Harris is playing Trump’s game

Harris responded to all this by calling out Trump for his “divisiveness and disrespect” — words that appeared in headlines around the country. It was the way any normal person would probably respond — with measured anger.

But Harris is not a normal person; she’s a presidential candidate now. And if she wants to beat Trump in November, she’s going to have to figure out how to run on her terms and not his.

Presidential campaigns, despite the way we talk about them, aren’t debates centered on a fixed set of issues, where either side gives its best answer to the same set of questions. More often, each candidate wants the campaign to be about something completely different, and those two messages might have very little to do with each other.

In 2008, to take an example, Republican nominee John McCain wanted the campaign to be about steady leadership at a time of grave peril in the world. Barack Obama wanted it to be about turning a generational page and reaffirming the American story. We remember that campaign as having been almost entirely about Obama’s message, in part because it was a more inspiring idea, and in part because Obama was a disciplined candidate who basically never let himself get goaded into arguing about something else.

The dueling messages this year may not be nearly as ennobling as either of those arguments, but they are becoming clearer. Trump intends to run the only campaign he has ever been capable of running — an attack on multiculturalism and changing demographics. Trump’s argument, reduced to its core, is that the America of his youth is being ruined by immigrants and coddled minorities, and Democrats are too controlled by the cult of diversity to do anything about it.

To Trump and Vance, a senator from Ohio, Harris seems to present the perfect foil. Like Obama, she’s Black but of mixed lineage, the itinerant child of a broken marriage. She can be made to portray a sinister kind of otherness in America — someone who acts the part but doesn’t really belong. This is what all the identity and Canada nonsense is about.

But unlike Obama, who came off as maddeningly cool and cerebral, Trump thinks Harris can be framed to fit another bigoted stereotype: the angry Black woman. Trump wants her to be simmering with indignation, quick to call out racism and discrimination. He wants to be able to say to White voters in swing states, in effect: “You see this woman who’s shouting about what a racist I am? You think she doesn’t think the same thing about you? Is this what you want the next four years to look like?”

Harris, on the other hand, has in these early days of the campaign latched on to a message about the “weirdness” of her Republican opponents. It’s not the term I’d choose. (“Weird” is what mean children say to other kids who don’t fit in, and we have enough of that already.) However, the underlying idea, I think, is powerful. Trump and his aging party are clinging at all costs to a long-dead version of 1950s America, strangely fixated on fears of outsiders who look or sound different, like some creepy old uncle who still packs a bomb shelter with fresh batteries and cans of Spam.

To put it simply, the campaign from here on out can be seen as a contest of conversations. Whenever Trump manages to engage Harris in arguing about identity or racism, no matter how right she may be, she’s helping him make his case. Whenever Harris is talking about Trump’s obsolete worldview and how to finally move past it, she’s running her campaign.

Her response to this week’s attacks on her identity, then, might have been appropriate and even understated. But it was mostly a missed opportunity. To call Trump “divisive and disrespectful” — words that ricocheted around the internet with rocket-like speed — is to risk playing into the stereotype he wants to create. It enables him to caricature Harris as a Black woman who sees racism around every corner.

Whereas it’s actually Trump who is endlessly obsessed with identity — that’s the point. And so a more disciplined response from Harris would have sounded something like: “I don’t know why he’s talking about me being Black again, or where I grew up, or whatever. It’s kind of strange, this fixation with who belongs and who doesn’t. The vast majority of Americans don’t really define each other by skin color or where their parents came from anymore, but I guess Donald missed all that.”

That’s a message the centers on modernity. It’s a confident message that gives Americans credit for the progress we’ve made and makes Trump and Vance seem desperate and out of touch, which they are.

I’m not minimizing the personal impact that race-baiting probably has on Harris. I’m guessing she saw enough of that as a child, and it probably took all the restraint she had not to remind Trump that she was born Black, just like he was born a bigot.

But there’s really only one way to make Trump regret his nativist bullying. And that’s to stay on your own message and win.