Kamala Harris, Time cover girl: Is her momentum against Trump fueled by an endless media honeymoon?

It's all about the atmosphere.

A word not usually associated with presidential politics, but rather late-night parties and bangs, is now the only thing that matters. At least if you're Kamala Harris.

She's on the cover of Time — with an admiring cartoon that makes it seem like she's already president — because of “the most rapid change of mood in American political history.”

Despite the ultra-liberal record of the running mate, most of the media join the march

Is that all it takes to win? The vice president has surged in the polls, raised tons of money, become a cultural phenomenon, enjoyed a relatively successful rollout of Tim Walz and will get an extra boost from the Democratic convention.

But after that, will it be a sugar rush? Will his numbers fall back to where they were in the face of Republican attacks?

For now at least, Donald Trump appears unhinged, his attacks on Harris are not holding up and he is openly pining for Joe Biden after spending years preparing to run against the frail 81-year-old president.

Moreover, with Biden dropping out, Trump, at 78, is now the old man in the race. And many pundits who spent their time defending Biden’s mental acuity have now taken to claiming that Trump is losing his mind.

Side by side with former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris. (Getty Images)

I thought he refuted that claim in his hour-long press conference, though he does tend to ramble. It reminded me of our recent interview at Mar-a-Lago, where he was incisive and serious on at least 15 topics.

But the media, which has been largely hostile to Trump for the past nine years, criticized the press conference. “It’s crazy,” wrote HuffPost. “It’s deranged,” wrote Rolling Stone.

But how did it help him to say that his inaugural crowd was as large, if not larger, than the one that attended Martin Luther King's famous “dream” speech in 1963?

The former president was widely ridiculed for saying at a press conference that he once had to make an emergency helicopter landing with Willie Brown, after Kamala's ex-boyfriend denied it. But it turns out there was an emergency landing with another black politician from California. He had mixed up the names.

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Trump has always presented himself as the strongman, the fighter, the leader of a movement, the one who transformed the party from its Reagan roots. Has Harris allowed wavering Republicans and independents who dislike his leadership to find a safe haven in her?

Her allies are asking her to focus more, including two former Trump advisers, Larry Kudlow and Kellyanne Conway. On Fox Business, Kudlow asked his former boss: “Don’t get sidetracked, don’t call her stupid and all kinds of names, just stay on message?”

“President Trump’s winning formula is clear,” Conway said. “It’s less name-calling, more insight and that political contrast.”

In a two-hour conversation with Elon Musk on X, which was plagued by technical issues, Trump said that the Time cover sketch of Harris “looks like the most beautiful actress who ever lived” and that she looked a lot like Melania. He then called Kamala a “beautiful woman.” (Musk said traffic peaked at 73 million views.)

Former President Donald J. Trump, Republican presidential nominee, holds his first public campaign rally with his running mate, vice presidential nominee U.S. Senator J.D. Vance (R-OH) (not pictured), at Van Andel Arena on July 20, 2024, in Grand Rapids, Michigan. (Bill Pugliano/Getty Images)

One result of Trump's media campaign is that it has prompted Harris to finally agree to answer substantive questions from his press team (after her 70-second stint with short, concise answers). He is running against a media system that treats Harris like a queen.

I don’t want to take anything away from Harris and the astute way she has handled the last three weeks. Having watched several of her television interviews while Biden was still a candidate, I told people she was a huge improvement from the hesitant, hyper-cautious speaker of the early days.

But the mainstream press has not made much of Kamala Harris’ refusal to give a single interview, despite constant criticism of Biden for avoiding the media. It has simply brushed it off, saying it hopes to be done by the end of the month. Yet Trump and J.D. Vance have been so vocal about it that reporters have been forced to cover the controversy, framing it as “Republicans blame Kamala Harris,” when that should also be part of their job.

The former president had said he would be less divisive after narrowly surviving the horrific assassination attempt, but he quickly announced he was abandoning that approach — a classic Trump trope. He called Harris “dumb as a rock” and questioned her racial identity before the National Association of Black Journalists.

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Trump also said Harris' camp was using AI to simulate large crowds at the Detroit airport, when wider shots showed there was an audience of thousands.

And he may have been shaken by what he says was an illegal hack, with internal documents sent to three media outlets — Politico, the Washington Post and the New York Times — that refused to publish the material.

“I absolutely hate fake news media,” he posted after the conversation with Musk.

But keep in mind that Trump has a much easier path to 270 seats and could well win. Harris is attracting new supporters but is also losing ground among some demographics that favored Biden. She must be seen as the outsider. She must navigate her policy reversals and persuade voters that the first Black female and Asian-American president would be a plausible commander in chief.

U.S. Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris waves as she boards Air Force Two at San Francisco International Airport on August 11, 2024, in San Francisco, California, as she returns to Washington, DC. (JULIA NIKHINSON/POOL/AFP via Getty Images)

A sign that is no longer unthinkable: Politico published a story about how “progressive national security professionals are already vying for positions in a possible Kamala Harris administration.”

The Time cover is wildly upbeat. Its enthusiasm “recalls that of Barack Obama's early days… It seems fitting for the moment: a former prosecutor is running against a convicted felon.”

And: “Harris’s rebranding—the happy warrior attitude, the viral memes, the rolling eyes at Republican ‘nuts’—has already done what no Trump opponent has ever been able to do: steal the spotlight.”

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We'll see how far the new atmosphere can take her.