Defeating Trump.

Remember the 500,000.

1. Part One of the GOP campaign playbook for the destruction of Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign was described recently by one of Donald Trump’s most relentless critics, Andrew Sullivan. He wasn’t doing so on purpose. He was explaining why he was torn about supporting Harris’s candidacy.

As follows:

Kamala Harris is another thing entirely: a politician who has fervently embraced identity politics as central to her understanding of the world, and is the most left-wing candidate to be nominated for president by a major political party in American history.

The record is somewhat difficult to ignore: Harris favored decriminalizing illegal border crossings, free healthcare for all illegal immigrants, funded bail for BLM rioters, abolition of private health insurance, a ban on fracking, and replacing ICE — “starting from scratch.” She is committed to the woke concept of “equity”, which means ensuring that all identity groups in America “end up in the same place” by government intervention. She favors what we now know are irreversible medical experiments on gay, autistic and trans children. She supports reparations for slavery. She wants to inculcate the core ideas of critical race, gender and queer theory in public schools from kindergarten onward.

So that’s Part One: she’s a woke lefty, way outside the mainstream.

Part Two is an avalanche of compare-and-contrast TV ads and social media posts describing her “updated” views on various issues. She’s not against fracking, she’s for it! She no longer believes in the abolition of private health care, she’s reconsidered and now thinks it’s essential. Etcetera, Etcetera. You know the ads. You’ve seen them thousands of times before.

Part Three is summation, borrowed from the George W. Bush media campaign of 2004: “John Kerry Kamala Harris: For it before she was against it.” She can’t be trusted. She surfs on the wind. She’ll say anything to get elected. She’s just saying what she’s saying because she thinks you’re stupid enough to believe it.

This 1–2–3 playbook has worked before and it can work again. It’s effective because it’s not untrue.

The question is: what will the Harris campaign do about it? How will it mitigate the damage, while recasting the race as a referendum on Trump? What will change the perspective of the 500,000 voters in the six “battleground” states, who will decide the outcome in those states and thus the outcome in the Electoral College.

Political consultants get all “big picture” on this subject: future vs. past, younger vs. older, optimism vs. anger, calm vs. crazy. But “big picture” isn’t going to get the job done. It may be an “environmental” advantage, but it’s not a decisive one.

The Trump attack ads will have to be answered, obviously, but point-by-point rebuttal will simply amplify the attacks. If Trump Attack Ad #1 is 60 seconds long and the Harris campaign’s “point-by-point” Response Ad is 60 seconds long, then half of the Harris Response Ad is Trump’s ad. So that’s a non-starter.

The best way to take the sting out of Trump attack ads is to respond with humor. If the Harris campaign can get voters chuckling at its responses to Trump attack ads, it will have won the battle, if not the war. And all the Harris campaign really needs to do is fight the “ad battles” to a draw.

What will be decisive is how the “referendum on Trump” is framed. The frame that will work is this: It’s time for Donald Trump to retire. Not be fired. Not discarded. Not derided. Not denounced. Retired, with thanks for his service.

There’s a famous story (there are about five different versions of this story) about Lyndon Johnson going to Washington following his election to the U.S. House of Representatives. Sam Rayburn was the Speaker of the House at the time and saw in Johnson, a fellow Texan, the makings of a legislative giant. Johnson looked up to Rayburn with something approaching awe.

Once he got settled, Johnson wanted to know how to deal with all the mail from constituents. There was a lot of it. Johnson asked Rayburn: How do you prioritize it? Which letters have to be answered immediately, which ones could wait?

Rayburn, the story goes, answered as follows:

“You’re going to get two kinds of mail, Lyndon. Letters that are written in pen and letters that are written in pencil. The letters written in pencil are from people who can’t afford pens. So you answer their letters first. Because the people who write you in pencil don’t have friends in Washington. You’re their friend. You’re their voice.”

Trump gave Jacksonian America a voice (again) in American politics. He brought Jacksonian thinking to bear on important matters of policy. He questioned a lot of “establishment consensus” that deserved re-thinking. He was right about China. He was right to demand that European nations spend more on its own defense. He was right to denounce and undo suffocating federal regulations, rules and mandates. He was correct in pointing out that the mainstream news media was too often pushing an agenda, not reporting the news. He rattled a lot of cages that deserved to be rattled.

Amongst the 500,000 who will decide the outcome of the election, I would bet that a majority of them would say: “Trump said things that deserved to be said.” I would bet a majority would agree that “Trump shaking up Washington was a good thing.” I would bet a majority would say: “Trump is worthy of our respect.”

Kamala Harris, Tim Walz, the Democratic elite, the progressive “movement”, the donor class and their media allies won’t get rid of Trump by calling him a con artist, a criminal and a psychopath. They’ll re-elect him.