"What's discipline got to do with winning?"
In the final days of the US Presidential election, the Trump campaign proves chaotic and Harris is still struggling to overcome the Van Buren jinx
Chris LaCivita, who co-manages Trump’s campaign with Susie Wiles, had constructed a campaign rooted in competence and restraint. And this was kryptonite to the man at the top of the ticket.
No single moment better illustrates the dichotomy between Trump’s restless, dysfunctional, chaotic nature and the LaCivita-Wiles professional operation better than the end of June. Reported in The Atlantic by Tim Alberta, a bored Trump tired of being “babysat” amid a sea of normalcy mused to close aides on a possible new nickname for Joe Biden. On the immediate build-up to his debate with Biden, Trump reportedly said “The guy’s a retard. He’s retarded. I think that’s what I’ll start calling him,”.
Despite desperate pleas from the professional gun-for-hires LaCivita and Wiles, Trump it seems insisted on muttering “Retarded Joe Biden” according to three people used by Alberta as sources.
June bled into July, with polling better for his campaign than anyone could imagine. So, why would Trump wish to risk it all for the sakes of a juvenile insult?
In hindsight we now know Trump never ended up using that vulgarity in public, but nothing captures the destructiveness of The Donald’s personality better. For 20 months the LaCivita-Wiles double act had successfully contained the worst of Trump’s macabre, outlandish and offensive personality.
Only problem was, Trump knew it too.
“People are calling this the most disciplined campaign they’ve ever seen,” Trump remarked to friends at a fundraiser over the summer according to Alberta’s reporting. His source explains, Trump smirked at the compliment. “What’s discipline got to do with winning?”
July 31st witnessed the restraint break as Trump unleashed his racist worst as he attended the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ). Speaking of Kamala Harris, the former President moaned that “I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn Black,” Trump, caked in his trademark orange-makeup, doubled down instantly telling the journalists onstage “I don’t know, is she Indian or is she Black?”. Eliciting gasps from the audience, the old Trump was back and entirely disinterested in professional campaigning. After-all, “What’s discipline got to do with winning?”
MEANWHILE on planet Democrat, July 21st had finally seen Kamala Harris launch her bid to solidify the nomination after Schumer and Pelosi had succeeded in ‘convincing’ Biden to step aside. As Trump was questioning the idea one could be bi-racial in America, Harris top aides were animated by something else.
It’s one of the most amazing statistics about American politics which, frankly, doesn’t seem to make sense. In the entire history of the United States of America there has only been two Vice Presidents who would go on to become President (excluding assassinations of incumbent Presidents).
In 1836 Martin Van Buren won the Presidency after having served dutifully as Vice President for Andrew Jackson. His feat would not be replicated again for 150 years until Vice President George H.W. Bush took over from Reagan.
Bush Snr joked after his 1988 victory that he “also want[ed] to thank Martin Van Buren for paving the way,”. The then president-elect said “It’s been a long time, Marty.” H.W would lean into the comparison, basking in it, talking up his “marvelous Van Buren transition” leading up to inauguration.
Interestingly, George H.W Bush much like ‘Marty’ Van Buren also failed to secure re-election four years later.
It isn’t easy to be the ‘Veep’ attempting to take over from your own running mate as he steps down at the end of his term up top. You have to walk a tightrope between respecting and showing loyalty to the outgoing president, while establishing herself as her own person. Plenty ‘Veeps’ tried and failed to talk that very tightrope, Nixon failed to pull it off in 1960, Herbert Humphrey in 1968 and Al Gore in 2000.
Perhaps this underpinned why her campaign made a strategic decision to simply ride the ‘feel good’ factor of Kamala’s honeymoon for so long? Policy-light and avoiding the tougher journalistic interviews was and will be for a long time remarked upon and analysed.
Yet you can only tread the shallower waters of ‘team Mamala’ for so long before reality slaps you and voters start growing restless. Yet as Trump-world was witnessing The Donald’s worst instincts reassert themselves, team-Harris was failing to walk that Van Buren tightrope.
Kamala Harris failure to balance loyalty to Biden with the need to assert her own individual distinctiveness was on full display in her recent interview with “The View”. When one of the hosts gently probed if she would have done something differently than President Joe Biden during the last four years, Harris delivered a disastrous answer.
“There is not a thing that comes to mind in terms of — and I’ve been a part of most of the decisions that have had impact,” Harris replied, giving opponent Donald Trump and fellow Republicans an opening to attack her, given Biden’s unpopularity.
CHOICES are everything, not just in Presidential elections but in life and film. As a child I still remember the scene from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade when Alison Doody as Dr. Elsa Schneider tricks Julian Glover’s character Walter Donovan into drinking from the wrong grail. As the scale of his mistake becomes quickly known, he rapidly ages, screaming and eventually turning to dust. The elder knight remarks casually, ‘he chose poorly’.
Sometimes it’s not just in film and movie where you are not left with enough time to fix a big mistake in judgement. In the world of modern 21st century Presidential elections, it’s certainly the case.
Choosing ‘the veep’ never the easiest task for a candidate running top of their party ticket. Who to choose as the running-mate is an eternal balancing act between managing internal party coalitions and seeking someone who can bring something to the ticket.
Ironically, as this election has unfolded, both Trump and Harris arguably made the same grave mistake: they both chose poorly.
In early August two blasts from Trump-world’s 2016 past re-entered stage right. Kellyanne Conway, infamous for coining the phrase ‘alternative facts’ and Corey Lewandowski, infamous for lying to the media about Trump’s attempted obstruction of justice and for mocking a down syndrome kid.
As Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles battled to contain Trump’s obnoxiously vicious personality and instincts Lewandowski and Conway wanted to do the opposite.
Trump reportedly told Lewandowski that he missed the “fun,” freewheeling nature of his 2016 run for the White House. At the same time Trump moaned to Kellyanne Conway he worried he was being overly “managed” by LaCivita and Wiles.
As Harris was riding the wave of excitement for her campaign and polling narrowed, Trump’s big game change idea was to lob a grenade into his campaign organisation. Bringing Kellyanne Conway in was a calculated move to put fear into LaCivita and Wiles. It is no secret that Ms Conway loves to take full credit for the 2016 election win, and relishes the limelight almost as much has her sex-offending, secret stealing boss Donald Trump.
As Harris was closing Trump’s polling lead LaCivita was busy focusing on how to avoid getting fired by his boss. LaCivita figured that appeasing Conway with money was the solution to his job insecurity dilemma, raising her monthly retainer at the Republican National Committee from $20,000 a month to $30,000.
How to satisfy Trump’s pugilism without indulging his explicitly racist and misogynist impulses? Clearly nobody knows. But one thing the Trump campaign top team does know is how to appease their boss to keep their jobs.
In a world where ‘money is free speech’, a seat at the trough of top-tier election campaign staffing is not to be blinked at. The 2020 election cycle (combining Presidential campaign spends with congressional spends) we find an appalling $14.4 billion was wasted spent on electioneering and staffers.
Interestingly however, Conway’s monthly retainer increase didn’t stop her from criticising one choice the campaign had made. In private conversations, Conway has reportedly continued to point out campaign’s shortcomings—especially, in her view, the mistaken selection of Ohio’s Senator J. D. Vance as Trump’s running mate.
She has a point, especially when you look at the gender gap. Conway’s biggest criticism of LaCivita has reportedly been his failure to talk Trump out of choosing a Veep pick so incredibly toxic to women voters.
Senator J.D. Vance, who once called for women to be monitored when travelling between states to prevent travelling to access reproductive healthcare, has not helped matters. Trump might love chaos and despise discipline, but his undisciplined choice of running mate could prove his downfall in a tight race where margins of less than 1 per cent matter.
In national polling Kamala Harris’s team has been grappling unsuccessfully with a 16 point gender gap between men and women. If the Republicans are haemorrhaging female support, the Democrats are likewise desperately searching for a way to staunch the bleed of men to the Republicans.
When Harris’s team chose Tim Walz of Minnesota to be her running mate, my head dropped into my hands. Rather than choosing a popular Democrat governor of a top swing-state like Josh Shapiro (the most popular Governor in Pennsylvanian history), Harris was talked into opting for Walz.
Surface level, most beltway talking heads concluded that team-Harris likely wished for a ‘safe pick’. For those who don’t know, that’s modern code for ‘let’s avoid upsetting the pro-Hamas wing of hard-left progressives’.
Josh Shapiro was simply too Jewish for the viva-Palestina brigade of so-called ‘progressives’ in Wisconsin and younger voters whose brains have been radicalised in Universities to demonize Israel.
So rather than lock-up Pennsylvania, Kamala Harris team decided to pick Tim Walz. Why? Because according to inside reporting, campaign co-chair (and US plutocrat) Jeffrey Katzenberg reckoned Walz would appeal to conservative men in flyover-town America.
The insider-beltway magic thinking so typically detached from reality is almost amusing. Walz wears cowboy hats, owns some guns and likes hunting so yeah the mouth-breather conservative leaning males in Arizona, rural Pennsylvania etc will find him appealing. No? Of course not. Because only moronic plutocrats whose power and influence is derived from their wealth could ever have imagined such a thing.
And only a naïve and untested candidate who never had to win her place on the ticket through a competitive primary would sign off on it
But choices are what political races are made of, and the JD Vance and Tim Walz picks could both prove to be the catastrophic mistake that cost either team the race in such a tight election. Vance actively makes Trump’s gender gap issue with women worse. Walz has failed to deliver male voters to Harris, which could prove disastrous given the race might come down to Pennsylvania - whose popular governor Harris rejected.
They both chose poorly.
ULTIMATELY the finish will be anyone’s guess. But a few things are clear as we enter the last moments of the US Presidential election.
Firstly, Trump’s campaign has since late June become characterised by his own disfunctionality. He took a well organised campaign created and run by LaCivita and Wiles and parachuted bomb-throwers into it such as Conway and Lewandowski. All so that The Donald could have a little more room to be his usual inflammatory, indulgent and outrageous self.
Secondly, Kamala Harris campaign is been a case-study in nervousness and fear. How to walk a tightrope of respecting Biden and becoming her own person? How to avoid upsetting the so-called ‘progressive’ hard left whilst still winning over never-Trump Republicans? The hesitancy is a sad feature rather than bug of what initially appeared to be a truly optimistic and energetic campaign. Now, sadly, it’s one retreating back into the tired rhetoric of ‘Trump is bad’ (which didn’t work for Biden either)
Thirdly, both campaigns have selected vice Presidents which could prove fatal should their team lose in what is highly likely to be a razer tight race. Although, at least there was something passing as logic when the Democrat campaign opted for Walz as compared to the hubris that characterised Trump’s selection of JD. Vance.
Fourthly, something we will be discussing long after this 2024 election is decided shall be the gender gap. 43 percent of Democratic lawmakers are women, while only 15 percent of Republican lawmakers are women. This is coupled with men breaking for Trumpism whilst women break for the Democrats in election cycles. Might the next stage of the demented US culture war prove to be ‘men’ vs ‘women’ as both parties retreat to ‘their half’ of the gender divide?
Finally, I cannot resist finishing with a quick anecdote about Stephen Miller (infamous for being the leading driving force behind forced family separation). When Tony Hinchcliffe made his outrageous remark about Puerto Rico being a floating garbage island, Miller apparently was deeply upset.
It seems Stephen ‘Goebbels’ Miller was not angry about the racism or the bigotry of Hinchcliffe’s ‘joke’. Apparently what upset the deporter-in-chief of Trump-world was that he knew the campaign had just committed a huge unforced error.
He believed that Hinchcliffe had done profound damage to Trump’s electoral prospects, right at the moment they were trying to close the deal in the final stretch of the race. Miller, according to Alberta, has been seethed at what this lack of discipline portended for Trump should he return to power.
The obvious irony is lost on Stephen Miller, Lewandowski et al. As they spend the final days of this election complaining bitterly about Hinchcliffe and those who recommended him, the elephant remains unnoticed in the room. The real culprit causing the conditions for such undisciplined chaos remains one man: Donald Trump.
So I find it delightfully amusing that Stephen Miller has complained so bitterly in recent days about mid-level staffer Alex Bruesewitz, who recommended Hinchcliffe to open Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally of October 27th.
“If we can’t trust this kid with a campaign,” Miller said to the group, according to one of the people present, “how can we trust him in the White House?”
How indeed, indeed Mr Miller.
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