Harris vs. Trump and the (Joyful) Revenge of Reality
Kamala Harris/X
Lisa Van Dusen
August 13, 2024
Contrast is a key ingredient of any election campaign, and in US presidential campaigns is always especially pronounced. In a country where political polarization is leveraged as a tactical asset and propaganda fuels that polarization, drawing distinctions with one’s opponent isn’t just a thing, it’s a political necessity.
After stepping aside July 21st for the sake of his country, President Joe Biden should now get a second Presidential Medal of Freedom, a Profile in Courage award, and a Nobel Peace Prize for that choice, unleashing as it did a pent-up Democratic and democratic passion for beating Donald Trump so potent that it could not abide the possibility not so much of Biden’s candidacy but of any candidate who may not be able to finish the job.
What’s become clear since Vice President Kamala Harris stepped in as Democratic nominee is that the lack of contrast daylight that was left between Biden and Trump as two 80-year-old (more or less) white (again, more or less…we didn’t know Trump was orange until he happened to turn orange) male candidates after months of tactical conflation (long story) was a problem distinct from any question of cognitive weakness on Biden’s part or apparent delusional disorder on Trump’s.
There’s a reason why the most crowd-pleasing piece of Harris’s stump speech is the “I know Donald Trump’s type” section. It’s the one that begins with, “As many of you know, before I was elected vice president and before I was elected a United States senator, I was an elected attorney general and an elected district attorney. And before that, I was a courtroom prosecutor.”
The delineation of moral distance that follows the word “prosecutor” between Harris as a buster of perpetrators of sexual abuse, fraud and scammery and Trump as a sexually abusing, 34-counts-of-fraud perpetrator provides an overwhelming contrast between a candidate who has spent her career enforcing and upholding the law and a candidate whose career has been spent piling up rule-breaking trouble for himself, his family and his country.
That contrast goes to the heart of what kind of president voters want and therefore — in this age of perpetual, collective content mind meld — what kind of lives they want to lead, starting with the difference between a one-way daily propaganda assault and a respectful, coherent political discourse. The differences between Harris, who behaves as though she not only loves her country and likes her fellow citizens but actually wants their votes, and Trump, who behaves as though his country is a projection of his ego and voters are not just a means to an end but a captive audience for the unfiltered sludge of an unhinged id, are obvious.
Those differences are both replicated in and reinforced by the contrast between Harris’s running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, and Trump’s running mate, J.D. Vance.
Walz is a former public-school teacher with 24 years of service in the National Guard. On the stump, he combines Biden’s un-fakeable authenticity with the Midwestern bona fides of a Nebraska farm-boy childhood, a Minnesota state championship football coaching trophy and an electability-enhancing avoidance of terms like “bona fides“. Meanwhile, Vance’s record so far as precisely the running mate you’d expect to audition for a job whose previous GOP incumbent was nearly hanged by a rampaging mob incited by his boss speaks for itself.
So, this race presents a contrast in not just policy, personality, temperament, and character but on questions of national identity more crucial than any since Americans voted on whether their fellow human beings should be slave or free. It’s not about childless cat ladies — though thank you, J.D. Vance, for that comedy motherlode — and it’s not about whether Mr. Vance had an inappropriate relationship with a piece of upholstered furniture, consensual or not.
History has proven that in any war in which reality itself becomes a tactical target, sooner or later, reality fights back.
Let’s be clear: in America on July 27th, a Republican presidential candidate promised to eliminate voting. I’ve covered US politics for 25 years as both a columnist and an editor — through the Clinton impeachment, the Florida recounts, the good and bad debates, the gaffes, the Kinsley gaffes, the dog whistle, the hope, the change, the many scandals, “scandals” and, most recently, the sound and fury of Donald Trump. Trust me, vowing to eliminate voting as a campaign promise is new.
Nothing like that bit of pre-emptive caveat emptor — “If you suckers vote to have yourselves disenfranchised, you’ll have only yourselves to blame” — and normal-world political malpractice (so ironic for being such a rare burst of honesty from a relentless geyser of balderdash), has ever happened before. As an explicit, mens rea disclosure of premeditated treason, it should have been disqualifying. If America’s democracy crisis were not bigger than Donald Trump, it might have been.
Yes, one downside of life during an undeclared war on democracy waged via performative propaganda and industrialized BS is that processing a daily deluge of patently ludicrous rubbish is exhausting and, ultimately, boring. But history has proven that in any war in which reality itself becomes a tactical target, sooner or later, reality fights back.
It happened in the US presidential election of 2020 when Biden’s authenticity and patriotism defeated Trump’s antics as a new world order chaos actor. That role has been played across an array of international datelines by an assortment of scenery chewing dictator-divas whose personalities have rationalized national self-harm, human rights obliteration and authoritarian creep: Boris Johnson on Brexit and bad brat-ism; Nicolas Maduro on avoidable economic catastrophe, mass displacement and election stealing; Viktor Orbán on political repression, ubiquitous surveillance, and undermining the EU from within; Benjamin Netanyahu on demeaning democracy, making a mockery of Israel’s right to defend itself by failing to defend it, and squandering the sacred trust of Israel’s moral authority (yes, Hamas…but Hamas were always thugs). International affairs writer Anne Applebaum calls this assortment of weaponized bullies — to which Elon Musk can now be added as a supporting, borderless propaganda actor — Autocracy, Inc. They are all Donald Trump’s type.
While it may come as a shock that a bombastic reality-show impresario would specialize as a president of sorts in performative misrepresentation and deception, Trump’s coup inciting, Supreme Court corrupting political pornography has simply been the American version of an ACME democracy degradation kit operationalized in country after country, thematically tweaked per global division of authoritarian labour and nominal local plausibility.
What Joe Biden did on July 21st was give reality a fighting chance. What Kamala Harris and Tim Walz have done since then is counter a shameless, intelligence-insulting heist with an authentic, joyful, sane and genuinely patriotic movement. In this undeclared war, that’s how reality begins to roar back.
Policy Magazine Associate Editor Lisa Van Dusen has served as a senior writer at Maclean’s, Washington columnist for the Ottawa Citizen and Sun Media, international writer for Peter Jennings at ABC News and an editor at AP National in New York and UPI in Washington.