“Slave driver, the table is turning. Catch a fire, you’re going to get burned” – Bob Marley
There is an episode of the television show Doctor Who in which the Doctor, incensed over a decision made by British Prime Minister Harriet Jones, takes his revenge by leaning over conspiratorially to her aide and saying, “Don’t you think she looks tired?”. The seed is planted, quickly giving rise to the more insidious six-word question that catches fire in the media; “Is she still fit for office?”. That question quickly brings her government down.
True, that’s television, but so is today’s modern politics, built on made-for-tv imagery and infotainment as substitutes for anything resembling serious policy debate. In the schoolyard playground atmosphere that US politics has descended into, the right imagery – and the right insults – can be devastating.
In the episode mentioned above, the Doctor explicitly threatens PM Jones that he can take her government down with one word – but then he says no, six words – a threat he follows through on moments later (“don’t you think she looks tired?”). But US Democrats managed to do even better, turning the tables on Trump with one word: “weird”.
The, well, weird thing about this has been that the more Democrats “lean in” to their mockery of Trump and Vance, the weirder Trump actually behaves. Never mind Vance’s flaccid attacks and vacuous arguments – his background and past statements reveal him to be a man who is equally empty, self-interested and utterly devoid of principle, attractive to nobody. No, it’s Trump’s well-documented statements of the past few weeks that have gotten stranger and stranger. As reported in The Guardian today (“Is Trump OK? Unhinged reaction to rise of Harris worries supporters”):
Since Harris assumed the mantle of the presumptive Democratic candidate, Trump has claimed to be better-looking than the vice-president, questioned whether she is really Black and attacked her laugh as that of “a lunatic”.
The former president has also characterized Harris as both a communist and a fascist, and described Harris as “dumb” but then told CBS he didn’t mean it as an insult because it was “just a fact”.
“I don’t think she’s a very bright person. I do feel that. I mean, I think that’s right. I think I am a very bright person, and a lot of people say that,” he said.
Trump seems particularly obsessed with the size of the crowds at Harris’s rallies, drawing derision for falsely claiming she used artificial intelligence to fake the turnout.
When he’s not worried about size, Trump is vexed by Harris’s looks. After the vice-president appeared on the cover of Time magazine, Trump compared her appearance to Sophia Loren and his wife, Melania, before drawing a comparison with his own features.
“I’m a better-looking person than Kamala,” he declared to an audience of thousands who were more amused than convinced.
The result of this has been a lot of public handwringing on the part of prominent Republicans, imploring Trump to cease his personal attacks and to stay focused on policy.
As Joe Biden would say, think about that, folks. Gone are the days of “let Trump be Trump”. Now we have Lindsay Graham saying, “Trump the provocateur and showman can’t win”. The fatal question is finally being asked publicly, the six words of doom: “Is he really fit for office?”
Meanwhile, the Democrats have suddenly, strategically – surgically even – appropriated as much as possible of the original Republican identity – now utterly abandoned by MAGA – as their own. This has not gone unnoticed on the American right, which is fuming at Dems wearing camo caps and talking about owning sharpshooting trophies. Yes, at the DNC it was “morning in America” again, filled with references that were almost reminiscent of Ronald Reagan – though of course they did not mention his name – an America of small towns, helpful, concerned neighbors, “hard-working, decent people”, Little League and high school football. As columnist Roberto Bertoni put it, speaker after speaker:
appealed to the spirit, the soul, the essence, the profound meaning of being American, trying to convince themselves first, and then those present – and the electorate in general – that Trump is just a bad dream, an anomaly, a parenthesis
The galvanizing effect among voters is undeniable and growing. The Harris campaign has broken the race wide open with its clever leveraging of the youth and social media markets, its very high media production values, and its ability to attract the support of important segments in the US that were pretty unenthusiastic about Biden (who, by the way, presciently already said this during his speech on the first night of the convention, when he said that Trump will “feel the power of women in 2024”). It was a girl’s DNC, y’all, full of the sass and spirit, spit and sarcasm that come quite naturally now to an entire generation that’s not only as good at mockery, if not better, than Trump, but is also much younger, infinitely more tech and social media savvy, willing to speak and act boldly, and yes, is much better looking than Trump.
Given the dizzyingly rapid deployment of the Harris campaign and its equally dizzying trajectory – apparently – into the hearts and minds of growing numbers of American voters, it seems perhaps unnecessary for the Democrats to have romanticized and moralized to quite the degree they did last week.
I’m the same age as both candidates, and I grew up in the suburbs outside New York City, went to high school in a small, southern college town, and went to college in a small town in Ohio, and I have to say that in my view, the egalitarian, tolerant, ‘decent’, ‘mind your own damn business’ and it doesn’t matter who you love or how you pray America that was repeatedly evoked in the biggest speeches, including Harris’ own, has never existed. It is fiction, and it is a portrayal that is just a false as the dark, apocalyptic vision of America being hawked by Trump. The way this imagined America was insisted upon as some kind of pre-existing condition that need only be restored (a theme particularly important in the speeches by both Obamas, evidently now America’s moralizers-in-chief) is disingenuous at best, and maybe even perilous.
I realize it’s just television, and as such it succeeded brilliantly in portraying a surging, open and dynamic party that is going to be pretty hard to paint as “weak, failed and dangerously liberal”, which is the slogan that appears on the almost daily Republican campaign mailers that go from my mailbox directly to the recycling bin.
The Democrats seem to have turned the tables on Trump, and they did it with one word. Reality has gone fiction one better. So why fictionalize? Can they not articulate their vision as what it really is – aspirational – while acknowledging the truth of America’s past and present? Now that the big show of the convention is over, I hope, even though it’s a downer, to hear some serious talk in the weeks to come about the very real threats to our country that aren’t Trump. America is awash in opioids and guns. Crime may be down in big cities, but here in North Carolina where I live, neighbors are shooting and killing neighbors on a daily basis. Public education is falling apart as hundreds of millions of dollars are diverted to private and religious schools. That’s just a few things on a much longer list. Then there’s foreign policy, and a global scenario of unspeakable risk and complexity – which was essentially ignored at the big shindig in Chicago.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m excited about the idea of beating Trump too. The optics of the Harris/Walz ticket are almost too good to be true. So, I repeat, why exaggerate? Why romanticize and fictionalize? The party in Chicago is over. The Democrats put on a great (historically so) show, but reality, as they say, bites.
Harris, Walz and the Democrats have turned the tables on Trump in grand television style. Now they must be very careful about the word(s) that might turn the tables right back on them, a plot twist plenty of powerful and deeply rooted interests in America are eagerly rooting for.
Stay tuned.
Cover Image: Flickr
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