Harris has figured out Trump’s greatest liability

There are many things to say about Tim Walz’s debut last night as Kamala Harris’ vice presidential pick. But I want to zero in on one thing he said, a throwaway joke about JD Vance, that says something important about pundits, parties and politics. It was about that couch.

That what?

That couch.

Someone somewhere, I don’t know who or where, started a rumor online about the GOP vice presidential nominee confessing in his book, Hillbilly Elegy, to having had sex with a couch when he was young. There’s nothing to the rumor. (Even the Associated Press fact-checked it before taking down the story.) However, the point was never that it was true. The point was that it could be, given that JD Vance seems like the sort of man who’d have sex with a couch.

Consider this small example. In Detroit, a reporter asked Vance the softest of all softball questions: “You have been criticized for being too serious, too angry. What makes you smile? What makes you happy?” Vance could have given the most boilerplate of all boilerplate answers, like my kids make me smile or serving the American people makes me happy, but no. Instead, he said, “I smile at a lot of things, including bogus questions from the media.” He laughed, without joy – malice, actually. That kind of thing makes you think he’d have sex with a couch.

At any rate, last night, during his debut in Philly, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz never spoke of the couch-sex rumor directly. Nor did he explicitly link Vance to couches, to sex or to sex with couches. His was the most oblique of jokes, meaning it was funny only to people who’d heard the rumor, who dislike Vance and who are tired of Republicans getting away with insulting the Democrat Party. He said he can’t wait to debate Vance “if he’s willing to get off the couch and show up.”

I thought it was great. I know I wasn’t alone. But there were people who didn’t like it, and I don’t mean Republicans who are now faking outrage. I’m talking about former Republicans, sometimes called Never-Trump conservatives, anyway, sniffy pundits who desire more influence over the Democratic Party than they can get, who wanted Kamala Harris to pick Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, who have been loud in their disappointment, and who seem to be voicing their resentment through pearl-clutching over a throwaway joke that lit up liberals and Democrats without veering into indecency or poor taste.

If I were to give Never-Trump conservatives the benefit of the doubt (and, of course, you are free not to do that), I’d say they were seeing name-calling where there’s sound political strategy. While insults are, for the Republicans, their own justification, that’s not the case for the Democrats. They serve a purpose, a goal – to wound Trump’s ego.

Everyone knows Trump’s ego is fragile. Flatter him and he’s happy. Criticize him and he’s sad. To him, agreement with him is perfection. Disagreement is intolerable. He’s never wrong. He always wins. And he can be bought on the cheap, because his morals are cheap. A man like that, as Hillary Clinton said, can be baited, like a child, because he does not defer to any authority higher than his own immediate needs. (Over the weekend, he said, “I only like people who like me.”) His ego may be like the sun. The Republicans around him are pulled in by its gravity. But it’s a sun that’s always on the precipice of implosion. That is, after all, what happens when your self-worth is based on your success in dominating other people. The moment they resist, you’re worthless.

Trump seemed to dominate things pretty well as long as Joe Biden was in the running, and as long as the Washington press corps made a fetish of his age, thus obscuring virtually everything, including the fact that Biden’s presidency has been transformational. But now that the president is out of the running, Trump isn’t dominating anymore, and, as is typical of people who must dominate or cry, he seems to want things to go back to the way they were or take his ball and go home.

ABC News reported Tuesday that Trump is not scheduled to appear anywhere in any of the battleground states this week, despite this being the middle of August, a key period, and despite the Harris campaign’s growing momentum. Instead, Trump is sending JD Vance around to stump for him. And then, last night, the former president wrote what can only be described as an insane post on his social media site. He seemed to suggest he wants the president back in the running.

With this, it’s hard to know which came first: Trump’s wounded ego or the Democratic attempts to wound it, but I’m pretty sure it’s the latter. Long before the couch-sex joke, Biden had spent months mocking his then-rival for being “a six-year-old.” (For this, I had called Biden the most combative Democratic nominee of my lifetime.) Harris, since taking over, has turned up that aggression. At her debut rally, she savaged Trump for pulling out of a debate he was supposed to have with her. If you have something to say, she said, “say it to my face.” The Harris campaign has bought television ads to trail Trump’s campaign rallies, saying he’s “afraid to debate” Harris. Then, Monday, her campaign posted her schedule, with six rallies in six swing states, next to Trump’s, with one event Friday in the friendly deep-red state of Montana. In the post, her campaign called Trump “low energy.”

The consequence is a Republican nominee who can’t tolerate being mocked, who won’t go to swing states for fear of being rejected, who can’t adjust, won’t adjust, to his new presidential opponent, who goes on televised tirades so vast and meandering that even his staunchest supporters go on Fox to implore him to stick with policy, and who reacts so badly, according to one pollster, that the more people see him, the less they want to see. Harris, Walz and the rest of the Democrats are finally hitting Trump’s soft underbelly. They have figured out that his greatest asset, his ego, is his greatest liability.