Kamala Harris is hardly even bothering to campaign in the conventional way against Donald Trump. And why should she? Joe Biden beat Trump in 2020 without running a real campaign against him, either.
Trump’s three big problems as a candidate are precisely the same qualities that mitigated the worst of what might have been a much worse Trump presidency the last time around: He is lazy, he is stupid, and he is childish.
I can hear you objecting: “Hey, we came here for serious analysis, not name-calling!” But, in this case, the analysis and the name-calling end up in the same place: finding that the most politically relevant traits of Donald Trump are that he is lazy, stupid, and childish.
Right now, the laziness is hurting Trump most. There is a very good, credible political case to be made against Kamala Harris—but Trump is too lazy to make the case. As political scholars based at UCLA run the numbers, Harris’ record in the Senate was the second-most left-wing of any Democrat to serve in this century. That gives Trump a lot that he could talk about, if he could only get his mouth—and his brain—around the words “for instance.” Instead, he just talks in half-understood generalities, typically dishonest ones (e.g., telling Elon Musk, “She is considered more liberal, by far, than Bernie Sanders. She’s a radical left lunatic.”).
There isn’t any serious person or analysis that finds Harris to be “by far” to the left of Bernie Sanders. But, even if there were, degrees of leftness or rightness are not especially useful in prosecuting a political case against a major-party nominee. Indictments of a candidate’s support of particular bad policies or opposition to particular good policies, however, really have to be answered. Harris has taken wrong—and unpopular—positions on everything from race-based college admissions to “Medicare for All” to the First Amendment. She has a pretty bad record on Trump’s hallmark issue, immigration, but Trump and his team cannot advance the conversation past the question of whether it said “border czar” on her business card (in part because the candidate gets distracted by his need to deliver disquisitions on Hannibal Lecter). Trump could do a Buzzfeed-style listicle of Harris’ three or five worst policy positions and hammer those home in a hundred speeches. But he is too lazy to do the modest work involved.
Trump’s stupidity is wrapped up in his laziness. Anyone who has heard Trump speak or read his unedited writing knows that he is not an especially intelligent man. But his native stupidity is compounded by his ignorance—which is to say, by the fact that he is too lazy to do his homework and acquire the kind of grasp of the issues that would make him a more effective candidate.
For example, it would not be very difficult to explain how Biden-Harris spending policies have made inflation worse, making it more expensive for Americans to buy groceries and necessitating policies that have driven up rates on mortgages and car loans. (Never mind that Trump followed the same policies during the COVID period—I’m not arguing that consistency, of all things, would make him a more effective political candidate.) But he would need to be at least superficially familiar with a little bit of elementary economics to do that in conversation. Or willing to let someone smarter write down some remarks for him to memorize.
But he won’t do the homework, and he may not have the raw brainpower to simply file away enough mental notecards to get the job done. There is a reason he wanders all over the place in his speeches—it isn’t only arrogance and self-centeredness. He’s dumber than nine chickens. That’s why he was an incompetent real-estate investor even though he was a successful reality-television grotesque. He isn’t the first dumb person to find success in the celebrity business, where stupidity seems to be an asset.
Naturally, all of this is made worse by his childishness. Trump goes into rooms full of would-be donors and supporters and bores them to death with tales of how the 2020 election was stolen. He is derailing his own campaign right now by having an extended tantrum over the Democrats’ Harris-for-Biden switcheroo, which has him blubbering that it is one more act of unfairness in the heavy catalog of such acts he has been made to suffer. (The poor dear.)
His penchant for using demeaning nicknames as a substitute for political argument might be thought of as an aspect of his laziness or his stupidity, but it is, at heart, part of his childishness. The same childishness is what has him insisting that he doesn’t need to run a conventional campaign, because he is a very special little boy. Never mind that after his fluke win in 2016, he has led his party from one electoral defeat to another—often in close succession, as when he pissed away Republicans’ chances in Georgia in a snit after his humiliating loss to the human eggplant in 2020.
Trump’s personality defects were, perversely enough, this country’s saving grace while he was president. He wanted to be a caudillo but ended up being very little more than a poisonous buffoon thanks to the laziness, stupidity, and childishness that kept him from realizing the worst of his ambitions as president. That very well may keep him from realizing any of his political ambitions in 2024.
I am not quite sure that I believe the maxim that “character is destiny.” Stupidity, on the other hand …
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