Opinion | Joy Can Do More Than Beat Trump

There is a difference between beating a candidate and sidelining a movement. After nine years of confronting Donald Trump and facing a MAGA movement that has remade the Republican Party I once belonged to, I believe that fear may be sufficient to beat Trump, but only joy can push MAGA back to the periphery of American life.

Let me begin with a confession I suspect many of us could make: I did not expect Kamala Harris to do so well, so soon in her contest with Trump. I did not expect the overflow, exuberant crowds, and I definitely did not expect to see such an immediate and effective pivot from the Biden message of “save democracy” to a Harris campaign that is so plainly emphasizing optimism and hope.

When evaluating American politics and culture, you can sometimes feel the mood shifting before it’s reflected in the data. That was certainly true at the beginning of the Trump era. If you were too deeply embedded in the polls when Trump announced his presidential bid in 2015, you probably snickered at Trump’s campaign.

He had paid actors in Trump Tower in case no one else showed up. His speech was strange — it didn’t just include the now-famous claim that Mexico was sending its rapists across the border, it also included bizarre asides, like a claim that other candidates “sweated like dogs.” The tone and the content that are familiar to us now seemed disqualifying in the moment.

Yet the American mood was far more populist than most political observers realized. Rare is the pundit who saw both Trump winning the Republican nomination and Bernie Sanders presenting a credible challenge to Hillary Clinton. Trump’s campaign initially seemed more like a bid for attention than a credible campaign for president. The Democratic primaries were supposed to be more of a coronation than a contest. But soon enough, the data started to match the mood, and angry populism was upon us.

I’m wondering if the mood is shifting again. I wonder if we’re on the front end of a change in national temperament that could be fatal for MAGA — if we’re leaving the era of the nasty snarl in favor of the broad smile. And it’s not just the Harris surge that’s made me wonder about this.