The 2024 presidential campaign is perhaps the closest race in modern history. The candidates are in the final stretch, receiving endless advice from the media and their champions who know the slightest bump will carry one or the other to victory.
I am going to give advice to both.
First, Vice President Kamala Harris. Media contributors like James Carville and Frank Luntz are hammering Harris to stop with the negative attacks on former President Donald Trump and instead go positive with her closing argument. This is what is done conventionally.
But this time they’re wrong.
Focusing on a positive message will be difficult at best. Even with the legacy media pushing the Biden-Harris report card, domestically and internationally, that is fraught with failure. Any promises to continue those policies will backfire with undecideds. Her socialist vision is one America simply does not endorse.
Harris attacks relentlessly with deliberately false personal slurs – designed not just to hurt Trump but to destroy him politically. She claims a long list of falsehoods: he is a racist; he’s a fascist; he admires Hitler; he is a dictator; he will start a war; he organized riots; he is unhinged; he is unstable. Then the left-wing media repeat her comments over and over.
If I had Harris’s ethics, I would too. She knows that if she slurs him dishonestly, she will be outed by conservative-leaning media. So what? It’s the other media that matters. Harris knows she and her lies won’t be called out by any of them. It is an astonishing fact of life that throughout this campaign, first with Biden but more aggressively with her, there has been one provably false ad hominem slur after another that has never been fact-checked by the national media.
There’s yet another reason for continuing these personal attacks. Trump has a famously thin skin and can be baited. His responses, moreover, can be equally nasty – which she wants. If the media do cover the story, it will be presented as a she-said-he-said affair, and to feature a smooth but forceful soundbite from Harris, one, say, calling him unhinged. This will be followed by Trump’s selectively edited denial. When this happens, she is controlling the narrative, and she wins.
You doubt me? Go back and analyze their debate. It’s precisely what she did all night long. He bit the hook repeatedly and lashed back. She was controlling the narrative.
What should Trump do? Ignore her and do the exact opposite.
Critics say that Trump is completely undisciplined. This is not so. No undisciplined man builds a multi-billion-dollar business empire and then gets elected president of the United States. Trump is disciplined when he wants to be disciplined. He now needs to be disciplined.
He enjoys political boxing, especially against featherweights. But needs to accept that, while broadside attacks might arouse rally attendees, they are no longer his targeted audience. He needs to sell the undecideds. Rally rhetoric won’t make those old dogs hunt. But so, what?
Both candidates are still in rally mode. Trump held a huge event at Madison Square Garden in New York and the media embarrassed themselves complaining about it. Harris just made a speech from outside the White House. The media love her canned speeches.
Trump needs to understand he has another, equally powerful, weapon at his disposal, and that will bring skeptics to his camp. I think Trump has historically under-appreciated the tremendous power he has delivering a positive message.
My advice to Trump is that he analyze his State of the Union addresses. Every year his enemies in and out of the media expected him to be off script and pugnacious, and they were ready for bear. Instead, he threw them a change-up every time. He did the opposite.
He went positive, examining his record for the year completed, which always contained copious achievements, while laying out his agenda for the one to come which was commonly ambitious and attractive to a strong majority of Americans. He was the statesman, and after the House Speaker Nancy Pelosi insultingly ripped his speech for the cameras, she was the angry failure.
Critics say that Trump is completely undisciplined. This is not so. No undisciplined man builds a multi-billion-dollar business empire and then gets elected president of the United States. Trump is disciplined when he wants to be disciplined. He now needs to be disciplined.
Go back and review his speech at Normandy. It was a masterpiece and projected him as the leader of the free world. Go back and review his speech at Warsaw. It was as powerful as anything ever delivered by President Ronald Reagan or British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, a full-throated defense of Western civilization, making hundreds of thousands of Poles roar their approval, and some weep.
Trump has something Harris doesn’t: a winning record, a winning agenda and a winning vision. She avoids her record because it’s not only radioactive politically, but socialism has a rich history of utter failure everywhere.
All Donald Trump needs to do is tell his story, remind people what was accomplished during his presidency. State simply he will do it again, both at home where so many are suffering, but also abroad where the world nears a boiling point. Lay out his vision of his city on the hill.
Make that his closing argument and Donald Trump will be the next president of the United States.