Kamala Harris, Time cover girl: Is her surge against Trump fueled by an endless media honeymoon? (2024)

It’s all about the vibe.

A word not usually associated with presidential politics — more with late night parties and a bong — is now the only thing that matters. At least if you’re Kamala Harris.

She’s on the cover of Time — with an admiring sketch that makes it look like she’s already president — because of "the swiftest vibe shift in American political history."

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Is that all it takes to win? It doesn’t hurt that the vice president has surged in the polls, raised truckloads of cash, become a cultural phenomenon, had a relatively successful rollout of Tim Walz, and will get a further bump from the Democratic convention.

But after that, will it prove to be a sugar high? Will her numbers slide back to where they were in the face of Republican attacks?

For the time being, at least, Donald Trump seems off balance, his attacks on Harris aren’t sticking, and he openly pines for Joe Biden after spending years preparing to run against the frail 81-year-old president.

What’s more, with Biden bowing out, Trump, at 78, is now the old man in the race. And many of the pundits who spent their time defending Biden’s mental acuity have now flipped into arguing that Trump is just losing it.

A side-by-side of former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris. (Getty Images)

I thought he disproved that in his hour-long press conference, though he does have a tendency to ramble. It reminded me of our recent Mar-a-Lago interview, when he was sharp and serious across at least 15 topics.

But the media, which have been largely anti-Trump for nine years, trashed the presser. "Wackadoodle," said HuffPost. "Unhinged," said Rolling Stone.

Still, how did it help him to say that his inaugural crowd was as big or bigger than for MLK’s famous 1963 "dream" speech?

The former president was widely ridiculed for saying at the news conference that he once endured a helicopter emergency landing with Willie Brown, after the ex-Kamala boyfriend denied it. But it turns out there was an emergency landing–with another black politician from California. He had mixed up the names.

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Trump has always run as the strongman, the fighter, the leader of a movement, one who transformed the party from its Reaganite roots. Has Harris made it safe for wobbly Republicans and independents who don’t like his conduct to find in her a safe harbor?

Allies are pleading with him to be more focused, including two former top Trump aides, Larry Kudlow and Kellyanne Conway. On Fox Business, Kudlow asked this about his ex-boss: "Don’t wander off, don’t call her stupid and all kinds of names, stay on message?"

"The winning formula for President Trump," said Conway, "is very plain to see. It’s fewer insults, more insights, and that policy contrast."

In a two-hour conversation with Elon Musk on X, plagued by technical glitches, Trump said the Time cover sketch of Harris "looks like the most beautiful actress ever to live" and that she very much resembled Melania. He circled back to call Kamala "a beautiful woman." (Musk says that traffic peaked at 73 million views.)

Republican Presidential nominee former President Donald J. Trump holds his first public campaign rally with his running mate, Vice Presidential nominee U.S. Senator J.D. Vance (R-OH) (not pictured), at the Van Andel Arena on July 20, 2024, in Grand Rapids, Michigan. (Bill Pugliano/Getty Images)

One result of Trump’s media blitz is that it prompted Harris to finally take substantive questions from her press corps (this is after her 70-second gaggle with brief, clipped answers). He is running against a media establishment that is treating Harris like a queen.

I’m not taking anything away from Harris and the shrewd way she’s handled the last three weeks. Having watched several of her TV interviews while Biden was still running, I told people she had improved tremendously from the hesitant and hyper-cautious speaker of the early days.

But the mainstream press hasn’t made an issue of Harris’ refusal to sit for a single interview, despite constantly criticizing Biden for avoiding the media. She just brushes it off by saying hopefully by the end of the month. Yet Trump and JD Vance have hammered the issue so hard that journalists have been forced to cover the controversy, framing it as "Republicans accuse Harris" when it should also be part of their job.

The former president said he would be less divisive after barely surviving that horrendous assassination attempt, but he soon announced he was abandoning the approach–a classic Trumpian pattern. He called Harris dumb as a rock and questioned her racial identity before the National Association of Black Journalists.

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Trump also said the Harris camp was using AI to fake large crowds at the Detroit airport, when wider shots proved there was an audience of thousands.

And perhaps he was rattled by what he says was an illegal hacking, with internal documents sent to three outlets – Politico, Washington Post and New York Times – which have declined to publish the material.

"I absolutely HATE the Fake News Media," he posted after the Musk chat.

But keep in mind: Trump has a much easier path to 270 and may well win. Harris is drawing new supporters but also losing among some demographics that favored Biden. She has to be considered the underdog. She has to deal with her policy flip-flops and persuade voters that the first black female president and Asian-American president would be a plausible commander in chief.

US Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris waves as she boards Air Force Two at San Francisco International Airport on August 11, 2024,in San Francisco, California, as she returns to Washington, DC. (JULIA NIKHINSON/POOL/AFP via Getty Images)

One sign that’s no longer unthinkable: Politico has a piece on how "progressive national security professionals already are angling for positions in a possible Kamala Harris administration."

The Time cover piece is overwhelmingly upbeat. Her excitement "resembled the early days of Barack Obama…She seems matched to the moment: a former prosecutor running against a convicted felon."

And: "Harris’ brand shift—the happy-warrior attitude, the viral memes, the eye roll at Republican ‘weirdos’—has already done what no Trump opponent has ever been able to do: snatch the spotlight away from him."

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We’ll see how far the new vibe can take her.