VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: The weird, creepy, surreal — and dangerous — campaign

The already-long 2024 presidential campaign has become the strangest in modern history. Here are many unanswered questions that illustrate how and why we’ve entered this bizarro world:

How can Kamala Harris merely promise us fixes to come in 2025 for inflation and an open border when she is still vice president for another six months? Why can’t she enact her proposed solutions to these problems (which she helped create) right now?

Would the media prefer to help her win but lose further credibility themselves by failing to ask why she has disowned her past three decades of leftist agendas? Or would they like to reclaim some of their reputations and thereby risk her losing?

Does the left appreciate the new campaign and election protocols it has now established? That is to say: Cancel by fiat their virtual nominee four months before the election when he sinks in the polls? Nullify the outcome of a year of primaries and the will of 14 million voters? Threaten a sitting president with removal by the 25th Amendment process unless he steps aside as his party nominee? Anoint a replacement nominee before the convention and without a single primary — and then prevent any rival candidates from challenging her?

After the precedents of 2020 and 2024, is the future orthodox protocol for any Democratic nominee now to avoid all interviews and ex tempore speaking and stick to teleprompted speeches and scripted responses only?

Is the fear that a transparent progressive messenger with an overt and honest left-wing message will double down on it and thus guarantee defeat?

For the next 80 days, has the chameleon-like Kamala Harris now become a temporary MAGA candidate, as she expropriates Trump’s positions from border security to no taxes on tips? Does the media care to ask the new 80-day MAGA Harris why she has renounced many of her once emphatic beliefs?

If Democratic presidential re-election candidate Joe Biden was pronounced fit as a fiddle before June 27, but after July 21 was abruptly forced off the ticket as too debilitated to continue as his party’s nominee, what exactly is his status now? (Half-cognizant and thus able enough to continue his not-so-important task as America’s president, but also half-enfeebled and thus utterly unable to continue as the far more important Democratic nominee, it appears.)

Does the new antisemitic Democratic Party prefer to risk losing with the radical nonentity WASP Tim Walz as vice presidential candidate rather than likely win with a popular, successful and moderate Jewish Josh Shapiro?

If one vice presidential candidate went to a war zone to serve with his deployed unit, while his counterpart preferred to retire from the military to avoid doing the same and lies about his abdication, how can the media credibly assert that the former’s tour was militarily suspect and yet pronounce the latter’s absence as heroic?

If the current president canceled his re-election bid because he was too debilitated and unpopular, and is now rarely seen or heard, and if the vice president is out of Washington running a campaign in his place, but avoiding all press conferences, interviews, and unscripted addresses, who exactly, if anyone, is running the United States for the next six months of the lame duck Biden-Harris administration?

If Donald Trump all summer has been compared by his enemies to Hitler and his murderous Third Reich, and if a 20-year-old would-be assassin and murderer with ease took up a sniper’s position to kill Trump — without a notified Secret Service or other law enforcement attempting to abort the shooter’s attempted assassination — what signal does that send to other would-be assassins for the next 80 days of the 2024 campaign?

Is the message that if a 20-year-old amateur sniper can brazenly and visibly for nearly an hour breach all Secret Service security perimeters to shoot eight times at the president, hit him in the ear, kill one innocent bystander, and wound two others, then almost any future, more-experienced serious shooter could match or exceed the ability of that disturbed amateur to get close enough to Trump to fire more than eight shots at his head?

And that shooting Trump in many leftist quarters would subsequently earn the unhinged killer eternal fame, applause and immortality?

And that if there are such anticipated rewards and perceived opportunities, then we may well see more attempts on candidate Trump’s life?

In sum, presidential campaigns traditionally kick off after Labor Day and mostly follow accepted protocols. But this warped 2024 version violates every prior precedent and is not just creepy but dangerous — even before the campaign was supposed to formally begin.

Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness and a classicist and historian at Stanford’s Hoover Institution. Contact at authorvdh@gmail.com.