The piece overall amounts to this never happens, therefore this isn't happening, and eventually Thiessen arrives at an historical analogy he finds suitably comforting:
The closer historical analogy to Harris’s bid is...1968, when Vice President Hubert Humphrey ran to succeed the deeply unpopular Johnson amid crushing inflation, global turmoil and antiwar protests. The difference between then and now is that Biden is almost 10 points less popular today than LBJ was in 1968, when voters rejected Humphrey as his successor.
Of course it escapes Thiessen's notice that Humphrey 1) was kneecapped by Johnson, 2) was beaten up in an acrimonious nomination process, and 3) almost won anyway.
But his real point is to emphasize that Harris=Biden, something the Trump campaign has been woefully unable to do so far. The subhead says it all ("Voters should realize: A Harris presidency would be a second Biden term."), and conveys Thiessen's palpable frustration that the voters just don't get it. The closing graf is part plea, part attempt to make it so by saying it's so:
Trump needs to make clear that Harris not only helped craft those Biden catastrophes, but also she plans to double down on the administration’s failures — and that a Harris presidency would be a second Biden term. Because history shows that when a sitting vice president runs to succeed a sitting president, the election is a referendum on the current commander in chief.
But the election currently isn't a referendum on Biden, and that's the subject of an excellent piece by Josh Marshall last Friday:
This morning on Twitter, Tim Murtaugh, a former Trump campaign spokesman, concluded a tweet attacking Harris by writing: “Her whole vacant message sounds like it’s from a party that’s out of power. But they’re her messes.” Through the spittle and frustration you can see him making a point which quite understandably has Trump’s campaign angry and bewildered. Harris has made Trump into the incumbent with her as the challenger running on a campaign message to turn the page....The Trump campaign itself is telling us this, almost in spite of itself. And it’s worth taking a moment to consider how exactly this manages to be the case. Since Harris is...literally the incumbent Vice President.
Of course there are good reasons to consider Trump the incumbent: he has actually been president, and as Yas notes we've been living under his threat for a long time now. And $540 million says people are pretty fucking sick of it.
But Marshall makes another point, which is that if Trump is seen as the incumbent it's his own goddamn fault:
But there’s another paradoxical way that Trump himself laid the groundwork for this campaign, and made it possible for Harris to turn his own political heft against him. The centerpiece of Trump’s post-presidency is the wicked conceit that he never stopped being president at all. At the most basic level he never admitted that he lost the 2020 campaign....He still calls himself president. He demands and universally receives that billing from his followers. He moves through the country with the trappings and insignia of the presidency. He continues to meet with foreign heads of state, not as an elder statesman but as though he never left office. He even argues that national secrets and presidential documents are his personal property....If Trump and his toadies are now complaining that Harris is treating him like the incumbent it is because in ways vast and small he has acted like one and demanded to be treated like one for almost four years. She’s taken his most perverse and vainglorious conceit and turned it into a massive liability.
The policy agenda matches this. A challenger talks about a new future. Trump hasn’t done that at all....Trump’s entire platform is retribution — retribution for his 2020 defeat, which he lacks the character to recognize, and retribution for what he considers his mistreatment during his term as president....Trump’s true second term agenda is undoing and getting even for what he’s mad about from the first term.
Hence the futility of Thiessen's position. Trump can't frame VP Harris as the incumbent because it goes against everything he's campaigning on, against his very definition of himself. Events could occur that refocus the race and tie her more closely to President Biden. But it isn't going to be the Trump campaign that does it.
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