The News
The chaos in the Democratic Party looks likely to swamp the Republican National Convention, leaving Donald Trump in an unusual situation: unable to get attention.
Reporters (this one included) are delaying their trips to Milwaukee for the Republican National Convention to cover Joe Biden’s attempt to hang on to power, while the ones who make it to Wisconsin may well be trapped in hotel rooms and media files, ignoring the event’s set pieces for the high-stakes story back east.
Trump’s campaign says they’re pleased enough to leave the media covering the other party’s disarray. “Our job is to make as little news as possible,” said one ally. Democrats, who don’t know who their nominee will be by this time next week, don’t exactly have a plan. But in the newly dynamic US political landscape, their party finally has voters paying attention.
In this article:
Ben’s view
Attention is hardly the only currency in politics. But in the 21st Century, it has proven a valuable and elusive one. And I’m not sure Trump’s aides are correct to make the unusual — for Trump, for politics — bet that the less attention the Republican nominee gets, the better.
In fact, the Democrats’ crisis also exposes Trump’s unexpected weakness: He has grown, in the media term of art, boring.
“3rd Trump RNC vs. history in the making next week by the minute?” texted one prominent television producer. “I know what I’m watching.”
Perhaps that’s fine with Trump, an unpopular candidate sitting on a solid, if modest, lead. Republicans have already shifted RNC rules so that he can name his vice presidential nominee as late as possible, giving him a chance to time the news for maximum coverage. Trump, a showman, loves a surprise, so perhaps he’ll diverge from the safe list of candidates currently in circulation. But it’s hard to see a rapprochement with Marco Rubio, or the ascendancy of Doug Burgum, making much of an impact on this news cycle.
And if Biden is no longer the Democratic nominee next week, his party could easily drown out, or reframe, the Republican convention. A shock new presumptive Democratic nominee, say Kamala Harris, campaigning outside the Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee would be far more compelling than anything happening inside the building.
Room for Disagreement
“I don’t think anyone at the RNC will really care if they are overshadowed by the DNC in disarray. It’s a win either way for them,” said a former top MSNBC executive, Jonathan Wald, who now produces the Don Lemon Show. (He added that there is “a list of people who should thank Joe Biden for his awful debate showing who were otherwise in the media spotlight, including but not limited to Will Lews at the Washington Post, Bibi Netanyahu, and Kevin Costner for the ‘Horizon’ bomb.”
The View From London
Democrats, grasping at straws, have looked to the surprise right-wing defeat in France and the collapse of the Tory Party in Britain for hope. But one close observer of British politics noted another trend in a conversation Friday: How swiftly voters’ allegiances may shift, and how much new information they can take in over what used to be considered a short period of time. It only took a month for Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party, and for a group of pro-Palestinian independent candidates, to emerge from nowhere to scoop up hundreds of thousands of votes and a handful of seats in parliament. In France, everyone from committed communists to business-oriented centrists coordinated in a mad dash after the far right led the first round of voting. In 2024, three months is an eternity.