As last Thursday’s CNN interview of Harris and her running mate Tim Walz made clear, she’s resolutely unwilling to let the press — or Trump himself — set the agenda for her presidential campaign. In the process, she’s managed to blunt the tools Trump has repeatedly used to undermine his opponents: drawing them into responding to his schoolyard slights, and turning the media’s pursuit of purportedly “legitimate” questions about his opponents — many of them formulated by GOP partisans — into political weapons.
Harris’s refusal to engage with Trump on his terms represents a break from how Democrats traditionally have dealt with him.
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For years now, Trump has made an art of luring his opponents to wrestle with him in the mud of his racist and misogynist insults and attacks. As a result, Trump has been able to neutralize the impact of (and sometimes even benefit from) his own vile activities and attributes.
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Harris is well aware of how engaging with Trump’s most reprehensible maneuvers and taunts poses the danger of sinking herself into the mud with him, and even allowing him to gain political benefits from what should be massive political missteps — such as Trump’s claim that Harris recently “happened to turn Black.” And Harris, almost alone among Trump’s many political opponents, has come up with an effective strategy for responding to Trump’s gutter politics game: ignoring it.
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Trump has long relied on tempting his adversaries to respond to his insults and bigoted taunts. That is how he has, for years, maintained control of the news cycle and made himself the perpetual center of attention. Harris’s curt dismissal of Trump’s most recent round of racism as a tired replay of a stale show marginalized him more effectively than most any of his adversaries, Republican or Democratic, have ever accomplished.
When a showman like Trump is no longer the center of attention, he turns into that most pathetic of Hollywood creatures: a has-been. With her [refusal to engage with a question about Trump's comment that she just recently "decided" to be black], Harris left Trump standing alone in the pit, covered in mud, with nobody to wrestle.
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[T]he press often asks insipid questions, and indeed can easily by manipulated to serve as conduits for entirely bogus claims and theories pushed by GOP partisans.
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[In the 2016 contest, Hillary] Clinton learned too late that answering the press’s “legitimate” questions made her more, not less, vulnerable. Once the proposition that there was a “scandal” [regarding her emails] had been legitimized, it was inevitable that Clinton would be placed on the defensive for the entire campaign. This situation was relentlessly exploited by Trump, who inevitably lied or otherwise obfuscated when presented with questions about his own shady conduct.
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Harris has, by contrast, learned valuable lessons about the danger of playing by the press’s rules and thereby allowing journalists’ purportedly “legitimate” questions to become a focus of her campaign.
During the initial weeks of Harris’s presidential campaign, members of the press joined the Trump campaign in fulminating over her delay in making herself available for a “tough” interview. Harris met those press demands with a firm (and as soon became clear astute) response: not now.
Harris instead spent those crucial initial weeks introducing herself to voters on her own terms.
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[When Chuck Todd questioned Hillary's changes of position, she] attempted to systematically explain her reasons for each changed position, thereby feeding the claim that she was a sharp operator rather than reasoned and non-dogmatic.
Trump, for his part, refused even to engage with (accurate) claims that he had changed his own mind about the Iraq War, most notoriously by contending that he had always opposed it despite a public record to the contrary. He’s now doing much the same, even more audaciously, on the subject of abortion rights.
Once again, Clinton paid a huge price for playing by the rules, while Trump did not.
As last week’s CNN interview demonstrated, Harris has learned from Clinton’s experiences. Instead of accepting Bash’s framing and “admitting” that she had “flip-flopped,” Harris stated repeatedly that her “values have not changed,” [even when her positions have.]
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The result? Bash’s line of questioning lost its punch for much the same reason that her effort to bait Harris to engage with Trump’s racist taunts failed: because Harris has refused to play by the tired old rules.
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