William Irwin Thompson once critiqued the emptiness of a modern culture in which we’ve learned to crave (and pay for) the synthetic as a substitute for the real. Cheez Whiz and Cool Whip. Fake wrestling substituting for real wrestling, etc.
“If Americans would rather tour a fake Europe at EPCOT Center in Disney World,” Thompson wrote, “they can go to ‘foreign’ restaurants, but still speak English.” Thompson described the Disneyfication of everything long before we elected Donald Trump, a ratings-obsessed, reality-TV president in place of a real one.
“Harris’ large crowds are a pivotal part of her strategy to defeat Trump,” reads CNN’s landing page just now. Hers are bigger. Trump’s manhood as well as his freedom is threatened.
Marcy Wheeler this morning speaks of how central spectacle is to Donald Trump’s sense of himself, and how threatened he is by the spectacle of a Harris-Walz rally:
The second I saw video of Vice President Harris rolling up to a hangar at Detroit’s airport on Air Force Two, then alighting with Tim Walz in front of cheering crowds, I knew it would break Donald Trump’s brain.
This is the kind of spectacle Donald Trump excels at creating.
This is the kind of spectacle on which Trump has built slavering loyalty from millions of MAGAts who see power in such spectacle.
And a Black woman created it.
Or rather, a Black woman and her campaign team, a campaign team which has already demonstrated they know exactly how to trigger Donald Trump, created it.
And sure enough, it did melt his brain.
Yesterday, he adopted the hysterical claims of some of his followers, posting that Vice President Harris was cheating because (he falsely claimed) she had used AI to sub in a crowd of people who weren’t there.
The rest is largely a critique of the news coverage’s misread (or ignore) of the timelines involved.
More a measure of his insecurity and need to pleasure himself, Trump’s boasts about crowd size are an essential feature of sustaining the Big Lie from 2020 (he believes crowd size equates to vote counts) and the one he’s updating for 2024 to explain his loss and to foment another coup attempt. Team Harris knows this and goads him at every opportunity with how her crowds translate into volunteers.
This is actually the purpose rallies are supposed to serve at this point of a campaign, even one launched a mere three weeks ago. These crowds are important not (just) because they lead Trump to melt down, but because they’re a necessary way to catch up on volunteer recruitment Biden hadn’t been doing. This is why Walz, especially, makes an ask at every one of these rallies. This is why Kamala always talks about the hard work ahead.
This is about recruiting bodies to do voter identification, persuasion, and ultimately GOTV. This is about basic campaign work.
Trump, meanwhile, has sent JD out to speak to empty parking lots.
Pro-Trump trolls like Cheong see this. But full time campaign journalists are slow to catch on. They’re slow to understand that Trump’s own insecurities can be — and were, deliberately — triggered, with predictable results.
Especially when someone can mobilize the kind of spectacle that Trump himself relies on.
