Kamala Harris, On The Brink
In the final, precious days of the campaign, Vice President Kamala Harris did something dramatic. She interrupted her march through the blue wall states to stand on the Ellipse behind the White House, the site of Donald Trump’s most egregious crime, and make her closing argument to 75,000 supporters, a crowd so large it stretched to the Jefferson Memorial.
What a speech! She smiled, but not so much that she looked unaware that the world is a vale of tears. She raised her voice, but not so loud that she scared the bros. She spoke to women about restoring their rights under Roe v. Wade, the 50-plus-year-old ruling that Donald Trump insists everyone hated. As confirmation that she’s not a cat lady, her husband, Doug Emhoff, appeared for a celebratory hug. Unlike Melania, the Second Gentleman didn’t flinch.
The evening was as much about where she was as what she said. Trump, she reminded the crowd, “is the person who stood at this very spot nearly four years ago and sent an armed mob to the United States Capitol to overturn the will of the people in a free and fair election he knew he lost.”
Was it worth the D.C. detour, or is Harris another Hillary, a pioneer set to be roadkill? The former, if she can snap an eighth of the country out of their Trump trance. He’s convinced his cult that the insurrection was a “day of love,” and the mob he told to “fight like hell” for him were tourists turned martyrs. January 6 has become a loyalty test for Trumpist politicians: Agree the election was stolen or be cast out of Trumplandia to spend more time with your family. Even Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell, who criticized the former president in a just-published biography as “stupid,” “ill-tempered,” and “a despicable human being,” gradually buckled and settled into detente with the man who’d taken over his party. He completed his full 180 with an outright endorsement this year.
The morning after Harris’s speech, it was relegated to the dustbin of history in favor of garbage. It was once something to be recycled, but now so relevant it dominated three days (and counting) of the last week before the election. Trump twisted Joe Biden’s remark criticizing the comic who warmed up Trump’s audience at Madison Square Garden. (In case you’re living on a desert island, Puerto Ricans, the comic said, live on an “island of garbage.”)
Republicans took faux offense, and it was all anyone wanted to discuss as Harris was embarking for Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, the part of the Keystone state between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh that James Carville calls Alabama. It’s so conservative that she’s resorted to soothing words about “representing all the people,” not exactly enough to thwart Teflon Don, who said he didn’t even know the comic who started it all, or the crack about Blacks carving “watermelons” on Halloween and a double entendre about Hispanics having unprotected sex and “coming inside” the country. Trump flagrantly milked Biden’s alleged offense, donning a sanitation worker’s neon vest, struggling to open the door of a massive trash hauler, and then driving it in circles on an empty idle runway to stretch out the time the media dwelt on whether Biden was venal or mumbling. It was ridiculous, but it must have been an infuriating detour for the Democratic nominee, who might want to reconsider having Hillary Clinton, of deplorable fame, campaign for her in Tampa over the weekend.
Harris would be better off in her race if she and Mr. Mar-a-Lago were judged by the much-discussed double standard. There’s actually only one standard—for her, and she fails short of it because her policy plans are not “specific” enough. There’s no standard for Trump, who Friday seemed to threaten to bring Liz Cheney before a firing squad, or maybe just hostile foreign troops. (Specificity isn’t his thing.) Killing Obamacare was his top domestic priority, but he could only mumble about “concepts of a plan” to replace it.
CNN’s Van Jones describes the 2024 operating standard as lawless for him and flawless for her. If Harris had, like Trump, swayed to hymns and show tunes for 40 minutes on the trail, as Trump did last month, she would have been carried off in a white jacket. The septuagenarian with a sexual assault verdict namecalls incessantly, labeling her “dumb as a rock, “lazy as hell,” and “a very low IQ individual running a campaign of hate, anger, and retribution.” Physician, heal thyself.
No Trump nickname for her has stuck in the tradition of “Crooked Hillary” and “Little Marco,” so he routinely mispronounces his opponent’s name as “Ka-MAH-la” to show general disdain (He says he “could care less how she says her name.”) and to label her “other” like all the immigrants, legal and illegal, he plans to deport. Can you picture Vice President Harris calling him Frump or Grump or something from The Apprentice now that the film about how bad he was at playing a competent boss is playing to rave reviews? According to two aides, in private, Trump calls her a “bitch.”
Imagine if she’d labeled Trump a fascist before two highly decorated military men of Trump’s choosing, the retired generals John Kelly and Mark Milley, broke with protocol to do so. As it was, the minute she answered a question about their moniker on CNN in the affirmative, she was slapped with questions about what the meaning of fascist is.
Woman, bite thy tongue. A lot has changed since Hillary ran against Trump in 2016, but women still must watch their steps, like the female half of the most famous dancing pair of the 1930s. “Ginger Rogers has to do everything Fred Astaire does, only backward and in high heels.” Harris has to slay the dragon but hide the Glock.
In these final days, just in case the Red United States of Amnesia awakes and abandons him, Trump is ready to replay 2020. He’s already blaming arson in ballot boxes in Oregon and Washington on Democrats. He sees Harris instigating fraud everywhere with her “sleazebag lawyer.” “We caught them CHEATING BIG in Pennsylvania. Must announce and PROSECUTE, NOW!” he posted, referencing voter applications being routinely reviewed in Pennsylvania.
Life may be unfair, but not for him. He gets away with so much, not (yet) paying any price for the abundant felony convictions and defeats in private lawsuits. After shattering a once-proud political party, he pasted the shards back together, but no one will mistake it for the party of Lincoln or Reagan. He’s installed his daughter-in-law as its head, replacing Ronna McDaniel, a woman so compliant she dropped Romney, her maiden name. His traveling aide-de-camp Elon Musk, likely an illegal alien from South Africa, throws million-dollar checks around. There’s no shining city on a hill, no better angels, no thousand points of light—we’re a shithole in waiting, despite the best economy in years.
Ivanka, the son he never had, has vanished. Watching Melania make her second appearance this campaign unless you count a drop-by at a Trumpettes of Mar-a-Lago event and, also on the property, an April fundraiser she was paid $237,500 to show up at. She’s like a ghost fulfilling prenup requirements with the help of a teleprompter. In Trump’s party, Hannibal Lecter gets honorable mentions, and titans of industry like Jeff Bezos kill The Washington Post’s endorsement of Harris in fear of losing his government contracts. The ex-president brushes off the garbage blunder with a pat on the back for himself: “I’ve done more for Puerto Rico than any president. By more, he means tossing paper towels into a crowd of homeless and destitute survivors of Hurricane Maria in a church in San Juan. Let them eat the quicker picker-upper.
After a first-term full of such offenses, who would have thought Trump would ever have lunch in this town again, much less be a whisper away from a well-done steak doused in ketchup in the private dining room off the Oval Office, the Ellipse just yards away?
Harris’s response to Biden’s unhelpful comments was not to distance herself from him, as some advised, but to reject Trump’s division for unity. “I promise you this,” she said, “I will always listen to you, even if you don’t vote for me.” Yes, she would. And no, the man with the enemies list would not.
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