The Harris-Walz campaign proved two important things last week. First, it proved that sometimes all you really have to do is answer attacks—the mere fact of answering them deflates their momentum. Second, it proved that Democrats have finally learned something from brazen Republican presidential campaigns over the years: Convert your perceived weakness into strength and their perceived strength into weakness.
The campaign did both of these things effectively last week. And it drove Donald Trump, and Republicans generally, nuts. Democrats aren’t supposed to do that! It’s like Cinderella saying she’s not doing the dishes. But Democrats are saying it, and it’s effing awesome.
The answered attacks concerned the swift-boating of Tim Walz’s National Guard service. The day Kamala Harris named Walz as her running mate, I, like the rest of you, saw the four or five main lines of attack they were going to trot out against Walz. Too left-wing, too old; choosing him over Josh Shapiro proved that Harris was captive of the hard left; one or two others.
I thought they were all preposterous and wouldn’t go anywhere—with the possible exception of the National Guard thing. The fact that Walz retired from his unit two months before it shipped out to Iraq seemed like something that (a) probably had a plausible explanation but (b) could nevertheless be made to stick. And for the first 24 hours, the Harris-Walz campaign didn’t have a good answer.
But over the course of the week, the campaign completely neutralized the attack. It turned out that there was indeed a plausible explanation—that, while his unit maybe did hear talk that it would be deployed, the order didn’t come until after Walz left the unit, and well after he filed his papers to do so. One conservative member of his unit, Joseph Eustice, defended him. The Wall Street Journal editorial page—the page, remember, that irresponsibly and disgustingly kept alive more Clinton conspiracy theories than Donald Trump has faced felony indictments—declared it a nonissue. Powerful pushback from important liberal journalists like Josh Marshall may have stiffened the campaign’s spine, or may not have, but the point is that the Democrats fought back hard on this.
Take a moment to grasp this point. Historically, it is of huge importance. Democratic weakness on attacks like this goes back to George McGovern in 1972. The Nixon campaign hit him on “acid, amnesty, and abortion” (the amnesty part referring to young men who’d fled to Canada to avoid Vietnam). McGovern’s aides raised it with him. He told them not to respond, no one would believe that about a war hero (which he was). Then, in 2004, John Kerry was swift-boated over his service in Nam. He too directed his campaign to ignore the attacks, no one would believe them. They may have cost him the White House.
The Harris-Walz campaign has clearly learned this lesson. Walz, who so far has been a perfect running mate, whose brilliant comportment (just the right balance of showing deference to Harris and offering his own unique defense of the party’s positions) has made most people forget the name Josh Shapiro, will still have to address this matter at the convention. But his place on the ticket hardly depends on it. Which it might have, if Democrats hadn’t hit back this past week.
Then, later in the week, Harris went after Trump on the border, converting a perceived weakness into a possible strength and turning Trump’s number one issue around on him. “I was the attorney general of a border state. In that job, I walked underground tunnels between the United States and Mexico on that border with law enforcement officers,” she said Saturday in Las Vegas. “Earlier this year, we had a chance to pass the toughest bipartisan border security bill in decades. But Donald Trump tanked the bill because he thought it would help him win an election. Well, when I am president, I will sign that bill into law.”
Exit polls after the November election may not show that Harris “won” the border issue. But if they show that she held her own on it and didn’t lose because of it, it will be because of impressively aggressive rhetoric like this.
This is something Democrats, with some exceptions, seem not to have understood well for two generations or more. If you don’t answer the other side’s attacks, they stick. The press assumes the attacks must be valid, so they smell blood.
But if you just answer and go on the offensive, you blunt the attacks right out of the box. Because all you have to do is say “bullshit” and then, in the media, it’s a he-said she-said, and the media won’t take sides, and swing voters will just figure it’s both sides doing their spin thing. And if the facts are actually on your side, as they are here in Walz’s case, then you can’t really lose. The worst you can do is draw.
Republicans have understood this for years. Seeing a Democratic presidential campaign finally get this is exhilarating to me personally but, more important, potentially game-changing.
And Donald Trump is freaked out in ways he never imagined were possible. He has faced a lot of opponents—from 1980s New York Mayor Ed Koch to all his many creditors to the 16 dwarves he ran against in 2016 to a Clinton campaign that thought the race was over to prosecutors he has known for years how to slow down, especially with corrupt hack judges having his back. But Trump has never had an opponent that made him go: “Oh fuck, these people mean business.”
Now he does. And that it’s a Black woman who means this business makes it so great, so much better. The New York Times reported over the weekend that he is so shell-shocked by the turnabout in this race that he’s doubling down on racism and “stop the steal” delusions. He is in full-blown meltdown mode, in other words.
All the pressure is on Trump now. Can he come back? Can he respond? Can he prove, contra George Conway’s brilliant ads, that he is not a pathetic psychopath? Can he make up these polling gaps, like his sudden four-point deficit in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan?
In 2016, we had a Trump who expected and even wanted to lose, who had no investment in winning. In 2020, we had a Trump with a deep investment in winning, and who expected to win. In 2024, we had a Trump—while he was running against Joe Biden—who fully expected to win.
But now we have a new Trump. He really isn’t sure. We’ve never seen this animal on the loose. Hide the wives and children. The Democrats are hitting him where it hurts. And it’s about damn time.
