In her national debut Kamala Harris was better TV than Donald Trump's rerun. Can she keep it up?

Only recently did it occur to me that Donald Trump may not have been filmed chatting with children while he was president. “Thank God,” you may be thinking – either that or, “Why would he?” It’s a fair question. The thought wouldn’t have crossed my mind either, if not for a video featuring kids interviewing Kamala Harris that circulated hours after she announced her candidacy.

The clip is five years old, dating back to her first presidential run before Joe Biden secured the nomination and asked her to be his running mate. Her grade school-aged interviewers may not have been child actors, but they were obviously selected for their ability to engage with Harris.

The candidate does not talk down to them or robotically deliver the “right” answers. Instead, she speaks in a way that is both validating and comforting.

In one exchange with a small girl, Harris doesn’t simply state her plans to enact gun control legislation. She asks her, “What do you think the rules should be?” When the child proposes “running a test to see if they’re going to be responsible with the guns or not," Harris affirms her with, “That is excellent. And that’s called background checks.”

All campaigning is theater. These scenes are particularly effective at playing up Harris’ empathy. Some of her junior interviewers looked like they needed comforting, and she provided her version of that, especially to one who expressed her fears about global warming and school shootings. “Here’s the motivation: you,” she says. “You motivate me.”

You’d be right to call this emotionally manipulative. That’s the point. Every visual medium relies on gripping our emotions, television above all. That video lives on Harris’ content-rich YouTube channel beside others featuring her talking and cooking with celebrities and fellow politicians, staged and posted moments that highlight her humanity.

Viewed another way, however, Harris’ conversations with children also showcase her aptitude as an ensemble player.

The ancient wisdom that TV makes its stars as opposed to the other way around underscores the audience’s will to uplift some stories and cast away others. And while it’s incautious to make any definitive predictions from the center of the culture’s euphoria, the early signs point to a favorable trend for Harris.

Charli XCX co-signed her candidacy. The Harris campaign officially joined TikTok to increase Gen Z voters' enthusiasm. We’re already swimming in memes. And there's no reason to try anything embarrassing like Hillary Clinton’s stiff whip and nae nae moves on “Ellen” back in 2015. There's enough existing footage of Harris dancing well and laughing honestly to feed the social media beat for the next 100 or so days. Besides, ignoring the memes is the right strategy; that part will take care of itself as long as she keeps producing good TV.

Helpfully the guest spots are materializing, with an appearance on the season finale of "RuPaul's Drag Race" already in the books. But even her campaign kick-off in Wisconsin was deemed a home run. Harris followed that with an Indianapolis rally counterprogrammed against Trump’s in North Carolina.

And Trump, TV creature that he is, used this match-up to revert to the signature the catchphrase of “The Apprentice” character that has served him best: successful businessman. “Kamala, you’re fired! Get outta here, you’re fired!” he barked on Wednesday to thunderous applause.

This presidential campaign cycle meets us in a swamp of TV revivals and franchise overload perpetuated by the audience’s preference for familiarity. This environment would have favored Trump if Joe Biden hadn’t bowed out of the race. Trump could have reheated the audience's nostalgia for that role of a lifetime Mark Burnett handed him “The Apprentice." Never mind that he was heavily directed to approximate competent leadership.

Viewers believed the illusion, and he expanded that mythmaking from there — headlining WrestleMania 23 in 2007 under the banner “The Battle of the Billionaires,” and ingratiating himself to Fox News hosts.

Republicans may not have viewed that July 13 assassination attempt as such a gift if he hadn’t pumped his fist in the air in full awareness of the cameras around him. The image has since drawn comparisons to the famous photo of U.S. Marines raising the American flag on Iwo Jima in World War II, plugging into the grand American story of resolve and power.

Against the 81-year-old Biden, Trump appeared powerful as long as he didn’t open his mouth. But all still frames quickly wash away by the 24-hour news cycle, especially when there are better moving images lifted by voice and feeling.

Repeats and revivals have limits on their ability to keep an audience interested, and Trump’s campaign has so far shown itself to be a looping rerun. The speeches remain the same along with his obsession over crowd size; to a man who measures his success by ratings, the number of bodies in seats matters more than the freshness of his message.

Still, he’s aware of how important looks are in a race that was never about policy and always focused on appearances.

“The fake news is talking about lying Kamala as if she's the savior of our country, that she's so brave,” he said to his North Carolina supporters. “I've never seen a turnaround like this. Three weeks ago, four weeks ago, she was the worst politician in America. Now they say, ‘Isn’t it amazing? Look at her. She is so beautiful. She’s so magnificent.’”

After this, he alleges that her rally at Milwaukee's West Allis Central High School, which attracted more than 3,000 in a space with a capacity of 3,600, was sparsely attended while he regularly draws crowds of "25, 30, 40, 50, 60 – 70,000!"

These claims usually don’t stand up to fact-checking, but disregard that to focus instead on his comment about Harris' appeal. A common tell of Trump is his tendency to say exactly what it is that he fears most about his opponents in his ramblings while painting that asset as a negative. To a man obsessed with appearances, a telegenic and competent woman is deadly.

But Harris’ advantage in cornering the attention economy isn’t just about her looks. It’s about what she represents. Left without his old chants of “Lock her up,” which lost their zing after his 34 felony convictions – which Harris’ supporters swiftly claimed — Trump wants to rewind 20 years to the peak of his TV popularity.

Back then he nailed the part of a singular, domineering authority and persuaded too many people that bullying is a sign of power. He had some help, performing during a TV golden age of anti-heroes personified by Tony Soprano and Vic Mackey of “The Shield.” People never would have lumped "The Apprentice" in the same category as any prestige shows in their day. Squinting into our rearview, though, we might better understand how the lionizing of those fictions legitimized the mirage of Trump’s success and capability.

Successful TV elicits feelings and cements itself in memory. Enough of us recall the slow agony of those seasons between 2016 and 2020 acutely enough to gravitate toward Harris’ message of moving forward. Trump never left the stage, but neither did he fundamentally alter his script to suit the mood of a broadcast audience exhausted by anger, vengeance and brutish incoherence.

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Optimism delivered stalwartly and peppered with a bright smile might prove to be a winning alternative. The catchphrase of “We’re not going back” might need a little work, but it'll do in a 100-day pinch.

Harris is right to remind the public of everything she is and represents versus Trump’s convictions and record of fraud, grievance and comfort with political violence. But television doesn’t reward granular specificity with data. Hillary Clinton and Biden were both reminded of that, which Harris can learn from, along with the strong meme invasion being waged on her behalf.

The creator of that viral “brat” video only includes a few seconds of audio featuring Harris expressing her love of Venn diagrams, you’ll notice. A bite-size is enough to convey that she knows what a Venn diagram is. The context in which she says that is moot. What matters more is the joy woven through it.

Trump can’t replicate that any more than he can distract undecided voters from noticing that he is now the oldest presidential nominee in history. And that will serve Harris as she persuades America that she's preferable living room company to a former host whose game show was canceled years ago. Her YouTube channel videos may be years old, but the telling part is that neither she nor the topics addressed therein have aged all that noticeably. Trump is still campaigning on deportation and meanness, and experienced gun violence first hand. Instead of it humbling him, it only made him crueler.

And yes, it’ll help to have Maya Rudolph delivering the punchlines she wouldn’t dare to on “Saturday Night Live” and the ladies of “The View” setting her up to successfully explain her party’s policy planks. Those opportunities are no doubt coming, and Harris should avail herself of each one – except, maybe, for a return trip to “The Drew Barrymore Show.”

Through it all we’ll be looking for how well Harris can sustain our excitement about the role she’s been handed, the part of someone who understands her part in leading an ensemble the size of a nation instead of insisting on being the whole show.