“Americans love a winner and will not tolerate a loser.”
As of about three weeks ago, Donald Trump was widely seen as the winner. Trump had crushed Joe Biden in their one and only presidential debate. Trump was so domineering, and Biden so overwhelmed, that the Democratic Party’s senior leaders and donors (and many of the party’s rank-and-file voters) turned against the president's re-election bid. The mainstream news media also participated, eagerly, in the feeding frenzy against Biden with allegations, greatly exaggerated, that he was no longer mentally sharp and that his age made him unable to continue as the party’s nominee (and that he should perhaps even step down from office).
Trump had just been handed victories by his right-wing activist justices on the illegitimate U.S. Supreme Court, a cabal that basically declared he was a king above the law. Trump’s federal trial on charges related to the Jan. 6 insurrection has therefore been delayed.
Trump was leading Biden in the national polls and more important, in the key battleground states. Trump also led Biden and the Democrats in fundraising. Many serious political observers, on both sides of the partisan divide, had concluded that if current trends continued Biden and the Democrats would likely be defeated on Election Day.
Trump then survived an assassination attempt in Pennsylvania and, in an iconic moment that may still win him the presidency, rose from the ground with his ear bleeding and pumped his fist as he declared, “Fight! Fight! Fight!” to the applause and awe of his crowd. The following week Trump was elevated to the level of god-king and American Il Duce at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, where some delegates wore bandages on their ears in a show of cult-like devotion.
The news media and pundits were literally writing President Biden’s political obituary in real time as they waited for him to be forced out of office by the Democratic Party’s senior leaders and donors — with no small amount of help from the news media itself. They got their wish: Three days after Trump’s acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention, Biden stepped aside so that Kamala Harris, his vice president, could be the Democratic Party’s 2024 nominee.
With that courageous and wise decision, Biden rebooted the 2024 election. In the three weeks since then, Democrats and their donors and supporters have rallied behind Harris. Trump and his propagandists’ attacks on Biden as too old and mentally unfit are now being turned against them by Harris and her campaign. (Trump is 78 years old and appears to be experiencing serious verbal, emotional and intellectual challenges; Kamala Harris is nearly 20 years younger and appears vigorous and sharp.)
Public opinion polls and other metrics have shown a whiplash-like shift in political momentum. Within just two weeks, Harris is now tied with or leading Trump in national polls. She is also leading in key battleground states. A new poll from the Economist/YouGov also shows a change in the public mood and enthusiasm in her favor, with more respondents reporting that she will win the 2024 election than Trump.
The Democratic Party’s base is also rallying around Harris after being tepid towards President Biden. Her rallies are growing and pulsing with enthusiasm while Trump’s rallies are increasingly flaccid and his MAGA people appear to be bored.
Last Tuesday, Harris chose Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz to be her vice-presidential running mate. Walz is a more populist and rural politician, and in all a quite different type of Democrat than the establishment Blue State elite. His presence on the ticket has also energized the levels of enthusiasm for Harris’ presidential campaign. Walz is also a counterbalance and foil for Trump’s vice-presidential running mate, Sen. JD Vance, and his “Hillbilly Elegy” life story.
Donald Trump and his handlers developed a strategy to defeat Joe Biden. They are now having to retool against Vice President Harris, who is truly a historic figure as the first Black woman and first person of South Asian ancestry to be a major political party’s presidential nominee. It has been reported that Trump’s campaign is in a state of disorder as he and his advisers are turning on one another.
Ultimately, Donald Trump is a human predator and natural aggressor who only knows how to attack as he uses a dominant leadership style (which is true of Republicans and conservatives more generally) to defeat any person or group who opposes him. Because today’s Democrats and establishment liberals and progressives are mostly conflict-avoidant and believe that they should “go high” when the Republicans and “conservatives “go low”, they have proven themselves to be especially vulnerable to such attacks.
In a recent conversation here at Salon, political scientist M. Steven Fish explains:
Donald Trump is all dominance, all the time. My research finds that his dominance game, much more than his policies or appeals to racism, is his most formidable political asset. He largely ignores the polls and tells you what he thinks, while low-dominance leaders tell you what they think you want to hear. His disdain for optics and polls isn’t a sign of real courage. Instead, they’re products of his narcissism combined with a lack of impulse control. But his congenital political gift is that the way these character defects manifest what looks like bravery, at least to a substantial minority. It’s what creates the perception that he’s his own man (however sociopathic) and acts on his own convictions (even if they’re nothing but ego-driven ambitions and resentments).
Trump’s dominance style is what separates him from every other politician and explains the ardor he elicits among those who thirst for strong leadership. And it’s what’s enabled him to retain his grip on his party, even as he’s proven to be a liability in elections. To many people, it makes him look indomitable—and other politicians like panderers by comparison.
Steven continues:
Trump’s high-dominance style taps into a complex combination of emotions. You’ve smartly written about how he triggers his voters with his horror movie strategy. Trump then piles on with narratives of self-pity, rage, and resentment. But what truly sets him apart, even from other Republicans, is his extreme high-dominance style that reassures his triggered followers that he will fix everything. Trump’s constant norm-breaking and crass behavior, which are also part of his high-dominance style, also makes his followers feel accepted and part of his group. And no one “owns the libs,” who they think look down on them, like Trump does.
Of course, many voters are repelled by Trump’s style. But overall he has gained more than he has lost because of his high-dominance strategies.
A high-dominance leadership style is not a superpower that is exclusive to Donald Trump. It can be turned and used against him by Kamala Harris and the Democrats to great effect—if they have the courage to do so.
Of course there are the obvious qualifier(s). Vice President Harris is a black woman. She will face inevitable scrutiny, criticism, and cautions for being “too aggressive” and “hostile” and “mean” that a white man would not. Even in “post-civil rights” America, racism, white supremacy, sexism, and misogyny continue to be a heavy and unfair burden on black women’s life trajectories and opportunities to the detriment of both Black America and American society as a whole.
Writing at the Atlantic, Laura Kelley previews this:
The political universe that Trump helped create presents both an opportunity and a risk for the Democratic ticket: Harris and Walz likely “have a certain amount of leeway” to “engage in discourse that maybe in the pre-Trump world” they would not have, Joel Goldstein, a historian of the vice presidency and professor emeritus at Saint Louis University School of Law, told me. Some level of disagreement and self-defense is fair game in an election, he argued (for that reason, he’s skeptical of overusing the “attack dog” trope). Still, going too far carries its own dangers—particularly for Harris, who may face more scrutiny for throwing harsh jabs as a Black woman than Walz would as a 60-year-old white man….
Vance’s and Walz’s approaches may morph depending on the extent to which Trump and Harris do their own dueling. But so far, they’re presenting two diverging models of the modern vice-presidential candidate. For now, the VP campaign looks like a contest between the happy warrior and the resentful fighter. Voters will decide which line of attack they prefer.
In our conversation here at Salon, Fish addressed these concerns about gender and sexism:
A raft of recent studies, including excellent work by scholars like Deborah Jordan Brooks and Nancy L. Cohen, show that women can wield dominance no less effectively than men. Ovarian fortitude can beat the testicular variety in politics no less than in all other realms of social interaction.
One of my new liberal high-dominance heroes is Democratic Rep. Jasmine Crockett, the glamorous second-term congresswoman from Dallas. She revels in skewering MAGA loonies like Reps. Anna Paulina Luna and Marjorie Taylor Greene with a mix of lawyerly analytic mastery and gleeful gut punches wrapped in down-home—and often transgressive—language. Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer’s personal style differs from Crockett’s, but she’s another example of effective feminine high-dominance leadership. Whitmer doesn’t limit herself to protesting MAGA hardheartedness; she flips the script and owns her MAGA opponents. That helps explain why she won re-election in 2022 by beating her MAGA opponent by double digits in a state that swung to Trump in 2016, and her leadership helped flip the Michigan state legislature from red to blue. Then, of course, there’s Nancy Pelosi. Nobody ever owned that boss.
As the saying goes, Vice President Kamala Harris is now living inside of Donald Trump’s head rent-free. In response Donald Trump is raging and lashing out.
I grew up in the 1980s watching the G.I. Joe Cartoon every day before and after school. At this moment I can’t help but imagine Donald Trump as Cobra Commander, discombobulated and throwing a tantrum when one of his schemes fails, as he beats his fists on a computer keyboard or dashboard or destroys whatever else is nearby. I do hope that someone makes an unauthorized version action figure of “Cobra Commander Trump" as I most certainly would buy it.
Last Thursday, Donald Trump held a “press conference”/speechifying event at his Mar-A-Lago headquarters. It did not go well. The felonious ex-president appeared to be even more lost as he made up even more lies, wallowed in delusions and fantasies, spouted out more racism and sexism, publicly tried to work through what seems like an extreme narcissistic injury, and was swallowed up by his fabulism and egomania as he fixated on the size of his crowds and compared them to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s and other American titans.
“Nobody has spoken to crowds bigger than me….If you look at Martin Luther King, when he did his speech, his great speech, and you look at ours, same real estate, same everything, same number of people.”
As others have plainly observed something is quite wrong with Donald Trump.
There are less than 100 days left until Election Day. Given the collective emotional state of the American people at this point in the interminable Age of Trump, those days will likely feel like years or decades. As these last few weeks have shown, anything can happen in that time; political fortunes and fates are very fickle, especially so in a society that is experiencing an existential democracy crisis. But for now at least, Kamala Harris and Tim Walz are “happy warriors” who have Trump and Vance on the ropes. Now is the time to press the attack even more and show no mercy. Because the American people love to win and hate to lose, Kamala Harris needs to be the winner and champion they have been desperately waiting for.
