‘Trump still speaks to people’s rage’

Has there ever been a stranger presidential election than 2024? In the space of two months, presidential candidate Donald Trump survived an assassination attempt, sitting president Joe Biden abandoned his bid to secure another four-year term, and his less-than-stellar vice-president, Kamala Harris, was gifted the Democratic nomination – without having to face a primary or even field questions from the media. At this week’s Democratic National Convention, the widespread misgivings about Harris’s candidacy seem to have dissipated entirely, giving way to unbridled Kamalamania. How can we make sense of such a sudden transformation? Are voters buying into the hype?

Freddy Gray – deputy editor of the Spectator and host of the Americano podcast – joined Brendan O’Neill from the DNC in Chicago to discuss Harris’s and Trump’s prospects in November. What follows is an edited extract from their conversation. You can listen to the full thing here.

Brendan O’Neill: What have you made of the Republican campaign since the assassination attempt on Trump?

Freddy Gray: The argument that the shooting has been ‘memory-holed’ is a slightly right-wing talking point. You can’t quite control reality that much, no matter who you are. But it is odd how everyone seems to have moved on, because it was such a shocking moment. You suddenly had Silicon Valley billionaires, who had always been very opposed to Trump, coming out very forcefully in his favour. Mark Zuckerberg, a long-standing opponent of Trump, even called him a ‘badass’ for responding the way he did. As the weeks went on, however, the Democratic psychodrama washed that all away. I thought that the picture of Trump with his fist in the air shouting ‘Fight! Fight! Fight!’ was going to remain an iconic image, but the script of this election is far stranger than that.

The Republicans are definitely struggling. Michelle Obama used to say that ‘When they go low, we go high’, but the Democrats have decided they can go lower and lower. They are now comfortable making jokes about JD Vance having sex with sofas. They are calling Trump and Vance ‘weird’ over and over again. And it is true that Trump, who has risen to the top almost entirely through insults, doesn’t seem to be handling it very well. I think that Tim Walz, Harris’s pick for vice-president, is particularly well liked among Democrats partly because he seems to be quite good at this kind of politics. He just chuckles at Trump and his absurdities, and admits that he finds him funny, instead of casting him as the Antichrist.

The Democrats are acting as though they are unfazed by Trump. I think that this is proving to be effective, and we’re possibly seeing that in the more recent polls. Trump has been scrambling a bit in response. It seems to me that he’s sort of lashing out. He’s trying to find a good attack line on Harris, whether it’s attacking her background or just sticking to what a disaster she was on the southern border, which she was. But he hasn’t found his response yet. I think that he will, because Harris will have to put herself forward more and more as the election approaches – and that will expose her vulnerabilities.

O’Neill: It seems that if leading Democrats continue to behave as if they’re not fazed by Trump, that could be far more wounding to him than if they keep calling him the next Hitler. Trump benefited from that treatment in 2016, because it allowed him to depict his opponents as hysterical – which many of them were.

Gray: I have a pet theory on that. If Trump’s opponents had treated him with kindness back in 2016, there would not be a Trump phenomenon today. If only the Democrats had said: ‘Oh, he’s a very good businessman. I don’t agree with a lot of his ideas, but I appreciate his passion.’ In that instance, there would have been no force behind the Trump movement, which is really a reaction to the hatred directed at Trump himself. These two things feed each other. The Democrats obviously aren’t being kind, but they’re not doing the usual crazy Trump-hatred any more. They seem to have learned that that doesn’t work.

O’Neill: Would it be fair to say that the Trump campaign has fizzled out, or is it more complicated than that?

Gray: It is very hard to explain. The Republicans will say the fundamentals of the race are still in Trump’s favour, and I suppose that’s probably true. Although, based on how it’s going at the moment, it is getting less and less true each day. If you look at key swing states like Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, Kamala is ahead. The race in Georgia, where Trump was firmly ahead not too long ago, is also tightening up. But Trump is still in a position to win the election. If the election was held today, Trump would probably win.

At the moment, however, Trump simply does not have the momentum. Kamala does. That’s because national conventions always give a bounce in momentum, as they’re all over the news. I suspect that Trump is probably thinking – not that I have any real insight into his insane brain – that he has to let this momentum happen. He understands how the media creates hype, and knows that there could be an October surprise. Something could happen that will change the race again in his favour. It is certainly true, though, that the Trump ‘juju’ is not working at the moment.

O’Neill: In 2016, Trump won on a wave of support from working-class, Rust Belt voters who felt betrayed by the establishment. Are those voters still supporting him?

Gray: Yes – and there are also new elements of the Trump coalition. He is still growing in support among African-American voters in crucial areas. There was a funny video that came out recently of two black women being questioned about Kamala Harris, and they said: ‘You think that you can just get Megan Thee Stallion to twerk an event, and we’re just going to buy it? That is so ignorant.’ A lot of African-American voters feel that they’re being taken for granted by the Democratic Party, and they like Trump because the elites so obviously despise him.

Among working-class voters in all the major swing states, Trump still represents the dispossessed. I remember that, back in 2016, you sent me an extraordinary Michael Moore video where, with rousing music, he tried to prove that Trump is awful. It was edited to have all these very moving scenes of poor but noble-looking people at Trump rallies. It is accidentally an amazing piece of political propaganda, because you really feel the rage that those people felt. Donald Trump spoke to their rage because he stood up to the system that had robbed them of their lives.

Freddy Gray was talking to Brendan O’Neill on The Brendan O’Neill Show. Listen to the full conversation here: