Trump, Kamala and the Very Online election

So it turns out it wasn’t brat summer – it was cat summer. To the alarm even of those of us who have long feared the dumbing down of politics, the US presidential election is suddenly full of felines. On one side we have the scandalously privileged celeb class coming out as ‘childless cat ladies’ in solidarity with Kamala Harris, and on the other Donald Trump and his dwindling band of ride-or-dies fuming over immigrants ‘eating cats’. Never have I been more convinced that America’s elite needs to get off the internet and touch grass.

Posterity will record yesterday as one of the weirdest days in the political life of the American republic. We had Trump posting on Instagram an AI image of himself cosying up to a clowder of cats (and some ducks) – a clear reference to the BS story that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio are cat-napping people’s pets and eating them. Then we had Taylor Swift posting a real photo of herself cuddling her cat and telling the Americans among her 283million followers to vote Kamala. She signed her post ‘Childless Cat Lady’, in reference to JD Vance’s old swipe at Kamala, AOC and other ‘people without children’ who run the Democrats.

If you thought the culture wars were bad, behold the cat wars. TayTay and Trump’s showy acts of feline solidarity really have been catnip – pun intended – for the Very Online of both the left and right. ‘Slay’, said every social-media ‘liberal’ in response to Swift’s cat post. ‘Wow. Wow. Wow’, said Jon Sopel, who is 65 years old. The New Republic – the actual New Republic – swooned over Swift for ‘completely eras[ing] all buzz around the presidential debate’ with her cat-hugging intervention. Meanwhile, more than 800,000 people have liked Trump’s cat post. It will be a million by the time you read this.

Cats even came up in last night’s drab debate. ‘In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs, the people that came in, they’re eating the cats’, Trump rambled. ‘They’re eating the pets of the people that live there!’, he cried. That there’s no proof for any such mass gobbling of Ohio’s cats by Haitians – local police say there are ‘no credible reports’ – seems not to matter. Harris looked at him as if he were mad, as well she might, and yet won’t she be feverishly lapping up the backing of out-and-proud childless cat lady Taylor Swift? Americans really are being asked to decide who loves cats more: rich white women for Kamala, or Trump, Vance and their online bros who fret over a cat holocaust in Ohio.

Beyond the cats, and ducks, last night’s debate summed up the shallowness of the presidential contest. People expected – or at least hoped for – fireworks. What they got was a cautious Kamala and a floundering Trump. Harris has clearly been media-trained to within an inch of her life, meaning she mostly managed to avoid her usual word salads. Trump seemed unfocussed, garrulous and unable to land any blows on his foe. You got the unsettling impression that this is a battle between an exhausted populist and a polished void, between a self-styled ‘man of the people’ who’s lost his mojo and a creature of the elites who never had it.

Even though they clashed on big issues – including the economy and abortion rights – the debate felt strangely substance-free. ‘I think you’ve heard tonight two very different visions for our country’, said Harris. Really? Where? As Kate Andrews at the Spectator put it, ‘there was no great “vision”’ from either of them. And ‘public policy was barely touched upon’. You could almost hear the media elite breathe a sigh of relief when Swift entered the fray, virtually, towards the end of the night. ‘Key takeaways from a debate that featured tense clashes and closed with a Taylor Swift endorsement’, said the main headline at none other than the Associated Press.

It is the hollowness of the contest that means such thin fare as childless cat ladies and cat-eating immigrants can dominate the headlines. One wonders who all this cat talk is aimed at. The Trump-haters of the MSM might gush over Swift’s Vance-mocking post, but what will it mean to the struggling mum of four that a child-free pop star worth a billion dollars likes cats and Kamala? Not much, I’d wager. Online Trump-heads might go wild for Trump’s promotion of the fact-lite tale about Haitians eating cats, but will it impact on the working classes of the Rust Belt worried about falling wages and outsourced industries? I doubt it. Americans concerned about immigration levels deserve to be engaged with seriously, not force-fed scare stories about foreigners eating felines.

What worries me about cat summer is that it confirms how Very Online American politics has become. Trump seems more interested in whipping up his keenest followers on X with horror stories of pet murder than in making a meaningful connection with working people who’ve never so much as looked at X. As for the rise of Kamala’s childless cat ladies – sure, Vance’s 2021 comment was rude, but can you think of anything sadder than wealthy, well-connected women defining themselves in reference to a throwaway remark made on Fox News three years ago by someone who wasn’t even a senator then, never mind a veep candidate?

The irony is that both Vance and Vance-mockers suffer from Very Online syndrome. Vance’s ‘childless cat lady’ comment was no doubt inspired by his virtual mingling with Bronze Age Pervert types who think child-free women are failing in their duty to God, nature and hormones. And yet when Swift and others – there will be many others now – reclaim the ‘childless cat lady’ slur for likes, they’re also appealing to wholly virtual audiences. They make themselves servants of the meme complex, players in the ceaseless feedback loop of virtual blather. ‘You’re a childless cat lady!’, cry virgins on X. ‘I’m a childless cat lady!’, respond rich women on Instagram. And everyone else wonders what the fuck is going on.

My advice to the candidates: get off the internet. Worry less about what will get you likes from people who haven’t seen sunlight in months, and more about what America’s hard-working families want and need. Forget cat-eating immigrants and cat-loving billionaires, and talk to real people, in the real world, most of whom have dogs anyway, and children. From the economy to housing to the border, America has many crises, and the people deserve a vision for how to fix them. There are 55 days left – up your game.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His new book – A Heretic’s Manifesto: Essays on the Unsayable – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy