"This afternoon, Donald Trump spoke at the annual meeting of the National Association of Black Journalists and it was the same old show. The divisiveness and the disrespect. The American people deserve better"
- Kamala Harris
"I'm optimistic. Was reading today about Kamala in a copy of Guardian from few days ago. In photo, striding along in suit and heels, she looked very presidential, like someone playing first female US President in some watchable TV drama. Generally, more presidential than Trump, I'd say.... And she has Air Force Two at her disposal which won't make you less presidential."
- Roy Wilkinson
Someone on J.D. Vance's "stalking" of Harris's plane, checking out what'll be his in a few months as the newly elected VP:
"Unserious, ridiculous performance art. They’re scrambling and can’t find an affirmative message. Trump can’t even be bothered to leave his house."
"Central Casting recommends it to counteract his beady eyes"
An increasingly desperate J.D. Vance:
"Kamala Harris isn’t running a presidential campaign. She’s producing a movie. Everything is scripted everywhere she goes."
But it's a movie that people want to watch, ideally in a crowded (amphi)theater- a feel-good, happy-ending one with lots of laugh lines.
Whereas...
Will Stancil on Trump's Georgia rally:
"Everything here - the speech, the signs, the logo - has the listless vibes of an aging star doing a dull retread. The kind of unwatchable cash-in that everyone will forget happened in 18 months. Die Hard 5 vibes."
"I like hearing that actors shouldn't have political opinions from people who voted for a reality TV character."
- John Fugelsang
Trump's Sorkin-esque fanfic, as someone put it, reeks of desperation:
Tom Nichols at the Atlantic's take on the same: the GOP is a messy soap opera now:
This might be too much even for a Sorkin script. Trump’s reactions lately are so unhinged, so hysterical, that they could pass for one of those scenes in a soap opera where a drunken dowager finds out that her May-December romance is a sham, and she begs him, as mascara flows down her cheeks, to fly off with her to Gstaad or Antibes to rekindle their love.
More fanfic from the Trump camp
Gotta love that "popcorn" emoji
Emily Nussbaum on today's "General Press Conference":
"I'm always struck by how closely Trump's querulous tone
resembles that of his inspiration, Livia Soprano"
Some tweeter on the Assassination Attempt and That Photo:
"This is the fakest bullshit of all time.
What a sad pathetic clown.
This makes the WWE look like Shakespeare"
Jonathan V. Last at The Bulwark says Pro-Wrestling Explains Why Trump Is Scared of Kamala
1. Trump as Vinnie Mac
We are seeing signs of panic from Donald Trump because he recognizes something in Kamala Harris that he has not seen in any other opponent: The beginnings of a cultural movement that vibrates at a level beyond politics.
He sees that Kamala Harris is drawing heat.
To explain this concept, we’re going to have to go deep into professional wrestling. This one’s going to be a journey. So strap in.
To understand Trump, you must understand professional wrestling.1Trump has long ties to the WWE and Vince McMahon, and Trump’s forays into wrestling formed his understanding of how populism and demagoguery function.
Here is how wrestling works:
The WWE was the creation of one man: Vince McMahon. McMahon was the Barnum of wrestling. Until recently, he alone decided who won and who lost, which characters were pushed and which faded into obscurity.
McMahon could be vindictive and capricious in his decisions, but at the most basic level he was guided by the audience. If a wrestler resonated with the crowd, McMahon would give them more work and elevate their standing. If a wrestler McMahon favored didn’t get a reaction, he would eventually sideline the wrestler or remake the character.
It is important to understand that the reaction McMahon looked for was value-neutral. It does not matter if the crowd loves a wrestler or hates him. In wrestling parlance this reaction is referred to as “heat” and there are two kinds of heat: (1) Heel heat, which is hatred and loathing on the part of the audience against villainous characters (known as “heels”). And (2) Face heat, which is love and adulation for heroic characters (known as “faces,” short for “babyfaces”).2
A wrestler’s most important job is to draw heat from the audience and it does not matter if the audience is booing or cheering. What matters is that they are loud and active.3 What matters is that the crowd cares.
Heat has been Trump’s political lodestar.
It explains why he pursued the Obama-birther story so doggedly even before he was running for president. It explains why he stopped talking about Operation Warp Speed. He’s even talked about heat explicitly, making fun of Republican audiences who yawn when he mentions about tax cuts but go crazy when he does trans issues.
In his lizard brain, Trump sees drawing heat as the pathway to dominating the culture and thus winning elections.
In this way, Trump is a savant. He has drawn heel heat more successfully than any figure in the history of American politics and used that power to take complete ownership of a political party.
So from Trump’s perspective, you can understand why he was so vexed by Joe Biden in 2020. No one really cared about Biden,4 who drew no heat, one way or the other. Biden was just kind of there, taking moderate positions and running a boring, effective campaign operation.
In Trump’s mind, his loss to Biden was the political equivalent of Hulk Hogan dropping the championship belt to some forgettable, mid-card talent. That’s not supposed to happen.5
2. Kamala as Daniel Bryan
Kamala Harris has succeeded—suddenly, unexpectedly—in drawing tremendous amounts of heat.
[the rest is hidden by the paywall - your guess as to who Daniel Bryan might be is as good as mine]
"The Republican voter is not attracted to ideas, but has a sense of alienation from elites and mainstream institutions, and simply wants someone loud and obnoxious enough to fight with them. And since he mostly just wants to grill and politics is a secondary concern in his life, he is not tuning in unless the show is particularly entertaining.
"Trump’s cultural predecessors are not previous Republican politicians like Bush or John Boehner. They’re talk radio hosts and TV personalities, except he’s better at their jobs than they ever were. It would be a mistake to try to understand why Rush Limbaugh had a larger audience than National Review by talking about his ideological differences with the magazine. Rush connected with the Republican base in a different way. He had an equal relationship with his audience in the sense that he met them at their level of understanding and sophistication, and used their preferred communication medium, but was also in a superior position in the sense that he was simply louder, fatter, and richer than they were, without trying to hide any of it." - Richard Hanania
"Trump is like a guy with an act that worked brilliantly and then all of a sudden it doesn’t work as well. You tell the same jokes but they don’t have the same punch...He’s struggling..." - James Carville
"Donald Trump has committed the one unforgivable sin of a carnival barker: he has become boring.
This will be the death of him".
- Wajahat Ali
“He’s more like the aging rock star whose fans have kind of faded away, so it’s more like a reunion tour for him. It just doesn’t quite have the spark it had in 2016"
- David Jolly
"People forget that Trump's schtick always wears thin after a time. First season of the Apprentice got 20 million viewers, by season 4 it was down to 10 million viewers, and by season 8 it was below 5 million. Same thing has happened to him in politics."
- Matthew Dowd
"We do not need 4 more years of bluster and bumbling, and chaos. We've seen that movie before, and we all know the sequel is usually worse" - President Obama at the DNC.
Birth of a meme - Trump as Vegas-era Elvis:
"Don’t ignore the evidence of your eyes: Donald Trump is floundering, stumbling, and fumbling. Like a superannuated Fat Elvis, he’s desperately trying to play his greatest hits — Racism! Insults! Bullshit! — but it’s not landing the way it used to, is it?"
- Charlie Sykes, To The Contrary
"[Trump] seems not just old but low-energy, stale, even pathetic. He has become the political version of Fat Elvis." - The Atlantic
"Once you understand that Donald Trump is Fat Elvis—a washed-up playboy at the end of his career who's embarrassing himself daily yet doesn't know it—you can't unsee it. Everything about Trump is sad and broken down and sordid and gauche and over" - Seth Abramson
Mike Scott of The Waterboys goes one further with the analogy:
"We've already seen his every trick, move and gambit, from the lies to the nicknames to the bloody insurrection. He has no more surprises, no more ideas, nithing. Zilch. Nada. Dead Elvis."
^^^^^^^^^^^^^
"A quick overall comment on the last few weeks of American political history:
Whoever the scriptwriters are, they deserve every penny."
- George Conway
versus
"Don’t want to speak too early, but it really does feel like the electorate is ready to return to sane, boring politics.
Enough with the weird entertainment culture"
- Adam Kinzinger
It's worth remembering that the Democrats win if they can get enough people to vote, and the Republicans win if they can dissuade enough people from voting. I'm not denying the importance of the presentation, far from it (that's why Biden had to call it quits), but it's ultimately the metric of turnout.
ReplyDeleteBut there is the question: every person who loathes Trump (let me reassure you that I am one of those people) realises that he's really bad as a salesman for the Trump brand. Why on earth would someone support him? The only comparison I can think of is how scam emails deliberately include bad grammar and typos, so only the poorly educated pay attention.
Yeah I think if Trump loses, it will be because his act is no longer entertaining. He seems to have lost his comic timing. He can't tell a story - self-aggrandising or putting-down the opposition - without losing the thread. I think he is into the late Lenny Bruce stage, when the latter's act was largely about the intricacies of his legal cases. People were just plain bored, and also lost - couldn't follow what he was on about.
Delete