Trump's old tricks are losing power
Since the 2016 presidential campaign between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, the politics of emotion has surpassed, if not eclipsed, the politics of self-interest and old-fashioned Republican conservatism.
Like it or not, as Sara Ahmed reveals in The Cultural Politics of Emotion, emotions often shape the contours of individual and collective bodies: They “feel” rather than “think” their way through the caverns of identity politics and social movements.
For example, these politics of emotion and the legacies of our “cultural wars” are engendered not only by the partisan memories of Trump’s efforts to steal the 2020 election that culminated in the January 6 failed coup d’etat but also from the fraudulent lawlessness surrounding the stolen classified documents as he was leaving the Oval Office.
Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut has maintained that the challenges the United States faces are not logistical. They are metaphysical, and “the sooner we understand the unspooling of identity and meaning that is happening in America today, the sooner we can come up with policies to address this crisis.”
Murphy was referring to what he called the “fall of American neoliberalism.” Or the broken consensus surrounding the U.S. version of liberalism – defined by an emphasis on free markets, globalization, and consumer choice – that has begun to feel to many as a dead end. In other words, no matter what the metrics told us about how well Bidenomics was performing, most Americans weren’t buying it and still have a dismal view of the economy.
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Sensibilities on both sides of the political aisle are also bounded by the omnipotent racial, gendered, elitist, populist, and xenophobic relations of cultural reproduction.
In different but emotionally related ways, the 2020 and 2024 races for the White House have together been about “how the myth of Reagan became the cult of Trump,” enabling a narcissistic sociopath to defy the rule of law and constitutional democracy while aspiring to become the nation’s first authoritarian dictator.
And yet emotionally, this no-holds-barred 2024 contest between Trumpian chaos and Project 2025 versus the Democratic Party is not just about the Harris-Walz campaign to save American democracy from the threat of autocracy and oppression. It is also about returning the two-party political system to some kind of bipartisan normalcy before the democratic republic can get around to hopefully reforming itself from a representative democratic minority into some kind of multiparty democratic majority.
Even if there were not a host of political, economic and ideological courses of action to be wrangling over as part of the upcoming November elections, policy issues with the exceptions of those connected to civil, reproductive, voting, climate and migratory rights have taken a backseat to the negative feelings or emotions of pain, hate, fear, disgust, shame and grievance.
Additionally, there is a huge mistrust in government that Trump, for the past eight years, has been disconcertingly cultivating throughout society. On the other hand, the corrupt MAGA Supreme Court and several of its controversial decisions have also rendered confidence in the Supreme Court to an historic low.
Until one month ago, when President Joe Biden abandoned his flagging reelection bid, the suppressed, positive emotions of joy, hope, love and reconciliation that were previously enjoyed by the presidential campaigns of Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012 had laid dormant. The absence of those positive feelings has now returned to the Democratic Party with much gusto, relief and reinvigorated energy.
The bipartisan majority of the American people who support constitutional democracy and law and order — who are also against the Trumpian chaos, danger and lawlessness — have needed somebody in whom they could put their faith. They needed somebody who could take down the former president, with his torrent of ogres pretending to be God-fearing victims of a “deep state” conspiracy. These fascist wannabes are also on some kind of phony mission to allegedly save America from the so-called radical socialists and Marxist communists of the Democratic left. (In reality, hardly any Democrats identify as radical socialists or Marxist communists.)
This is why we have been witnessing independents, undecideds, white dudes, evangelicals, young people, old people, Never Trumpers and many other “racial and gender identity groups, venture capitalists, and even Deadheads” getting on board the Harris-Walz train toward victory — heartened by the retiring of the Biden-Harris train, which had been headed toward all-but-certain defeat.
This is not necessarily because non-Democrat voters have suddenly joined the Democratic Party. Rather, these folks understand how terrible Trump has been and how worse he would become if America gives him another opportunity to lead our nation.
So as the saying goes, they are “putting country over party” this election.
Presenting herself as a pragmatic leader who could unite the American people during her acceptance speech as the Democratic candidate for the 47th presidency of the United States, Vice President Kamala Harris stated: “With this election, our nation has a precious, fleeting opportunity to move past the bitterness, cynicism and divisive battles of the past. A chance to chart a new way forward. Not as members of any one party or faction, but as Americans.”
At this particular moment, the contrasting negative and positive emotional tropes of Republican “doom and gloom” versus Democratic “hope and joy” are comprised of two clashing populist movements.
The former movement has been metastasizing like a cancer since late 2015. It arrived with the rise of Trumpian disparagements, anguished grumblings and grievances galore that call for cruelty and other means of divisiveness. This MAGA movement has successfully killed the GOP traditions of both Abraham Lincoln and Ronald Reagan. Republican presidents from Teddy Roosevelt to George H.W. Bush are certainly turning in their graves over Trump’s GOP takeover.
The latter movement of “reconciliation” has been captured and unleashed by Harris and Tim Walz, her vice presidential running mate, with a vision that has at least temporarily mended intra-party Democratic divisions and seeks to overcome their urban-rural antipathy. This episodically reoccurring organizing on behalf of the good of the commonwealth consists of generational warmth, love and recovery with the potential for realignment, restoration or rapprochement.
Accordingly, on the second night of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, we heard from former Democratic President Barack Obama, first lady Michelle Obama, second gentleman Doug Emhoff, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, and Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, an independent. But we also heard from Republicans such as Mayor John Giles from Mesa, Arizona, former Trump press secretary Stephanie Grisham and Republican political strategist Ana Navarro.
Other Republican officials spoke as well on Wednesday and Thursday evenings. The thrust of their comments all revolved around their negative experiences working with Trump and about how terrible he had been during his term as president.
Neither of these populist movements – one vile and the other sublime — can be detached from their antithetical narratives or from the paradoxical currents of the past and present social injustices within the United States. When taken together, these human indignities and lost or unrealized freedoms are at the heart and soul of this nation’s unfulfilled promises.
Because President Joe Biden decided that he would not be running for re-election and would be endorsing Vice President Harris as his replacement to take down his former rival as well as the “grand old party,” this political contest now feels completely different from what it felt like only five weeks ago. Going as far back as the political dust settling after the 2022 midterm elections, and less than two weeks later when Trump announced his third candidacy for the presidency as a means of trying to prevent, or at least delay, his four criminal indictments from materializing.
The recent changes in feelings away from Democratic party angst and resignation to Democratic party optimism and eagerness were only intensified after Minnesota Governor Walz became Harris’ running mate. During the week of the DNC, those positive feelings and expectations were further heightened and solidified because of a collective sense of empowerment.
This emotional high was a function of Democrats “leaning in” to who they really are and what they value or stand for. Not since the days of President Jimmy Carter in the 1970s and the rise of President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s has this been a part of political reality. So what was wonderful for this old political junkie was watching and listening to former presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama as well as former first lady Michelle Obama being their real selves rather than their suppressed selves from the past when they mostly played defense and treaded lightly.
In other words, this unexpected campaign season dropped on the Democratic Party at the last possible moment has been liberating and exhilarating not only for the Democratic Party, but most importantly, for the Harris-Walz ticket allowing them to be themselves. As the Minnesota governor and former defensive high school line coach stated during his acceptance speech for the vice presidency: “So let me finish with this team. It’s the fourth quarter. We’re down a field goal. But we’re on offense and we’ve got the ball. We’re driving down the field. And, boy, do we have the right team.”
Overnight, the popping and TikTok-savvy dynamic duo changed the public spirit and common geist. Not only because they read the mood of most Americans but also evangelizing a vision of present-day hope and change that’s now being sung across television and TikTok and Taylor Swift fan chats in ways impossible just six weeks ago. They also possessed the skill sets to out-meme and out-troll Teflon Don as no other aspiring presidential candidates – Democratic or Republican -- had ever been able to.
For example, how cool it was when Harris-Walz, on day two of the Democratic National Convention, simultaneously rallied live at the filled-up Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee — where the Republican National Convention nominated Trump the month before — and beamed it live to a capacity Democratic convention crowd at Chicago’s United Center. The split screen of the two events was equally striking as viewed by most Americans.
The Harris-Walz team also can take the attention away from Trump — except for when the former president is making a buffoon of himself, which, lately, is just about every day.
On the same day Harris and Walz did their dueling rallies bit, Trump was addressing a crowd of law enforcers and invited supporters in Howell, Michigan, former home to the 1970s-era Ku Klux Klan.
A meeting hosted by Livingston County Sheriff Mike Murphy was closed to the public and allegedly in violation of campaign electioneering law. But word quickly spread that Trump promised that he would stop the “Kamala crime wave” if voters returned him to the White House — and if he didn’t become president, Trump warned that “World War III” would be coming.
Trump’s tangible campaign strategies are limited by his old and tired refrains of scaremongering and belligerence. He simply cannot shake his addiction to denigrating his nemeses, real or imagined. Nor can he escape from his pathological deceitfulness and cultural warfare par redux ad nauseum.
In fact, Trump’s obnoxious verbal attacks and perpetual lying have become so stale and pathetically predictable that they are losing the power that they once held. Now they provide his adversaries, the mass media, and everyone else – exceptions being MAGA sycophants, FOX News and other far-right media platforms – with unending grist for mocking and trying to shame the grand old delinquent and his gang of minions as being weird and despicable.
Of course, Trump’s handlers and other allies have all been wishing that the insurrectionist-in- chief would return to or stay on message. Unfortunately for the Trumpists, he has been staying on the MAGA message of mean-spirited missives, race-baiting and conspiracy theories.
As for the rest of America? Fortunately for us, the ex-president’s need to address the concrete issues and policies of the election will never happen.
There are two reasons for this.
First, the Trumpian Republican Party has no policies of merit to speak of on any of the major issues of our time — health care, the environment, the cost of living, infrastructure.
Second, even if the Republicans did have any substantive policies for addressing these issues, we all know that Trump would not be capable of speaking about any of these off the cuff — even superficially, let alone in detail — because he is simply speaking ignorant about them.
Trump today is trapped, frothing at the mouth about his favorite “oldies and baddies,” whether they are relevant or not, truthful or fictional.
For example, without mentioning the serious issues of gun violence or mass shootings with automatic weapons in the United States, the former president falsely rants about nonexistent violent or urban crime epidemics and homicidal killings while the rates for both of these are at 50-year lows. And when it was Trump himself who was shot in the ear and nearly assassinated during a July campaign rally by a 20-year-old man wielding a mass shooter’s weapon of choice, the AR-15, Trump doubled down on his support for unfettered gun ownership. No matter that one of Trump’s own supporters was murdered in the melee.
Trump also rattles on about “high” inflation and a “free-falling” economy when the former is the lowest in the post-industrial high-tech world, and the latter is the healthiest it has been since at least before the Wall Street implosion in 2007.
As the Big Mac-loving Donald and his captured GOP leadership know all too well, they have no life-affirming, freedom-expanding agenda to pivot to. They have nothing of value to sell to the American people. There’s no beef for their “nothing” burgers let alone any seeds for their “impossible” versions — both of which they are serving up to American consumers with plenty of Trumpian packets of “secret sauce” word salads.
Absent from their daily toxic menus of trickle-down “leftovers” is any mention of huge deficits, costly tariffs and tax breaks for the uber-wealthy, or the plethora of deregulations for corporate monopolies — all subsidized by average American taxpayers and at the expense of a sustainable environment for all.
As enumerated in Republicans’ dueling policy platforms – one from the “official” 2024 GOP Platform consisting of 20 promises and the other from the “unofficial” Project 2025, otherwise known as Trump’s 2025 Presidential Transitional Project – the MAGA agenda for America is dangerous and negative, the stuff of repression, authoritarianism and anti-democratic constitutionalism.
These kinds of deceitful tactics have always been the former president’s go-to modus operandi, from the alternative realities of Republican disinformation to the election denying of Biden’s victory in 2020 to the early preparation by the GOP as in Georgia and elsewhere not to certify the 2024 election should Harris defeat Trump.
In the current Republican Party’s alternative world order, there is Trump’s continuing fictional portrayal of election interference by his adversaries rather than by his own 2020 non-fictional fake electors and their coast-to-coast efforts of election interference for which these individuals are being criminally prosecuted.
There is also Trump’s uber-fake issue of threatening hordes of migratory criminals invading our nation and savaging the American people. These are little more than fabrications, as border crossings are lower today than when Trump left office. Besides, migrant rates of crime, while not zero, are nevertheless much lower than non-migrant rates of crime, as numerous studies have revealed over the past decade.
In stark contrast, the defining Democratic issues of the Harris-Walz political campaign is standing up for the rule of law and for American democracy.
Former federal prosecutor and chief assistant city attorney for San Francisco Dennis Aftergut has, for example, reduced the political race in 2024 to a matter of the “defenders of the rule law working against Trumpist attempts to erode it.”
Meanwhile, the Democratic agenda of Harris-Walz – focusing on lowering the price of groceries and prescription drugs, the costs of housing, child tax credits, paid leave, and expanding health care — are constructive and meaningful add-ons when juxtaposed with the harmful agendas of the Republicans.
Moreover, implementing most of this Democratic agenda would help the United States catch up with most of the rest of the world’s developed democratic nations, which have been providing these services to all of their citizens for decades.
In other words, there’s nothing “radical” about what Harris is proposing. This is not “communism,” as Trump incessantly brays. And, there’s nothing here that the majority of Americans don’t support, such as the rights of girls and women to reproductive health care.
During her nearly 40-minute acceptance speech at the United Center in Chicago, Harris not only hit it out of the arena on domestic policies but she also nailed it on foreign affairs.
From the importance of NATO for world security to her positions on the Russian-Ukraine War to Israel and Gaza: “I will not cozy up to tyrants and terrorists, like Kim Jong-un, who are rooting for Trump.”
Throughout her acceptance speech, candidate Harris did a masterful job of prosecuting the case against Trump and why he should never again be anywhere near the White House. She also made it crystal clear why the future of American democracy is on the line and why this is one of the most critical elections in the life of our nation.
As for those skeptics questioning whether the Democrats are experiencing a “sugar high” or if Harris has the “chops” going forward, let me remind everyone that it only took Kamala 48 hours to “seal the deal” on her nomination after Biden announced that he would not be running again.
And by the end of August, or after six weeks since securing the nomination, she will have likely raised more than $600 million across her presidential campaign committee, the Democratic National Committee and other closely aligned political committees.
As far as Harris sitting down with the press to do interviews and her upcoming debate with Trump on Sept. 10, both will be putty in her politically enlightened hands.
By the end of this abbreviated political campaign season, “Kamala Harris, for the People” and her platform of economic populism and social justice for all, as contrasted with the former president’s kleptocratic alternative for the few both at home and abroad, should provide more than enough currency to carry the day on Nov. 5.
Emotionally speaking, there is another more profound and more troubling reason that Trump must be defeated by Harris this fall.
It concerns a question asked by Trump’s mother, Mary Anne MacLeod Trump, when she was 78 years old.
“What kind of son have I created?” Trump’s mother asked her soon-to-be ex-daughter-in-law Ivana Trump.
We now know the answer all too well. Trump is the kind of son who would become the president of the United States and go down in U.S. history as bringing out not only the worst in the greatest number of Americans but also an even more significant number of U.S. citizens and others suffering from severe bouts of post-traumatic Trump syndrome.
As Harris herself has declared in unison with so many others, the correct decision for America is clear: “We’re not going back.”
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Gregg Barak is an emeritus professor of criminology and criminal justice at Eastern Michigan University and the author of several books on the crimes of the powerful, including Criminology on Trump (2022) and its 2024 sequel, Indicting the 45th President: Boss Trump, the GOP, and What We Can Do About the Threat to American Democracy.
