Ducking the Age Issue

When you’re former President Donald Trump, and you don’t know what to do, go for the tried and true.

That was the consensus about Trump’s false comments about Vice President Kamala Harris’ ethnicity that came up during a recent lunch I had with a group of Chicago political pros. Together, they have decades of experience running, writing about, and working on campaigns ranging from aldermanic and mayoral races all the way up the political food chain.

photo from nabjonline.org

Trump appeared before Black journalists in Chicago and accused Vice President Kamala Harris of suddenly discovering her Black roots to bolster her White House campaign, a patently false allegation. Harris has long and proudly touted her Black and Asian heritage in many campaigns. She’s no Black-come-lately.

The question that surfaced over salads and drinks at a local pub was this: Did Trump’s insulting remarks amount to a slip of the tongue or a calculated comment designed to dominate the headlines?

By my count, my lunch partners agreed that Trump deliberately made the remark to draw headlines in the media and divert attention from facts that might not play so well for him. Otherwise, why go before an audience that he assumed would be hostile, Black journalists, to make an insulting and false claim against a woman with a Black heritage?

The remarks were vintage Trump. Remember, he hectored President Obama to produce his birth certificate to prove he was born in America. Similar thing here. That controversy kept him in the headlines for years. Even though he targets journalists with disparaging remarks, he loves to be in the media. He can’t get enough of it. Trump reinforced the consensus of my lunch partners when he continued his attacks on Harris’ ethnicity at a rally in Georgia over the weekend.

Trump is a master at diverting media attention from facts that don’t play well for him. So far, it’s not working, though. His campaign has faltered since President Biden dropped out of the race, and sympathy for the dreadful assignment attempt on his life has faded. He – and many others – thought the race was his until Vice President Harris emerged as a relatively youthful and sharp-tongued opponent. The game has changed, and Trump, the ultimate showman, knows it.

Notice, by the way, that Trump’s comments about Harris’ heritage didn’t include an answer to the question a reporter originally posed to him about why any Black person should vote for him, given his litany of insulting statements about Blacks?

Perhaps Trump’s tactic was to deflect attention from big issue he wants to avoid: his age. The game has flipped since Biden dropped out. At seventy-eight versus Harris’ fifty-nine, Trump is now the old guy in the race. His displays of cognitive decline, natural for anyone of his years, will now be openly on display. President Biden’s obvious signs of age-related decline will no longer overshadow Trump’s. The media attacks him as a liar, which is partially true. Often, though, Trump’s misstatement of facts, muddled thinking, misidentification of world leaders, memory challenges, and exaggerations raise the same age issues that forced Biden to end his bid for a second term.

So far, Vice President Harris, who has secured the Democratic nomination before the party’s Chicago convention this month, has not taken the bait he dangled before her with his insult.  She reacted quite mildly to his performance before the Black journalists as she focused on selecting a running mate, a decision expected by Tuesday.  

She is certainly gaining momentum and must now focus on one of Trump’s main issues, the economy. The current turmoil in the financial markets notwithstanding, the economy is not bad. In fact, the last report on the broader economy sets the stage for the Federal Reserve Board to start cutting interest rates at its next meeting in September, less than two months before voters go to the polls. The current financial market jitters reflect typical reactions from traders that usually last as long as the next chance to buy low after stock prices tumble.     

Vice President Harris is proving her mettle as a politician, too, as she heads into a Chicago convention that will probably give her a bump. She can spotlight Trump’s verbal and factual missteps, brush off his personal attacks, and use her political assets as a woman of color to attract voters who had been drifting away from her party. She has a lot going for her.

And what does Trump have going for him? Cognitive decline, J. D. Vance, he of slandering single, childless cat ladies (single women are as significant a voting block as Blacks), and Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s lengthy report replete with politically venomous ideas. The Heritage report has Trump’s fingerprints all over it. He’s been trying to disown Project 2025, but Harris and the Democrats won’t let it disappear. It’s like a tattoo. Once the ink sets in, it’s there forever

The dynamic in the new phase of the race probably won’t be factored into the polls until the coming weeks. No one is suggesting that Vice President Harris's campaign will be easy. Trump’s support among loyal Republicans borders on a cult. He is a tough campaigner with a base that has some legitimate complaints about how out-of-touch Democratic elites treated them. Democrats have yet to answer for policies they endorsed that sent many well-paying jobs overseas. Republicans have proved more able to avoid a subject that is an issue for them, too.  

Trump seems disoriented and off-keel. He was so sure-footed and confident when his campaign was geared to run against Biden. Now, he faces a woman who has demonstrated sharp political instincts since Trump’s preferred opponent stepped down and endorsed her. Democrats and donors seem to be rallying behind her, and she’s given the party a shot of sorely needed adrenalin. She raised $310 million since she announced her bid, nearly twice as much as Trump. Voters get excited at the prospect of someone making history as the long overdue first female president and a woman of color at that.

Two months can be an eternity in politics. Many things can happen that would turn the race against either candidate. Fired-up political bases alone won’t be enough to win this election. The Pew Research Center says about two-thirds of registered voters identify themselves as partisan and are evenly split between Republicans and Democrats.

Many voters (roughly thirty-five percent) straddle party lines and identify themselves as independents, sometimes voting for Republicans and sometimes Democrats. They will decide this election and are usually more motivated by the candidates' positions on issues than party loyalty. For once, maybe – and hopefully – the media will focus on issues as much as theatrics.

That may help or hurt the candidates, but it would be good for the rest of us.

—James O’Shea

James O’Shea is a longtime Chicago author and journalist who now lives in North Carolina. He is the author of several books and is the former editor of the Los Angeles Times and managing editor of the Chicago Tribune. Follow Jim’s Five W’s Substack here.