CHICAGO — In his history as a candidate for president, Donald Trump has never experienced anything like the past month. Vice President Kamala Harris, a Black and Indian American woman, has pushed the White alpha male to the sidelines of the national conversation, denying him the spotlight he craves and constantly demands.
Analysis by Dan Balz
Democrats concluded their electrifying national convention here on Thursday night with Harris as the main event, delivering an address sculpted to keep her on the crest of a wave that has changed the contours of the presidential election.
The Democrats are in the game, the former president is in a box, and it’s not clear whether he knows what to do.
Trying to free himself from this bind, Trump has plucked from what was once a tested playbook of tricks that in the past has kept his opponents off-balance and himself at the center of attention. But as the campaign now moves to its next phase, the focus on him and how he attempts to regain his balance will be as much or more of the story compared with how Harris navigates the road ahead.
Harris defined the stakes of the election in blunt terms in her acceptance speech. “Fellow Americans, this election is not only the most important of our lives, it is one of the most important in the life of our nation,” she said. “In many ways, Donald Trump is an unserious man. But the consequences — but the consequences of putting Donald Trump back in the White House are extremely serious. … Just imagine Donald Trump with no guardrails.”
Meanwhile, as she was speaking, Trump was providing a running stream of criticism on Truth Social, though in the same unfocused and sometimes confusing style that has marked many of his recent appearances. “IS SHE TALKING ABOUT ME?” he wrote in one post.
As Harris has glided through the past month, Trump has taken to social media or to friendly media interviews in hopes of setting the terms of the conversation, but that has backfired. He has tried invective, exaggeration and lies, something that in the past he used to shift the focus, sometimes to distract from his own problems, at other times to draw attention away from a rival. It hasn’t done what he hoped.
The former president has tried counterprogramming to force the media to look his way this week. It should have been obvious to him that this would be Harris’s week in the same way that the Republican convention was his. The only news Democrats made during his convention was that pressure on President Joe Biden to quit his reelection bid was ramping up. Trump has learned, perhaps painfully, that at this moment, fewer are listening to him. In short, nothing seems to be working the way it once did.
As the Democrats leave Chicago and the campaign turns to its final season, Harris enjoys both the attention and the momentum. Whether this can last much longer is anyone’s guess. Everyone now awaits the next round of national and battleground state polls to see whether Harris receives the traditional bounce that accompanies a successful convention and whether the enthusiasm that was on display this week inside the United Center and at massive rallies in the days before will settle a bit.
As many of the luminaries who spoke here this week reminded Democrats, this is a very tight race, close enough certainly that even a disoriented Trump could win — if he regains his legs as a candidate, which is one of the biggest questions at this moment.
Campaigns are about many things: the state of the nation and the national mood, candidate character and candidate quality, policy prescriptions, the strength of a party’s infrastructure, money and advertising. But they are also about some intangibles, things that do not rise to the level of high policy or dignified debate, including sometimes a day-by-day jujitsu contest at which Trump once excelled.
