Kamala Harris’ superpower is bringing out the worst in Trump

It is rare to see Democrats having this much fun. Conducted in the midst of the pandemic, the 2020 presidential election was a funereal affair, with Joe Biden presenting himself to a mournful nation as the grief counsellor in chief.

Often it is forgotten that former president Barack Obama’s momentous victory in 2008 was preceded by a war within the Democratic Party, during which the young Illinois senator wax lyrical about the “audacity of hope” while his then rival, Hillary Clinton, argued that this upstart should wait his turn.

Even his historic election as the first African-American president brought to the surface mixed emotions. Joyful exuberance at the sight of a black man finally leading the nation was tinged with the expiation of white guilt.

An ascendant Vice President Kamala Harris. Is it more than a honeymoon?Credit: Mat Otero/AP

Though freighted with so much history, the excitement surrounding Vice President Kamala Harris feels lighter and more playful. The handing of the torch to the next generation, after Biden finally relaxed his white-knuckle grip, has felt less like a solemn ritual and more like a riotous party. Though her bounce in the polls is being described as a honeymoon, it also has the vibe of spring break.

“Welcome to Kamalot,” proclaims the latest cover of New York magazine, neatly capturing the zeitgeist. It shows the vice president, perched atop a giant coconut, laughing uproariously while Obama, Biden, Nancy Pelosi and George Clooney hit the dance floor down below. The Trump campaign thought that Kamala’s laugh would be her Achilles heel, a mannerism that could be ridiculed. But for Democrats, it is fast becoming the leitmotif of her campaign.

The Kamala candidacy, from donors large and small, has unleashed a tsunami of fundraising. Her campaign is being inundated with volunteers. With a boost from groups such as the celebrity-studded “White Dudes for Harris”, she is killing it in the viral war on social media. TikTok is awash with pro-Kamala memes, many of them hurling well-aimed rotten tomatoes not just at Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump but also his Diet Mountain Dew-guzzling sidekick, J. D. Vance. This overgrown frat boy’s “childless cat ladies” diatribe is becoming to the Trump campaign what the “basket of deplorables” gaffe was to Hillary Clinton. As well as defaming women, his misogyny sounds plain weird, the Democrats’ most wounding new buzzword.

With every fresh trawl through his back catalogue on YouTube, Trump’s choice of running mate looks more calamitous. Going mega-MAGA was supposed to propel the former president’s triumphant march through the rust belt, Vance’s native soil. But suburban female voters, such a pivotal demographic in those muscly blue-collar states, could well be allergic to the author of Hillbilly Elegy.

Illustration: Simon LetchCredit:

The focus, however, remains Trump, and Harris’ superpower may be an ability to bring out his worst and most vile traits. His misogyny. His racism. At a conference of black journalists overnight, he even questioned her black identity. “She was Indian all the way, and then all of a sudden, she made a turn, and she became a black person,” he said of the vice president, whose mother was born in India and whose father hails from Jamaica.

For Trump, this is a reversion to type. The showing of his true nativistic self. He made his political name, remember, as the untitled leader of the so-called birther movement, which questioned the very legitimacy of Obama’s presidency by promoting the specious and racist claim that he was not born in the United States. Trump is becoming more Trumpian, which is playing into Democrats’ hands.

At the risk of sounding like a party pooper, the Harris campaign would do well to remember that bacchanals can quickly be followed by hangovers. Bubbles burst. Not since 1968 – which saw the withdrawal of Lyndon Baines Johnson, the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, and the victory of Richard Nixon – have we witnessed a campaign in which history has come at us so thick and fast and in which storylines have changed with such manic suddenness.

After the failed assassination attempt on Trump and the instant iconography of his “fight, fight, fight” flag-bedecked fist pump, many Democrats were resigned to certain defeat. But this near-death experience, both for Trump and the Democrats, provided fresh impetus to blast out Biden.

Before his catastrophic debate performance, one of the strongest rationales for the 81-year-old president remaining as the party’s nominee was the widespread concern that his vice president would prove an even weaker candidate.

That, and the argument that “Scranton Joe” – a reference to the city of his upbringing in Pennsylvania – was best placed to win that state, along with Michigan and Wisconsin – the ones Trump unexpectedly took from the Democrats in 2016 but which Biden wrestled back four years ago.

Even now, after the success of the Harris rollout, an argument could be mounted that other Democrats, such as Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro or Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, would perform better in the rust belt.

But the process of picking a stronger candidate through a messy contested convention obviously ran the risk of splitting the party. Besides, Kamala Harris is almost unrecognisable from the candidate who started so strongly in 2019 before ending her campaign with a whimper.

Crucially, Harris offers the media a compelling new storyline. One of the strongest forms of partiality is better story bias, in which politicians offering the most journalistic entertainment value dominate the headlines.

Ultimately, though, American voters are the pen-holders when it comes to writing the next chapter. In this electoral cliffhanger, will “Kamalot” prove a more enticing prospect than a Trumpian restoration?

Nick Bryant, a former BBC Washington correspondent, is the author of The Forever War: America’s Unending Conflict with Itself.

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