How Harris is outmanning Trump

As you know, I’m a vibes-skeptic. Vibes brought down the candidacy of President Joe Biden. In time, they could bring down the candidacy of Vice President Kamala Harris, too. That remains to be seen, however. In the meantime, I will say this about vibes: the hotter Harris gets, the colder Donald Trump gets. If she can maintain her momentum, Trump is going to look, by contrast, older, weirder and more emasculated.

I thought of that yesterday while watching the vice president’s rally in Atlanta. In a moment already being described as iconic, she taunted Trump for pulling out of a debate previously scheduled for September.

“The momentum in this race is shifting. And there are signs that Donald Trump is feeling it. Last week, you may have seen, he pulled out of the debate in September that he had previously agreed to. Here’s the funny thing about that. He won’t debate, but he and his running mate sure seem to have a lot to say about me. And by the way, don’t you find some of their stuff to be plainly weird? Well, Donald. I do hope you’ll reconsider to meet me on the debate stage, because, as the saying goes, if you got something to say, say it to my face.”

The electricity of the moment was such that Democratic strategist Cornell Belcher said the Harris campaign had become a movement. “There’s something happening. Last night, this campaign moved in the direction of a movement. It vibrates different, its rhythm is different, it’s gaining cultural significance that resonates beyond conventional political metrics. It’s becoming a vibe. The GOP has no answer for this.”

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It is becoming a vibe, to be sure, but movements are not built on vibes. They are built on a set of “truths” that everyone understands but might not know they understand. When a leader says something that taps into that shared understanding, it electrifies everyone, and a movement is born. The thing everyone understands is that the president’s age matters, perhaps more than anything else matters, to the point that concern about aging leaders drove out the president.

That’s what Harris tapped into. When she said, “say it to my face,” she was doing more than taunting him in the most Generation-X way of taunting anyone. She was reminding everyone of what they already know, because they had been conditioned to know it by a Washington press corps that made a fetish of the president’s age – that Donald Trump is a 78-year-old man who’s so emasculated by his own age that he won’t risk drawing more attention to that fact by debating her.

He no longer has the strength to “say it to my face.”

That throwaway line, about Trump saying “plainly weird” things, is getting a lot of attention. It’s part of the Democratic Party’s coordinated attack on Trump, his vice presidential pick and rest of the Republicans. But to work as intended, “weird” depends on the right context, in this case the already established context about the aging of candidates. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttegieg made that connection Sunday. “I’m pretty sure voters are worried about the age and acuity of President Trump compared to Kamala Harris,” he said. “How could anybody not watch the stuff he’s saying, the rambling on the trail, and not be just a little bit concerned?” Buttegieg then cited Trump’s “rambling about electrocuting sharks and Hannibal Lecter.”

Once this connection is made, it can’t be unmade. Indeed, Trump keeps proving critics right. Today, at the convention of the National Association of Black Journalists, he said he would challenge Kamala Harris to a cognitive test, just as he had challenged Joe Biden to one, before adding that she’d probably fail because she failed her bar exam on the first try. I don’t know about you, but that’s the weirdest thing a candidate could say about his opponent, though on second thought, par for a 78-year-old Republican nominee who has made a habit of rambling in public about electrocuting sharks and Hannibal Lecter.

That the impact of “weird” depends on a broader context of Trump’s age is shown in another way. Trump, the Republicans and their media allies struggle to “flip the script.” The “I’m not weird, you are” gambit is failing, mightily, mainly because there’s nothing about a 59-year-old vice president that strikes anyone as weird, even if they hate her politics. She’s the opposite of weird, totally normal, an embodiment of America. Trump, on the other hand, not only said Christians won’t have to vote anymore after the election is over, implying that, if he wins, there won’t be any elections for them to vote in. He also said that a 59-year-old vice president who electrified an arena after handing him his ass should take a cognitive test. He’s trying so hard to be manly, but he can’t pull it off. He keeps emasculating himself.

That must be unnerving.

Trump spent years smearing Biden on the basis of energy, stamina, virility, manhood, and so on. That’s what “Sleepy Joe” and a hundred other insults were about. And his smears almost paid off after The Disaster Debate. Virtually no one noticed his own habitual incoherence. But now, after Biden drops out, here’s his vice president sayding that if he’s got something to say, say it to my face, and here’s Trump, at the convention of the National Association of Black Journalists, trash-talking again, behind her back, challenging her – of all things – to a cognitive test, as if that were some kind sick burn.

Whatever energy, stamina and virility he had is gone.

Metaphorically speaking, Harris is outmanning him.

He knows it.