Children lie in front of the television, eyes wide, dumbstruck, not comprehending or, worse, learning from what they see and hear: the cruel, heartless, misogyny-spewing rambles of Donald Trump, with a dash of hateful fantasy from JD Vance thrown in.
The much-praised video ends with flickers of hope as the kids listen to Kamala Harris’s “more in common” message. But despite being seamlessly accepted as such on social media, this is not an advertisement from her campaign. It’s an unofficial TikTok mash-up of recent news clips with a 2016 Hillary Clinton ad called Role Models.
Perhaps that explains why the “ad” feels nostalgic, almost wishful, invoking a time when young children haven’t already absorbed the coarse, debased culture propagated by Trump to traumatising effect.
The TikTok video is readily mistaken for a Harris-endorsed ad because what was true in 2016 is even more true now. The US is nearing the plutocratic endgame that is this presidential election. It is the campaign that has raised the most finance (Harris) versus the candidacy that promises the biggest bonanza to the rich (Trump). But the choice is clear.
One is a Democrat and a democrat. The other is neither. One is an erstwhile prosecutor and a woman with the temerity to hold political office. The other is a criminal, judge-confirmed rapist who has bragged about his role in removing the constitutional abortion rights of women.
No one ever gets to run a campaign on their own terms, which is why so many advertisements funded by Harris’s supporters revolve around the lumbering spectre of the would-be authoritarian.
They’re not so much attack ads as they are light contextualisation of Trump’s own garbled words. There’s one that argues, slickly and compellingly, that Trump will always choose Vladimir Putin over the American people. There’s one that quotes the endless supply of grim-faced people who worked for Trump the last time and don’t think he should be let near the White House ever again.
Say what you like about these former Trump appointees, but at least they have learned something. They’re not so seduced by the comedy cadences of his speech that they fail to take his fascist brain-dumps seriously.
By contrast, a perennial trap media commentators let themselves fall into is that it’s passé to call a spade a spade. A residual fondness for giving Trump credit where none is due has, in some quarters, devolved into the tendency to absolve him of any obligation to meet basic standards of decency, competence or sanity. To expect this of him would be obviously naive, so the expectations dissolve. He gets away with it.
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Throughout her campaign spots, Harris offers herself up as the moral choice. It’s easy to do. She exudes normalcy, stability and credibility – just ask the 23 Nobel-winning US economists who deem her policies “vastly superior” to Trump’s tariff-strewn path to self-sabotage. Where she is bad, Trump is always worse.
But ads are only as effective as their targeting, and it’s alarmingly uncertain if there are enough receptive swing-state voters out there for her to target. We regularly hear in the media not just from diehard working-class Republicans intent on voting against their own interests, but from various groups of tribally Democrat men who declare that, actually, no, they won’t vote for her. They never say it is because she is a woman. That’s just the subtext.
”Freedom”, meanwhile, is the single word stressed by Harris. Not freedom to own guns, pay no income tax and grope women without consequence. Not freedom meaning only freedom for men.
She means freedom from the chaos and hate spread by Trump and his string-pullers, freedom from both poverty and patriarchy. She means the very reproductive freedom that Trump, via his supreme court nominees, has taken away.
In one distressing campaign ad, a Texas woman called Ondrea Lintz reveals the permanent damage to her body after she had a miscarriage at 16 weeks and was not given the healthcare she then required: an emergency abortion. She was instead allowed to develop a life-threatening septic infection, with only a six-hour surgery saving her life.
Her horror story, representative of so many similar ones, plays out under audio of Trump bullishly claiming the overturning of Roe v Wade as a personal victory.
Something else is different in this election. We used to hear about “shy Trump voters”, like “shy Tories”, the implication being that some people were too ashamed to admit these preferences to pollsters. But the chill winds of 2024 have brought us the phenomenon of the Shy Democrat: Wall Street types like JP Morgan chief executive Jamie Dimon who are pro-Harris, but don’t want anyone to know about it. They fear retaliation if Trump wins.
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Still, it’s hard to know if Patrick Soon-Shiong and Jeff Bezos, the billionaire owners of the LA Times and Washington Post respectively, were engaging in anticipatory obedience when they blocked their newspapers’ planned endorsements of Harris, or if they’re just greedy.
Either way, their interventions are proof of how much damage has already been inflicted upon media freedom.
On the left, people are desperate for Harris to be braver. But just getting and going as far as she has is starting to look dangerously courageous relative to the cowardice of the business elite. I’d like to think that, win or lose, a positive legacy from this belly-laughing, freedom-reclaiming, charisma-radiating, Beyoncé-soundtracked candidate will live on past November 5th. Instead, the evidence suggests that, win or lose, what happens next will be ugly.
If she is condemned to lose like Clinton, expect a queue of smug pundits to tell us where she went wrong. The woman with a massive scar across her abdomen was a turn-off, they’ll say. Perhaps Harris should have been less confrontational, more respectful of Trump? Maybe she should have smiled more. Maybe she should have laughed less.
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