PHILADELPHIA — One is running a high-decibel campaign. The other is waging a high-incel campaign.
By Dana Milbank
From my seat in the press section on the arena floor, I measured the noise when Harris and Walz took the stage at 107 decibels. That’s approaching rock-concert levels, but it wasn’t coming from the sound system; it was entirely from the lungs of 12,000 Democrats.
A low-energy Trump, by contrast, scheduled only one rally, in Montana. Instead, he and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, made a series of overtures to the “manosphere,” an online community of right-wing — and frequently misogynistic — men.
At Mar-a-Lago, Trump sat down for an hour and a half with 23-year-old live-streamer Adin Ross, who has been banned from the streaming platform Twitch for “hateful conduct.” For the benefit of Ross’s hypermasculine young audience, the two men discussed their shared fondness for Ultimate Fighting and compared their “favorite fighters,” and Trump praised the “good heart” of antisemitic rapper Ye. The two also discussed their admiration for the Nelk Boys (“great people,” Trump said), other far-right influencers who, like Ross, have promoted self-described misogynist Andrew Tate, known for celebrating violence against women and who is facing rape and human trafficking charges in Romania.
Vance, in turn, recorded a TikTok video and a podcast with the Nelk Boys to boost his candidacy, which has been struggling since comments surfaced in which he disparaged childless women as “cat ladies.” Vance followed Harris around the country this week, but his crowds were generally in the dozens or low hundreds. When the Harris and Vance planes were on a Wisconsin tarmac at the same time, Vance and a phalanx of bros approached Air Force Two in an unsuccessful effort to confront the vice president and, he told reporters, to “get a look at the plane because hopefully it’s going to be my plane.”
Former Republican congresswoman Liz Cheney (Wyo.) commented on the photo Vance posted of his entourage (there appeared to be nine White men in suits) on the tarmac. “Looks like @JDVance brought all his rally attendees to the airport with him today,” she wrote.
Things weren’t much better for Vance in Philadelphia, where he drew all of 200 people and fielded a reporter’s question about cat ladies. “This cat lady loves you,” somebody in the audience called out.
“Thank you, ma’am,” said Vance.
“Every type of white man that gets a hasty ‘swipe left’ on his dating profile was in attendance,” wrote Salon’s Amanda Marcotte, including “glowering loners staring at the two women under 40 like cats watching birds out a window.”
The Trump campaign appears to think angry men can send him back to the White House. Hulk Hogan ripped off his shirt at the Republican National Convention. Trump went on professional wrestler Logan Paul’s podcast and joined UFC boss Dana White ringside. At an event on Aug. 3, Trump told the crowd how his wife hates it when he groans and moans onstage, pretending to be a girl struggling to lift a barbell. He praised a waitress he met while campaigning: “She grabbed me. She gave me a kiss. I said, I think I’m never going back home to the first lady.”
Now, Trump allies are launching what the Wall Street Journal says will be a $20 million “Send the Vote” initiative aimed at young men. They’re hoping all of this will improve Trump’s standing among men under 30, a demographic that is about 5 percent of the electorate.
But it’s almost certain to hurt Trump’s standing further among a group that votes in very large numbers. Only 39 percent of women, and just 27 percent of college-educated women, view Trump favorably in the new NPR-PBS-Marist poll. Only 28 percent of women, and 24 percent of college-educated women, have a favorable view of Vance.
Many other women see the Trump-Vance buffet of abortion bans, cat-lady barbs, vulgar insults and ultimate fighting for what it is: gross.
Richard Reilly woke up at 3 a.m. at his home in Kingwood, N.J., so that he could arrive at the Harris event in Philadelphia by 5:30 a.m. for the 5:30 p.m. event. He has a long white beard and wore a red Santa hat, T-shirt and shorts to be sure he stood out.
Would he have gone to the same trouble if President Joe Biden were still the nominee? “Probably not,” Reilly admitted. “I just felt that it was going downhill fast.”
A few places back in line was Vevette Cundari, from Yonkers, N.Y., who came down the night before so she could be in line at dawn. She, too, wouldn’t have made the trip for Biden. “I was not optimistic,” she said. “But now there’s been a resurgence of hope.”
Trump has always drawn large crowds from his cultlike following; they gather, as though for a reunion, to compare their Trump-themed apparel and homemade signs. But in Philly, I saw an energy among Democrats I hadn’t experienced since Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign.
Outside, they danced and chanted Harris’s name while a drum corps played. A guy waved his “Kamala is Future” sign, decorated with coconuts. The few anti-Israel protesters who demonstrated outside the event (I counted four of them) were largely ignored by the crowd.
Inside, dozens of Black women wore the pink and green of Harris’s college sorority, Alpha Kappa Alpha. A guy in a turban danced behind the stage. They wore their recently acquired merch for the new nominee: “Yes We Kam,” “Swifties for Harris,” “Old White Men for Harris,” “Kamala Harris for the People.” From the upper level, attendees dangled a bedsheet declaring “Madam Vice President” with “Vice” crossed out. A young woman, DJ Diamond Kuts, pumped up the crowd with hip-hop music, followed by a Motown singalong. The campaign handed out rock-concert-style wristbands that flashed red, white and blue. Two hours before Harris appeared, each of the 10,000 seats in the arena was occupied, and the floor was full.
And it was loud — even for the warm-up acts. CNN’s Jeff Zeleny showed me the double noise-canceling earpieces he was using. “For Biden rallies, this was not necessary,” he told me.
“I work with JD Vance,” Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.) told the crowd. “And I’m here to confirm that he is a seriously weird dude.”
When Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, who had been on Harris’s list of potential running mates, mentioned that Vance is “not exactly off to a good start,” the crowd responded with an impromptu chant: “He’s a weirdo!”
Shapiro, a powerful speaker, brought the crowd’s roar up to 104 decibels when he spoke of the Republicans’ abortion bans: “It’s not freedom to tell women what they’re allowed to do with their bodies. That’s not freedom!”
Harris eclipsed even that energy when she spoke about “two middle-class kids, one a daughter of Oakland, Calif., who was raised by a working mother, the other, a son of the Nebraska plains who grew up working on a farm. It’s the promise of America. Because only in America, only in America, is it possible for them together to make it all the way to the White House.”
From the crowd came a thundering chant of “USA! USA!”
It was a welcome reminder that Trump’s MAGA followers don’t own that chant — and they no longer own the advantage in enthusiasm.
Some of the very first words out of Walz’s mouth captured the moment perfectly. “Thank you,” he said to Harris, “for bringing back the joy.”
In the week leading up to Friday, Trump delivered one speech, in Atlanta on Aug. 3. He used the word “I” 317 times. Contrast that with Harris, who referred to herself in the same way only 39 times during her Philadelphia speech.
In fairness, Trump used most words more than Harris did, because he droned on for 91 minutes, compared with Harris’s 31. The former president’s speech was typical: a blend of self-praise, random attacks, lunacy and invention — with no discernible structure.
“I’d like to congratulate Vladimir Putin for having made yet another great deal,” he announced, eight minutes into his speech.
He lavished praise on himself: “Trump is right about everything. ... They were saying how great I was. ... They said, ‘He was the greatest president we ever had.’”
He spent a full minute complaining that the arena operator, Georgia State University, didn’t let more people in. Twenty-five minutes later, he complained about it some more: “A very liberal school, I guess. Right? Not happy with the school.” He offered his usual prophesies of doom (“We could end up in World War III and a depression. How about that?”) and other nonsensical assertions.
He referred to the Midwest as the Middle West. He gave his views on electric vehicles: “I’m for them, for a small slice is a slice” but “there’s no way you can ever load them up.” He said that he’ll get the economy “booming like it was four years ago” — when it had collapsed. He spouted a falsehood about an Algerian Olympian boxer being transgender, and claimed he was shot because people called him a threat to democracy; the shooter was a Republican with no identified political motive.
He tried to attack Harris, but his lines were lost amid a kaleidoscope of grievances directed not just at her but at Biden, Hillary Clinton, California Gov. Gavin Newsom, prosecutors Alvin Bragg and Fani Willis, and Republicans Paul Ryan, Mitt Romney and, especially, Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp. Trump devoted the better part of 12 minutes to attacking Kemp, as well as the governor’s wife, for being “disloyal” in refusing to help overturn the 2020 election.
In contrast to that 91-minute stream-of-consciousness, it takes Walz less than three minutes to make the case against Trump. “Again and again and again, Trump weakens our economy to strengthen his own hand,” the Minnesota governor said in Philadelphia. “He mocks our laws. He sows chaos and division. And that’s to say nothing of his record as president. He froze in the face of the covid crisis. He drove our economy into the ground. And make no mistake, violent crime was up under Donald Trump. That’s not even counting the crimes he committed.”
He delivers a message on abortion rights — “There is a golden rule: Mind your own damn business” — and says not to believe Trump “when he plays dumb” about Project 2025 and its plans “to restrict our freedoms, to rig the economy to help the super rich.” Walz then dispatches Vance as an elitist: “Like all regular people I grew up with in the heartland, JD studied at Yale, had his career funded by Silicon Valley billionaires, and then wrote a bestseller trashing that community.” Walz concludes: “These guys are creepy and, yes, just weird as hell.”
Walz usually gets credit for branding Trump as “weird,” but really it was former president George W. Bush, who reportedly said after Trump’s bizarre inaugural address in 2017: “That’s some weird s---.”
The charge clearly stings, because Trump keeps trying to refute it — in ways that are pretty weird. “J.D. Vance Isn’t Weird, The Democrats Are,” announced an argument Trump posted online written by ... Roger Stone?
And Trump keeps piling up erratic behaviors. He withdrew from the previously agreed-upon ABC News debate then unilaterally announced a new one, on Fox News, before reaccepting the ABC debate he had just rejected. He decided to rename Harris “Kamabla.” He posted an article about a cow tax in Denmark. He shared an article asking: “Will July 4th, like Columbus Day, soon simply disappear?” He posted several hysterical claims about a “KAMALA CRASH!” on Wall Street on Monday, then was silent as the market recovered most of its losses. He posted a claim on Truth Social saying “Tim Walz let Minnesota burn” during race riots — but an audio recording from that time has Trump praising Walz’s response.
But the lines aren’t just random and strange. Sometimes, they’re ugly. Trump, on Fox News, made the outrageous claim that Shapiro wasn’t chosen as Harris’s running mate “because of the fact that he’s Jewish,” which is “very insulting to Jewish people.” Vance, embracing the same vile tactics used in the “swiftboating” of John Kerry 20 years ago, accused Walz of “stolen valor” and said he “abandoned” his unit when he retired from the National Guard after 24 years for his successful run for Congress.
Twenty years ago, the attacks on Kerry were devastating, in part because such brazen lies were not yet routine. But Americans know to expect new outrages every day from Trump — and he seldom disappoints.
On Thursday, he shared on Truth Social an image of Harris, her face distorted and darkened, her body turned into an insect’s. He held a news conference at Mar-a-Lago at which he denied saying last week that Harris “happened to turn Black” in recent years. “She’s the one that said it. I didn’t say it,” he claimed, calling Harris “very disrespectful.” He also used the session to tell an apocryphal story about a near-death trip in a helicopter, to say that Jews who vote for Harris “should have their heads examined” and to boast that, “on crowd size, in history, for any country, nobody’s had crowds like I have.”
In particular, Trump proclaimed that there were more people at his speech on Jan. 6, 2021, before the attack on the Capitol, than for the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s March on Washington in 1963: “When you look at the picture of his crowd versus my crowd, we actually had more people.”
Weird doesn’t begin to cover this.
