“The bullet hit Trump – but it killed Joe Biden. The single gunshot that changed the trajectory of the world.” The front page headline in The New European issue of July 18-24 was arguably the most striking in the wake of the July 13 bid to assassinate the former president at a Pennsylvania campaign rally. Inside, beneath the headline, “It didn’t kill him, it made him stronger,” Matthew D’Ancona wrote, “the iconography of Trump’s defiance – and how it speaks to the American psyche – make it even more important that Biden quits.”
It was a view I shared, even as someone who once knew Donald Trump quite well personally in his pre-political days and has long argued in print and on air his unfitness to be POTUS. But that iconic image of Trump, face bloodied, fist raised, emerging from a scrum of Secret Service agents and mouthing “Fight, fight, fight” seemed, as I told one US broadcast station, to have “sealed the deal on recapturing the White House”.
Trump the unifier?
Inevitably, the Republican National Convention days later to confirm The Donald as its presidential candidate became more a cultish ‘Messianic’ religious festival, almost a deification, than anything else. It had been preceded by too easily swallowed media briefings that his narrow escape from death had miraculously transformed Trump from the divisive to the unifying electoral force.
Headlines in print and on news bulletins on both sides of the Atlantic trumpeted lines like… ‘A Changed Trump’… ‘Can Trump United the US?’ … ‘Trump: We must heal discord’… ‘A new Don: Trump preaches unity, vows to heal divided America’ interspersed with more realistically cynical ones like ‘A politically cunning transformation’.
But more eagle-eyed journalists, including longtime Trump-watcher Nicky Woolf, observed the ‘Don the Unifier’ spin story literally unravel before their eyes and ears during the former president’s convention speech.
Writing for the July 25-31 New European edition, Woolf reported: “From where I was sitting, I could see the teleprompter. I watched the text scroll, early on, through empty platitudes like; ‘I am running to be president for all of America, not half of America’ and ‘the discord and division in our society must be healed’ and ‘as Americans we are bound together by a single fate and a shared destiny, we rise together or we fall apart’.”
But as Woolf reported, the longer the speech went on and Trump went off piste, reverting to his trademark vitriol, rambling about “insane asylum immigrants and murderers”, and the incomprehensible “Has anyone seen The Silence of the Lambs? The late. Great Hannibal Lecter. He’d love to have you for dinner.” (No, me neither). It also veered into reigniting the ‘Stolen Election’ shtick while, behind the Milwaukee convention platform, Trump was said to have assured far right groups like The Proud Boys that if elected he would pardon all those jailed over the January 6 insurrection storming of Capitol Hill. In return, the Proud Boys and similar groups hint that a Trump defeat on November 6 could spark a violent response.
At 92 minutes long, it was a convention speech worthy of the marathons delivered by Putin and Xi, the kind of autocrats The Donald is known to admire, or at least envy. Lest we forget that Trump not so long ago announced that if re-elected he would not be “a dictator, apart from day one”. Encouragingly, perhaps, the US TV ratings agency Nielsen reported that more than 20% of viewers had switched off well before the end, They also reported that 8m fewer people tuned in than for the previous record long convention speech delivered by – guess who? – Donald Trump in 2016.
Trump win in the bag?
The combination of the assassination bid, the convention, the state of Joe Biden’s health and the Trump factor itself meant much greater British newspaper and broadcast focus on a US election than normal so far ahead of the November poll. Most of the coverage accepting the apparent inevitability of a Trump victory, in some cases resenting it or in others, including Boris Johnson in his Daily Mail columns, applauding it and bizarrely predicting a returning President Trump would stand by Ukraine, no matter President Zelensky fearing the opposite.
Johnson, Liz Truss and – of course – Nigel Farage popped up as attendees at the convention, although the former two found themselves speaking to near-empty side room events, with very little media projection. Farage settled for a backroom happy snap, gurning alongside his hero Trump and immediately pumped out by Reform’s PR operation.
None of the above did much to shift my grim expectation of a Trump victory on November 6 until the Sunday night Joe Biden reluctantly bowed to the pressure from the Clintons, the Obamas, Nancy Pelosi, George Clooney and the brutal reality of a donor drought developing and announced he wouldn’t stand for re-election and effectively nominated VP Kamala Harris. Suddenly the game has changed and the campaign turbocharged into uncertainty and a genuine contest.
Trump the liability?
It isn’t just the Trump camp who are rattled by the prospect of their man being the word-mangling gerontocrat but a global media both intrigued and energised by the 59-year old ‘Prosecutor versus the 78-year old Convicted Felon’ pitch promoted by a reinvigorated Democrat party campaign machine.
In the UK, the current Economist magazine front page carries Kamala Harris’s image with the headline: CAN SHE WIN? It invites, perhaps, echoes of Obama’s game changing ‘Yes, We Can’ electoral slogan.
In an editorial, the Economist acknowledges the steep scale of the challenge she faces, not least given Biden’s belated decision to pull out, but it also argues that as the ‘first black and South Asian woman to run for the presidency it could, if handled right, make her a compelling symbol of the American dream’ and propel her to the White House against an opponent steeped in scandals, legal battles and deeply unpopular beyond his worshipping base.
Certainly, early polls suggest that Harris is motivating Gen-Z, Millennial, black and Hispanic voters who were unwilling to vote for an ailing Joe Biden. While still narrowly trailing Trump in some crucial swing states, the momentum – at least for now – is with Kamala Harris. Some national polls suggest she’s closed Trump’s 6-point lead in a week. ‘Harris Honeymoon’ or ‘sustainable shift’ is the big question? She’s been boosted too by embracing the social media ‘Kamala IS Brat’ craze inspired by British pop star Charli XCX which the Harris campaign team are smartly playing for all it’s worth even if they’d never heard of the Mercury prize nominated 31-year old before this month.
Polls on both sides of the Atlantic, including The Times here, suggest that while a small majority of US men don’t welcome the idea of a first female POTUS they are clearly outnumbered by women who do. It makes Kamala Harris’s powerful stance on women’s abortion rights (much stronger than Joe Biden’s in fact) potentially the decisive issue among female voters that swings them behind her and against Trump and propels her into the White House.
Trump’s questionable VP choice
So much so that some senior Republican figures are now openly questioning Trump’s choice of the uber divisive Ohio senator and ‘Hillbilly Elegy’ author JD Vance as his VP running mate, a choice urged on him by his son, Donald Jr.
Even Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal’s editorial board has come up with this Opinion stance: “Donald Trump’s choice of 39 year old JD Vance as his running mate was supposed to present the GOP ticket as modern and looking to the future. Instead, the campaign has found itself playing defence against Mr Vance’s censorious views about women who don’t have children. As a Senate candidate in 2021, he said the ‘US is being run by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices they’ve made, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable too’. That sounds like he was referring to Vice President Kamala Harris, who has two step-children but none of her own. The comment is the sort of smart-aleck crack that gets laughs in certain right wing male precincts. But it doesn’t play well with millions of female voters, many of them Republicans, who will decide the presidential race.”
Some Republican strategists admit to concern over how effectively Team Harris and their “liberal media allies” can deploy Vance’s past history of hostility to Trump with such depictions as ‘America’s Hitler’, ‘Cultural Heroin’ and ‘morally reprehensible’.
Unsurprisingly, the Harris team have made sure those remarks, along with Vance and Trump’s anti-abortion rights history, has gone viral and will make it a major plank of her campaign strategy. Along with Trump’s ‘Truth Social’ website accusations that Harris’s stronger than Biden stance with Israel over the Gaza civilian carnage makes her an ‘antisemite’, ignoring the inconvenient fact her attorney husband is himself Jewish.
Democrat strategists are also targeting Trump’s recent remark that if elected in 2024, America won’t need a 2028 election. With the implication he could seek to amend the Constitution to enable himself a third term or, as one critical senior judge has even suggested turn himself into the equivalent of a ‘king’.
Signs of disarray in a Trump campaign team that had been organised on the basis that Joe Biden wouldn’t bow out and would prove a vulnerable, befuddled opponent has come with suggestions they may refuse future TV debates with Harris, bizarrely portraying her as an ‘illegitimate’ candidate who benefited from a ‘coup’ against Biden!
But as one senior Harris strategist tells me: “We look forward to debating and winning against Trump in a prosecutor versus convicted felon debate about the future of American democracy against a man who wants to establish an American autocracy. But if he really does run scared and refuse to debate then I reckon the Great American Public will decide who the winner really is.”
The Financial Times gave another boost on Monday with its July 29 front page headline ‘Harris raises $200m in first week of ‘record shattering’ election campaign.’ Suddenly the Democrat donations that were drying up as Joe Biden clung on have turned into a flood outscoring those for Trump, a bitter blow for a man consumed by being the ‘big bucks’ candidate.
Harris is now scheduled to make the vital pick of her Veep running mate next week. The choice rests between two key swing state politicians, Arizona senator and decorated ex-navy combat pilot and astronaut Mark Kelly and Josh Shapiro, the governor of Pennsylvania who manages to be popular with Republicans as well as Democrats.
Trump likely to play it dirty
While an Observer leader (July 28th) supporting Harris, lauded the ‘speed and single-minded way in which she had silenced doubters and secured the nomination. It urged her to capitalise on her record of championing voting rights, climate change action and leading opposition to the Trump-appointed Supreme Court that overturned Roe v Wade and effectively robbed women of their reproductive rights. But it was also at pains to warn: “No one should doubt Harris faces an uphill battle. Trump is a vicious, unscrupulous, resourceful opponent, already calling her a ‘bum’ and a ‘radical left wing lunatic’ while ‘disrespectfully’ mispronouncing her name. Without specifically saying so, the latter point echoes Trump’s infamous ‘birthing’ slur when he tried to suggest Obama wasn’t really an American.
The powerful Observer leader concludes: “Trump’s choice of JD Vance, a far right white nationalist as running mate, is an indicator of the coming misogynist, sexist and racist election onslaught to come. If they sense they are losing, Trump and his Republicans will go lower and dirtier. Harris and America are better than that. She must rise above it – and win.”
If nothing else, the US, UK and global media can look forward to covering a far more exciting cliffhanger election than the Trump shoo-in the polls had forecast before Joe Biden bit his own electoral bullet.
For those of us who’ve long argued that Donald Trump was never fit to be POTUS and that US democracy and western democracy generally hinges on the outcome of November 6, that can only be good news. And while they can never risk saying so publicly, you can bet that Sir Keir Starmer and Foreign Secretary David Lammy, to name but two, are privately hoping Kamala Harris really is changing the name of the game.
