Victor Davis Hanson
Trump/Vance have less than 12 weeks to crack the Harris/Walz/DNC/media/donor/backroom cabal and expose the Democratic ticket as the first Biden administration on steroids. Can it be done?
Debates? Trump is again now negotiating for debates. He must avoid the 2020 first debate performance when his disruption gained sympathy for a bewildered Biden (who was not confused but saved by Trump’s interruptions).
Trump’s second 2020 debate was far more successful, but it took place after 50 million voters had already cast early/mail-in ballots and thus was not fully advantageous. His 2024 debate destroyed Biden, but Trump winged it, and let the ossified Biden self-destruct, rather than confront him with detailed counterarguments.
Trump always should avoid generic insults, especially against a black woman: labeling Harris as “stupid,” or a “disaster,” or “horrible,” or “dumb” tells the audience little. The key is to demonstrate in detail why that is so, e.g.:
“Why Vice President, do you talk of what you will do and what your agenda will be when right now you have half a year left as Vice President with a vanished president—in other words, why not start to implement your visions now?”
“Why Vice President, do you avoid speaking ad hoc to journalists or crowds?”
“What was the real purpose of letting in 10 million unaudited illegal aliens? Did you care about the people whose small towns were swamped with thousands of illegal aliens without background checks? What did you think defunding the police would accomplish other than to render the poor defenseless?”
And so on—in detail.
The audience can assess whether Harris is supposedly “stupid” or not by the caliber of her repartee and answers. And she may just prove that if given a chance to debate without name-calling.
Cannot someone ask Harris: “Why are not you proud of letting in 10 million aliens—you seemed to be until this election year?”
“Why did you drain the strategic petroleum reserve at midterm time, and why did you suddenly start encouraging oil and gas pumping—but only at election time?”
“What was so great about bailing out felonious rioters and defunding the police, please explain?”
Is there still a despised late Lee Atwater sort in the Republican Party, who is now postmortem roundly trashed (and by just those Obama ethicists who ran the McCain senile ads (and the Romney dog and high-school hazing ads) as too mean?
But in 1988 after Atwater closed a 17-point deficit in less than two months, he was considered a crazy genius for redefining Dukakis, who went from a supposedly apolitical “technocrat,” “professional,” and virtual nonpartisan shoo-in who built the “Massachusetts miracle”—into a hard-core leftist whose policies endangered his state, spiked crime, nearly bankrupted it, and did nothing to clean up its pollution.
Note that Obama in 2012 vastly outspent Romney on negative ads that were also much more toxic—and effective.
When Obama got through with the aristocratic Romney (who perhaps preferred to lose nobly than win ugly?), the Republican nominee was reduced to a selfish tax cheat (remember also Sen. Harry Reid’s infamous brag of that bogus 2012 tax-cheat campaign lie that “it worked, didn’t it?”).
We saw night after night Romney’s running mate Paul Ryan, pushing the wheelchair-bound over cliffs (thereby executing granny). And again, Romney was the scourge who supposedly never talked to his garbage man—as well as having an elevator in his house and whose MS-stricken wife, god forbid, was an elite equestrian.
Add in the debate “moderator” Candy Crawley attacking Romney, hijacking the debate, and becoming an ally of Obama on stage.
Ditto the asymmetry in the earlier 2008 campaign against McCain. Do we remember the planted rumors of his “affair” or the ads suggesting he was demented or that he was a virtual war criminal or was a veritable crook?
The point is not to revel in dirty ads but rather not to fall victim to the leftwing pseudo-morality that it abhors negative advertising when in recent years it has been the past master of destroying candidates through one-minute hit pieces as a way of redefining their opponents.
As for Trump’s press conferences and rallies:
- Hold them weekly to highlight the differences between Trump and the secluded Harris.
- Ensure they are 25 minutes—not over an hour.
- Avoid all ad hominem insults not just because they are “mean” (Harris routinely calls Trump a “perpetrator”), but because they don’t give any detail to convince the listener why the insult may be true.
- Rallies also should not go over 90 minutes. They should accentuate the positives of what Trump did in the past as a guide to how he will even do better in the future. Don’t waste time settling scores with perceived old tormentors, especially when they are of your own party and have endorsed you.
- Ignore the 2020 election. It is ancient history. Learn privately from it, but don’t publicly beat it to death.
- Don’t brag about crowd sizes. Observers can see the huge assembly without the need to claim that Trump rallies are bigger than those once of Martin Luther King. Demonstrate popularity and superiority without a need to assert it.
- History now begins from mid-August to November 5. Anything before then is increasingly irrelevant. Trump must play smart. It is beat-the-clock 2-minute drill football, given his dawdling opponents are trying to run out the clock.
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