Autumn arrived early to The Swamp this year. As the poet forecast, honey crisps are ripening in the north of Old Dominion. An October chill, cast from the wending Potomac, coasted in and cooled the wee morning hours leading up to Labor Day. Even the memes took note.
It’s been a surreal, mind-shunting summer in our capitol Babylon. The great contest of wills looms in November. Nobody—not the politicians, not the pollsters, not the prognosticators, not the pressmen, not the prevaricating pencil-necks in Politico, not the parlayers putting a packet on their preferred pol, not the Penn Quarter pedestrians piddling through the Washington Post on their phones—knows which path our republic takes after the last ballot is registered. All the polling, when the noise is muted, averages are accounted, and third parties are struck, shows a dead-even match. The chances split in equal measure.
Yet no American paying even scant attention to the political scene over the sultry season can genuinely claim calm, even-keeled disposition toward the big-ticket tangle. The country has undergone a profound sense of geworfenheit since June. What was before a fated path—two frailing men grasping for the brass ring with withered hands—has morphed into something altogether different, even if many of the players remain (mostly) the same.
If the reader will agree to indulge, and converse in full with your horizonless imagination, picture yourself in either pair of partisan shoes, even if they don’t physically fit and scrunch your toes. If you’re a Democrat, you kicked off summer in a slump. Your nominee, whom 14 million of your party peers assented to, was a teetering skeleton bordering on senility. His prospects for reelection were slim. Then *poof*, he’s old news, dozing on a Delmarva beach, and your future is as bright, bubbly, and exuberant as your nominee, caterwauling Kamala Harris.
If you’re a Republican, summer ends on a dim, and darkening, note. Your nominee is the same preening pol he’s been for almost ten consecutive years, with a little less sharpness to his depthless manic energy. Donald Trump’s bombastic bile was more acidic when flung against the hollowed silicone husk of Joe Biden. But against a woman a generation his junior? And of duel-race extraction? Protest p.c. propriety all you’d like, but there’s no softening the de trop scene of “old white man yells at young black woman.” Trump is trapped, ensnared in an identity oubliette he helped construct. He has no avenue to woo back swing-state suburban women who are a necessary spouse to an Electoral College engagement. His greatest asset—a stabbing nana nana boo boo that taunts and disorients his opponents—belittles hollow men but only deflects off the opposite sex. (Hillary Clinton, this simple man reckons, isn’t considered a genuine matron by her muliebral matches.)
Where did it all go wrong? (For the bumbling pachyderm party.) And where did it all go right? (For the nimble burro bloc.) The 2024 Summer of Consequence, I’m afraid, has ramifications our over media-stimulated political system hasn’t made complete sense of.
The first presidential barb bash accomplished what no debate ever has—nor ever will—eventuated: crumbled a campaign. For over a stretched hour, the public witnessed a horrid sight: the prospect of their aging parents holding the nuclear football. The old impiousness kicked in—more so for Democrats whose political identity is intertwined with razing gray obsolescence. Biden, after a week more of fumbling, was euthanized as a prospect. In came Kamala who, a month earlier, was a running joke with no Oval path and nihil nominee votes. Then, seemingly overnight, under the cover of darkness, deep in the wilderness away from prying cameras, a new Harris took form, incanted into sleek shape by a coven of glamor journalists. The most unpopular vice president in recorded history and the once superlatively liberal senator transmuted into a veritable pop star with modest beliefs and a red-white-and-blue attitude. All without having to exercise her flap-happy jawbone. Real movie magic!
Such a flashing recast was head-spinning enough. But between there was the bullet—the 5.56 round that almost irreparably bent our country’s trajectory toward an unknowable, though undoubtedly disastrous, path. Thomas Crooks’s décapité manqué nearly tor the nation asunder. What saved Trump’s towheaded cranium was the allure of a chart documenting the jump in illegal immigration ingresses since Joe Biden assumed office. Mr. Build-a-Wall rescued by the xeno-fear that catalyzed his political career! Maybe there are really jobs that illegal aliens are willing to do that we damn Yankees won’t—like staving an assassination.
Trump’s reaction to cheating death was perhaps the most courageous thing an American politician has done this century. The image of a nearly felled man rising, fist defiantly arched to the sky, blood streaming down his face, encouraging his followers to “FIGHT!” is the stuff of “Napoleon Crossing the Alps,” Muhammad Ali licking Sonny Liston, the well-kick in “300.” Yet the very picture has been memory-holed, delete-keyed off major media, replaced with the same staged hustings shots we’re spoon fed every four years. A man can take a bullet in the view of millions, but if he’s not a loved man, that is, a man adored by the right narrative writers, then he’s just a freak news story.
With the beach umbrellas shaken out and stored, all the towels laundered, and shoreside condos fees paid, the summer comes to a dizzying close just as the high horse race hits its home stretch. The election watchword, it’s been declared by so many invisible bylined mediators, is a Gen-Z coinage: vibes. It’s not Kamala Harris vs. Donald Trump, but joy vs. resentment, happy vs. hate, fun vs. drudge, brat vs. crab. Our epistemic institutions demand we accept the dicthotomy.
But how can anyone feel the moment when the seminal events of the summer have yet to settle in our body politic’s stomach?
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