It’s a ‘Vibes’ Election Now, and for Trump That’s Bad

T o begin with a home truth: Nothing about the 2024 presidential election has been even remotely worthwhile — despite its having been anything but predictable — because nothing about it has felt the slightest bit real. It’s been a wild, politically substanceless affair, and to no good end; to paraphrase one noted critic, it’s felt like riding a rollercoaster into your own grave. I’m willing to qualify that by adding “in my opinion,” but if you disagree, I can only ask, with mild disbelief: What in particular is it that you have found edifying about the process to date? The Republican primary had almost no ideological content whatsoever, and served merely as a coronation for Trump. (Witness the casual ease with which he disposed of so many core conservative planks of the party.) The Democratic contest was a puppet show designed to hide a sick man from view until it was too late.

Even as recently as June of this year, things felt vaguely surreal. America was being served recycled candidates desired only by the base of their party electorates: two men who had nothing new to say either to one another or to American voters but who had somehow only gotten ghastlier and weirder since the last time we were asked to vote for them. The entire experience felt akin to an old ’80s Nintendo game where in later levels you encounter a palette-swapped version of the Stage 2 boss, except this time with horns and a tail drawn on as well. So back around mid June the campaign seemed destined to be about nothing at all, just two old men barking about the past rather than the future. (I took to calling it “Nick at Nite” in private.)

After one calendar month of earthshaking political news, everything is different and yet everything is curiously the same. Biden is gone, Kamala Harris has taken his place, the momentum has entirely shifted in the race, and everything still feels equally as unreal as before — except for the stakes. The newest batches of swing-state polls are in, and what’s clear is that Trump’s momentum in this race has been entirely halted, if not reversed. We are left with campaigns equally as substanceless as before, equally as driven by “vibes.” Yes, even Harris’s defenders are willing to freely admit: Forget about her policy positions from 2020, some of which would have had Venezuela’s Maduro raising an eyebrow. It’s now the vibes election.

And for Donald Trump, the vibes are bad.

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Imagine how weirdly disorienting the month of July must have felt for Team MAGA: For once things were looking undeniably up, in a way they never have. After Biden’s debate meltdown in late June, his already-poor polling bottomed out, and the media drumbeat to oust him began. I, myself, as a conservative political observer since 1994, had never seen anything like it in living memory: a panicked media furiously cannibalizing a Democratic candidate for president as his public image cratered and he stumbled from one public speaking disaster to the next.

Then Donald Trump nearly got assassinated on live television — and responded in a heroic way. The election seemed over. I remember telling a friend, “I really wish I could be enjoying this more than I am,” and the reason wasn’t just because I regarded the entire sequence of events as a series of national disgraces. It was also because anyone could see over the horizon and understand that Biden would have to go, the pick would have to default to Kamala Harris . . . and then? Trump was always going to be Trump — not even a bullet to the ear could cure that — and with a new candidate, even one as flawed as Harris, who knew what could unfold next?

We know now. Nate Silver will tell you, based on the latest polls, that it’s a coin-flip race — pay attention to him, for his model is robust and he says what he thinks is true rather than what people want him to say — and the momentum is clearly moving in Harris’s direction. You can see that Trump is panicking as well. Two days ago, writing about Harris’s curiously hollow-centered campaign for the presidency, I ended on this note:

Donald Trump is in Chicago today of all places, joining what promises to be an extremely interesting Q and A at the yearly convention of the National Association of Black Journalists. . . . Trump fans should pray that if he makes news today it’s only for giving away the store politically, as opposed to accidentally alienating an entire voter demographic.

Well, I did not figure he would make news by questioning Kamala Harris’s blackness to open the conversation. Noah Rothman covered the entire affair crisply, but the incident is worth lingering over because it well illustrates what Trump looks like as an off-balance, desperate counterpuncher: clumsily flailing and packing nails into his gloves. Most of you were probably stunned by the crude and immediate attack on Harris’s biracial identity — that she has been content to characterize herself at times as Indian-American as well as black. One might reasonably ask: “Why not? She is.” Me, I’m a baseball fan, so it reminds me of Gary Sheffield churlishly arguing that he was a better exemplar of minority success than Derek Jeter — while they were teammates! — because, in Sheffield’s view, “Derek Jeter ain’t all the way black.”

This is not an alien discourse within certain segments of the black community, for those unaware. And that is why when Trump later took to TruthSocial to continue hammering on it insanely, in one frothy post — and, alas, Laura Loomer retweet — after another, it was obvious this was some piece of demographic information his team had fed him and he had decided must be disseminated to the public. In the way that only Donald Trump can, because it is all Donald Trump knows.

Pause for a moment to note the sheer brutal efficiency with which the Harris campaign has managed to publicly assassinate the character of J. D. Vance without leaving even a single fingerprint on the scene of the stabbing. Vance — a working-class, bookish Marine veteran with a remarkable life story embodying uplift — has become, in the public imagination, everybody’s chubby, vaguely greasy college roommate who hides in his room all weekend long and only comes out for a new box of Kleenex. It’s pure defamatory nonsense, all of it based on internet lies, and it was absolutely a strategy masterminded by cynical opposition researchers. It’s not fair — not in the slightest — but it is how the dirty work of politics is done.

Now contrast that approach to Trump’s, which is to walk right into the middle of the room and toss an enormous pile of dank Forbidden Discourse on the table and dare you to pick amongst the steaming offal for something edible. Which approach will triumph among women and educated suburban swing voters? It’s the sort of move someone pulls only when they know they are on the back foot: when the momentum in the match has perceptibly shifted, the opponent is closing aggressively and unexpectedly, and undisciplined instincts inevitably revert to blindly defending alternating with blindly lashing out. Trump still has a puncher’s chance in the race, but not as long as he keeps throwing wild blows that hit nothing but air.

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For it would be self-defeating folly to credit Kamala Harris’s sudden ascent in the polls solely to the mainstream media. Not only does that stink like all such excuses for perpetual failure (the big bad media is always going to be arrayed against Republican candidates, after all), it also ignores the obvious reality that the Republican Party’s primary electorate wittingly chose Donald Trump, again. They asked for this. Americans said in poll after poll all throughout 2023 that the one presidential matchup they least wanted to face in 2024 was Donald Trump (whom they knew, and hated) and Joe Biden (whom they knew, and hated). The Democratic Party’s grandees and — even more significantly — the Republican Party’s primary voters decided to force that choice on them anyway. Are you surprised the people still want neither?

I well recall Rich Lowry musing last year, on an episode of The Editors, that the first party to replace its presumptive presidential candidate with anyone else — Justin Trudeau, an inanimate carbon rod, anyone — would be the party to win the 2024 election. It was an insight that cut to the core of the disgust that Americans have empirically demonstrated toward both of these graspingly geriatric retreads. As bad as Kamala Harris is — despite all her howlingly crazy positions, her fear of unscripted questions, her general incompetence and boozy cackle — she has one key advantage for these voters: She is not Joe Biden and she is not Donald Trump. (She is, in fact, willing to be anything you want her to be, gentle voter.)

In a morally and spiritually exhausted nation, it is looking like that may be enough: a substance-free decision again, but one made instinctively by Americans eager to turn the page on an entire messy chapter of failure in recent history. So is this a vibes race? Of course it is — from start to finish we have been arguing about imagery as opposed to policy substance. It’s telling that in the one legitimately pressing domestic-policy crisis of the Biden era — the border — Harris just released an ad claiming somehow to be “tougher on illegal immigration” than Donald Trump. It is a perfect emblem of the zone of total unreality in which this campaign is being conducted, one governed only by prevailing winds for lack of any true ballast. And now the weather has shifted in this race, toward something that at least looks from a distance to be new.