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It’s quite possible that no presidential challenger in living memory had a better month than Donald Trump had from June 27 to the end of the Republican National Convention. First, Donald Trump showed up at CNN’s headquarters in Atlanta for a presidential debate, only to find himself beating up on a sad old man with a vacant stare on his face. Then, he was treated to weeks of Democrat infighting as they struggled to push out their supposed party leader and fought amongst themselves over who would replace him.

Oh, and he survived an assassination attempt, saved by a timely tilt of the head and (just maybe) the hand of God. Trump’s nigh-miraculous survival wasn’t just good fortune, and it didn’t just give him sympathy and support. It actually gave direct proof of what a great man he is. Placed in dire physical danger, Trump rose to the challenge, refusing to panic and refusing to cower behind his bodyguards. Put to a test that almost no American leaders ever are—the test of being in immediate physical danger—Trump showed true heroism and true leadership.

The Trump-Biden race was headed for a landslide outcome. Forget 270 electoral votes, or even 300. With Old Joe’s mumbling husk still in the race, winning 350 electoral votes was a very real possibility come November.

It’s tough to say goodbye to that possible future because it was a beautiful one.

But hey, no great victory was ever easy.

A few days after the Republican convention came to an end, Democrats finally did what they’d seemed incapable of all year: they took a difficult, decisive step and did so quickly. Within 24 hours of Joe Biden announcing he would not stand for reelection, the party had unanimously pivoted behind Kamala Harris as its new champion.

For many American nationalists, the quick pivot to Kamala was a welcome surprise. A common fear was that Democrats would swap in an entirely new figure like Michelle Obama, letting them cut bait on the unpopular Biden administration and install someone with far better poll numbers. To many, the party’s decision to stick with the least popular VP on record is a stroke of good fortune.

But we must reluctantly pour some cold water on that notion.

Kamala Harris’s arrival has transformed the 2024 election into a toss-up. Forget all talk of a landslide. Kamala has a very real chance of winning the November election by running the most shapeless, messageless, and incomprehensible campaign in American history.

Sound ridiculous? It’s not. As of this writing, in fact, Kamala has pulled slightly ahead of Trump in PredictIt’s election betting market.

“But how could this happen?” you ask. “Her approval numbers are as bad as Biden’s!”

Yeah, not anymore. Already, the astroturf job is taking effect: Kamala’s personal approval numbers are up. Way up, in fact.

Newsweek:

Kamala Harris is now more popular than Joe Biden or Donald Trump have been at any point in the 2024 election cycle, according to a new survey.

A Morning Consult poll of 11,538 registered voters between July 26 and 28 found 50 percent have a favorable view of Harris whilst 46 percent have an unfavorable view. According to the pollster, “Harris’s 4-point net favorability is a higher rating than Biden or Trump have posted all cycle.” … The latest Morning Consult survey [is] significantly higher than the one conducted a week before, when her favorability was 43 percent and 51 percent had an unfavorable perception of her.

What’s going on? At the root, the Democrats’ new opportunity comes down to this: Kamala Harris is one of the phoniest candidates in history, but the special circumstances of 2024 give her a chance to run an entirely phony campaign.

What do we mean?

Kamala Lets Democrats Reset the Issues

Kamala’s entry into the fray has widely been described as a chance to “reset” the presidential race, and that’s true. But this goes beyond simply swapping out one candidate for another. By dumping Biden from the ticket, Democrats have a convenient chance to completely change their posture on every issue where the party is vulnerable.

Consider the issue of cryptocurrency. The Biden Administration, led by Biden SEC Chair Gary Gensler, has been very hostile to crypto, suing exchanges such as Coinbase and Gemini for allegedly operating as illegal, unregistered securities exchanges. This cycle, that hostility came back to bite the Democrats. In 2020, the largesse of scammer Sam Bankman-Fried meant that crypto donations were weighted heavily to the left, but in 2024, millions in crypto donations to Trump have helped narrow the money gap. Not only that, but pro-Trump sentiment in the crypto community has helped fuel the wider pro-Trump shift within the tech world.

Kamala offers a chance to reset that, and Democrats appear to be seizing the opportunity.

FT:

Kamala Harris’s advisers have approached top crypto companies to “reset” relations between her Democratic party and a sector that has come out as an important backer of Donald Trump, her rival for the US presidency.

Members of the vice-president’s team have contacted people close to crypto companies about meeting in recent days, said four people with knowledge of the matter. Those include leading exchange Coinbase, stablecoin company Circle and blockchain payments group Ripple Labs, two of the people said.

While crypto is the most standout example, Kamala can potentially pivot on every issue, and in several cases, it already has. Since the Oct. 7 attacks in Israel, the Biden Administration has awkwardly tried to straddle a middle position in that war, in the process angering both Jewish-Americans and Palestine-sympathizers. Harris, notwithstanding her snub of Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro for VP pick, is more clearly taking a pro-Israel position, aggressively condemning the pro-Palestine mob who burned the flag outside Union Station to protest Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to Congress last week.

The highly unusual situation in which the incumbent president and running mate of the same party are different people allows for Harris to take credit for anything good and distance herself from anything negative or unpopular associated with the Biden regime. She can, for instance, disavow the Biden economy, avoid any blame for its surging inflation, and run on a new platform that is, essentially, “anything good Biden did but nothing bad.”

FT:

The putative Democratic candidate is already embracing the most popular parts of Joe Biden’s plans and legislative achievements while drawing a contrast with Trump’s proposals — and hoping that she will be less tarnished than the president by the cost of living crisis that has unfolded in recent years.

Current and former Biden administration officials say Harris is expected to continue with Biden’s plan of investing in the country’s manufacturing sector, patching up infrastructure and incentivising green energy.

But she will also focus heavily, and possibly more forcefully, on the so-called “care economy”: increasing access to childcare, paid family leave and funding for education — plans that Biden was unable to get through Congress.

Perhaps most importantly, Harris may be a more effective defender of the Biden administration’s economic policies to American voters than the president himself in the face of relentless attacks from Republicans, including Trump, who blamed him for runaway prices.

It’s a truly shameless ploy, which a campaign can’t ordinarily do, especially this late in the game. If Joe Biden or Donald Trump were to nakedly disavow their own policy from two months ago for purposes of political expediency, they would be savaged. But as a brand-new candidate, Kamala is getting a pass, letting Democrats tweak their platform to respond to public sentiment far closer to Election Day than normal.

The Media Is Ready to Let Kamala Run a Friction-Free Campaign

The month of July was a strange, almost gravity-defying time for those on the political right. For the first time in years, America’s press apparatus was in clear, full-blown conflict with the leadership of the Democrats. For the first time that anyone alive can even remember, the press took all the narrative manipulation and investigative pressure they routinely use against the right and deployed it squarely against a Democrat administration.

For weeks, Joe Biden was determined to stay at the top of the ticket. He made one statement after another, saying as much. He gave multiple interviews to demonstrate his resolve and prove his competence. In other circumstances, the left-wing press would have received the memo and eased up to avoid weakening Biden too much. But this time, they held firm. Every gaffe and struggle was highlighted. After years of quiet, there were suddenly countless sourced stories detailing troubling signs of Biden’s deficiencies going back months or years.

But this was no permanent upgrade to the press’s sincerity. Instead, it was just an operation to take down a candidate the press didn’t want. Now that Kamala is in, the press is dutifully stepping into a supporting PR role with renewed enthusiasm.

Kamala has lost a whopping 92 percent of her first-year staff, yet nobody seems interested in interviewing any of Harris’s former employees about why they all left. Kamala slept her way into some of her earliest jobs, yet there doesn’t seem much interest in that topic. Most jarring of all, the same press that hounded every stutter by Biden is now totally indifferent to Kamala making official remarks like this:

If the press wanted to, they could demand that Kamala show proof of competency, ideas, or literally anything. Instead, so far, nothing has happened. Don’t expect that to change. We’re back to the same press that ignored the Hunter Biden laptop: calculated avoidance of Democrat weaknesses is the historical normal.

RFK Voters Now Hurt Trump More

Early in the year, it was looking like Robert Kennedy Jr.’s presidential run could be the first third-party run since Ross Perot to eclipse ten percent. While polls showed RFK taking similar amounts of support from both Biden and Trump, there was ample reason to think he hurt Biden more. RFK was a former Democrat; he was particularly popular with Hispanics and young people, and he could appeal to people who were simply disgusted with the incumbent president but not willing to take a leap to the Republicans.

But amid all the drama of the past two months, including the possibility of more sex scandals on the horizon, RFK’s numbers have crashed.

NY Mag:

In the RealClearPolitics averages of national presidential polls that include Kennedy and other non-major-party candidates, RFK Jr. dropped from 8.7 percent before Biden withdrew from the race to 5.8 percent now. Looking at longer trends, Kennedy was at 10.3 percent in the RCP averages as recently as July 6. So it’s been a pretty steep downward drop for the former Democrat. And in terms of his personal favorability, he’s been struggling for a while. FiveThirtyEight’s averages showed RFK Jr.’s favorability ratio going underwater on May 14, and is now at 33.7 percent favorable–41.5 percent unfavorable.

While both candidates do gain from RFK’s decline, it looks like the Democrats are the bigger beneficiaries. The Kamala campaign has given Democrats a stronger focus on the youth vote, and she offers voters who simply refused to back the incumbent an excuse to get back on side.

In contrast, nothing in particular has happened to encourage Trump-leaning RFK supporters to return. And so, while RFK’s overall poll numbers have plummeted, multi-way polling indicates that those who remain are drawing significantly more from Trump’s potential base of support than Kamala’s.

The most damaging of all might be the fact that Trump and RFK met in person to discuss a possible endorsement, but it didn’t actually happen. Such negotiations signal that RFK is closer to Trump than he is to the Democrat slate, encouraging natural Trump voters to defect while pushing potential RFK voters on the left to stay away.

Kamala Has No Real Identity—And That’s a Good Thing

Bernie Sanders and democratic socialism. AOC and the Green New Deal. Gretchen Whitmer and being the Dolores Umbridge of Michigan. Josh Shapiro and being a kosher Zionist.

Most Democrats who have been national figures for multiple years have a political brand. They have issues and constituencies they are associated with. They are seen as far-left or centrist. They represent reformist or old-fashioned factions of the party.

Kamala Harris, though, is a void of her own making. Even Democrats noticed it: When she was on Joe Biden’s ticket, nobody on her own campaign could figure out what her real nature was.

As an AG, Kamala signaled a tough posture by going after marijuana and the parents of truant kids. As a senator, she was the most liberal person around. When she ran for president, she couldn’t figure out if she was an identity politics gremlin, a far-left crusader, or a centrist coalition builder. As vice president, she’s been shuffled from issue to issue and doesn’t even want to own a particular one.

In a normal election, this would be bad. It’s why Kamala flopped in the primaries—there was nobody who organically liked her over some other Democrat.

But this isn’t a normal election. Instead, Kamala has simply been airdropped into the race, with no debate to be had and only three months to go. And that means Kamala’s very chameleon-like nature is actually something of an asset.

It’s sometimes pointed out that, in the polls, “Generic Democrat” or “Generic Republican” will outperform a candidate with an actual name because voters can simply use the “generic” label to fill in their ideal candidate. In this unusual, abbreviated election, Kamala might be pulling that off. She has no real expectations. Democrats can treat her as a fantasy blank slate. Kamala is the generic Democrat, and in a short race, that’s helping.

The two weeks since Kamala took over the Democrat ticket have been jarring in the sheer amount of vapidity that has defined her ticket. Without a vote and almost without debate, the Democrats are foisting her onto the country. One might think some introductions are in order. Yet so far, Kamala hasn’t given a single adversarial interview, and she has shunned even potentially favorable environments like the National Association of Black Journalists conference.

When Donald Trump entered the 2015 race, he immediately made it about his chosen key issues: the border, foreign wars, and so on. Kamala Harris’s debut, meanwhile, has centered on her being… “brat.”

The word of the year, it turns out, is “vibes.” Kamala Harris has no accomplishments, no identity, and no causes. What she has is “vibes.”

On Twitter, user “Coddled Affluent Professional” speculated that this might embody an entirely new, Gen-Z form of post-politics:

Kamala might just be successful and usher in a new regime of retarded, vibes-based politics where politicians are memetic spectacles, have no platform, make no promises, hold no opinions, but are explicitly aligned with (and captured by) this or that set of powerful interests who will be the ones actually doing politics opaquely out of public view.

This arrangement worked well with Biden except that he reminded everyone of death and dementia every time they looked at him and he was nostalgic for organized labor. The trick was to find someone with the superficial surface appeal of Obama but who was 40 IQ points stupider, more cynical, and who had no thoughts of their own.

That millennials lose political power with this sort of arrangement is actually fine with them because, despite their protestations, the conflict and grubbiness and oppositional behavior required for effective politics makes them feel anxious and psychologically unwell and they’d prefer to cheer something on as a group rather than disagree and negotiate and actually have to do politics.

So, I think people make a mistake when they say Kamala doesn’t have a base because there’s a big contingent of the over medicated, over socialized who have no real political interests or material needs and who only feel well psychologically cheering on ‘social progress.’ She is the candidate for them.

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This “vibes-based” politics extends to Harris’s choice of vice president, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz. The choice of Walz is based almost entirely on an image he can project at a completely superficial glance.

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Walz is a man meant to look a certain part. He hunts! He coached football! He was in the military! He’s a 60-something white guy! Can’t you feel how moderate and sensible he is?

Just like with Kamala, it’s an impression that can’t survive even a minute’s inspection. Walz stuck tampons in boys’ bathrooms and passed a “trans sanctuary” law that encourages parents to kidnap kids from other states. Walz oversaw the largest COVID-related fraud in the country, letting the state’s Somali community loot $250 million for fraudulent children’s meals while state regulators did nothing. Walz froze and did nothing for an entire day after the mayor of Minneapolis begged him to send the National Guard to contain the George Floyd riots. And, just for added flavor, there’s the whole thing about Walz abandoning his unit ten minutes before they deployed to Iraq.

But hey, he wears orange sometimes in the fall. Kamala’s campaign is betting that’s enough to win moderates.

Is all of the above unfathomably, almost incomprehensibly stupid? Yes. Could it be true anyway? Maybe, but probably not. American presidential campaigns are two-year ordeals. Nobody is going to run a multi-year campaign solely on substance-free “vibes.”

But you know who could get away with it? A candidate who only has to campaign for 100 days.

Kamala Harris will spend less time running than just about any candidate in the country this election cycle. Unlike a primary winner, she’s skipped past the phase where intraparty rivals dig up dirt and highlight weaknesses. Unlike a normal heir apparent, she’s skipped past the years where alert journalists would dig into her record for ways to define and attack her.

For the Kamala Harris campaign, a good slogan could be borrowed from George Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-Four”: Ignorance Is Strength.

So, given all of the above, what should the strategy be for President Trump and those who support him? To reduce it to a single sentence: Up Kamala’s exposure.

Already, there’s a debate about whether President Trump should debate Harris come September or if he should cancel it now that he’ll no longer be facing Biden. Trump himself has indicated he’s undecided on the topic, a far cry from his “any time, any place” challenge to Biden.

Our view is straightforward: Trump should debate. In fact, he should try to add additional debates, preferably with modified rules from those previously agreed on for the Biden showdown.

There are several reasons for this. First, the press has gone all-in on bolstering Democrats and building a mirage of likeability and competence around Harris. A confrontational debate is one of the only chances Trump will have to directly puncture this mirage.

Second, Kamala is bad at debates! Her most successful showing was in the first Democrat primary debate of 2019, where she got viral attention by accusing Joe Biden of trying to keep her from attending integrated schools as a child.

But five years later, it’s easy to point out some key caveats. First, America was still in its pre-George Floyd state of perpetual racial agitation, so it was easy for Kamala to get away with making a ridiculous race-baiting attack on Biden. Second, this was a crowded primary debate where each candidate only got a few minutes to speak, and a single canned setpiece with zero policy specifics was viable.

Notably, in Kamala’s second debate, she bombed badly. Hit with questions over her Medicare plan, Kamala couldn’t defend her plan’s specifics and sometimes seemed to have forgotten what it actually did. Kamala, the prosecutor, was hopelessly unprepared to be the one getting interrogated.

This must be the central narrative of the attack on Harris. Yes, she is liberal. Yes, she’s unpleasant and can’t keep a staff. But above all, she is a fraud. Elevated vastly above her competence, Kamala is hopelessly out of her depth on all political questions. When put on the spot, she has to retreat to talking like a baby.

@mrpoliticalclips

Kamala Harris teaching us what’s the deal with Ukraine & Russia #kamalaharris #kamala #joebiden #politics #democrat #biden #ukraine #russia

♬ original sound – MrPoliticalClips

The fraud that is Kamala can only be exposed through relentless attention and publicity. Anything that can force a candid, unscripted break from the media’s non-stop curated vibe-fest should be welcome and encouraged. Only Trump can do it, and the best way is by demanding more debates and more confrontation. Let the fun begin.

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