Boy oh boy organisational cabin fever is a hell of a thing. You know that meeting-room moment when you’re trying to think of something, anything to do, to make the 10th, 23rd, 90th occasion something special. Eventually someone comes up with what is the worst but also the most audacious solution, and in exhaustion and relief enough people think it’s brilliant it must work, and that is how Donald Trump ended up on the stage of the US National Association of Black Journalists annual conference.
Apparently the prospect of this encounter split the board. Not enough to stop it apparently, as the combative encounter went ahead, to storms from the audience as The Donald described himself as the best president for Black people since Lincoln, blamed the organisers for him being late, and questioned whether Kamala Harris was “really black”, before Trump’s own team, presumably begging and cajoling back stage, cut the interview short.
Well the possibly soon-to-resign board can hardly say it was surprised. Trump will get whatever kudos he’s going to get from the encounter, from those who like that he stood up to woke folks. Who knows what result among Black men, among whom his stocks have been rising for a while (about eight Black women vote for Trump).
The downside of the interview — aside from the, you know, hostility and disdain — is the chaos of it. In the days since Kamala Harris took over the nomination from Joe Biden (remember Joe Biden? It’s not certain that Joe Biden does) the Trump campaign has found itself in the one place it can’t be, that of being perceived to be not wiiiiiinnning. The selection of Harris has mobilised every ghastly prog meme one thought it would, down to the coronation moment of an Obama phone call, and the vague and unwelcome sense (that became associated with Hillary) that the American electorate was the chorus to the main story of the candidate’s rise to manifest destiny.
Nevertheless, Harris’ candidacy has knocked Team Trump sideways, the ex-president responding with his worst, most obsessive bitterness and pettiness, the stuff his base loves but the periphery that he needs to win hates (but will tolerate). The klutzy handling of the response to Harris — personalised, rather than tying her to the Biden administration — suggests that The Donald has now lost his strategic compass, and there is no-one in the campaign to get him back on track.
After all, the 2016 campaign, for all the chaos around it, was focused on one big thing: tying Hillary Clinton to NAFTA, and the globalisation of the US economy in the ’90s, which turned the rust belt into a rust bucket, and, by creating a US-Mexico border zone of industrialisation, turned the stream of undocumented border crossers into a flood. With Trump tasked with selling it in 2016, and his VP choice Mike Pence, the representative of the Republican Party establishment (when it had an establishment) standing there, feet firmly planted, like a bass player keeping the beat, the presidential candidate could go wild.
But now Pence has gone, after Trump appeared to not intervene to stop the January 6 mob from trying to find and hang him (though you better believe Pence would still have taken the same gig again if asked) and the Republican Party establishment has dissolved. Trump’s VP is Ohio Senator JD Vance, running on a line that the term “culture war” does not adequately describe. Vance’s attacks so far, on women who don’t have children, on Harris herself for that, is pure kulturkampf, the relentless construction of the other side as the enemy of all that is good in human life.
You can’t have two people playing crazy lead like that unless you’re The Who, and who are who are you you ain’t no who. Indeed, Vance’s politics actually go against Trump’s, harking back to the Tea Party’s Americanist self-reliance fundamentalism, which is not what Trump’s periphery voters are interested in. The Tea Party was a small government, indeed Ayn Randist anti-government* movement, which constructed tax as theft, and celebrated self-reliance, small business etc. That didn’t play with working-class voters, and helped Obama win the 2012 election.
Vance continues that individualist ideal in his coming-of-age bestseller Hillbilly Elegy, in which he blames the people of Appalachia for their own poverty, drug addiction and social disarray, diagnosing laziness and complacency. Since earlier generations of said people provided the bulk of US mine workers, and formed the strongest fighting unions from it, the most basic reflection would tell you that the opposite of individualism is the case. Social redundancy is far more disabling than outright economic oppression, especially when deregulated governments allow de facto heroin in pill form to be prescribed by any GP.
Voters in the rust belt didn’t like being blamed for the destruction of American industry in 2012, and I doubt they’ll like it any more now. Trump’s great stroke in 2016 was to run against American constitutionalism, and in favour of a big state going toe to toe with China on behalf of the American populace, through tariffs and trade wars. Trump talked of the “good jobs” coming back for everyone, thus removing the requirement of virtue for prosperity. You deserved a good life if you worked, not as external proof of the goodness of your heart, the Puritan ethos underlying the constitution’s call to self-reliant men and women to make their own history. Trump would give you the factory back, you were done by 3pm, and you could do and be whatever the hell you liked.
Trump’s obsessiveness and vengefulness are now getting in the way of that, but Vance’s moralising absolutely undermines it. So why did they choose him? Partly because he helps with the Pennsylvania vote, which will probably decide the election, but also as a nod to the hard-right Silicon Valley, where he once worked. Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, who have taken the place of the old Republican Party business establishment, are dictating terms. They want a promethean government, tying economic nationalism to military supremacy, and supercharged hi-tech transformation of humanity. It is a dark vision hitching its ride to a future of unlimited domination of humanity by humanity, and to the hopes of many millions of Americans that someone will champion the achievement of modest prosperity sufficient to make a home and a life, which is all most Americans, like most humans, want.
Can Kamala Harris speak to that? Can she give a calm and simple account of how to make life a little better, a little easier, for about 50-60 million “lower-middle” Americans who see the possibility of “a life” disappearing into a process of mere existing? Should she be able to, the election is hers. She will take all the states Biden and she got back, and have a good chance of regaining Florida, and restarting the fight to make inroads in Texas.
But if the Democrats get hung up on the self-congratulatory parade of “achievement” and diversity, then Trump and Vance, chaotic, sinister and improvised, will lose the popular vote but win the election as Trump did in 2016.
Still, Harris’ candidacy has turned this from a rout into a contest — and in his private jet, Team Trump must be going through a fair bit of their own cabin fever.
