Frum: Donald Trump is overexposed & Kamala Harris has ‘mystery appeal’

One of the funniest things about the past month is that Donald Trump’s campaign strategy was thoroughly exposed and he is incapable of changing. His big campaign strategy was: Joe Biden is too old. That was it. And it was “working” in a sense. Now that Trump is running against an enthusiastic 59-year-old woman (who looks and seems a lot younger), Trump doesn’t know what the hell to do or say. Even more hilarious is that Republicans are openly trying to hand him new strategies and he refuses to take their advice. To be fair, their advice sucks. Trump can’t “stick to policy” because his policies are wildly unpopular. He can’t “stop attacking Kamala Harris’s race” because everything he does is based on his own white nationalism. Well, David Frum has written this piece in The Atlantic: “The Trump Campaign’s ‘Please Shut Up’ Phase.” Some highlights:

The X Spaces interview delivered Donald Trump without makeup or dress-up, talking unselfconsciously: manic, boastful, untruthful, aggrieved, abusive, obsessive, random, ignorant, tedious, bitchy—and ultimately, formless and endless. You might think a major-party presidential nominee would have other claims on his time, some sort of deadline, if only to get some sleep to ready himself for the next day’s campaigning. But no. At no point in the explosion of talk could one guess whether it would continue for another five minutes or another five hours….Trump seemed to have no budget for his time, no plan of campaign, no message to drive—and nothing else to do, nowhere else to go.

Trump’s not running against President Joe Biden anymore, yet he talked about Biden at least as much as about his actual opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris. He still lacked any clear or memorable critique of her, except for his derisive comments about her supposed inability to do the kind of interview that he, Trump, was making such a desperate hash of. Trump is the challenger and the topic should be the Biden-Harris record, but he preferred to reminisce about his own good old days.

There’s an old joke about the fool at the poker table: If you don’t know who it is, it’s you.

…Huge crowds have gathered for [Kamala Harris], sizzling with enthusiasm. How did that happen? Through the alchemy of politics, an alchemy that invites people to see themselves in a political champion, that depends heavily on selective availability. A champion who’s too invisible fades from mind, as Biden did during his presidency. Too visible, and the champion can become overdefined, in ways that may alienate reachable voters. This is Trump’s problem. For all his jibes at her intellect, Harris is managing the mystery appeal effectively. Whereas Trump, who endlessly congratulates himself on his MIT-professor uncle’s brains, is fast arriving at the “Will you please shut up?” phase of his political descent.

Meandering, solipsistic, and crushingly boring—the interview was an awful premonition of the rest of Trump’s life should he lose again, in November: wandering the corridors of his clubs, going from table to table, buttonholing the dwindling number of guests, monologuing relentlessly until they squirm away.

[From The Atlantic]

Frum is basically saying that Trump is overexposed, that his famewhore ways have made him too familiar to the voters and familiarity breeds contempt. Which, yes, is a factor here. But I think the basic math here is: without Joe Biden’s old ass in the race, people suddenly remembered that they f–king hate Donald Trump. They remembered that, oh right, Trump is crazy and senile and he incited an insurrection. As for Frum crediting Kamala Harris with successfully cultivating an air of mystery… perhaps. She’s less of a known quantity than Trump, that’s for sure. But there’s also a likeability factor at play – what we know about Kamala Harris, we like: she enjoys cooking, she’s married to a mensch, she’s funny and memeable. Trump is just so damn unlikeable.

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