The Phantom Public

There are many things that have changed since we first watched Donald Trump come down that escalator on June 16, 2015, but if there is one thing that stands out it is that we no longer have any confidence in our ability to know what matters and what doesn’t matter when it comes to a presidential candidate’s competitive viability.

I remember thinking that Trump had destroyed himself and his political future, in July of 2015, when he said about John McCain: “He’s not a war hero. He was a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.” In Rick Perlstein’s 2014 book The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan, he makes the point that President Nixon executed a pretty clever mind trick by convincing many Americans that the return of the country’s Vietnam POWs was, in a strange sense, the victory America sought. Never mind that the war was a disaster, the pictures of reunited families on tarmacs, of children and wives running to their fathers and husbands was, Nixon hoped, a story happy enough to make people forgot what had been lost.

The extent to which Nixon succeeded is debatable, but the place of those returned POWs in American folklore, particularly among conservatives, has never been in doubt. For Trump to criticize John McCain, famously known for refusing early release from captivity, surely made many of us think Trump had done himself irreparable damage. On top of that, of course, is that the remarks came from someone who had ducked the draft through college deferments and medical exemptions, another “black mark” that has raised eyebrows in past presidential campaigns.

We could talk about the Access Hollywood tape where Trump bragged about the sexual assault he is able to get away with because he is a celebrity. There is the E. Jean Carroll lawsuit, the Stormy Daniels case, January 6th, and on and on with scandal after scandal. January 6th is interesting because so many high profile, experienced Republicans thought Trump’s political career would be over because of his support for the rioters, though they mostly backed off when it became clear his base (and their base) didn’t care. Again, old rules did not apply.

Then there is Tuesday’s debate when any number of truly laughable statements were made by Trump, statements about immigrants eating pets, Kamala Harris’s ethnicity, and January 6th rioters. It’s all so new we don’t need to go into detail, but the point is that it really hasn’t seemed to matter.

Why is that?

There are three things that come to mind. The first is in a clever term that someone came up with called “sane-washing,” which has been defined as “an act of packaging radical and outrageous statements in a way that make them seem normal.” The argument goes that reporters, charged with making the world make sense for us go the extra mile to make otherwise incoherent statements meaningful.

Another factor is in what some of Trump’s supporters tell us we should do, which is to take Trump “seriously but not literally.” Trump strategist Corey Lewandowski once said that “the problem with the media is that [they take] everything Trump says so literally. The American people don’t.” I guess this means we are supposed to be satisfied that Trump doesn’t literally mean that immigrants are eating cats and dogs, but that they are here and doing bad stuff in general. Perhaps his question about whether Kamala Harris is really black isn’t that he cares about such things, but that she changes positions for political gain. You get it.

And finally, the existence of Fox News has created an immensely powerful safety net for Trump, an entire network dedicated to his protection. Someone once said that if Fox News had been around in the early ’70s, Richard Nixon would not have had to resign because a sufficiently robust counter-narrative would have been available to protect him and to make Nixon’s voter base sufficiently organized to threaten any Republican who got out of line.

I’m sure there are other reasons Trump gets away with so much, and the few ideas proposed here don’t, I’m sure, explain everything nor do they operate in silos. More than one mechanism can be at work at once, and different mechanisms are likely at play with different kinds of statements and actions.

To end where I began, since Trump, we no longer have any confidence in our ability to know what matters, and it is frustrating as hell, though I doubt I am alone in thinking about it, a lot.

A question on the minds of many a supporter of Kamala Harris’s presidential bid is the extent to which Trump will be able to effectively attack her new running mate, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, as a radical leftist.

With all the appropriate qualifiers about how Harris is the one at the top of the ticket and vice presidential nominees don’t move that much vote, Democrats are still hoping that Walz can help to balance concerns voters might have about Harris’s perceived vulnerability of being too liberal.

Put simply, Harris and her campaign team are hoping that Walz’s image, his midwestern-nice, gun-toting, football coaching, military serving, dad-energy personae will make enough people, particularly older white men in the middle of the country, comfortable enough with the Harris-Walz option to vote for it and thus eat into the majorities this cohort will surely deliver for Trump. And make no mistake, this calculation is about losing this bloc of voters by less and not outright winning it.

Republicans are hoping they can point to a bunch of policy decisions and actions by Walz that make it easy to tar him as a radical. They say he is on board with much of Harris’s liberal agenda with issues such as expanding benefits like paid family leave, protecting abortion rights, and restricting guns. They ramble on about his policy of free tampons in school bathrooms as a way to accommodate transgender students and voting rights for felons. They are particularly vocal about how he handled the civil unrest in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd.

Democrats are hoping to emphasize something entirely different. As Lisa Lerer writes at the New York Times, “The Democratic strategy is based far more on the identity politics of race, gender and cultural affiliation than on any policy calculation.” It is, according to this argument, about who he is, or who he is perceived to be and not what he has done or supported through work and deed.

The argument is, however, more complicated.

My guess is that no matter how hard Trump and Vance try to suggest these positions he has taken and the things that he has done are the work of the devil, a large chunk of voters, even many white working class men, are going to see this as the kinds of positions one might take when they try to serve their constituents as governor, when they try in good faith to get things done.

Maybe this is a hard sell in today’s political environment, but if you respect voters enough to tell them why you have done what you have done, they are not going to be overly fussed that they don’t agree with everything you have done.

The magic of someone like Walz, a guy who exudes integrity and decency, is that whatever policies Trump thinks he can attack him with, it is precisely the way Walz presents himself, his identity, that makes him attractive to voters. In others words, it’s not who he is versus what he has done; it’s his ability, because of who he is, to talk to voters in a respectful way about why he did what he did, and what he thinks needs to happen next.

Trump doesn’t respect people who vote for him. And don’t forget Hillary Clinton’s major blunder of describing some who might vote against her as deplorables. Walz will not get a majority of white working class voters. But he is going to get some of them by being who he is, a guy who knows you can disagree with people and still respect them, and sometimes even vote for them.

On Wednesday night President Joe Biden spoke to the nation about his decision to step down from the 2024 presidential race. He framed it as a necessary step, as a passing of the “torch to a new generation” required in this moment to save democracy. Much has been written about how difficult it must have been for him to make that decision and how rare it is for someone in such an important role to walk away for the greater good.

What is important, though, is how the greater good should be framed by the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris as she attempts to define her candidacy. For no matter how true it is that this next election is in fact a fight for democracy itself, it is also true that such a framing is simply too abstract, to difficult to articulate in the kind of raw political terms required by a national campaign for the nation’s highest office. It’s always harder and less effective to defend an idea than it is to point to what you are going to do to make people’s live better, and what voters are going to get if they choose you.

As Kamala Harris no doubt has some very smart people on her campaign team, it is clear they understood the challenge and have begun to rise to it.

Less than a week after President Biden’s speech, the Harris for President Campaign released their first official video. As narrated by Harris, the first words are “What kind of country do we want to live in?” She goes on to say: “There are some people who think we should be a country of chaos. Of fear, of hate….but us, we choose something different…we choose freedom.”

And then she tells us what that means:

The freedom not just to get by, but to get ahead. The freedom to be safe from gun violence. The freedom to make decisions about your own body. We choose a future where no child lives in poverty. Where we can all afford healthcare. Where no one is above the law.

The tag for the ad, the promise she makes, is this. “We believe in the promise of America and we’re ready to fight for it. Because when we fight, we win.”

Now, one might think it counterintuitive that Democrats would run on a theme extolling the value freedom given that Republicans like to claim they are the party of liberty. But, of course, Republicans are not the party of liberty; they are the party of making sure everyone lives according to their values.

In a speech to the American Federation of Teachers in Houston on Thursday, Harris used the phrase, “We are not going back,” as she cited the draconian measures laid out in the Project 2025 policy book like big tax breaks to corporations, ending the Affordable Care Act, and destroying gains made through collective bargaining in America. She talked about the Republican’s “full-on attack on hard-won, hard-fought freedoms,” like LGBTQ rights, abortion access and gun violence restrictions.

There is a truism in politics that people are far more tolerant of not getting new benefits than they are of having things they have come to expect taken away from them.

There is little doubt that democracy is at stake in this election cycle, but Team Harris has quickly figured out that to defend democracy voters need to be reminded what they will lose if they elect a candidate and a party who are all about taking away so much of what Americans have to come to expect and value. Freedom is on the ballot.

The Lincoln Project is out with their first ad in support of Kamala Harris’s presidential bid. While honouring Joe Biden for the difficult decision he made, the announcer also gives us a sense of how the Harris campaign might come after Trump. The narrator says, “Vice President Kamala Harris is ready, experienced, and as a tough prosecutor, Kamala Harris dealt with men like Trump all the time — rapists, con men, frauds, criminals.”

The prosecutor vs. the criminal. Buckle up.

Joly tells China’s top diplomat Canada won’t ‘tolerate any form of interference in our democracy’ – Globe and Mail

Montreal city councillor to represent Liberals in byelection (CBC News)

Federal Liberals launch website lambasting Poilievre’s record as a Conservative MP – Montreal Gazzette

Justin Trudeau’s Liberals head into summer with lowest share of committed voters since they were elected in 2015 – Toronto Star

Trudeau taps MacKinnon to be new labour minister, ahead of cabinet meeting (CTV News)

Not 24 hours after Joe Biden stepped down to make way for his Vice President Kamala Harris to become the likely Democratic presidential nominee, Nate Cohn at the New York Times is already harshing our buzz by reminding us that victory in the November election will not be a walk in the park for Kamala. Surely her nomination is not in doubt, as we have seen a number of high-profile Democrats, many of whom would have been considered viable candidates in their own right, endorse her. Though we are not sure what process the party will put in place to nominate her, there is little doubt we are looking at a Harris-Trump match-up. It is also absolutely true and, frankly, obvious that this will be a tough election.

Cohn makes the perfectly reasonable case that “the majority of voters have long had an unfavourable view” of Kamala Harris, just as they have had an unfavourable view of Biden. Still, he says, as recently as a year ago many Democrats were not particularly concerned about their unpopularity because they saw the election as a referendum on democracy itself and Trump’s obvious authoritarian impulses. They believed that American’s would understand this and that an “anti-MAGA” majority would reject Donald Trump.

A deeper dive, as Cohn points out, shows that there is surely more to it. For example, recent polling has suggested that, beyond Biden’s age, a majority of voters are not happy with the direction of the country and have deeply held concerns with issues such as immigration and the economy, areas in which many voters seem to trust Trump more. Kamala Harris was a key part of Biden’s team and can be easily blamed for any perceived failings of the Administration so, again, no walk in the park.

Mr Cohn does suggest that Kamala Harris could be seen as an agent of change able to present a vision for the country that successfully addresses concerns voters may have. He does not, however, seem overly optimistic.

I think he misses a key point.

When news began to circulate that Joe Biden was going to do the very brave and noble thing of stepping down for the good of his country, there was not only a sense of relief but also of excitement, almost giddiness that now Americans terrified of another Trump Presidency would have a fighting chance.

After Trump’s truly awful acceptance speech at the GOP convention, many pundits said that his rambling incoherence was proof that he was beatable. There is an old saying, however, that you can’t beat something with nothing, and many of us felt that with Biden at the top of the ticket that was the problem. In the June 27th debate, every time Trump would lie, more than 30 times according to CNN fact checker Daniel Dale, we could see for ourselves that President Biden was not capable of offering a challenge. In subsequent appearances, which were intended to quell our concerns, we were never quite sure what he was trying to tell us.

Of course we don’t know what the outcome of the election will be; we don’t know how Kamala Harris will perform, but we know we have a chance. The overwhelming sense that I felt and that I think was shared by many others when we heard that Biden was stepping down was excitement and even fun at the prospect of taking on Trump effectively.

The Biden Administration has a good record to run on; they are on the winning side of issues like reproductive rights and foreign policy, and Kamala Harris will be able to draw attention to the terrifying policies that we are likely to get with four more years of Trump, such as those promoted in Project 2025.

For the first time in a while, it’s fun and exciting being a Democrat, and that’s the sort of thing that opens checkbooks, draws volunteers, gets people to their polling stations and wins elections now that we have something to fight with.

The GOP love-fest in Milwaukee is over. Trump is back on the campaign trail with his new best buddy J.D. Vance. President Biden is hunkered down in Delaware with COVID-19 trying to figure out his next move, which increasingly looks like a departure, though no one is sure. I’m siding with those who think Joe Biden is no longer able to campaign effectively and will most likely lose if his name is on the ballot in November. It’s a lot to think about, a lot to say, and those who are paid to write about it and talk about it are hard at it.

As we look ahead, my biggest concern is that the media will continue to ignore or minimize who Donald Trump is and what he has said and done because they are exhausted by the horror of it all, and don’t believe their audience has much of an appetite to rehash it either.

Here is a case in point:

On July 13, 2024, Donald Trump, the Republican Party’s presumptive nominee, was shot and wounded in the right ear at a campaign rally near Butler, Pennsylvania. It was in all the newspapers. It was, of course, a tragedy and something we hated to see. The bit of blood across his face, the pumped fist in the air, the flag in the background, and the exhortation to “fight, fight, fight” made many of his supporters marvel at his courage, heroism, and toughness. Some were even saying that America hadn’t seen such a brave and tenacious presidential candidate since Teddy Roosevelt in the early 20th century.

Well, there was a presidential candidate in 2008, a Republican by the name of John McCain. Most people will remember that McCain was taken prisoner of war in North Vietnam in October of 1967. He was shot down by a missile over Hanoi, fractured both arms and a leg when he ejected from the aircraft, and nearly downed when he parachuted into a lake. He was transported to the “Hanoi Hilton” where, though badly wounded, his captors wouldn’t treat him.

In a fascinating development, in 1968 his father John S. McCain Jr. was named commander of all U.S. forces in the Vietnam theatre. The North Vietnamese wanted to release McCain for propaganda purposes though he refused unless other prisoners taken before him were also released, which the North Vietnamese would not do. He was subsequently tortured and held as a prisoner of war for five and a half years, until his release in March 14, 1973. His wartime injuries resulted in a permanent disability.

Old news, right? And to suggest that Donald Trump is tougher than John McCain is of course absurd, though not the point. The point is that in July of 2015, Donald Trump, while appearing at an event in Arizona, said of John McCain, “He’s not a war hero…he was a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.”

Here’s the deal: the assassination attempt on Donald Trump was a terrible thing, and under the circumstances one would have expected his supporters to make the most of his supposed brave response. But those in the mainstream media who made too much of his bravery, courage, and toughness in the days following without also mentioning what Donald Trump said about a real American hero like John McCain were doing the country no favours.

At some point, as a part of the narrative, Trump’s attacks on McCain should have been a part of the story; they were not. Perhaps even mention of Trump’s many Vietnam era deferments, and his statement that those who gave their lives to defend America were losers could have been in the mix.

Whatever else happens in this campaign, whoever runs for the Democrats, I am convinced Donald Trump will win if the media fail to report on the now long history of terrible things he has said and done because it is old news. As they search for new angles, new ways to generate advertising revenue, sell newspapers, and generate clicks, I fear they will do nothing to remind the public who this man is because the stories are old, and anyway there are too many of them, and we all know what he’s like, right?

With apologies to Maya Angelou, Donald Trump has been showing us who he is forever. Voters will believe him, and reject him, if the media, and the rest of us, have the patience to repeat the awful stories and reexamine the awful facts that are a matter of public record if only we can overcome our own weariness.

Biden Plans to resume campaigning as more Democrats urge him to quit (New York Times)

Biden is ‘absolutely’ staying in race, campaign chair says (Washington Post)

JD Vance nomination puts Europe on notice (The Hill)

Wave of Hill Dems renews calls for Biden to drop out (Politico)

Trump Goes Off Message in Milwaukee, but Biden Remains an Underdog (Cook Political Report)

In the coming days, it may well be that President Biden will decide that for the sake of having a chance at another Democratic White House, for the sake of down-ballot Democratic races, for the sake of democracy itself, it’s time to walk away. For many of us, I suspect, this seemed the best outcome following his famously disastrous debate performance on June 27th in Georgia. Though, if he goes, it will not be because he had one bad debate; it will be because everything he did after the debate to prove he was still capable proved just the opposite.

He may surprise us by refusing to heed calls from some of the most important voices in the Democratic Party, though I can’t see how anyone would even want to run after such public rejection by so many of his supposed allies. More than that, how could he run a successful campaign when the leadership in his own party is telling him, and announcing publicly, that he is no longer able to do the job? And for those who think that that is not precisely what is being said, if he is incapable of running a credible campaign, he is incapable of serving another four years.

Those who are speaking personally to Biden about leaving, and those who are conspicuously absent in their defence of the President are clearly part of a well-coordinated campaign. The difficult step they have taken, the conspiracy they have engaged in, is to ensure he cannot win as a way to convince him he should not run.

I agree that President Biden should step down and make way for a candidate better able to represent the Democratic Party in the November. The stakes are too high. I also agree it does not appear he was willing to take a hint about stepping down even when it became clear for anyone with eyes and ears that he should.

If Kamala Harris is the candidate or someone else there will be no avoiding that ugly politicking was behind it. Maybe that’s always the case in one way or another and maybe Democrats will hold hands and sing together when they have to.

Even if the outcome is what I think is for the best, I’m not feeling great about this.

Very early Tuesday morning, about 4:40 a.m., the federal byelection in the riding of Toronto-St. Paul’s was called for Conservative candidate Don Stewart. While the margin of victory was small, about 1.5 per cent, the Conservative win, and consequent loss for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberals, was a gut punch for the incumbent government currently set to face voters in the next general election in October 2025.

The Liberals have held Toronto-St. Paul’s since 1993 with outgoing Liberal MP Carolyn Bennett having won the seat by around 24 points against her Conservative challenger in the previous general election in 2021. And though the loss is a surprise, the national landscape provided a hint with the Liberal’s main challenger Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives leading by about 20 points in the polls, a margin that has been holding steady for several months.

Still, before things started to go badly for Trudeau, he and his governments had since 2015 been safely on the winning side in what has been called for them “Fortress Toronto,” and this riding in particular. To put a fine point on it, if this seat is not safe for the Liberals, it’s hard to know which seats would be.

Having said that, there is always much chatter about how important byelections really are given that they don’t typically result in a change of government and provide a chance for the electorate to give the government of the day a bit of a kick in the pants without changing who is in charge.

Going into this byelection, according to research conducted by CBC News, voters did in fact site inflation, the lack of affordable housing, and the Israel-Hamas conflict as issues of contention, though many also said they were looking for change and were frankly tired of Trudeau. And there it is.

Toronto Star writer Susan Delacourt noted the frequency of comments by past Liberal voters at the door who said they could not vote for Liberal candidate Leslie Church “because they are keen to see Trudeau leave.”

A great deal of speculation over the past few months has had it that if the Liberals somehow lost this safest of downtown Toronto seats, Trudeau would have to consider stepping down in favour of a new leader who might at least have a chance of righting the ship. Now that this has happened, pressure will certainly build, though he has recently dismissed bad polls by claiming Canadians were not currently in a “decision mode.” Some might say the voters in Toronto-St. Paul’s disagree.

No politician signals departure before it is absolutely necessary for fear of undercutting their ability to get anything at all done, so Trudeau’s comments are likely meaningless. What has meaning is the kind of calculus one might undertake in these sorts of situations. Does it make sense for Trudeau to lead his party to the polls in the next general election and in doing so “take the fall” in what is likely to be a very bad loss for the Liberals. In doing so, the argument goes, he could shield a new leader from permanent damage, from the stench of loss. Or could a new leader make a difference, even if only to keep the Conservatives from forming a majority?

Yes, with the next election over a year away much could change. The United States could be in the middle of the next Trump presidency, which might scare Canadians away from voting for a Conservative government. Canadians might decide they are not after all absolutely beyond tired of looking at and listening to Trudeau, though ten years is a long time to lead a government and pretty much the outer edge of the best-by date. None of this, nor events we cannot contemplate, are going going to change much.

I should note before someone else does that there are a couple of notable examples in Canada of leaders taking over long-tenured federal governments only to get crushed in an ensuing general election. True, but so what? Calculate your odds and roll the dice.

Whatever one thinks of Justin Trudeau, his time in the political spotlight appears to be coming to an end and I strongly suspect there are many Liberal candidates, both incumbents and challengers, who hope he takes the hint and rides off into the sunset giving someone else a chance to lead.