice ideology rather than American values. In Chris LaCivita, Trump’s co-campaign manager, the former president has one of the most seasoned attack dogs in the business: one of the key figures in the “Swift Boat Veterans for Truth” operation that helped to sink John Kerry in 2004.
So far, though, the model is the even older “Willie Horton” strategy that did for Michael Dukakis in 1988: a series of ads focused on an African-American prisoner who, given a weekend pass while Dukakis was governor of Massachusetts, raped a white woman and stabbed her boyfriend.
The GOP machine will focus relentlessly on every remotely liberal decision taken by, or statement made by, Harris in her 21-year political career, and declare her soft on crime, soft on drugs and soft on border security. In their deranged, misogynistic way, the MAGA men will present her laughter not as a gift, but as a symptom of dizziness.
The trap into which she should not walk is to relitigate her past. She is not the one who has been convicted on 34 felony charges, found liable by a jury for sexual assault, and impeached twice. She did not incite a mob to storm the Capitol.
Instead, just as John F Kennedy said in his inaugural address that his generation had been “tempered by war”, Harris should say that her own has been “tempered by crisis”: the pandemic, its economic consequences, the Ukraine war, Gaza, and, most pointedly in this race, the January 6 insurrection.
Her 2020 presidential bid was indeed a failure. But any politician who has not evolved in the past four years has not been paying attention.
In fewer than 100 days, she must insist on debating Trump at least twice; make herself available for no-holds-barred interviews; answer unscripted questions at as many town halls as she can. She must be humble about the unfinished business of the Biden administration and robust in her answers on the economy, housing, immigration and healthcare.
Lofty coastal distaste for her opponent’s vulgarity will do her no good and cost her votes in states such as Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin (all three of which she must win). She must explain again and again precisely why a second Trump term would be terrible for the voters.
For all the euphoria, the race is still a toss-up. In a country where opinion shifts slowly, her campaign will be absurdly compressed.
She has made a flying start. But she only stands a chance of winning if she makes clear that nobody is yet safe from four more years of MAGA. Because nobody is.
