What’s really triggering newfound Democratic joy

The conventional wisdom is Democrats are feeling joy again after many months of feeling dread. Joe Biden is the most transformational president of our lifetimes, but he’s also the most geriatric. Fair or not, lots of people weren’t really into the old man, including lots of liberals and Democrats. As long as he was in the running, there was a feeling among many that the Democratic Party was slouching towards doom.

Things are different now. With Kamala Harris and Tim Walz at the top of the ticket, the Democratic Party is again feeling elated. The vice president and Minnesota governor are filling stadiums in swing states, bringing in record donations and inspiring legions of volunteers. (They are even doing well with Trump’s white working-class voters.) At his debut rally, Walz turned to Harris to say: “Thank you for bringing back the joy.” The next day, Harris called themselves the “joyful warriors.”

There’s something to be said about this cause and effect, but I think there’s another constructive way of looking at it, which is this: The Democrats are feeling joy again because they no longer feel crazy.

To explain, let me take you back to The Disaster Debate in late June. There, we saw Biden struggling mightily for reasons that no longer matter. We also saw Trump struggling mightily, but he did so loudly and confidently, so no one in the Washington press corps noticed that his mental state – though loud and confident – was rapidly declining.

Donald Trump was a mess. He was bowls of word salad and a firehose of lies. He frequently made no sense while turning our shared reality upside down, backwards and prolapsed. You didn’t need to be senile to be confounded by it. Yet every time Trump finished his statements, CNN’s moderators turned politely to the president for his response.

To see how insane this actually was, let’s take The Disaster Debate out of its immediate political context. If DoTrump spoke, say, Esperanto, and if he answered all his debate questions in Esperanto, and if CNN’s moderators turned to Biden for a response to statements Trump made in Esperanto, no one – and I mean no sane human being – would expect him to respond, because everyone would say, “the fuck is this?”

Practically speaking, Trump’s bowls of word salad and his firehose of lies constituted a vocabulary as alien to most of us as Esperanto. Yet Trump spoke so loudly and confidently that CNN’s moderators didn’t notice he was speaking words that they did not understand. Despite that, they expected a response, as if Joe Biden were fluent in them.

That’s crazy.

Crazier was the reaction by the CNN moderators and, later, the rest of the Washington press corps. First, they pretended they understood what Trump was saying, so much so that what he said was scarcely of any importance (not even his repeated vow to accept the results of the election only if he wins.) Then, they acted shocked – shocked! – when Biden did not respond as expected to the insane request to counter statements in a language neither he nor anyone else understood.

Crazier still was the aggressive gaslighting. There’s clearly something wrong with holding one man, no matter his age, responsible for another man’s decisions, while giving a pass to that other man and his habitual incoherence. Yet the press corps and, later, some leaders of the Democratic Party said the only thing wrong was Joe Biden.

Actually, that’s not crazy.

That’s crazy-making.

Biden’s decision to drop out ended that. So did the vice president’s decision (as I argued Tuesday) to prevent the press corps from being the arbiter of the rules of politics. She’s doing that by minimizing access for the time being. In that, she’s reserving the right, and the power, to define herself, her campaign and her message. Where the president depended on the press corps to communicate his record of accomplishment in good faith, in the hope of being rewarded for those accomplishments, the vice president presumes no good faith at all.

More than that, she presumes deceit. She seems to understand, rightly, that if it waits for the press corps to treat Trump’s habitual incoherence with the same scrutiny it gave the Disaster Debate, she will be waiting for a very long time. So when the chance comes to say his mental state is rapidly declining – he’s speaking Esperanto, as it were, but doesn’t know he’s speaking it – the campaign takes it.

For instance, during a recent interview with Elon Musk, Trump was “slurring his words and is unable to clearly enunciate S-words, in unusually messy ways,” wrote Bloomberg’s Tim O’Brien on X. “He has declined and aged noticeably over the last year.” Later, for his column, O’Brien wrote: “After the unhinged Trump-Musk bro-fest on X last night - and last week’s therapy session at Mar-a-Lago - it should be clear to all by now that the man aspiring to lead the US isn’t well.”

Not trusting the press corps to make Trump’s deteriorating mental state more widely understood, the Harris campaign added that: “Donald Trump’s extremism and dangerous Project 2025 agenda is a feature, not a glitch of his campaign, which was on full display for those unlucky enough to listen tonight during whatever that was.”

Which is why, right now, Democrats feel so much joy.

It’s not a joy that comes with the end of dread.

It’s a joy that comes with flexing a comeuppance.