Harris campaign's framing that Trump and Vance are “weird”

I have been saying for a while that the Biden framing of this year’s election as democracy vs. autocracy, Constitutional government vs. rightwing insurrectionist, is a valid and necessary one. But that it also has to be put into concrete terms of what specific rights are at stake, e.g., reproductive rights, the right to vote.

Because the Trumpistas use a rightwing populist framing in which they represent The People vs. The Elite. In their spin, the Elite is pretty much a vague image of “Hollywood” (one of their many political synonyms for “Jews”), public school teachers, scientists, doctors, and Mexican immigrants. While they represent the True People (white, heterosexual, racists, and ammosexuals).

It was notable in convicted felon Trump’s instantly-notorious speech at a Christian nationalist event sponsored by the far-right Republican group Turning Points Action that he referred to Democrats several times as “fascists.” One suspects his more literate handlers fear that the warnings from Democrats that Trumpistas want to do away with democracy is getting traction. And so they are encouraging him to use gaslighting language to label Democrats as the real fascists.

Even though historians and political scientists have split a million hairs over the exact definition of fascism, most American voters at least have a notion that it means something bad and un-American and has something to do with Hitler and Mussolini. So Trump is now using in the sense of: No, we’re not fascists, “you’re the fascists, nyaa-nyaa.”

Politico has a new report, much of which reads like stenography from the Democratic side, on what appears to be a new wrinkle on the Democrats democracy-vs. autocracy frame. (1)

I’m automatically suspicious of any article that uses any form of the word “quintessential.” It’s one of those words that at least in American English that is generally only used by newspaper columnists. I don’t recall a single time ever hearing anyone use it in part of a normal sentence or even a formal presentation. It means something like, really unique and super-special and distinct. I’ve most often seen it used in the phrase “quintessentially American.” Which is like, I guess, eating hotdogs on the Fourth of July?

(Excuse the Trumpish rambling there. I’m just weirdly fascinated by how that word is used.)

Come for the “weird”...

Okay, I see two possibilities with the stenographically-delivered message about Democratic messaging, which includes this:

Biden and his senior adviser Mike Donilon, who conceptualized nearly every one of Biden’s TV ads, both believed deeply in making the issue of democracy a central theme of the campaign. But the president’s remarks on the subject often featured a grave tone and a heaviness that, more than three years after the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection, the country had seemingly tuned out. Polls showed voters rated Biden and Trump roughly evenly on questions of which candidate would be better to protect democracy.

One possibility is that the campaign is emphasizing Trump’s age, verbal gaffes, ditsy rambling are problems for him, which they are. And that what he says is very often bonkers, which it is. And the hope would be that this will encourage people to not just process Trump’s appearance as goofy reality TV but to listen a bit more closely to catch those “weird” moments. Like his appearance before a religious group at a “Believers’ Summit” sponsored by the far-right group Turning Points Action:

Christians, get out and vote. Just this time. You won't have to do it any more. Four more years, you know what, it'll be fixed. It'll be fine. And you won't have to vote any more, my beautiful Christians. I love you Christians. I'm [garbled word] Christian. I love you, get out. You gotta get out and vote. In four years, you don't have to vote again. (2)

If people stop and think about that for a second, they will come up with ideas like, “When someone tells you who they are, believe them.” And: “Wait … he said what?” Because a normal politician would not say that, simply because it sounds like he’s saying there won’t be any more elections if he takes over again.

The Substacker Yastreblyansky parses that statement more closely, and he makes the point that this was a case of Trump going off the teleprompter script and stating something sloppily like he often does. (3) Because he’s, you know, old, arrogant, self-absorbed and, uh, weird.

Trump's speeches, in the long, improvised solo riffs outside the frame [speechwriter Stephen] Miller or another writer has provided for him, are chaotically disorganized, but that doesn't mean he doesn't have a particular idea he wants to push forward—it's just that he can't put it together in a coherent way, because he's so distracted by his other obsessions.

In this case it's two things he's associating, that came up a bit before the halfway point: one fact, about the relatively low propensity of a big component of his base, Dominionist Christians and gun nuts, to show up at the polls ...

Yastreblyansky is probably right. Trump hadn’t planned to announce that he was ending democracy. But concentrating on “making the sell” in that moment and going off script, he used wording that most politicians and highbrow rightwing freaks usually remember not to use when speaking to a public audience. In this case, he made a Freudian slip or a lazy blunder that will sound, well, weird to most voters listening to it.

And hopefully that will be one benefit of the Democrats urging voters and reporters to look for “weird” formulations like this one. Which will hopefully get more notice for authoritarian, anti-democracy things like this that Trump says all the time.

In other words: Come for the weird, stay for the fascism.

But “weird” needs to be connected to the democracy issue

One the Democrats’ perennial problem is a chronic (and, yes, “weird” one) is their chronic reluctance to fight for their own side on issues that seem obvious. Part of that is an historical hangover that we see in Biden’s talk about “bipartisanship.” Because even into the early 1980s, the left-right alignments cut across party lines. On major issues like desegregation and Medicare and arguments over wars, there was not the kind of party alignment of Republicans on the right/far-right and the Democrats on the center-left that has since become the norm.

But the left-right polarization and the intensity of it has been very asymmetrical, with the Republicans becoming a Trump cult and the Democrats still trying to sound like safe governmental technocrats. (4) And that tendency is not only a lingering habit. It also has much to do with America’s astonishingly corrupt campaign financing system. Big donors tend to be conservative when it comes to paying taxes and regulating businesses. Republican politicians are completely fine with that program. And Trump has been able to create a cultish rightwing populism that is certainly weird but attractive enough to enough voters who are far from being oligarchs to vote for their side.

Democratic constituencies, on the other hand, tend to think that democratic government should not only stay democratic but actually deliver for the real needs of the majority, not just the preferences of oligarchs and wealth tech-bro authoritarians of the Peter Thiel variety. But Democratic politicians still want big donor money. So they have to walk that tightrope until they develop and new approach and fix the campaign-financing system.

But at least some normie Democrats and some Democratic strategists will surely be tempted to use the weird theme not as a way to call attention to the Republicans’ danger to democracy but instead of stressing the democracy vs. autocracy theme.

That would be a big mistake. The Biden campaign presented the democracy vs. autocracy theme as broad framing. But it generally wasn’t focused enough on translating that abstract framing into more practical consequences. The Harris campaign needs to provide voters with specific issues and images of what losing democracy would mean: Voting rights. Republican hostility to reproductive rights and to women’s rights more generally. The right to organize unions. Availability of good quality public schools. Freedom of speech. Requiring responsible policing.

Okay, the Democrats have tied themselves in knots over policing issues but endlessly repeating the Republicans own slogan condemning the “defund the police” slogan while ignoring real issues of police misconduct and often poor service. So they will try to dodge that completely in the Presidential election.

But if the Democrats can use the “weird” theme to get people to pay more attention to some of the genuinely awful things Trump and his cult followers are advocating, that will be a great thing to see!

Notes:

(1) Stokols, Eli & Schneider, Elena (2024): How Trump and Vance went from a ‘threat to democracy’ to ‘weird’. Politico 07/26/2024. <https://www.politico.com/news/2024/07/26/trump-vance-weird-00171470> (Accessed: 2024-29-07).

(2) Trump Tells Christians ‘You Won’t Have to Vote Anymore’ if He’s Elected. WSJ News YouTube channel 07/27/2024. <https://youtu.be/bTm0du4kUH0?si=i4VmFLZDoNyctHrY> (Accessed: 2024-29-07).

(3) Yastreblyansky (2024): Ripcord: Trump prose poem drops. Yastreblyansky‘s Substack 07/29/2024. <https://youtu.be/bTm0du4kUH0?si=uJMV1KjvLY0I-KDj> (Accessed: 2024-29-07).

(4) Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein provided an excellent description of this process as it was developing dramatically during the Obama Presidency: It’s Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided with the New Politics of Extremism (2012). New York: Basic Books.