The Trump-Vance campaign would be great if not for Trump and Vance

Like so many wares branded with Donald Trump’s name, his 2024 campaign is a shoddy product in glossy packaging. Trump-Vance 2024 has benefited from savvy marketing. This time around, Trump has enlisted the aid of two of the Republican Party’s premier operatives: Susie Wiles, who masterminded the GOP’s conquest of Florida, and Chris LaCivita, who introduced “swiftboating” into the American vernacular. And the professionalism and ruthless pragmatism of Trump’s new state managers has made itself felt. At the Trump campaign’s direction, the GOP removed calls for banning abortion federally or opposing same-sex marriage from its platform, while adding a pledge to sustain Medicare and Social Security’s existing benefit levels and retirement ages. All these changes brought Republicans into closer alignment with public opinion. At the Republican National Convention, meanwhile, Trump’s team made overtures to various traditionally Democratic constituencies, giving a labor leader and biracial influencer primetime speaking slots. When Democrats put a spotlight on the Heritage Foundation’s “Project 2025” — a compendium of all the conservative movement policy goals for a second Trump White House, including federal abortion restrictions and the criminalization of pornography — the Trump campaign not only disavowed the document, but got its lead author ousted. And recently, Trump has touted heterodox economic policy ideas with some appeal to swing constituencies, such as exempting tips and Social Security benefits from taxation. But sound marketing only gets you so far. And in recent days, Trump and his running mate have made it clear that their campaign is trying to sell a similarly defective product. Their handlers can try to present them as center-right populists who will get tough on immigration, while protecting entitlements and leaving abortion to the states. But let them speak unscripted for long enough, and the weird and hateful nature of their worldviews will shine through. On Wednesday, the GOP nominee participated in a question-and-answer session before the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ). Trump could have used this appearance to advance a few of his campaign’s many sound lines of attack against Kamala Harris: that she once endorsed many exceptionally left-wing policies, such as the decriminalization of border enforcement; that she presided over the highest inflation in four decades; or that she might have publicly downplayed the extent of President Joe Biden’s cognitive decline. Instead, he chose to suggest that Harris is not really Black, since in some contexts she has identified with the heritage of her Indian mother. (Her father is Jamaican.) The vice president “happen[ed] to turn Black,” Trump explained. “She was Indian all the way and all of a sudden she made a turn and she became a Black woman.” Since his exile from Twitter, Trump has had fewer opportunities to advertise his racial insensitivity and personal cruelty on a high-visibility platform. But no campaign consultant could vet Trump’s extemporaneous musings on Harris’s ethnicity before they escaped his mouth. Nor, evidently, could they prevent him from doubling down on this bizarre line of attack in the face of controversy. At a rally in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, Wednesday night, Trump projected on a large overhead screen an image of a news story that described Harris as “Indian-American.” On Thursday, Trump reiterated this attack by posting on Truth Social an old photograph of Harris with several Indian family members, beneath the sardonic message, “Thank you Kamala for the nice picture you sent from many years ago! Your warmth, friendship, and love of your Indian Heritage are very much appreciated!” Trump’s attacks on Harris’s ethnicity are dishonest (and probably counterproductive) It is perhaps misguided to seek some strategic logic in these rancid effusions. To the extent that questioning Harris’s Blackness was a coldly calculated move rather than a thoughtless outburst, its aim is to promote the idea that she is a phony: For most of her life, Trump implicitly argues, Harris’s true, primary ethnic identity was Indian, but she chose to downplay that part of her heritage — and emphasize her Jamaican roots — once she entered Democratic politics, in an inauthentic bid for personal gain. If this argument has a rational purpose, it is to trigger white Americans’ resentment of affirmative action (by insinuating that Harris owes her position to the cynical exploitation of her heritage) while dampening Black voters’ enthusiasm for her candidacy. I cannot say with total certainty that Trump’s attack on Harris’s identity will fail to achieve either of those ends. Trump launched all manner of disgraceful attacks in 2016 and then won the presidency anyway. And current polls suggest he is the slight favorite in this year’s election. But I do not believe that any competent political consultant would encourage Trump to pursue this line of attack. Voters are worried about immigration and inflation. Harris’s record leaves her vulnerable on both fronts. Any day that the media is talking about her ethnic heritage is a day they aren’t talking about the most unpopular positions she took during her 2020 primary campaign. Meanwhile, one of Trump’s biggest liabilities include the perception that he stokes racial division, and therefore is not actually the candidate of order and social calm. Attacking Harris on the basis of her race increases the salience of that liability — especially since the attack in question is transparently mendacious and insincere. Harris attended Howard University, a historically Black college. Her identification as Black therefore long predates her political career. It is Trump who abruptly chose to adopt a manifestly inauthentic social identity once he started running for office: After spending decades as one of America’s most prominent libertines, Trump refashioned himself in 2015 as a devout Christian whose “favorite book” is the Bible. Nevertheless, he proved unable to name a single treasured biblical verse when asked in an interview and flubbed the name of one of the New Testament’s books in a campaign speech. [Media: https://twitter.com/joshcarlosjosh/status/1772709698979930377] J.D. Vance is the most disliked vice presidential candidate on record In any case, Trump’s remarks about Harris were not the only missteps in his appearance before the NABJ. Asked whether his choice for vice president, J.D. Vance, is qualified to assume the duties of the presidency on day one, the 78-year-old Republican nominee declined to say yes, replying instead, “The vice president in terms of the election doesn’t have any impact.” Trump’s eagerness to distance himself from his running mate is understandable. Vance is a similarly difficult commodity to sell. The Ohio senator’s career as a politician has been brief and undistinguished. In 2022, he won election to the Senate by just a six-point margin, even as the GOP’s gubernatorial candidate Mike DeWine won his race by 25 points. The sources of Vance’s underperformance aren’t hard to identify. He has the charisma of a memoirist, not a politician. And he has staked out a wide variety of deeply unpopular and off-putting policy positions, arguing that rape victims should be legally forbidden from receiving abortions since “two wrongs don’t make a right,” and lamenting the imprisonment of January 6 rioters. In recent weeks, Vance’s peculiar contempt for childless women has come to national attention. Democrats have promoted a clip from a July 2021 interview that Vance gave to Tucker Carlson, in which he told the then-Fox News host that the Democratic Party is run by “childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives.” Vance backed up this claim by citing Harris and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg as childless Democrats who, as a result of their childlessness, had no “direct stake” in their country’s future. One problem with Vance’s argument is that Harris has step-children and Buttigieg was in the process of adopting twins in summer 2021. Another problem is that you do not need to have children of your own to have young loved ones (including, say, your nieces or nephews), or to care about improving your country, as an end in itself. And a third problem is that many people who would like to have kids are unable to do so as a result of infertility, and mocking their supposed misery is a weird and offputting thing to do. Actor Jennifer Aniston, who has openly struggled with fertility, highlighted this third point in an Instagram post criticizing Vance’s remarks. The Republican vice presidential candidate then had an opportunity to walk back his years-old comments, express remorse for any hurt his ill-considered remarks may have caused, and explain that what he really meant to say was that we need to make it easier for Americans to start families through better public policy. Instead, he decided to suggest that Aniston had sexualized his toddler because she wrote in her message, “Mr. Vance, I pray that your daughter is fortunate enough to bear children of her own one day.” “Hollywood celebrities say, ‘Oh, well, J.D. Vance, what if your daughter suffered fertility problems?’” Vance said on The Megyn Kelly Show. “Well, first of all, that’s disgusting because my daughter is 2 years old. And second of all, if she had fertility problems, as I said in that speech, I would try everything I could to try to help her because I believe families and babies are a good thing.” None of this has ingratiated Vance to the American people. As CNN’s Harry Enten notes, Vance is the first-ever vice presidential nominee to have a net-negative favorability rating right after being introduced at their party’s convention. And in ABC News’s polling, Vance’s net approval has dropped from -6 points shortly after his nomination to -15 points today. All this said, it remains entirely possible that Trump and Vance will move into the White House next year. Indeed, Trump is still leading Harris in many polls of key battleground states. But if the Republican Party succeeds in winning the presidency this November, it will be in spite of the two men on its ticket, not because of them.