Jobs

While Trump refuses to debate her again, Kamala delivers a knockout punch in his right-wing territory

by

Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

Heather Cox Richardson

October 16, 2024

Two Fox News Channel interviews bracketed today: one this morning with Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump in front of an audience of hand-picked Republican women in Georgia, the other by Democratic presidential candidate Vice President Kamala Harris with host Bret Baier. Together, the two were a performance of dominance. 

FNC billed Trump’s so-called town hall as a chance for female voters, a demographic that is swinging heavily to Harris, to ask Trump about issues they care about. But Hadas Gold and Liam Reilly of CNN reported that FNC had packed the audience with Trump supporters. The first question came from the president of the Fulton County Republican Women, though she was not identified as such. FNC then edited the broadcast to cut out remarks in which the attendees expressed support for Trump. 

It seems unlikely that Trump attracted any new voters by speaking to an audience of loyalists audibly cheering him on.

After Trump refused to debate her again, Harris voluntarily moved into his right-wing territory, agreeing to an interview with FNC host Bret Baier. In that interview, Baier reframed right-wing talking points as questions, essentially giving Trump a second shot at a debate. Baier kept talking over the vice president’s attempts to answer—even putting out a hand to interrupt her—in a stark contrast to FNC’s deference to Trump. Harris asked him to let her reply, and then answered his questions, sometimes testily, usually turning them into opportunities to contrast her own candidacy and record with Trump’s. 

Control of the interview changed abruptly when Harris called out Trump for referring to the “enemy within” and talking about using the American military against those he considers enemies. Baier used that opportunity to show a clip of Trump saying he wasn’t threatening anyone, but the clip was edited to remove his threats against “sick,” “evil,” “dangerous” “Marxists and communists and fascists” including Representative Adam Schiff (D-CA) and “the Pelosis”—presumably former House speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and her husband, who was attacked by a man with a hammer in 2022 by a man who wanted to force Nancy Pelosi to renounce the investigation into the 2016 Trump campaign’s ties to Russia. 

Harris had had enough propaganda.

“Bret, I’m sorry, and with all due respect, that clip was not what he has been saying about the enemy within that he has repeated when he’s speaking about the American people. That’s not what you just showed…. You and I both know that he’s talked about turning the American military on the American people. He has talked about going after people who are engaged in peaceful protest. He has talked about locking people up because they disagree with him. This is a democracy. And in a democracy, the president of the United States in the United States of America should be… able to handle criticism without saying he’d lock people up for doing it. And this is what is at stake, which is why you have someone like the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff saying what Mark Milley has said about Donald Trump being a threat to the United States of America.” 

Simply by going on the right-wing network, Harris was demonstrating dominance. Then, by answering as thoroughly as she did, she undercut the right-wing narrative that she is stupid and inarticulate. By calling out the FNC for deliberately misleading its viewers, she took command. Baier, rather than Harris, was the one doing the post-interview spinning.

Writer Peter Wehner, who worked for presidents Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and George W. Bush, wrote: “Bret Baier has rarely looked as bad (or tendentious) as he did in his interview with Kamala Harris. On the flip side, this was one of her best interviews. She dominated Bret. All in all it was quite a bad day for MAGA world’s most important media outlet.”

In between the two FNC events were two others that also told a story, this one about how the Republican Party’s descent into MAGA is creating a new political coalition to defend American principles.

Trump held a town hall with undecided Latino voters moderated by Mexican journalist Enrique Acevedo for Univision. Members of the audience asked excellent questions: how would he bring down household costs, who would take the jobs left behind by undocumented workers if Trump deported them and how much would that drive up food costs, why Trump took so long to stop the January 6 rioters, if he had caused deaths during the pandemic by misleading Americans, and if he agrees with his wife, Melania, about protecting abortion rights. 

But Trump did not answer the questions, instead regurgitating his usual talking points. He promised to produce more oil and gas, called undocumented immigrants criminals, repeated the lie about Haitian migrants eating pets, and, after notably referring to the January 6 rioters as “we” and law enforcement officers as “the others,” called January 6 “a day of love.” The audience did not appear convinced.

Meanwhile, Vice President Harris joined more than 100 Republicans in Pennsylvania, near the spot where George Washington and more than 2,000 Continental soldiers crossed the Delaware River on Christmas night 1776 to surprise a garrison of British soldiers at Trenton, New Jersey, where they won a strategic victory. 

Harris noted that those gathered were also near Philadelphia, where in 1787 delegates from across the country gathered to write and sign the U.S. Constitution. 

“That work was not easy. The founders often disagreed. Often quite passionately. But in the end, the Constitution of the United States laid out the foundations of our democracy, including the rule of law, that there would be checks and balances, that we would have free and fair elections and a peaceful transfer of power. And these principles and traditions have sustained our nation for over two centuries, sustained because generations of Americans, from all backgrounds, from all beliefs, have cherished them, upheld them, and defended them. 

“And now, the baton is in our hands,” she said. [A]t stake in this race are the democratic ideals that our founders and generations of Americans before us have fought for. At stake in this election is the Constitution of the United States…its very self.” 

Harris welcomed the Republicans in the crowd, saying that everyone there shared a core belief: “That we must put country before party.” The crowd chanted, “USA, USA, USA.” 

Harris noted that many of the Republicans on stage had taken the same oath to the Constitution that she had. “We here know the Constitution is not a relic from our past, but determines whether we are a country where the people can speak freely, and even criticize the president, without fear of being thrown in jail, or targeted by the military. Where the people can worship as they choose without the government interfering. Where you can vote without fear that your vote will be thrown away. All this and more depends on whether or not our leaders honor their oath to the Constitution.”

Trump, she pointed out, tried to overturn the will of the people expressed in a free and fair election, has vowed to use the military to go after any American who doesn’t support him, and has called for the “termination” of the Constitution. “It is clear,” she said, “Donald Trump is increasingly unstable and unhinged, and he is seeking unchecked power.” Trump, she said, “must never again stand behind the seal of the President of the United States.”

“And to those who are watching,” she said, “if you share that view, no matter your party, no matter who you voted for last time: There is a place for you in this campaign. The coalition we have built has room for everyone who is ready to turn the page on the chaos and instability of Donald Trump.”

“I pledge to you to be a President for all Americans. And I take that pledge seriously.”

She reiterated her promise to appoint a Republican to her cabinet and to establish a Council on Bipartisan Solutions to strengthen the middle class, secure the border, defend our freedoms, and maintain the nation’s leadership in the world. She noted that the country needs a healthy two-party system, and described how the Senate Intelligence Committee left partisanship at the door. It “was “country over party in action,” when she sat on the committee, she said, “[s]o I know it can be done.”

“[O]ur campaign is not a fight against something,” she said. “It is a fight for something. It is a fight for the fundamental principles upon which we were founded, It is a fight for a new generation of leadership that is optimistic about what we can achieve together—Republicans, Democrats, and independents who want to move past the politics of division and blame and get things done on behalf of the American people.

“[W]e are all here together this beautiful afternoon because we love our country…and we know the deep privilege and pride that comes with being an American and the duty that comes along with it…. Imperfect though we may be, America is still that ‘shining city upon a hill’ that inspires people around the world. And I do believe it is one of the highest forms of patriotism to fight for the ideals of our country.”

“So, to people from across Pennsylvania, and across our nation, let us together stand up for the rule of law, for our democratic ideals, and for the Constitution of the United States. And in twenty days, we have the power to chart a New Way Forward, one that is worthy of this magnificent country that we are all blessed to call home.” 

Trump’s disgusting hurricane/FEMA lies are part of his strategy to overturn democracy

by

Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

Heather Cox Richardson

October 6, 2024

This morning began with a CNN headline story by fact checker Daniel Dale, titled “Six days of Trump lies about the Hurricane Helene response.” Dale noted that Republican nominee for president Donald Trump has been one of the chief sources of the disinformation that has badly hampered recovery efforts. 

Trump has claimed that the federal government is ignoring the storm’s victims, especially ones in Republican areas, and that the government is handing out only $750 in aid (in fact, the initial emergency payment for food and groceries is $750, but there are multiple grants available for home rebuilding up to a total of $42,500, the upper limit set by Congress). He has also claimed—falsely—that the Federal Emergency Management Agency is out of money to help because the administration spent all its money on Ukraine and undocumented immigrants.

Trump’s lies are not errors. They are part of a well-documented strategy to overturn democracy by using modern media to create a false political world. Voters begin to base their political decisions on that fake image, rather than on reality, and are manipulated into giving up control of their government to an authoritarian. 

Russian political theorists who were key to the rise of Russian president Vladimir Putin after the collapse of the Soviet Union called this manipulation “political technology.”

They developed a series of techniques to pervert democracy through this virtual political reality. They blackmailed opponents, abused state power to help favored candidates, sponsored “double” candidates with names similar to those of opponents in order to split the opposition vote and thus open the way for their own candidates, created false parties to further splinter the opposition, and, finally, created a false narrative around an election or other event that enabled them to control public debate.

Essentially, they perverted democracy, turning it from the concept of voters choosing their leaders into the concept of voters rubber-stamping the leaders they had been manipulated into backing.

This system made sense in former Soviet republics, where it enabled leaders to avoid the censorship that voters would recoil from by instead creating a firehose of news until people became overwhelmed by the task of trying to figure out what was real and simply tuned out. 

But it has also worked in the United States, where right-wing leaders have used it to divide the American people and spread disinformation. While “misinformation” is simply false information—which we all spread innocently and correct with accurate information—“disinformation” is a deliberate lie to convince people of things that are not true. 

Before the 2016 presidential election, Russian operatives working for Putin set out to tear the U.S. apart and thus undermine the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) they see as stopping the resurrection of Imperial Russia. They called for provoking “instability and separatism within the borders of the United States… encouraging all kinds of separatism and ethnic, social and racial conflicts,… [and] support[ing] isolationist tendencies in American politics.” 

But they were not the only ones operating in this disinformation sphere. In 2014, then–Breitbart chief executive Steve Bannon explained to a right-wing Catholic group meeting at the Vatican that he believed traditional western civilization was fighting a war for survival. To win, current western-style civilizations must be completely reconfigured to put a few wealthy white Christian male leaders in charge to direct and protect subordinates. 

In that year, Bannon set out to dismantle the administrative state that was leveling the playing field among Americans and push Christian nationalism. With the help of funding from Republican megadonors Robert and Rebecca Mercer, he launched Cambridge Analytica, a company designed to develop profiles of individuals that would enable advertisers to group them for targeted advertising. Before the 2016 election, the company captured information from the Facebook profiles of more than 50 million users without their permission or knowledge, enabling it to flood the platform with targeted disinformation. 

Bannon became the chief executive officer of Trump’s 2016 campaign. He then served as chief strategist and senior counselor for the first eight months of Trump’s term, during which he worked to put MAGAs in power across the administration and across the country.

“The Democrats don’t matter,” Bannon told a reporter in 2018. “The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with sh*t.” Keeping listeners constantly trying to defend what is real from what is not destroys their ability to make sense of the world. Many people turn to a strongman who promises to create order. Others will get so exhausted they simply give up. As scholar of totalitarianism Hannah Arendt noted, authoritarians use this technique to destabilize a population.

Trump’s administration began with a foundational lie about the size of the crowd at his inauguration. Recent challenges to that assertion from Vice President Kamala Harris and former president Barack Obama rankled as badly as they did for Trump because that lie allowed Trump to define the public conversation. Forcing his supporters to commit to a lie that was demonstrably untrue locked them into accepting others throughout his presidency, for backing away would become harder and harder with each lie they accepted. 

Challenging that lie, as Harris and Obama did, challenged all those that came afterward, including the lie that Trump had been the true winner of the 2020 presidential election. Thanks to the October 2 filing by special counsel Jack Smith, we know that Trump was in almost daily communication with Bannon as he pushed that lie. 

Scholars of authoritarianism call a lie of such magnitude a “Big Lie,” a key propaganda tool associated with Nazi Germany. It is a lie so huge that no one can believe it is false. If leaders repeat it enough times, refusing to admit that it is a lie, people come to think it is the truth because surely no one would make up anything so outrageous.

In his autobiography Mein Kampf, or “My Struggle,” Adolf Hitler wrote that people were more likely to believe a giant lie than a little one because they were willing to tell small lies in their own lives but “would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods.” Since they could not conceive of telling “colossal untruths…they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.” He went on: “Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation.”

The U.S. Office of Strategic Services had picked up on Hitler’s manipulation of his followers when it described Hitler’s psychological profile. It said, “His primary rules were: never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it.”

The MAGA movement is now based in the Big Lie. Its leaders refuse to admit that Trump lost the 2020 election. Trump’s running mate, Ohio senator J.D. Vance, two days ago actually said Trump won, and as media figures more frequently ask the question of MAGA lawmakers, they continue to dodge it, as Arkansas senator Tom Cotton did today on NBC’s Meet the Press, and as House speaker Mike Johnson did on ABC News’s “This Week.”

Now, though, their lies about the federal response to Hurricane Helene show that they are completely committed to disinformation. As Will Bunch noted today in the Philadelphia Inquirer, when Vance lied again at the vice presidential debate about the legal status of the Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, and complained when moderator Margaret Brennan corrected him, he gave up the whole game. “Margaret,” Vance said, “the rules were that you guys weren’t going to fact-check.” He continued to argue until the moderators cut his microphone. 

Bunch points out that MAGA Republicans insist on the right to lie, considering any fact-checking “censorship,” a position to which Vance pivoted when Minnesota governor Tim Walz asked him if Trump won the 2020 election.   

Just as Russian political theorists advocated to overturn democracy, MAGA Republicans have created an alternative political reality, aided in large part by the disinformation spread on social media by X owner and Trump supporter Elon Musk. 

They continue to be aided by foreign operatives, as well. This morning, on CBS’s Face the Nation, Senate Intelligence Committee member Mark Kelly (D-AZ) warned, on the basis of information he has heard from the FBI, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and the National Security Agency, that Russia, Iran, and China are generating about 20% to 30% of the political content and comments on social media.

But the largest purveyors of disinformation are homegrown.

Perhaps, though, the very real, immediate damage MAGA’s disinformation about Hurricane Helene is causing might finally be a step too far. In what is at least a muted rebuke to Trump, Republican governors across the damaged area have stepped up to praise President Joe Biden and the federal response to the disaster. 

Democrats are reclaiming the country and its symbols

by

Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

Heather Cox Richardson

August 21, 2024

In 1974, music writer Jon Landau saw a relatively unknown musician in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and wrote for an alternative paper: “Last Thursday, at the Harvard Square theater, I saw rock’n’roll past flash before my eyes. And I saw something else: I saw rock and roll future and its name is Bruce Springsteen. And on a night when I needed to feel young, he made me feel like I was hearing music for the very first time.” The review helped to catapult Springsteen to stardom. 

After three days at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Illinois, I feel like I have seen the political future and its name is the Democratic Party. But rather than feeling like I’m hearing politics for the first time, I am hearing the echo of political themes embraced in the best moments of America’s past.

The theme of the third day of the Democratic National Convention, held in the United Center in Chicago, Illinois, was “A Fight for Our Freedoms.” But the speeches were less about fighting than they were about recovering the roots of American democracy.

The Democrats have not lost their conviction that the reelection of Donald Trump and the enactment of Project 2025 are an existential threat both to democracy and to Americans themselves. Speakers throughout the convention have condemned Trump and highlighted Project 2025, a blueprint written by the Heritage Foundation and other right-wing organizations for a second Trump term. Although Trump has tried to distance himself from Project 2025, Democratic vice presidential nominee Minnesota governor Tim Walz, who was a high school football coach, notes that no one bothers to write a playbook if they’re not going to use it.

Tonight, comedian and actor Kenan Thompson illustrated the dangers of Project 2025 with humor, bringing home the horror of it as only humor can do. With a giant copy of the plan as a prop, he gave a woman married for eight years to her wife the bad news that Project 2025 would end protections for LGBTQ+ Americans, informed a woman who pays $35 a month for her insulin that the plan would overturn the law that makes drugs more affordable, notified an OBGYN that the plan would ban abortion nationwide and throw abortion providers into jail, and put a woman who called herself a proud civil servant on notice that Project 2025 would guarantee she would be fired unless she is a MAGA loyalist. 

But the dark dangers of the assault of Trump and the MAGA Republicans on the country have finally pushed the party to move away from its customary caution and focus on policy to embrace the possibilities of a new future. The convention is electric, packed with young people who push jokey memes and poke fun at themselves, much as Walz and presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris are doing to deflect criticism, and who are sharing homemade politically-themed friendship bracelets that echo the homemade paraphernalia of singer Taylor Swift’s Eras tour. 

And, after decades in which Republicans claimed the mantle of patriotism, now that the fate of democracy itself is on the line, Democrats are joyfully claiming the symbols and the principles of American democracy for their own. 

During the Vietnam War in the 1960s and early 1970s, many Democrats shied away from symbols of patriotism because they seemed to support imperialism. Then, in the 1980s, Reagan and his supporters wrapped themselves in the flag and claimed it for their own. That impulse to define “Americans” as those who vote for Republicans has led us to a place where a small minority claims the right to rule over the rest of us. 

The Democratic National Convention has powerfully illustrated that the rest of us are finally reclaiming the country and its symbols. The convention has been full of references to the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the American Revolution, the national anthem, and the pledge of allegiance. Tonight, attendees chanting “USA” waved signs emblazoned with the letters. Speakers, many of whom are military veterans, have testified that they are proud to be Americans. The theme of patriotism was even in one of tonight’s afterparties: Haitian-born rapper Wyclef Jean played The Star Spangled Banner with an interpretation that recalled Jimi Hendrix at Woodstock. “America is the best place to be,” he said. “I’m the best of the American dream. Welcome to America…. You know what makes America great? We’re a bunch of immigrants.” 

As Jean indicated, that embrace of our history does not come with the exceptionalism of MAGA Republicans, who maintain that the U.S. has a perfect past that it must reclaim to become great again. Indeed, speakers have emphasized that honoring our history means remembering the nation’s failures as well as its triumphs. The Democrats’ patriotism means recognizing that despite the fact that the U.S. has never fully realized the principles laid out in the Declaration of Independence, it has never abandoned them either—a statement paraphrased from President Joe Biden, who has said it repeatedly. 

Speakers have highlighted that the imperfect version of those principles has enabled their personal success stories. Speaker after speaker, from Harris and Walz, of course, to tonight’s speakers Maryland governor Wes Moore, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, and journalist and television personality Oprah Winfrey, have recounted their own process of rising from humble beginnings to their current prominence, 

Winfrey is an Independent who generally stays out of politics, but tonight she spoke passionately during prime time about electing Vice President Kamala Harris and Governor Walz. When a reporter asked her why she was willing to make a political statement, she said: “Because I really care about this country. And there couldn’t have been a life like mine, a career like mine, a success like mine, without a country like America. Only in America could there be a me.”

The many stories in which ordinary Americans rise from adversity through hard work, decency, and service to others implicitly conflates those individual struggles with the struggles of the United States itself. Running through the stories told at the convention is the theme of working hard through a time of darkness to come out into the light. “Weeping may endure for a night, but joy comes in the morning,” speakers have quoted the Biblical psalm, and they have referred to the vision of the American flag still flying after a night of bombardment during the War of 1812, captured by Francis Scott Key in the national anthem, promising that after our time of national darkness, there will be light.

The DNC has called not just for reasserting patriotism, but for reclaiming America with joy. It has showcased a deep bench of politicians, some of whom are great orators, repeatedly calling for joy in the work of saving democracy, and it has shown poets like Amanda Gorman and a wide range of musicians, from Stevie Wonder to Lil Jon to D.J. Cassidy to John Legend. The convention is designed to appeal to different generations—tonight actress Mindy Kaling helpfully explained to older attendees who she is—and younger attendees have handed out friendship bracelets saying things like “Madam Prez” to older people in an echo of the exchange of bracelets among Taylor Swift’s fans.

After an era in which politicians have seemed to lie to the American people, the convention has emphasized authenticity. It has featured testimonials about the candidates with speakers ranging from the candidates’ children and grandchildren, to extended family and, tonight, to members of the football team Walz coached. There have been stories of Harris’s cooking and how Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff awkwardly called her for a date, and fond memories of Walz pulling a student out of a snowbank, hunting, and caring for his children. The convention has emphasized that the American government is made up of individuals and that the character of the people we put into leadership will determine what that government does. 

Further, the Democrats have made their points with the stories of individual Americans who have overcome dark hours in order to move forward. In that storytelling, individuals represent the nation itself.  

The message of joy as we protect democracy, backed as that message is with four years of extraordinary accomplishments that have bolstered the middle class and spread opportunity among poorer Americans, has taken off. The convention has heard from three Democratic presidents and a range of other speakers, including a number of Republicans who have turned against Trump and are backing Harris and Walz. In July, Harris raised four times the money Trump did: $204 million to $48 million, much of it from small donors. 

The palpable energy and enthusiasm in Chicago, based as it is in a celebration of American values—especially in the idea of American freedom—reminds me of the enthusiasm of 1860 or 1932. It is about ending the darkness, not indulging in it, and it requires the hard work of everyone who believes that we deserve the freedom to determine our own lives.

Tonight, after his acceptance speech, Walz walked off stage to a favorite song of his: Neil Young’s “Rockin‘ in the Free World.” Neil Young personally allowed the campaign to use the song. When the Trump campaign used it, Young sued to make them stop.

“Trump is not well. He is not stable. There’s something deeply wrong with him.”

by

Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

Heather Cox Richardson

August 9, 2024

When President Joe Biden announced that he would not accept the Democratic nomination for president and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris on July 21—less than three weeks ago—the horizon for the 2024 presidential election suddenly shortened from years to about three months. That shift apparently flummoxed the Republicans, who briefly talked about suing to make sure that Biden, rather than Harris, was at the head of the Democratic ticket, even though the Democrats had not yet held their convention and Biden had not officially become the nominee when he stepped out of contention. Lately, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has suggested that Biden might suddenly, somehow, change his mind and upend the whole new ticket, although Biden himself has been strong in his public support for Harris and her vice-presidential running mate, Minnesota governor Tim Walz, and Democrats held a roll-call vote nominating Harris for the presidency.

The idea that presidential campaigns should drag on for years is a relatively new one. For well over a century, political conventions were dramatic affairs where political leaders hashed out who they thought was their party’s best standard-bearer, a process that almost always involved quiet deals and strategic conversations. Sometimes the outcome was pretty clear ahead of time, but there were often surprises. Famously, for example, Ohio representative James A. Garfield went to the 1880 Republican convention expecting to marshal votes for Ohio senator John Sherman—General William Tecumseh Sherman’s brother—only to find himself walking away with the nomination himself. 

As recently as 1952, the outcome of the Republican National Convention was not clear beforehand. Most observers thought the nomination would go to Ohio senator Robert Taft, the son of President William Howard Taft, but after a tremendous battle—including at least one fist fight—the nomination went to war hero Dwight D. Eisenhower, who challenged Taft because of the senator’s opposition to the new North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Taft supporters took that loss hard: Massachusetts senator Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. drove Eisenhower’s victory, prompting right-wing Republicans’ enduring hatred of what they called the “eastern establishment.” 

The 1960 presidential election ushered in a new era in politics. While Eisenhower had turned to advertising executives to help him appeal to voters, it was 1960 Democratic nominee Massachusetts senator John F. Kennedy who was the first presidential candidate to turn to a public opinion pollster, Louis Harris, to help him adjust his message and his policies to polls. 

Political campaigns were modernizing from the inside to win elections, but as important in the long run was Theodore H. White’s best selling account of the campaign, The Making of the President 1960. White was a successful reporter, novelist, and nonfiction writer who, finding himself flush from a movie deal and out of work when Collier’s magazine went under, decided to follow the inside story of the 1960 presidential campaign. “I want to get at the real guts of the process of making an American president—what the mechanics, the mystique, the style, the pressures are with which an American who hopes to be our President must contend,” White wrote to Senator Estes Kefauver (D-TN). 

White set out to follow the campaigns of the many primary candidates that year: Democrats Hubert Humphrey, Lyndon Johnson, and John F. Kennedy and Republicans Richard Nixon and Nelson Rockefeller. 

Before White’s book, political journalism picked up when politicians announced their candidacy, and focused on candidates’ public statements and position papers. White’s portrait welcomed ordinary people backstage to hear politicians reading crowds, fretting over their prospects, and adjusting their campaigns according to expert advice. In heroic, novelistic style, White told the tale of the struggle that lifted Kennedy to victory as the other candidates fell away, and his book spent 20 weeks at the top of the bestseller lists and won the 1962 Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction.

White’s book emphasized the long process of building a successful presidential race and the many advisors who made such building possible. In the modern world a presidential campaign lasted far longer than the few months after a convention. In his intimate portrait of that process, White radically transformed political journalism. As historian John E. Miller noted, journalists who had previously covered the public face of a candidacy “now sought to capture in minute detail the behind-the-scenes maneuvering of the candidates and their strategy boards and to probe beneath the surface events of political campaigns to ascertain where the ‘real action’ lay.” 

For journalists, seeing the inside story of politics as a sort of business meant leaving behind the idea that political ideology mattered in presidential elections, a position that political scientists were also abandoning in 1960. It also meant getting that inside story by preserving the candidates’ goodwill, something we now call access journalism. Other journalists leapt to follow the trail White blazed, and by 1973 the pack of presidential journalists had become a story in its own right. White told journalist Timothy Crouse that he had come to regret that his new approach to presidential contests had turned presidential campaigns into a circus.

Over time, presidential campaigns began to use that circus as part of their own story, spinning polls, rallies, and press coverage to convince voters that their candidate was winning. But now the 2024 election seems to be challenging the habit of seeing a presidential campaign as a long, heroic sifting of advice and application of tactics, as well as the perceived need for access to campaign principals.

Yesterday, apparently chafing as the Harris-Walz campaign turns out huge crowds, Trump called reporters to his company’s Florida property, Mar-a-Lago. Those determined not to miss any twist of the campaign—and who had enough advance notice to make it to Florida—listened to him serve up his usual banquet of lies: that doctors and mothers are murdering babies after they’re born; everyone wanted Roe v. Wade overturned, no one died on January 6, 2021; he loves autocrats and they love him; and so on. The journalists there did not ask him about the recent bombshell report suggesting that Egypt poured $10 million into his 2016 campaign.

But, as conservative writer Tom Nichols of The Atlantic noted, Trump appears nonetheless to have gone entirely off the rails. He claimed that the crowd he drew on January 6 was bigger than those who gathered in 1963 to hear the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. deliver his famous I Have a Dream speech, and he told the entirely fabricated story of surviving an emergency landing in a helicopter with former San Francisco mayor Willie Brown. As Nichols put it, “The Republican nominee, the man who could return to office and regain the sole authority to use American nuclear weapons, is a serial liar and can’t tell the difference between reality and fantasy. Donald Trump is not well. He is not stable. There’s something deeply wrong with him.”

But the media appears to be sliding away from Trump: today he angrily insisted he could prove that the dangerous helicopter trip actually occurred, leading New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman to note that “Mr. Trump has a history of claiming he will provide evidence to back up his claims but ultimately not doing so.” When asked to produce the flight records he claimed to have, Trump “responded mockingly, repeating the request in a sing-song voice.”

In contrast, as presidential candidates, first Biden and now Harris have not appeared to bother with access journalism or courting established media. Instead, they have recalled an earlier time by turning directly to voters through social media and by articulating clear policies that support their dedication to the larger project of American democracy.

Yesterday, after journalists had begun to complain that they did not have enough access to Harris, she came to them directly on the tarmac at the Detroit airport and asked, “What’cha got?” All but one of their questions were about Trump and his comments; the one question that was not about Trump came when a journalist asked when Harris would sit down for an interview.