August 1, 2024 | Reading Time: 4 minutes
Harris is outmanning Trump
If the vice president can maintain her current momentum, Trump is going to look, by contrast, older, weirder and more emasculated.
I am a vibes-skeptic. Vibes brought down the candidacy of Joe Biden. In time, they could bring down the candidacy of Kamala Harris, too. That remains to be seen, however. In the meantime, I will say this about all the new vibes: the hotter the vice president gets, the colder Donald Trump gets. If she can maintain her momentum, he’s going to look 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,” she said. “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.”
Indeed, it is becoming a vibe, but movements are not built on vibes. They are built on a set of essential “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. Right now, the thing everyone understands is that a presidential candidate’s age matters, perhaps more than anything else, to the point that concern about aging candidates drove out Biden.
That’s what Harris tapped into. When she said, “say it to my face,” she was doing more than taunting him. 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 Biden’s age. She was reminding everyone that Donald Trump is also an old man, but unlike Biden, he’s an 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 manhood to “say it to my face.”
That throwaway line — the one about Trump saying “plainly weird” things — is getting attention, because it’s part of the Democratic Party’s coordinated attack on him, his vice presidential pick, JD Vance, and the rest of the Republicans. But to work as intended, “weird” depends on the right context, in this case the already established context about the age of presidential 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.”
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Once this connection is made, it can’t be unmade. And it doesn’t hurt that Trump keeps reinforcing it. Today, at the convention of the National Association of Black Journalists, he said he would challenge Harris to a cognitive test, just as he had challenged Joe Biden to one. Then he said 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, that’s par for a 78-year-old Republican nominee who has made a habit of rambling 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. His attempt at turning the tables — “I’m not weird, you are” — is failing, because there’s nothing about Harris that strikes anyone as weird, even if they hate her politics. She’s the opposite of weird. She’s the embodiment of America today. Trump, however, not only said that Christians won’t have to vote anymore after the election is over, implying that, if he wins, there won’t be any more elections for them to vote in. He also said that a healthy, vibrant 59-year-old vice president who electrified an arena of thousands after handing him his ass should take, um, a cognitive test. He’s trying 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 really about. And his smears almost paid off after The Disaster Debate. Virtually no one noticed his own habitual incoherence. But now, after Biden dropped out, here’s Harris saying that if he’s got something to say, say it to my face, and here’s Trump, trash-talking again, behind her back, challenging her to a cognitive test, as if that were a sick burn. Whatever manhood he had is gone now.
Harris is outmanning him.
He knows it.
John Stoehr is the editor of the Editorial Board. He writes the daily edition. Find him @johnastoehr.
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