19 Days to Go

Why Trump Works

Had lunch with an old boss of mine today, Ed Kosner, who edited me for six years at New York Magazine. He was the best editor I ever had when it came to figuring out how to cover big running stories, like political campaign—he always had an uncanny sense of where I should go, what I should think about, what readers were curious about—in the very moment. We were a weekly magazine and the turnaround could be quick. It was exhilarating work. So I asked him today, if we were covering this campaign, now, what would he be wanting me to write about—right now, this week? And he said, “Trump—how on earth is he doing this?” We both knew Trump back in the day, back in the 80s…and he was then as he is now, a brilliant fraud. The other real estate developers in New York thought he was a showboat, a huckster, a con artist—and a failure, who kept going bankrupt.

Ed had—as he often did—tweaked something in me, a realization that was so obvious that we tend not to think about it anymore: The reason why so many people like Trump is that he just doesn’t sound like other politicians. He can sound crazy, but his crazy is real. His racial disdain and hatefulness is real, too. His disgust with “the system” is real for a people so coddled they don’t understand how rare and lucky their prosperity is.

The thing with Trump, ever since he called John McCain a failure for having gotten shot down, you just don’t know what he’s going to say next. With other pols, you do. And that is the most important fact about Trump’s career as an American politician: he changed the paradigm and the “pros” don’t seem to have noticed yet.

Politics is a long story. It has evolved over more than 200 years. It has certain traditions, ceremonies, parameters. It does change, over time, and it has changed rapidly in my lifetime, mostly due to developments in the media. There was radio, which introduced the illusion of intimacy into the process—FDR taught a series of speechwriters how to write for the medium. (I’ve looked at his edits of the drafts he was handed—they were non-stop brilliant.) John Kennedy was the first TV president—how you looked and seemed was suddenly important and the intimacy intensified. Cool became necessary. Young Roger Ailes convinced Richard Nixon in 1968 that he would have to—coolly—take tough, negative questions in town meetings that were not canned, in order to rebuild his credibility. The pollster Pat Caddell taught Jimmy Carter that the presidency was a “permanent campaign.” Political consultants—including brilliant rogues like Lee Atwater and James Carville—brought advanced marketing techniques to the fray and became rock stars. Focus groups, dial groups; language was market-tested. Everything was pre-cooked. Even when Bill Clinton took two empathetic steps toward a befuddled questioner in the 1992 Town Hall debate against George H. W. Bush, it was rehearsed in debate prep. Truly inspired performers like Clinton and Barack Obama could, at times, transcend the market-tested straitjacket. Less talented politicians like Hillary Clinton and Mitt Romney could not.

And, over time, the game calcified. The market-tested language sounded all the same. People began to understand sound bites, talking points—it all seemed phony.

And then Donald Trump blew it up.

He did not sound like any other politician in 2016; he doesn’t sound like any other politician now. He lied through his teeth, but—if I can take a bit of a leap here—they sounded like honest lies, things he really believed. He really did believe his Inauguration crowd was larger. He really did believe he couldn’t have lost the election in 2020. I’m not sure that he believes that January 6 was a “day of love,” but his supporters are inured to his peculiar kinds of truths, comforted by them. This makes him no less a sociopath, no less ignorant about the processes of government or economics or war. It doesn’t make him any less of a hand-puppet for Vladimir Putin, but it does enable people to say, “Well, I don’t agree with him on that, but at least he’s honest about what he’s thinking.” Even when he’s lying more than I ever thought possible for a public person. They like the honesty of his playground dishonesty.

But here’s the amazing thing: the political pros, the pollsters and consultants tasked with coming up with the next new thing have come up with nothing to counter or even acknowledge the revolution wrought by Trump’s style. They are still playing their old games in ever more shiny and cryptic ways. Voters are micro-targeted now; there is AI; there are deepfakes. But politicians still sound exactly the same. This is especially true of Kamala Harris, about whom I’ll have more to say below.

Why the stultification? I remember talking to Lee Atwater in 1988—mostly about the Blues, but also about the glee he experienced when his oppo team discovered that Michael Dukakis had allowed the children of Jehovah’s Witnesses not to say the Pledge of Allegiance. “You really think that’s gonna make a difference?” I asked. Silly me. And talk about glee and honesty: James Carville is still bringing it 40 years later. But their essential business has remained the same. The Consultant-Pollster-Industrial complex rules the roost the same way the Military-Industrial complex does—just listen to David Petraeus talk about the iron-clad conformity that is preventing us from innovating our defense arsenal on our latest Night Owls podcast.

But there’s hope for the military-industrial complex. We may still be making bombers we don’t need, but you can retool assembly lines—or simply avoid them by retooling cyber-space. You can’t retool political consulting to build in spontaneity. It’s bad for business. You can’t tell your candidates “sound more like Trump”—that is, fresh, if you haven’t shown them focus groups responding to market-tested Trumpish language. And people know that that market-tested Trumpish language sounds phony. No no no, consultants: your candidates have to be spontaneous without you, on their own. Your mission, if you see fit to perform it, is to let them know, post-spontaneity, what worked and what didn't. Your job is now retrospective, not prospective. Not as powerful, but perhaps more useful.

If actual spontaneous moments happen in nature, as one did earlier in the summer when Tim Walz called Trump and J.D. Vance “weird,” the impact can be ginormous—and then quickly washed away as the media and other Dems tried to pick it up, repeat it and make it boring. Yes, Trump repeats himself—past ad nauseam—but there’s a steady flow of new outrages that are so impolitic that they must be real. Ten years later, he seems as ugly and brutal…and fresh, as ever.

So why is Trump doing so well, even though he’s a dangerous charlatan? Because he broke the paradigm of American politics—and no one else has been able to figure out how to do it, not even those like Ron DeSantis who mechanically tried to replicate Trump’s policies. People don’t care about Trump’s policies—except for the cultural ones, the ones that hit close to the bone. They care about Trump. They care because he sounds nothing like other politicians. The others sound antique, transparent, purposely opaque—so 20th century. He may be a one-off, but I’m willing to bet there are young politicians of both parties watching this now and seeing exactly what is happening—that you don’t need to massage every word, that you can say outrageous stuff if it comes from your guts, that you can make mistakes—say stupid things—and live to fight another day. If you have guts. If you’re willing to be, embarrassingly, real.

Which brings me to Kamala Harris and last night…

Fox Outfoxed?

Well, if it was more a debate than an interview, Bret Baier lost, but I’m not sure Kamala Harris won much of anything on Fox last night. She was tough and composed throughout. Baier was prohibitively rude, which was at variance with his nightly attempt to portray himself as an actual journalist. He might have, at the outset, let Harris answer his first, very good question about why the Biden Administration had ended Trump’s “remain in Mexico” policy for asylum seekers, a policy that opened the illegal floodgates, but he didn’t let her finish a sentence. Left to twist slowly—or interrogated in a more respectful fashion—Harris might have been forced into an inconvenient truth: That the Biden policy had been wrong.

Of course, she could have ju-jitsued it: “Yeah, Brett, we made a mistake on that one and then we tried to rectify it by passing a bill that Senate Republicans essentially wrote. It would have closed down the border. But Donald Trump blocked it…and so we had to take executive action to close it down. And we have done that. The border is now closed.”

Why can’t politicians do that? Oh, I remember: the headlines. Harris Steps Away From Biden on Border!!! Which would have been a good thing for her campaign—it would have shown independence and a willingness to tell inconvenient truths. She needs that to close the deal. I would guess that it is a requirement. Hubert Humphrey nearly overtook Richard Nixon in 1968 when he broke with his boss, Lyndon Johnson, on Vietnam. (And by the way, having “a” Republican—Secretary of Transportation, inevitably—in her Cabinet isn’t the most thrilling diversion from the Biden path.)

There were two other items of interest in the interview. One was Harris utilizing Glenn Thrush’s reporting in The New York Times: Trump allowed sex-change treatment for prisoners at taxpayer expense when he was President. And I suppose this was only humane, in the case of hormone treatments. There are complexities to sex-change procedures that defy all or nothing positions, apparently. But Trump allowed federal prisons to have them done. End of issue…except for the larger question of how we, as a society, allowed this dangerous fad to become a temptation for our children.

But Harris’s best moment came when Baier tried to cheat. It was the moment when she brought up Trump’s despicable “enemy within” demagoguery and Baier ran a rather milquetoasty clip of Trump joking about it. In one of her best moments as a candidate—lightning fast, too—Harris said: “Bret, I’m sorry, and with all due respect, that clip was not what he has been saying about ‘the enemy within’—that he has repeated, when he is speaking about the American people. That’s not what you just showed.” (Memo to Harris’s handlers: If she can do that, you can let her off the leash.)

Here, in fact, is what Trump said in that very same interview:

It is the enemy from within. And they’re very dangerous. They’re Marxists and communists and fascists, and they’re sick. I use a guy like Adam Schiff . . . They’re dangerous for our country. We have China, we have Russia, we have all these countries—if you have a smart president they can all be handled. The more difficult are, you know, the Pelosis—these people, they’re so sick and they’re so evil.

Then she really unloaded on Baier:

And here’s the bottom line. He has repeated it many times, and you and I both know that. And you and I both know that he has talked about turning the American military on the American people. He has talked about going after people that are engaged in peaceful protest. He has talked about locking people up because they disagree with them. This is a democracy. And in a democracy, the president of the United States, in the United States of America, should be willing to be able to handle criticism without saying he’d lock people up for doing it. And this is what is at stake.

Now, if she were Trump she might have taken an even greater risk, she might have gone outside the box, torn down the wall between the commentators and the audience: “Bret, why do you Fox folks have to do this? You can’t believe this sort of misleading and destructive crap is good for our country. The guy won’t even do a debate on your network. He’s scared. Remember how Megyn Kelly mauled him in 2016. Aren’t you a little embarrassed, Bret, to be carrying this water?”

It might not have worked. But it would have been real. Kamala Harris, right now, has less than 19 days to compete on a playing field that Donald Trump has created. It is time for her to take off the shackles. It is time for her to get real.