It took a while, but the Obamas got around to endorsing Kamala Harris.

The five-day delay wasn’t an expression of consternation about Harris’s candidacy. It was likely just Barack Obama wanting to avoid the impression that he was personally crowning Harris rather than simply supporting the candidate Democrats collectively decided to run.

JD Vance this week accused Democrats of conspiring against Joe Biden, an effort he said was spearheaded by Obama, George Soros and an unnamed cabal of “elites.” Elon Musk spent the week trafficking in similarly silly narratives, all aimed at perpetuating the (self-evidently false) notion that Biden’s support in the primaries, such as they were, was somehow a reflection of voters’ enthusiasm for his reelection bid (rather than a reflection of the fact that Biden, as a sitting, first-term president, faced no serious opposition for his party’s nomination).

Anyway, Barack and Michelle Obama are going to “do everything [they] can” to get Harris elected, they told her, in a call posted to Harris’s social media accounts. “The friendship you have given over the years means more than I can express,” Harris told them. “Thank you both! It means so much. And, and we’re going to have some fun with this, too, aren’t we?”

Yes, we are going to “have some fun with this,” where that presumably means driving Donald Trump even further into the darkest reaches of dictatorial delirium. Trump’s campaign — which, I can’t emphasize enough, was very well run up to this point, particularly by the standards of the clown shows we saw in 2016 and 2020 — is struggling to find the right line of attack. Republicans on the Hill — or top Republicans, anyway — have reportedly asked Trump to consider the possibility that racist language or inflammatory allusions to gender, could backfire. Whether he’ll listen’s another matter.

For now, the Trump campaign’s latched onto Harris’s figurehead role in the border crisis as a kind of stopgap message while they craft something more coherent. But even there (at the border), Trump’s exhibiting the usual penchant for — how should I put this? — mordant scorn, enhanced by slasher flick imagery. At a rally in Charlotte this week, he called Harris a “radical crazy person” (she’s neither and more importantly for Trump’s messaging, doesn’t present as such), before lapsing into the macabre. “If border czar Harris stays in charge, every week will bring in blood-thirsty rapists to go after our sons,” he ranted.

I don’t know how effective that sort of thing’s going to be outside of Trump’s base. The border might’ve been Harris’s portfolio, but she didn’t have any real authority or operational capacity to do anything consequential, and besides, conjuring bloody rape scenes to attack a woman when you’re someone who was found liable in court for sexual abuse is a bad look, and could be off-putting for women Trump needs to turn out in November.

Trump would probably do better just to stick with some kind of border message that’s inflammatory but stops short of the Rob Zombie threshold, while hitting the Biden administration on inflation. So: The “invasion” narrative sans Saw sequels and the cost of living. As noted here earlier this week, housing costs in swing states have doubled since Biden was elected. That’s something Trump could exploit if he can squeeze it in between retelling The Texas Chainsaw Massacre only with a Mexican Leatherface.

The tables, below, show June payroll growth (and manufacturing jobs growth) for swing states, the rust belt and a collection of what BofA calls “swing counties.”

You can get everything you need from the chart headers and footnotes. To be completely honest, I’m not sure there’s much to glean outside of the YoY decline in manufacturing jobs in rust belt states and counties last month, which I suppose is the point.

“Job growth in ‘Swing 7’ states is marginally lagging the national data, but note weaker job growth in the critical ‘Rust Belt 3’  driven by the manufacturing sector,” BofA’s Michael Hartnett wrote, emphasizing the 0.5% and 0.8% YoY declines in factory payrolls for Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, and for a handful of rust counties in those states, respectively.

Trump doesn’t know those numbers. If someone told him, he forgot immediately, and that’s if he was even listening in the first place. Trump’s going to lean into stories, not numbers. It’s about story-telling. Manufacturing payrolls could be up sharply YoY in those states and counties, border crossings cold be way down and it wouldn’t make a shred of difference for Trump’s narrative. He’s going to spin (and respin) his “American carnage” yarn, central to which are horror stories about immigrant crime, various kinds of “rape” (whether literal or figurative in the context of trade, particularly with China) and the necessity of “saving” the Amerian way of life from existential oblivion.

Trump was exhibiting more than a little adeptness at leveraging the inflation problem to score points against Biden, but since the assassination attempt and Harris’s ascension to the top of the Democratic ticket, it feels like he’s lapsing back into the kind of sinister demagoguery that turned him into a folk hero and got him elected in the first place. So much for the idea that his brush with death left him a changed man keen to unite rather than divide. The menacing narratives, I’d quickly note, make for a rather disquieting juxtaposition with the messiah story he’s also keen to foster and perpetuate. Let’s face it: If Trump’s a messiah, he’s David Koresh not Jesus Christ.

Meanwhile, the latest Times/Siena poll showed Harris all but closing the gap with Trump among likely voters. She’s just one point behind. It’s a dead heat.