Trump’s Crucial Power Has Been Neutralized

If you’re compiling a list of the head-spinning, gob-smacking, I’ve-never-seen-this-before events of the 2024 campaign, here’s one more potentially decisive factor to add: A sitting vice president has become the “change” candidate.

It’s almost a violation of the laws of the political universe. By definition, a vice president looking to inherit the Oval Office has been part of the outgoing administration, and there’s only so much distance that a vice president can credibly put between them and their boss. (Often they try to find a way to praise what has happened, while hinting that things will be different, as when George H.W. Bush urged voters to “choose the horse that’s going the same way,” even as he’d pursue “a kinder, gentler nation.”)

But this time, the sudden elevation of Kamala Harris, along with the identity and character of her opponent, has — for now at least — made her the candidate who embodies change, no matter how little her policies differ from the current president. That this happened by accident rather than design does not make it any less potent as a political asset.

And worst of all for Donald Trump, it deprives him of one his greatest powers. Trump rode to the presidency in 2016 on a promise to smash the status quo. Now he faces credible charges that he represents the past — and there’s a telegenic, younger contender eager to make that case.

Think back to Trump’s race against Hillary Clinton.

The Clinton campaign scoffed at the idea that she could possibly represent the status quo — wouldn’t she become the first woman president? How much more change can you imagine? This was a serious misjudgment. Clinton had been a key White House figure for eight years as first lady, a senator for the next eight, and then was secretary of State. She was a visible, important figure in the highest reaches of American politics for a quarter century.

By contrast, Trump represented nothing but change. He lacked every quality usually associated with the presidency: Ignorant of history, a life solely devoted to personal aggrandizement, famous as a figure on the gossip pages and as a reality TV star. But in a time when large numbers of citizens felt aggrieved by the failures of government to protect their lives and fortunes, the very aspects of Trump that seemed like bugs were more like features. No experience in government? Look what the experts did! A rhetoric of insult and vulgarity? About time someone spoke in plain English!

Clearly, whatever else Trump was, a vote for him would be a vote for a president as different as imaginable. There’s something appealing and empowering about that.

As I wrote in August 2015 floating the possibility that maybe, just maybe, Trump could win: “When disaffected voters discover a power that they did not realize they had, highly unanticipated consequences may follow.”

Even apart from Trump, the American public has long shown a desire to break with “normal” politics in ways large and small. It means the voters of Alaska can send a write-in candidate to the Senate, as Lisa Murkowski proved after she lost a GOP primary. It means the voters of Minnesota can elect ex-wrestler Jesse Ventura as governor on a third party. It means the voters of California can — for the first time ever — recall a sitting governor and put an ex-body builder-turned-actor named Arnold Schwarzenegger in his place.

It’s that realization that accounts for Trump’s presidency in the first place — a bizarre version of the slogan “Yes we can!” made famous by another noted “change” candidate. In 2016, Trump voters said yes we can put a candidate with no experience and no traditional qualifications into the Oval Office; yes we can ignore the warnings of the mainstream press; yes we can vote for change more radical than any in our history.

In 2024, however, Trump’s claim of change is much harder to come by. For one thing, voters are being asked for a restoration; Trump’s already been in the White House before. For another, Trump seems incapable of putting aside his 2020 defeat; he persists in relitigating his false election theft claims, even to the point of assailing the hugely popular Republican governor of Georgia . Whatever else that is, it is not change.

Now look at what happened on the other side. For a year or more, Democrats have been facing the dim prospect of keeping a historically old, historically unpopular incumbent in the White House. Resignation and hopelessness were Joe Biden’s real running mates. Then with that debate performance, it became clear to the most significant forces in the party that Biden simply could not win in November. Amid a rising pressure campaign and worsening polls, the president yielded and stepped down from his reelection bid.

It was as if the Democratic Party had rediscovered a power that it had never used, maybe never even been aware of; far from being a “coup,” it was the execution of the essential task of a political party: The use of formal and informal power to protect itself from political disaster.

Within a matter of two weeks, voters now faced a reality that had previously seemed impossible: “You don’t want to vote for Biden or Trump? Now you don’t have to! You want change? Here she is!” The flood of money, volunteers and crowds toward Harris testifies to the power of that sentiment.

Harris and her fledgling campaign also seem well aware of the changed dynamic of the race as well as how powerful it can be to signal forward progress: “We’re not going back” has quickly become a mantra for Harris on the trail, with the audience chanting it in response. It’s a way to talk not just about the attack on abortion rights but so much else about the Trump era and the failures of the past.

A cautionary note: We don’t know the half-life of these sentiments. The Republicans will have a billion dollars or so to remind voters that Harris is still the second-highest official in the Biden administration and to argue that she bears responsibility for the wide dissatisfaction on issues like immigration and inflation. Maybe Trump will discover an instinct for self-preservation and stop his temper tantrums on the stump. Maybe events will conspire to weaken the administration in its last months.

But for now, at least, we should appreciate that the vice president’s emergence as the candidate of change is just another way in which this campaign is like watching a Steph Curry half-court shot or a Willie Mays over-the-shoulder catch: “I see it, but I don’t believe it.”