Trump spent time in his old stomping ground, while Harris picked up yet another major celebrity endorsement, writes Stewart Sowman-Lund in this extract from The Bulletin.
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A Trump homecoming in true blue New York
Given it’s a short week and not a lot tends to happen over a long weekend, I thought we’d start things off by looking at the impending US election. In just over a week, polls will close in the presidential race between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, setting the course for the next four years of global politics. Yesterday saw Trump appear before thousands at New York’s Madison Square Garden, for what was something of a homecoming rally. As The Guardian reported, the former president’s speech (which has been somewhat overshadowed by a comedian’s offensive jokes) included the expected off-beat tangents and focused largely on immigration along with attacks on not only his opponent, but what he has called the “enemy within” – those he views as having wronged or betrayed him in the past. Trump has virtually no chance of winning New York (polls have him about 15 points behind Harris), but has made several detours away from swing states over his campaign. One Trump backer put that down to the spectacle of an appearance at the iconic New York arena. “It just goes to show ya that he has a bigger following of any man that has ever lived,” they said. Critics have called it a vanity rally.
Writing for The Post, Andrea Vance, who is in New York, noted that Trump’s team are relying on the rally to reach audiences far outside of New York. But, Vance added, there is also an unpleasant parallel for the former president. Trump has been fighting off claims from his former chief of staff that he fits the definition of a fascist and, in 1939, thousands of pro-Nazi sympathisers packed in the Garden for rallies in the lead up to World War II. As CNN reported, Democrats projected messages on the exterior of Madison Square Garden during the rally that “Trump is Unhinged” and “Trump praised Hitler”.
Celebrity power
Meanwhile, vice president Kamala Harris has been in the critical swing state of Pennsylvania. It’s the largest of the battlegrounds and, as NPR explains, could dictate who nudges ahead on election night. It’s an intriguingly divided electorate, part of the reason both candidates have spent substantial time on the ground there. As The Guardian reported, Harris’s speech over the weekend continued to frame the election as a choice between two “extremely different visions” for the country, while taking aim at the “fear and divisiveness” that she said had been caused by Trump.
Earlier in the weekend, Harris was joined by pop superstar Beyonce at a rally in Texas. The singer said she was at the rally not as a celebrity or politician, reported AP, but as a “mother who cares deeply about the world my children and all of our children live in, a world where we have the freedom to control our bodies, a world where we’re not divided”. Beyonce is the latest in a long list of high profile endorsements for Harris, including from Taylor Swift and Oprah. In a piece for Vox, it was noted that while celebrity endorsements may not do a lot to sway an election, Beyonce’s star power brings with it wide reach and influence. At the very least, it could convince a large number of people to register to vote – especially among demographics core to the Harris campaign.
The podcast election
While the two presidential contenders are continuing to host large rallies, one traditional medium of campaigning has been largely abandoned – that being the mainstream media. Trump shunned the traditional pre-election interview with 60 minutes, for example, but over the weekend appeared for a three-hour sit down with prominent podcaster Joe Rogan (an interview that was, claimed CNN, littered with at least 32 unfounded and unchecked claims). The fact he made inaccurate comments isn’t new, nor is the fact that weren’t picked up in real time. But the decision to speak with alternative media outlets is relatively novel, leading some to claim this as the podcast election.
This comment by Brady Brickner-Wood in the New Yorker earlier this month nicely sums up, I think, the appeal for candidates in choosing to speak with alternative media. “When a public figure sits across from a podcast host to embark on a purportedly shapeless, stream-of-consciousness chat suffused with crude jokes and senseless tangents, an odd alchemy occurs: the speakers begin to sound like pals bantering at a pre-game, with the listener as a silent confidant.”
Harris, too, has opted to give interviews with outlets outside of the mainstream press, such as on Alex Cooper’s Call Her Daddy – a show with a predominantly female audience. As the AP explained, few outlets offer the opportunity to zero in on an audience better than podcasts.
The New Zealand angle
It’s easy to think that the US election doesn’t matter for us down in little old New Zealand. But former National Party leader, and US politics obsessive, Todd Muller told The Spinoff’s Toby Manhire on a special edition of Gone by Lunchtime, that’s the wrong way to think about it. “What you want from a New Zealand perspective is consistent, predictable leadership from America,” he said. “My personal view is that Trump, from a foreign policy perspective, is just too unpredictable. You just do not know what he’s going to say or do on any given day.”
On Trump as a candidate, Muller said that while most New Zealanders find his personal approach to politics “aggressive”, many of his American supporters like what he represents – the anti-establishment.
Muller’s old boss, John Key, agreed. In a recent interview with ThreeNews’s Samantha Hayes (that also saw the ex-PM show off his new helicopter), Key said Trump’s popularity was symptomatic of “middle America… feeling left behind and feeling unfairly treated”. But while Key believed that Trump’s “America First” views wouldn’t benefit New Zealand all that much, he still thought that “on balance” he would be better for the economy. “He’s likely to embrace a bit more market. He’s likely to have less red tape and he’s certainly going to have lower taxes. So that bit is good.”