Trump’s Ed Davey-style stunts could win him the election

The presidential hopeful is showing off his weird and wacky antics in an attempt to appeal to unengaged voters

You have to feel sorry for the Democrats and their candidate, Kamala Harris.
They tried so hard to make this election about stuff they cared about, important stuff like abortion, the cost of living and taxes.
But that damned Republican jelly has proved just as difficult to nail to the wall as it was in 2016: the 2024 election has been about just one thing: Donald Trump. And it’s genuinely painful, wince-inducing to watch his opponents crow about how unfit he is to be president.
We already know that he’s unfit for the job. We knew it eight years ago. We knew it while he was in office and it was confirmed by the way he behaved on January 6, 2021, when his supporters stormed the Capitol in an attempt to overturn the results of the previous November’s election.
It has been more than proved since he left office, by the felonies of which he has been convicted, by the many and serious allegations of sexual misconduct made against him, by his offensive and unhinged rhetoric.
We know all that. So why does Harris’s team believe that being reminded of such will impact on the result of next week’s election? What precedent are they drawing upon that would make them believe that Trump’s many failings have not already been factored into Americans’ decision about who to support for president?
The Democrats believe that their fellow citizens need to be warned of the threat posed by a second Trump presidency; Americans would rather be entertained. And therein lies the biggest threat to Harris’s ambitions.
For Trump is, if nothing else, entertaining. I mean, the garbage truck stunt is a very good case in point. Even now, no one is quite sure of the point he was trying to make by driving the vehicle, plastered with his own name and his campaign slogan, and taking media questions from the comfort of the driver’s seat while wearing a hi-viz vest. It doesn’t matter. People saw it on their TV screens and they laughed about it, or maybe they raised an eyebrow at it, or shook their heads and rolled their eyes. But they’ll all remember it.
When the former president rolled up his sleeves and did a shift at a McDonald’s restaurant, oh how the critics sneered! The social media memes flew, with clever, clever people commenting archly that it prefigured his employment prospects after he loses in November. Really? Is that how the majority of Americans – or at least the large proportion of citizens whose support Trump needs to enlist – saw it?
Or were they entertained at seeing a well-known celebrity in an environment that they themselves know well, from one side of the counter or the other?
Of course, these events – and many others – said nothing about what policies Trump would follow in his second term or what impact, positive or negative, those policies would have on the country. They were nothing more than stunts that allowed the candidate to make a few self-effacing jokes (and many more less self-effacing ones about his opponent).
Trump is often compared – unfairly, I think – with Boris Johnson, if only because the same kind of people in the media and in politics nurture the same level of personal hatred for each man, and for different reasons. But the rather more persuasive comparison is not with Johnson but with another senior politician who is actually still in the Commons.
Sir Ed Davey may be younger and his politics certainly have more in common with Harris’s than with Trump’s, but when it comes to campaigning, the two are soulmates. Who knows? Perhaps Trump’s campaign team were paying close attention to the Liberal Democrat leader’s bizarre shenanigans during the summer’s general election, in which he posed for many a silly stunt that involved water rides, canoes and bungee jumps.
The Republicans will have noted that if nothing else, these events helped Davey avoid difficult policy questions, assuming any journalists present were even interested enough to ask. No, they only wanted dramatic pictures of the former cabinet minister making a fool of himself for the cameras, and that is what they got. What Davey himself got was the biggest rise in personal popularity of all the UK party leaders and the largest increase in the number of Lib Dem MPs in its history.
All those silly pratfalls and deliberate self-soakings said nothing about his party’s views or electability, but they made for a pleasant break from watching Rishi Sunak’s self-immolation or Keir Starmer showing us depressing holiday snaps from his childhood holidays in the Lake District (where I bet he never capsized a single canoe).
Davey made people smile, or at least smirk. Which is what Trump’s weird, inexplicable antics are doing across the Atlantic. But if, when residents of Pennsylvania or Nevada go to the polls next Tuesday, those images are still making voters smile to themselves, or – even worse – if they would rather watch a septuagenarian driving a garbage truck instead of listen to another lecture on niceness and tolerance from the current vice-president, it may be Harris who’s considering a shift at McDonald’s after January 20.