Kamala-mania vs Weird Trump - an election without politics

Jacob Reynolds reflects on the 'vibes election', and the dire choice on offer for voters in the US.

From the vantage point of distance from the earth-shattering attempted assassination of Donald Trump, the upcoming US election appears strikingly empty. 

As Trump stood up, blood flowing from his ear, fist raised to the crowd, his election seemed almost preordained - like something from Tacitus. The minuscule distance by which his life was saved, the image of him standing tall and defiant, the contrast between the unbowed strength of the 78-year-old and the flailing, amateurish Secret Service detail - all of this gave the impression that history was in the making. 

This mood has all but evaporated. Trump rose from the gunshot with impossible gravitas, but seemed to have nothing to say. We know that he is the enemy of the establishment - and, for this reason, he remains the only possible candidate for anyone with even a hint of sympathy for populism - but he has become an empty vessel. Those critics of populism who say that to be merely ‘on the side of the people’ is to be in favour of nothing in particular seem to have been vindicated. 

At one point Trump looked like he was going to buck this trend. Reports have focused on how he is determined to truly drain the swamp - to overturn the system that frustrated his every move during his previous term in office. He even followed up his brush with death by picking the most radical of options for vice president: JD Vance. Vance is a man talked about as if he were the saviour of the left-behind working classes of the American heartland, a man determined to overturn the neocon consensus in foreign policy, a man with almost deranged energy lighting up his tiny, sunken eyes. 

Yet Vance, too, seems to have been curiously neutered of content. His contributions to the race have so far consisted of repeating lines drawn from the terminally online Right rather than the ordinary people of flyover America. How the online right laughed when he called his critics ‘childless cat ladies’. But the Democrats - for once - hit the nail on the head with their response: what a weirdo. Vance had always been a bit weird – but his weirdness was the interesting weirdness of a maverick, the working-class guy made good. Ever since he became addicted to the dark corners of Twitter, he seems weird in the wrong sort of way. 

The electoral calculation seems off, too. Trump’s great strength has always been his ambiguity. He packs the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v Wade, but has remained agnostic on the question of abortion. He will Build The Wall, but appeals to recent immigrants. He will force an end to the war in Ukraine, but is prepared to threaten Putin to make it happen. On all these issues Vance - messianically anti-abortion, pathologically anti-Ukraine - seems to destroy Trump’s room for manoeuvre. 

Was Vance picked out of hubris? Has Trump lost his touch?

If political considerations seem to have vacated the Trump camp, it is nothing compared to the political vacuum surrounding the Democrats’ Kamala Harris. 

The most obvious example of the void is the electoral one: Harris has had zero connection to voters in anything resembling a primary process. She became candidate simply because Biden became too blatantly senile, and there was no one else. Her rise is reminiscent of some late Soviet parable where the last guy in the building is accidentally crowned president. 

At the ideological level, few can tell you what Harris represents. She has no ideology, no programme, no track record aside from her penchant for locking up young black men and poor Californians. She laughs, quotes incomprehensible gobbledegook and stands to attention to record empty but carefully crafted TikToks. Her ethnicity seems to change, she is one minute a tough cop and the next the hope of the incarcerated, one minute in charge of the border and the next has nothing to do with it. 

This lack of anything resembling substance positions her perfectly for the choreographed rise that social-media wizards have in store for her - a rise dutifully tracked by the polling organisations who are, of course, completely independent. Her campaign’s only contributions to the discourse are a cringeworthy embrace of pop-star Charlie XCX and the aforementioned naming of the ‘weird’. 

Despite the degree to which the ‘brat’ marketing is clearly astroturfed, the Harris campaign has accidentally hit on the truth. Charlie XCX’s album – the attempted celebration of midlife, cocaine-fuelled listlessness is in fact a long confession of one’s fundamental worthlessness – is the perfect avatar for a politician without a purpose. Even her only concrete position is a negation: she is not Trump. 

As we head into what has been dubbed the ‘vibes election’, the political contest without politics, the volatility at play is clear. When candidates seem to stand for nothing, does it matter which way one votes? Trump is funny, Harris can be, too. Does it come down to who tells the best joke?

It is likely that Trump - who, after all, comes closest to representing something, a challenge to the consensus which is only more farcical as each day passes - will carry the day. But the dispiriting contest suggests the US, which still far more than any other nation carries the hopes and the dreams of the West, has a mountain to climb if it is to regain its logical place as primus inter pares for us children of The Enlightenment. 

Jacob is convenor of The Academy and author of the Letter on Liberty Beyond the Culture Wars.

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SESSIONS INCLUDE:

Untangling anti-Semitism / What do women need to be free? / Suing for the climate / From mental health to toxic debate: is technology the problem? / Could AI break the productivity impasse? / Will a new Race Equality Act improve race relations? / The politicisation of maternity / Are we all neurodiverse now? / The rise of lawlessness / Putting your life on (meno)pause / Working to rule: humanity and the history of the algorithm / Liberty vs anti-extremism / The crisis of free speech on campus / What’s the future of the gender wars? / The wellbeing industry: is it doing us good? / Are Gen Z right wing? / Is there a ‘clash of civilisations’? / Free Speech Nation with Andrew Doyle – LIVE / Running back to EU? Labour and the Single Market / Untangling Islam, Islamism and Islamophobia / The queering of society / The return of national populism / Disinformation? The battle for free speech online / From WPATH to the Cass Review: the crisis in medical ethics / Kamala-mania / The War against the Past / What’s the endgame for Ukraine? / Anti-Semitism on campus: ban it or tolerate it? / Immigration: integration into what? / Living in a dangerous world: how should the West defend itself? / EDI and compelled speech / Understanding France / Should institutions be politically neutral?