Supporters of former President Donald Trump have been looking forward to next week’s debate with Vice President Kamala Harris because they believe, not unreasonably, that she will be exposed as an unqualified lightweight.
But not even a Biden-like collapse will sway most Democratic voters. They will not see it — and if they see it, they will ignore it.
That is the world we inhabit in 2024. It’s not just that the media are trying to lie to, or hide the truth from, the public; voters, especially but not exclusively on the left, are also actively participating in creating their own self-delusion.
That is how Kamala Harris, one of the least popular presidential candidates when she ran in 2019 (she dropped out before 2020), whose approval ratings were even lower than those of President Joe Biden, suddenly became a beloved leader for her party, bringing the “joy” back to politics and pulling Democrats off the sidelines and back into the race.
Democrats — not just leaders, but voters — have decided that they only see what they want to see in Kamala Harris. There is the obvious: she is female, she is black, she is Asian, and she would achieve “firsts” in presidential identity.
More than that: she is described as a breath of fresh air, despite being a loyal member of what calls itself the Biden-Harris administration, and despite casting tie-breaking votes in the Senate that ushered in its worst legislation.
Democrats have decided to see what they want to see in Kamala Harris, and what they want to see is an alternative to Trump. Nothing more needs to be said — nothing about the policies, and nothing, really, about the candidate herself.
A recent Boston University poll reported the interesting result that while the “joyful” Democratic National Convention had emphasized Trump’s negative attributes, it said next to nothing positive about Kamala Harris. It didn’t need to.
President Barack Obama, musing on his own popularity, once described himself as a “blank slate” on whom people projected whatever it was they wanted to see.
Kamala Harris is like that, too — with one difference: Democrats aren’t just seeing what they want to see, but also erasing what they don’t. Because unlike Obama, Harris actually has a long record, and it isn’t good. She was a poor local and state prosecutor, a radical Senator, and a hapless vice president.
All of that must be denied.
And meanwhile, new lies must be told about Trump and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-OH).
In that regard, the Harris campaign is setting new lows for dishonesty. The “KamalaHQ” Twitter/X account, the official “rapid response” account, is notorious for sharing hoaxes and lying about what Republicans have said. Most recently, it claimed Vance called school shootings a “fact of life” without noting that he was lamenting that fact.(Harris later did the same.)
KamalaHQ and accounts like it will share snippets of the debate that paint Harris as the runaway victor, regardless of how badly she loses or how well Trump does.
All campaigns share their candidates’ highlights and opponents’ lowlights, but the Harris campaign has a pattern of simply making up claims that — to borrow from Orwell — do not “bear any relation to the facts, not even the relationship which is implied in an ordinary lie.”
We Americans now live in two neatly separated media universes, rarely connected by facts held in common. As such, our election has really become two elections, run in parallel, separately, by the two parties and their preferred media outlets, with the winner being whichever side can best motivate its own voters.
The debate will not dissuade Democrats. The best Trump can do is use it to communicate with his own supporters — as Kamala does with hers.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of “”The Agenda: What Trump Should Do in His First 100 Days,” available for pre-order on Amazon. He is also the author of “The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency,” now available on Audible. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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