Trump is retooling his campaign into a neo-Nazi battle cry, but Harris is slow to respond

I don't like writing much about the presidential race, you may have noticed. A big part of that is because I'm considerably less optimistic about the odds of a Harris victory than most other left-of-center writers, and that's a point of view that left-of-center communities very much do not want to hear about as we cruise closer and closer to November.

Harris still has a better chance of winning than losing, according to recent polls, and from this some pundits have gone to speculate on the chances of a "blowout" election in which she wipes the floor with the frothing seditionist felon. But the percentages between "wins, but barely" and "blowout election," as you tick down state polls in key states, are very, very small. They depend on pollsters having finally figured out how to weight their polls after struggling with it through two decades of technological change. They depend on the vagaries of October news cycles we can't predict.

We were at this point in 2016. Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton was perceived to be ahead in the polls, not by a large amount but by enough to count as an almost-certain win. But the New York Times savaged her in the last weeks of the race with what we know now and knew then to be utterly phony scandals. And the rest of the press savaged her too, seeking a "balance" in the race that would pair each horrific act Trump engaged in or horrific thing he said with some petty triviality or policy whining that necessitated just as much or more column space. And it turned out that the polling was wrong, and the polling was wrong in large part because if you ask people if they think a grotesque, narcissistic, and racist manslut would be a good choice to run their country they will be generally loath to admit it—until they get to the promised privacy of the voting booth, when their true feelings on the matter get tapped onto a screen or marked on a piece of paper.

I don't know how anyone could live through 2016 and be confident that Harris is cruising to probable victory right now. This time around, Trump may a seditionist and a felon—but he now benefits from a far more overt press bias than ever before, one that continues to paper over his most delusional statements and brush aside, day after day after day, his repeated promises to inflict horrors on the country ranging from ideological purges of government to the installment of mass concentration camps aimed at removing immigrants and American citizens by the millions—imprisoning or deporting 1 in 20 residents nationwide, or so his advisors claim.

Post-coup Trump also has the support of the nation's wealthy, who do not give a damn about democracy so long as their own wallets stay fat; the sedition-peddling crook enjoys the special favor of a Silicon Valley class that has become infuriated by government regulations that threaten to stand in the way of turning their crypto schemes into full-on consumer scams, criminal money laundering markets, or both.

Yes, I know what happened in 2020. And right now Trump enjoys more support from the political press than he did before launching an attempted coup—because our media betters, who are all very rich and do not give a shit about the horrors Trump promises so long as they remain in charge of their own little fiefdoms, insist that to judge him by the standards used for other politicians would be somehow biased against him.

So they let it happen, and burp out occasional editorials warning of Trump's promised horrors while insisting, still, that they themselves are true patriots for being unwilling to condemn his attacks on our democracy in their day-to-day coverage of the "race."

In the wake of a disastrous debate performance that the New York Times would have insisted proved Trump was incapable of performing the duties of the presidency, if Trump was named Joe Biden, Trump and his running mate have responded by embracing neo-Nazism and white supremacy. It's difficult to argue against the notion that they are intentionally goading far-right violence in Springfield, Ohio and in other places; Trump's initial coup attempt was premised in large part on his ability to rally his most violence-minded supporters and set them loose in front of the U.S. Capitol. He and running mate J.D. Vance will likely escalate their rhetoric until such far-right violence happens, then escalate it more once they have crafted "proof" of the dangers that come with welcoming immigrants.

Trump's rhetoric is no longer merely anti-democratic or even fascist. It is now genocidal.

Today, if you were to place the rhetoric of Unite the Right side by side with that of Trump’s 2024 campaign, you would struggle to find a difference. Echoing the chants of “blood and soil” we heard in Charlottesville, the former president now tells audiences that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.” He calls his foes “vermin” and warns that “the threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous and grave than the threat from within.”

All of this is to Trump's personal advantage. Using violence to prove the need for authoritarian rule is at the heart of all such movements. Trump's Jan. 6 coup attempt included a threat to invoke the Insurrection Act if the violence that Trump himself directed towards lawmakers got out of hand; he and his Republican allies were to declare that the violence proved public tension was too high to allow the constitutional certification of his election loss and that therefore he would institute some form of martial law in order to give Congress and the states "time" to reconsider his loss.

If Trump can stoke such violence, what will happen next? Will the average voter, who is a sublime idiot if focus groups can be believed, vote for Trump in order to quell the violence or vote for Harris to rebuke it? How does the elimination of federal abortion rights play out in November, after the press has all but declared it irrelevant and insist that no no, real American women are far more concerned about Immigrants or Taxes or The Deficit than they are about personal freedoms? What new Democratic scandal will the Times "discover" this time around?

The gruesomeness of Trump's current rhetoric is threatening to dismantle the major campaign advantage Harris had in the race: the ability to paint Trump not as powerful and threatening, but as a weak, hapless, bungling clown.

After all that, Harris’s speech was something of an anticlimax. It lasted only about 20 minutes, and despite nearly hysterical cheering as she entered, she didn’t manage to establish Shapiro’s level of connection with the crowd. One problem was that the speech was somewhat unfocused. One section had a recitation of her record as a prosecutor, including how she had gone after Mexican drug traffickers, which fell somewhat flat. Then she went through a grab bag of proposed policies ranging from the fairly silly (a $50,000 tax deduction for new small businesses) to the pretty good (helping cities build more housing) to the very good (a massive expansion of federal child benefits).

That's from an American Prospect piece in which Ryan Cooper expresses a broad dissatisfaction with what he heard when attending Harris's Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, rally. (It continues the general trend of pundits wishing Harris would present policies that are both as broad and as detailed as possible, the one where pretty much everyone who purports to know anything about politics grumbles about vibes and how voters don't want vibes, they want the policy documents that probably already exist but not one of these supposed fking voters ever went looking for.)

But what's not mentioned is much of a sense of fun, in the rally, or of the brutal full court press on Trump's competence and character that marks so much of the Harris campaign's online efforts. Perhaps that's to be expected. Campaign rallies are interminable chores for candidates and audiences alike, and are meant more to boost energy among local diehards already squarely in the candidate's camp than to change minds; given both the hastiness and cheapness with which these things are assembled, you're not often going to see any polish beyond what each individual speaker can manage.

The danger here, though, is that nobody is talking about J.D. Vance trying to impregnate furniture. He's not being treated as a laughingstock, a pathetic suck-up who's gone from wealthy benefactor to wealthy benefactor, changing his beliefs and whole supposed personality to parrot whatever his newest political sugar daddy most wants to hear. It's very hard to turn Vance into a comic figure, no matter how much the petty little man deserves it, when Vance is quite visibly stoking neo-Nazi premised violence using neo-Nazi stoked, racist conspiracy theories that were being peddled long before his birth, all for the sake of getting someone killed because getting someone killed will, Vance believes, boost his campaign's poll numbers.

Now he has "power" again. He took it. He took the power to create violence, just as Trump did on Jan. 6, 2021, and is reveling in it. He may be a pathetic and tragic figure, an example of what can go wrong in a person's life when they have no beliefs at all other than what they think the nearest rich person wants to hear, a man so pathetic that a rumor can spread about his dalliances with home furnishings and all who hear it think "finally, somebody is putting this preening prima donna in his place and all it took was a little blue humor"—but he does have the power to stoke violence, if he wants to, and the shit-eating grin on his face during every new interview, as he revels in that power, is telling.

Again, I don't quite have a solution here. But what can't happen is what's currently happening, in which Trump and Vance continue to ratchet up their violence-provoking rhetoric and both the press and the opposing campaign largely brush it off to continue the narratives they'd decided on instead. The Harris campaign would likely be ill served by mounting large-scale attacks on the Trump-Vance camp's genocidal rhetoric because, again, the pair would only smile even more broadly that their power to provoke violence was growing with every attack. What must be done instead is the unraveling of this power, by exposing it as the "power" only of criminals and arsonists. It is the "power" of lone gunmen and school shooters, the power to sow violence somewhere so that they can feel good about having final agency in other people's lives, no matter how miserable and pathetic and rudderless their own lives have been up until that point.

I don't know how to make that funny. It's not. Trump and Vance are like every other would-be assassin and militia freak, except that those other freaks want to do the violence themselves and Trump and Vance would much prefer to stoke it from afar and then watch it on their television sets. Maybe the answer is that the time for jokes really is over, and the time for portraying Trump and Vance as pathetic, gutless man without attaching humor to it would do better.

But the pair are gutless, that's for certain. Trump is running in a frantic attempt to stay out of prison and retaliate against everyone in law enforcement who tried to put him there. Vance is only there because no matter how many times you f--k a couch it's not going to lend you a private jet to fly around in.