It’s probably right to call Kamala Harris the change candidate. Though she’s the vice president, she’s running against forces that struck down Roe and stripped the basic freedoms from half the country. So, for many, voting for her is voting for the restoration of individual liberty.
But I believe she’s a change candidate for another reason.
To understand, you have to reimagine Donald Trump. Think of him less as the Republican challenger to a Democratic administration and more as a kind of over-incumbent. He’s more or less an omnipresence, as if he were now sitting in the White House. His face is everywhere. His words are everywhere. The man takes up all the oxygen in every room.
Joe Biden is the president. Harris is his second in command. But since 2015, they and the rest of us have been living in the era of Trump.
And the dominant trait of our era has been negation.
As president, Trump was against fairness and balanced budgets when he cut taxes for the rich. He was against free trade and free labor when his administration tried to complete a border wall. He was against peace and diplomacy when he sabotaged relations with US allies. He was against competence when his negligence killed over a million people in the pandemic. And he was against democracy and the rule of law when he tried and failed to overturn a free and fair election.
What Donald Trump started as president, he has continued as the GOP nominee, the main difference being that the scale of negation is so massive that his own campaign is now about nothing, literally nothing.
There are no serious policies. There are no serious plans to solve problems. He isn’t giving anyone a reason to vote for him. Trump is only “s— talking America,” as Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro put it, for the purpose of negating Kamala Harris and his enemies.
And to hide the blindingly obvious fact that Trump’s campaign is about nothing, he has made up fantastical lies about the economy being the worst on the planet, America being a “failing nation,” foreign leaders “laughing at us,” big cities being overrun by criminals, thugs slitting throats, gangs raping women and, of course, Haitian immigrants eating cats and dogs. Trump’s latest whopper is about the United States government refusing to help hurricane victims if they’re Republicans.
As Times columnist Paul Krugman wrote: “At this point, the Trump campaign rests entirely on denouncing things that aren’t happening — an imaginary bad economy, imaginary runaway crime and now an imaginary failure of Biden and Harris to respond to a natural disaster.”
Of course, his campaign is about nothing, because he believes in nothing.
“I only like people that like me,” he said in August.
He’s never said anything truer. It captures the entirety of his moral worldview. If you like him, you’re good. If you don’t, you’re bad. There’s no such thing as higher-order values. There is no lie too grotesque, thought too stupid, act too shameful or crime too heinous. The only rule determining virtue or vice is whether you’re for or against him.
A campaign about nothing that’s run by a candidate who believes in nothing is predictably chaotic. I wake up each morning to read news about a lie Trump told yesterday that’s become even more obscene.
For instance, what began last month as a ridiculous accusation that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating dogs and cats took a turn this week when he said he would, as president, strip the legal status of those same immigrants in order to “remove them.”
When nothing is more important than your own immediate needs, higher-order things like facts, morality and the rule of law can be dismissed. And if he can do that to Haitians, he can do that to virtually anyone – turn them into monsters to justify acting monstrously.
And if he can do that to people, he will do that to democracy.
The line that stands out most to me in reporting about the special counsel's indictment of Trump for the crimes of trying to overturn the results of the 2020 election is this one: “It doesn’t matter if you won or lost the election,” Trump said. “You still have to fight like hell.”
Spoken like a true nihilist.
All that seems solid melts into the air.
All that seems holy is profaned.
“Donald Trump is the most dangerous candidate for president in my lifetime,” Bruce Springsteen said in a video endorsement of Kamala Harris and Tim Walz that was released today. “His disdain for the sanctity of our Constitution, the sanctity of democracy, the sanctity of the rule of law, and the sanctity of the peaceful transfer of power should disqualify him from [holding] the office of president ever again.”
The Boss didn’t mention “nihilism” in his three-minute sermon, but he meant that when he said Trump “doesn’t understand the meaning of this country, its history or what it means to be deeply American.”
He doesn’t, because he can’t. Nothing matters to Trump but Trump.
This is why Harris is the change candidate.
Trump is an empty space.
She’s going to fill it.
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