Trump Flails Without EMAILS Or Age Smears

Manufacturing those attack lines takes time, but his loyalists will work quickly when desperate.

You do not, in fact, gotta hand it to Vivek Ramaswamy, but it does speak volumes that, compared to Donald Trump and the rest of his surrogates, Ramaswamy seems positively clear-eyed about how badly Kamala Harris has outmaneuvered them. 

“The hard truth is we need a massive reset right now,” Ramaswamy tweeted. “The criticism that Kamala mounted a coup on Biden isn’t landing, neither is the claim that she covered up Biden’s cognitive decline. None of that matters to voters now. We need to offer our vision for the future of America, it’s the only way we’re going to win this election.”

He is correct in theory, at least about this much: If Republicans had an appealing vision for the country, they could shed many of the tribal appeals that make them unable to assemble majorities. But theory does all the work for him, much as you might never be late to work again if your car could fly. The GOP is in most ways purpose-built not to offer up a vision that appeals to most Americans. Trump has underscored this in recent days by rolling out a handful gimmicky policy ideas—tax-free tips, tax-free social security—each a thinly disguised giveaway to rich people.

Republicans will thus continue to run against Harris by smearing rather than outcompeting her. Ideally they’d like one of their attack lines to stick, but they mostly seem intent on interrupting Harris’s juggernaut before she can build an insurmountable lead. They’ve cycled through a number of options already, and seem intent now on stressing the idea that she’s “phony”—both in the conventional sense that her policy agenda has changed over the years, and in the vile, dishonest sense of questioning her racial identity. Indeed, they are unsubtly trying to make these one and the same.

So Trump will say, “she was always of Indian heritage, and she was only promoting Indian heritage. I did not know she was Black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn Black, and now she wants to be known as Black.” And his running mate JD Vance will clean up with, “he pointed out the fundamental chameleon like nature of Kamala Harris.”

It’s an unusually weaselly two-step, and, as Ramaswamy would probably admit with the microphones off, a loser. Whether Trump’s flight back to overt racism backfires or not, I don’t suspect a constant rotation of baseless character attacks to restore Trump’s advantage in the race. That’s the good news—the bad news is Republicans have a tried and true method of seeding public misgivings about Democrats, and it isn’t to race-bait them, or drag them into a fight about trans people, but to foster the illusion of scandal around them. 

If and when Republicans grab on to an effective line of attack against Harris, it’ll likely bubble up from the sewers where Jim Jordan and James Comer dwell, rather than from Trump’s nickname drawing board or his lizard brain.

PHONYING IT IN

The biggest problem Republicans have deploying character attacks of any kind is that Donald Trump is the lowest-character person in the history of American politics, and they all support him unreservedly. 

Their second biggest problem is that Harris isn’t particularly phony or “inauthentic” for a long-serving politician—particularly compared to her current opponents.

Trump’s reversals reflect nihilism and graft, where Vance’s reversals reflect Faustian moral corruption. Vance knows in his heart that Trump could be as evil as Hitler, but serves him anyhow; he knows Trump is a sexual predator but treats him as a role model; he aligns with a man who would strip his wife of citizenship and deny his children their mixed heritage. That’s in turn what Trump likes about Vance. Surrounded only by toadies, Trump can (and frequently does) take any position on any issue at any time—whatever suits him best—and nobody in his orbit questions it.

Trump does strike some marginal voters as “authentic” because he has no filter. If he says whatever’s on his mind all the time, how can he be a calculating liar? But his dishonesty precedes him, in ways large and small. His hair isn’t actually yellow, and his skin isn’t actually orange. He lies about the attendance at his rallies and his record as president. Sometimes it seems like barely a week goes by without a court or jury somewhere finding he’s engaged in mass fraud. 

Harris does have a filter, and as a result she occasionally finds herself leaning on platitudes. But her supercharged campaign launch proves that to be the exception to the rule. She’s a dynamic speaker who electrifies audiences, and does so with crisp rhetoric—no bizarre diversions about electric sharks or Hannibal Lecter. 

She has trimmed back her policy ambitions, but Trump has reversed his outright in exchange for cash. This shouldn’t be lost on the campaign press corps, and Democrats shouldn’t allow it to be. Advocating Medicare-for-all in a primary, losing the primary, and thus reverting to more incremental health policies isn’t really a reversal—it’s a concession to reality and an alternate route in the same general direction.

Trump, by contrast, wanted to ban TikTok before a rich TikTok investor gave him money and he became a TikTok superfan. Same electric cars and BitCoin and so on. The only people who can have any confidence in Trump’s views are the people who pay for them. 

SCANDAL WITH CARE

More to the point, if trying to define Harris as a phony were a rich vein to mine, Trump wouldn’t have had to scrounge for the toxic idea that she can’t be black because she’s biracial. 

After Trump trotted out that line during an interview with the National Association of Black Journalists, many commentators compared it to the gutter tactics of his 2016 campaign. This is meant to be both a normative judgment and a cautionary tale: Yes, Trump’s habit of opining on who can call themselves black, or what makes a good Jew, or which races of people can be fair courtroom judges, is gross—but he also won that election. 

I find the comparison wanting for a few reasons, though of course the similarities are real. 

For one thing, Trump’s racist campaign appeals in 2016 were directed outward at his enemies, and Clinton’s allies, and various racial and ethnic scapegoats, because Clinton herself is white. And though managed to eke out an electoral college majority in November despite losing the popular vote, his fortunes were always bleakest when he was defined by his bigotries.

Trump won eight years ago because the theme of the campaign shifted at the end away from Trump’s various sordidnesses (thanks, James Comey) and because too many people—elites and citizens alike—grew complacent in the belief that he couldn’t win.

What’s happening now is more like if he’d challenged Barack Obama in 2012 as a birtherism dead-ender. That was toxic, and it was also deeply weird, and while nothing in the world is certain, I’m quite confident that if he’d tried it, he would’ve lost. 

I don’t think Trump can replicate the mass complacency of 2016, even if he falls far behind in the polls—he won once before; everyone knows he can win again. But I do think he’ll come to realize that his only hope is to create an EMAILS-like miasma of scandal around Harris. Phony Kamala Isn’t Really Black doesn’t do the job. Everything about the smear, from her race to his dishonesty, is a matter of clear fact. It is, instead, hardening the impression that MAGA is weird and off-putting. It’s also creating mental strain within the Republican ticket. How does JD Vance, husband of Usha, feel about the idea that the daughter of an Indian woman can’t have two racial identities? 

The Clinton model contains many fewer landmines. Republicans did something similar, and to similar effect, with Joe Biden even after Trump got impeached for extorting Ukraine to set the smear campaign in motion. Trump’s insult-comic nicknames don’t have magical power—most of the people he insults win their elections—but making those nicknames resonate with some imaginary malfeasance does seem to work.

I don’t know if Republicans will turn to foreign governments or faithless federal law-enforcement officials or Rudy Giuliani, or precisely how they’ll abuse their oversight powers. But I do suspect that they will soon pivot away from trying to make Harris seem different toward trying to make her seem dirty. The good news: this takes time. In Hillary Clinton’s case, decades. In Biden’s, years. The bad news: there’s more than 90 days until the election. Trump might have beat Biden in 2020 if Democrats hadn’t exposed his extortion scheme. Republicans today control House committees and (unlike Senate Democrats) are willing to use them. The people who want Trump to win are desperate for it, and they will work diligently to get him what he wants in time for the fall campaign.