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In a typical election season — remember those? — right about now we would be preparing for, or recovering from, the final presidential debate. But Oct. 23, the date of a proposed CNN showdown that Kamala Harris accepted and Donald J. Trump declined, came and went without one.
Instead, as Ms. Harris and Mr. Trump raced to claim different corners of the national screen, they were essentially staging a virtual debate, presenting competing versions of themselves on strikingly different stages.
Mr. Trump substituted the debate podium with a takeout window, performing a shift on the fry cooker at a closed McDonald’s franchise and violating the occasional job protocol. It was a familiar kind of reality-TV stunt for a reality-TV candidate.
This time, however, he was not emulating “The Apprentice” but staging a political version of “Undercover Boss.”
On the CBS reality series, which aired 11 seasons from 2010 to 2022, company executives went incognito to work low-level jobs at their companies. The premise was to show bigwigs how the grunts lived. But it also served, in the years after the financial collapse and Great Recession, as a form of prime-time crisis P.R. Chief executives were people too, it told us; they shared common purpose and mutual respect with the rank and file.
Mr. Trump’s shift, which lasted less time than a single “Undercover Boss” episode, had different aims. Most overtly, it was a way of using virality — what news producer can resist footage of Donald Trump shoveling fries into a container? — to spread his unsubstantiated claim that Ms. Harris had lied about working at McDonald’s while in college. (As with his birtherism campaign against Barack Obama, media coverage generally noted that his charges were baseless, but the dust still got kicked up, the doubts potentially sown.)
In this case, the undercover boss was not particularly undercover. Mr. Trump strapped on an apron but kept his scarlet tie and French cuffs. The visual was so uncanny that it could have been generated by DALL-E, reminiscent of the actual A.I. images of him wading through floodwaters after Hurricane Helene. (All this, of course, in an effort to label his opponent as inauthentic.)
That very weirdness may have been the stunt’s biggest benefit. It was the kind of can’t-look-away image that, like a goofy YouTube thumbnail, makes you stop scrolling. It was a font of malleable memes, shared by supporters, by opponents, by cable news and talk shows. It also, therefore, competed for space with darker reports this week about Mr. Trump wishing he’d had generals like Hitler’s (a comment he denies making) and his former chief of staff, John Kelly, saying that he met the definition of a fascist.
This is how Mr. Trump has benefited from contradictions in his media persona. Click on one channel, there’s the dangerous Mr. Trump fantasizing retribution; click another, there’s the risible Mr. Trump marveling at Arnold Palmer’s endowment. Click: aspiring strongman. Click: aspiring fry cook.
Mr. Trump’s adviser Steve Bannon once said that you can dominate the information environment if you “flood the zone with” excrement. Turns out you can also flood it with McNuggets.
This is the kind of thing that a candidate’s opponent could call attention to at a debate, if there were one. Instead, Ms. Harris has used her own media presence, in part, to put together a less flattering edit of her opponent.
At her recent rallies, Ms. Harris has been yielding the floor to Mr. Trump, in the form of a snippet from a Fox News interview in which he described Democrats as an “enemy from within” who might need to be quelled by the National Guard or the military.
“Please — roll the clip,” Ms. Harris says, presenting it, like Exhibit A in a courtroom, as evidence of Mr. Trump’s “worldview and intentions.”
The same clip was a flashpoint in a contentious interview with Bret Baier on Fox News, in which she confronted the host for playing Mr. Trump’s defense of his remarks (in a friendly Fox town hall) but not the original quote itself.
If she couldn’t have a debate against Mr. Trump, a showdown with a Fox host may have been the next best thing. Ideally, of course, candidates give press interviews to inform voters and explain themselves. But inevitably, there’s a meta-element: Doing interviews, particularly hostile ones, becomes the feat in itself, a proxy for a candidate’s ability to handle actual conflict.
So Ms. Harris, once criticized by journalists for eschewing interviews, has been stacking them up: NBC, Telemundo, a town hall on CNN.
And while the most news-making part of that town hall may have been Ms. Harris calling Mr. Trump a fascist, another significant point may have been her telling the audience of undecided voters, “Donald Trump should be here tonight to talk with you and answer your questions. He’s not. He refused to come.” Sometimes, in the TV era, part of the argument is showing up.
Practice helps in doing TV, and Ms. Harris seems more fluid and comfortable the more interviews she does. She is not, for better or worse, the attention machine that Mr. Trump is. His lack of a filter is his political asset and liability. Ms. Harris, like many politicians, has medical-grade filters; you can hear them gently whirring behind her responses.
In one of her most interesting town hall answers, she acknowledged this caution to a voter who asked her to name a personal flaw, and framed it as a positive: “I may not be quick to have the answer as soon as you ask it about a specific policy issue sometimes because I’m going to want to research it, I’m going to want to study it. I’m kind of a nerd sometimes.”
That Ms. Harris was working traditional media while Mr. Trump was working the deep fryer speaks to a difference in their campaigns’ goals and tactics. It also says something about the different license they have for self-presentation.
He, a TV celebrity who once wore overalls to sing the “Green Acres” theme at the Emmys, can do minimum-wage cosplay and have it covered as a flamboyant display of showmanship. She, running to be the first woman president, is appearing in formats designed to help an audience imagine her in that role of authority, doing the things that we know presidents do on TV.
Of course, voters will tell you that what they want from candidates is substance and detail, not stage presentation. But inevitably, from any appearance, they’re taking in nonverbal information too: How confident a candidate seems, how calm under pressure, how clever, how thoughtful, how quick.
Your answers, as a candidate, may be about fine points of your policy. But part of the message is simply showing voters that you can take it, and that you can dish it out. Sometimes with extra salt.
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