How to feel about this
When polls mean almost nothing, narrative is everything. Plus, MAGA's daddy issues.
Hello! There are 11 days till election day.
Appropriate Jitters
Let’s not split hairs: if you are worried about another Trump presidency, things do not feel good right now.
A lot of that is down to the polling, which to all intents and purposes remains within the margin of error in every relevant state. The things that many people expected to derail Trump – his accelerating mental and physical decline, a disastrous debate performance, the deep unpopularity of J.D. Vance – have failed to stall him. And less than three months on from Harris’s euphoric launch, it’s hard to recapture the feeling that set her convention ablaze with joy.
My argument to you is that this is a healthy response to a genuinely concerning situation, but also to some extent a creation of the Harris campaign itself.
Firstly, it may be dispiriting (to say the least) that Trump and Harris are polling evenly, but it’s time to stop paying attention to that. You cannot change it, and the nationwide polling — not hugely important in itself — is often skewed by the release of polls by Republican-leaning pollsters who flood it with results that look good for Trump.
We also do not know what data the campaigns are seeing on the inside and how that’s guiding their choices, much less whether those choices will turn out to be the right ones.
Even worse are the betting markets, which look very good for Trump right now. To take this as a meaningful indication of anything is a serious mistake: see this report from Semafor revealing how a French megadonor dumped millions into the market to skew the prediction in Trump’s favour.
Just remember this: it’s going to be close, and it was always going to be close. In that sense, nothing has changed.
But also bear this in mind: it is in the Harris campaign’s interest for people to worry about Trump getting back in. If normal people only just tuning into the election now aren’t sufficiently worried, they might not bother to vote — and if highly engaged people who’ve already sent in their mail ballots aren’t worried, they might not lean on their friends and family to do their duty as well.
A more cynical take on this is that the news cycle being what it is, the Harris campaign was always and rightly anticipating a wave of stories about how they have somehow failed to streak ahead of Trump despite his increasingly abysmal behaviour.
The calculation may be that it’s better to have those stories written with two-odd weeks to go than just a few days before; come next weekend, editors will be expecting their reporters to come up with new angles, and if the supply of Democratic despair stories has been exhausted, hope may be next on the agenda.
I’m not certain that this strategy is real, and it’s a risky one if so. But in support of the hypothesis, here are some of the subject lines of the emails the Harris campaign has been bombarding supporters with in the last week:
“Is there ANYTHING at all we can say?”
“Asking for two hours. Yes, just two hours.”
“Trouble.”
“The timing is not great at all”
“An urgent request”
So ignore Nate Silver’s projection, ignore the betting markets, ignore the NYT poll, and ask yourself instead why the campaign is trying to convince you — and the journalists you read — that the election could be tipping Trump’s way.
Big Daddy
The evolution of MAGA’s vocabulary and symbology has been rapid and bizarre, weaving together ideas from myriad other movements to create a Trump universe that can be hard for people on the outside to navigate.
At a rally held by far-right organising force Turning Point Action, Trump was introduced by none other than ex-Fox News radical Tucker Carlson, whom Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau recently said under oath is being funded by the Kremlin-controlled outlet RT.
In his remarks, Carlson not only commanded Trump’s supporters to refuse to accept a Harris victory, but also told them they should think of the former president as an angry “daddy” ready to spank his daughter for being bad.
If you don’t believe it, watch below.
There are two things at work here, one of them downright sinister and the other no less insidious but decidedly sad.
Firstly, note how Tucker doesn’t just refer to Trump as a father figure, but explicitly invokes a worldview in which good fathers are angry authoritarians to be feared by family members who misbehave. On the face of it this is plain traditionalism about old-school “family values”, but there’s something more to it.
The various strains of traditionalist and far-right Christianity converging behind Trump have many things in common, but among them is the idea that manhood, and particularly fatherhood, consists not in care or affection, but in the exercise of authority and strength.
Among the right-wing Christian nationalist subculture that has installed itself at the centre of the Trumpist movement — see Project 2025, for a start — many subscribe to a hardline version of the concept known as “complementarianism”, a school of Christian thought in which male and female roles in everyday life and the family in particular are not just different, but divinely ordained.
For a taste of it, here’s pastor Joel Webbon, an extremely popular young Texas pastor who makes up a class of so-called “TheoBros” who’ve played a key role in shaping the thought of one J.D. Vance.
Men are patriarchs, exercising spiritual authority over the home and everyone in it; women are nurturers of children and keepers of the domestic sphere, but in many or most ways are commanded to defer to their husbands, whom they ideally married while still young. (On that particular point, here’s a brilliant deep dive on must-follow podcast Straight White American Jesus.)
This stuff isn’t confined to the fundamentalist Christian fringe, and plenty of other MAGA folk have long trafficked in the idea that to be a man is to be not just strong, but brutish.
Back in 2021, Madison Cawthorn – the now-largely-forgotten former Congressman who was effectively turfed out of Congress not for putting a trip to Hitler’s holiday home on his “bucket list”, but for claiming that fellow Republicans had invited him to orgies and snorted cocaine off their car keys – gave a horrific speech in which he said that US culture was trying to “demasculate” (sic) young men. In it, he implored the women in his audience to “raise your boys as monsters”.
Even the less sinister wing of the right often dabbles in its own fantasies of rugged father-son hand-me-down masculinity.
When the crie de coeur of working-class socioeconomic despondency Rich Men North of Richmond took the right-wing music scene by storm last year, National Review’s Mark Antonio Wright slammed it as a perfect demonstration of how white working-class American males had lost their sense of what it means to live well:
We, as citizens, as men, still hold it in our power to ignore the corrosive effects of our politics and the popular culture and get on with living the good life: get a job, get married, raise your kids up right, get involved with your church, read good books, teach your boys to hunt, be present in the lives of your family and friends, help your neighbors.
God forbid a father would teach his girls anything, least of all hunting. That’s men’s work.
And then there’s Tucker himself, with his brittle anger at supposedly declining virility and masculinity. For him, it’s tied up with the Great Replacement conspiracy theory, which holds that higher birth rates among non-white populations are part of a grand strategy to destroy the white Christian polity as we know it. (Here’s an NPR explainer on how Carlson got into this stuff.)
What panics Tucker is that the American male has been feminised, undermined, marginalised, humiliated — and that sperm counts and testosterone levels are falling. During his Fox News days, his show featured many segments on the problem with American men, but it culminated in a truly deranged special, The End of Men, which featured a detour into the pseudoscientific world of “testicular tanning”.
The trailer for it below has to be seen to be believed.
There’s a flip side to all this, though: The presence of a father implies children, and the behaviour of Trump’s most loyal fans certainly has something childlike about it.
You often hear terms like cosplay and LARP bandied about to describe what happened on January 6th 2021, when thousands of people clad in naff Trump paraphernalia violently stormed the US Capitol on his and his allies’ instructions. For many people, it was their chance to experience being part of a lethal militia, of the next 1776, of QAnon’s long-promised but never-manifested “Storm”.
It was also a vicarious enactment of Trump’s inability to accept losing, something he has in common with any given child under the age of about eight. Teaching your children to be good losers should surely be a part of the wholesome American childrearing that the right are so obsessed with, but on January 6th, it was proven at last that in their devotion to him, many of Trump’s people have seemingly reverted back to a juvenile level of anger.
See below one of the most notorious January 6th defendants, Beverley Hills beautician Gina Bisignano, dressed to the nines in Luis Vuitton and Chanel but behaving more like the class president-elect of an elementary school homeroom:
Awful as the January 6th spectacle was, there’s something poignantly childlike about Bisignano’s bleating about “Trumpy bear”.
Not only did many of the Trump supporters who stormed the Capitol fall for an easily disprovable lie because they loved their leader too much, but they embarrassed themselves in ludicrous outfits on video, so confident of their cause that it never occurred to them their relatives might notice them on Facebook and dob them in for something they should have known would get them into trouble.
This combination of suggestibility and bratty, untamed pique is children’s behaviour. The Trump movement today is almost worse, centred as it is around giving licence to base impulses that you usually learn to control as you grow up.
If Trump’s posture is that of a violent daddy ready to spank an out-of-line daughter (I can scarcely believe I’m writing that), his rally crowds heckle and carp in public like the hangers-on that surround playground bullies. If Trump wins, they may never need to grow up — and God knows what example that sets for their own kids.
By way of a footnote: The Trumpy Bear is, in fact a real toy, albeit one of strange provenance entirely disconnected from the formal Trump operation. Wired ran a piece about him in 2018 that nails his significance pretty perfectly:
For those who do not support the president, the bear is a testament to Trump’s brainwashed base, and it might be worth buying as a voodoo doll. For Trump supporters, it’s a new way to “trigger” histrionic snowflakes. Trumpy Bear isn’t your average meme-bred merch gone viral: It appeals to everyone and no one, it stands for everything and nothing, and that is exactly the point. Trumpy Bear is the nastiness of the Trumpian internet made plushie.
🎧 Further listening
My fellow Substacker Aaron Ellis has dropped a podcast episode featuring yours truly. Here’s how he described it:
A deep-dive into Trump, Harris, and the last thirty years of American politics.
We discuss why Donald Trump has such a hold on the Republican Party, how it’s qwhite interesting that a certain demographic finds Kamala Harris “unimpressive”, the relevance of her political apprenticeship in California, and whether or not her campaign is deliberately killing “the vibe” before a final joyful push.
Aaron and Andrew also talk about the toxic legacy of the 2008 Democratic primary.
You can listen to it on his Substack, Strategy Aaron, below. Don’t forget to give him a follow!
