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When I was a younger man, I was not notable for my good sense (this is the general Young Man experience; how much I have improved since then is an ecumenical matter). I did, however, manage to stumble into a few inclinations and reasonable anxieties that have stood me in good stead. One of the most powerful and enduring of those was a fear that I would blunder into the wrong corner of the internet and The Teens would roast me.
I came by this fear honestly: I saw them roasting other people. It was the early 2010s on social media, and a Golden Age of people born before 1990 getting into shitfights with teenage social media users and getting skewered with a finesse and precision that would do credit to a Renaissance fencing master. I did not know how The Teens developed such terrifying instincts for identifying and falsifying their targets’ various pretensions, swiftly stripping them of their facades of status and ability, slicing them right in the emotional vulnerabilities, and leaving them naked, shivering, and exsanguinating in a digital gutter, but I had no goddamn intention of finding out the hard way. These kids were obviously some species of digital alpha predator, to be crossed at your peril.
It’s now more than a decade later, and The Teens are running Kamala Harris’s media strategy.
Harris was forceful and - there really is no other word for it - belittling.
Much has justifiably been made of Kamala Harris’s tonal approach to Donald Trump in the debate of September 10. She was forceful and - there really is no other word for it - belittling. That word usually has a spiteful connotation, but in this case it’s just a descriptor: she (appropriately) trivialized Trump’s motives and interests, bringing his fixation on crowd sizes and the flattery of variously brutal and oafish strongmen into proper perspective.
The constant dismissive and minimizing jabs clearly got to Trump. Never disciplined and now in the throes of obvious cognitive decline, he’s a natural target for goading, and goaded he was. You could occasionally see glimpses of a viable strategy for disqualifying Harris in his responses, surfacing like shark fins before disappearing into the boil of the right-wing fringe gibberish and saggy grievances and inexplicable, impenetrable perseverations the Big Guy falls back on when his executive function runs out and he gets cranky.
Harris clearly believes this is the right way to talk about and to Trump, and deserves credit for being the first Democratic presidential candidate (maybe the first major Democratic leader of any kind) to have settled into a natural and effective way of dealing with him. And that certainly didn’t start at the debate - she’s been under his skin for a while. It starts with her media strategy, especially her social media strategy, run - and I mean this as a glowing compliment - by the meanest Zoomers on earth.
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The tonal shift was obvious and immediate. As soon as Biden stepped off the ticket and Harris become the front-runner, Trump ceased to be a grave, generational threat to democracy (in the language of the Democratic campaign), and became a ridiculous windbag frantically flailing and failing at being a person of consequence.
(Not for nothing: my colleagues and I did a study of GenZ Latinos recently, and asked our respondents to gather images they associated with Trump. The most common image they chose was a clown. I want to emphasize that we didn’t give them options to choose from - they could have picked any image from anywhere on this blighted internet. It’s the clowns for them.)
Official Harris campaign press releases started referring to Trump’s press conferences as “whatever that was”. The campaign released a digital ad of Trump boasting of how people don’t get bored with him, followed by a supercut of audience members yawning hugely during his speech. On Trump’s own social media site, Truth Social, the Kamala Harris campaign has a profile. It follows one person - Trump. All it does is troll him about the size of his rally crowds. The campaign cut another digital ad making fun of Trump’s rally crowds, and targeted its placement this week in Palm Beach and Philadelphia so that an audience of exactly one too-online and vainglorious man could see it before the debate.
I mean, good lord, look at this.
These people have zeroed in on the exact nature of Trump as a fundamentally inadequate man obsessed with the shallow validation of strangers and a handful of powerful oafs and brutes, and they are absolutely giving him the business. Trump thinks of himself as a bully, and to a degree, he is. But he learned how to be mean; the “feral 25 year olds” running Kamala Harris’s media campaigns were born to this brutality. They are native to the platforms and fluent in casual digital savagery. As my brilliant friend and colleague Ngiste Abebe observed, “there’s no way to teach whatever they learned from cyberbullying in middle school.”
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There’s no way to measure the effect this has had on Trump; at most, it is but one factor contributing to what I believe is a clear decline in Trump’s faltering ability to perform, his tendency toward tangentiality worsening on what looks like a daily basis. The worthy Jason Stanford has written elsewhere on the significance of Trump’s failure to find a way to bully Harris. That analysis is right, and we saw during the debate that Trump is not just losing his ability to effectively demean his opponents - he’s flustered, aggrieved, and incoherent, unable to stick to a script of any kind.
And yes, that does mark a change in Trump. For a project earlier this year, I went over the text of about ten Trump speeches from the closing weeks of 2016 (I do not recommend this exercise; also, thank you, CSPAN, for your assiduous record-keeping). The bellicosity was there; the idiosyncratic, imprecise language was there. But within the texts, there was a message, a small number of clear, accessible grievances around which a defined segment of Americans could organize, and a bracing, grand vision of the America he and they could build together to right those wrongs.
His speeches now have that bellicosity, and the idiosyncrasy. But they have no heart, no central, accessible grievance that allows anyone except his existing adherents to see themselves in his campaign, and no sparkling vision of the future. Mostly, he whines about he is treated. And I cannot shake the feeling that some of this, at least, is down to the way that Harris’s ravening pack of vicious Zoomers have hounded him since the day she effectively acceded to the top of the ticket.
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That approach, by the way, that ceaseless trivialization and mockery, strikes me as fundamentally respectful. Not of him, of course - the feral 25 year olds do not respect him, and he does not deserve to be respected; he’d lock them all up, if he could, for the crime of having laughed at him. He’s all but said so himself.
I see this as being, in its way, respectful of Americans. Trump has never pretended to respect his opponents (it’s how he won the GOP nomination in 2016), or the government over which he presided, or the democracy that produced him, or the people who voted in it, or the people who didn’t. He has never for a moment suggested that he respects or values anyone except people who obviously venerate him, and not even most of those. He scorns and ridicules the processes of democracy and government at every turn.
Until Harris (and her band of merry Zoomer pranksters), the Democratic response has been to elevate Trump. In serious tones, Democratic leaders and associated advocates have gravely questioned his temperamental fitness to serve as Commander in Chief; have publicly doubted his commitment to the sacred principles of the Constitution; have named him a threat to American democracy; etc. This was all true of course - he is unfit to be C-in-C; he doesn’t care about the Constitution; he’d end democracy tomorrow for his own convenience, if he could. But the man is not some kind of supervillain; he’s weak, strange, and world-historically venal, but Democrats for too long treated him as a figure worthy of a kind of fearful respect because of the grandiosity of the office for which he was running and then held. Unwilling to belittle him for his triviality and flop-sweating dampness, Democrats essentially went to Americans, pointed at an obvious clown in makeup, bells, and motley, and said “we beg you to take this man seriously.”
Let us call the question: in that situation, who, really, is the asshole?
Trump is and always has been unworthy of elevation; no office he seeks or holds can make him anything other than what he is, and he should be treated according to his actions, not according to the prestige of an institution into which he’s managed to bully or con his loathsome way. To do otherwise is to confer gravitas on the man out of veneration for a series of institutions the dysfunction of which led to him darkening our doors in the first place. There’s a word for that tendency: smarm.
Smarm insults its audience by asking them to pretend that something that manifestly has no merit deserves to be taken seriously and treated with a degree of deference. My own analysis is that the Democratic Party was, for years, quietly dominated by a subtle but powerful inclination toward smarm; more on that later.
That spell is broken. In the words of noted cultural critic Holly Anderson of the Shutdown Fullcast, you have to meet conversations at the level they deserve. Democrats are starting to do that. Harris’s feral Zoomers are running free and extremely at large.
Sleep lightly.