I’ve said it many times in this space – going back to 1986, I’ve never liked Donald Trump’s public persona.
I couldn’t quite bring myself to vote for him in 2016 – I wrote in Scott Walker.
And while Trump turned out to be a fine president on a policy level, I thought his behavior in the last few months of his presidency gave him a lot of baggage the GOP didn’t need – which was borne out in the 2022 cycle, and is certainly complicating this one. His personality cult has, shall we say, underdelivered I was on Team DeSantis before there was a Team DeSantis, and I’m already on his 2028 team.
But with all my ambivalence about Trump, the prospect of a Harris/Walz administration makes the notion of voting for a third party, a write-in or, heaven forfend, Harris herself impels me to do my darnedest to convince people, like I convince myself, to hold my nose and vote for Trump.
Because Harris is that much worse.
How?
How can I count the ways.
She Is The Incumbent: The mess we’re in right now has her autograph on it.
She’s been the sitting Vice President for almost four years. Harris, not to mention Biden, have proudly proclaimed she was the “last person in the room” when decisions about the economy, not to mention the disastrous exit from Afghanistan, were made. She was the “border czar” (Czaritsa?) during an era when eight digits worth of people crossed illegally into the country and stayed, the cartels took de facto control over the southern border, and over 300,000 unaccompanied minors disappeared from the ICE’s radar.
She’s been part of the brain trust that emboldened Putin to invade Ukraine, Iran to invade Israel by proxy, ruinous spending, the porous border, the collapse in Afghanistan and the side-tracking of the peace process in the Middle East, and the hyper-acceleration of Trump’s own ill-advised spending..
She’s Incoherent: The whole “Joy!” and “Brat Vibes!” memes sprang up as a way to spin attention away from her supremely annoying verbal crutch of breaking into cackling whenever she gets nervous.
She can’t explain anything. Off the teleprompter, she sounds like a stream of lawn signs and bumper stickers; like an AI campaign slogan generator that needs some more work.
And all of that is presuming she’s not an alcoholic, prone to working drunk during the day.
She is hiding. Behind all the “joy” and “brat vibes”, she’s clearly running out the clock, dodging interviews, committing to nothing, putting up vague bland hints at policy online,
She’s Dishonest: For all the nine years of palaver about Trump’s facility with the half-truth, Harris spent three solid years lying about President Biden’s health – repeatedly exclaiming the President was stronger and more with it than Jackie Chan in his thirties – until time came to defenstrate him.
And she’s lying about him now – keeping him in office so the American voter doesn’t see her in office via that 25th Amendment, riding herd on the policies she spent four years helping to drive.
These two things can not be true at the same time.
And let’s talk about her magical floating accents. Her prominent black supporters say she’s “code switching”, something we’re told every black person ostensibly does. They’re wrong – every human who jumps between linguistic subgroups does it; white academics who grow up in the Mississippi Delta go from goober-chaw brogue back to standard English pretty routinely. AOC slips back and forth between “Alli from the block” and her regular brand of shrill as needed. My original accent doesn’t sound like the guy you hear on the radio, and doesn’t usually come out until I’ve been in North Dakota for a bit. So “code switching” is real.
But when you’re changing into the accent of a place and culture where you never lived – like Harris pasting on a Latina accent in Hispanic areas – it’s not code-switching. It’s pandering. It’s being a minstrel.
It kind of insults our intelligence.
She’s A Terrible Manager: Harris ran one of the worst credible presidential campaigns in history in 2019 – jumping from front-runner to donesville before she could garner a single primary vote.
She’s never run a significant compaign very well. She’s never run a tough race; the one race she’s ever run against a Republican, for Attorney General in California, she almost lost, and her only other competitive races have been against Democrats – and in the case of the 2020 primaries, she’s been a disaster. WIthout the media running active interference for her, she’s a hapless wreck.
And when she is in office? Leaving aside her many political failures (until below, anyway), she’s a terrible executive, who’s had over 93% turnover in her office as Vice President. Which, by my count, is worse than Orange Hitler’s turnover rate.
She’s Got A Record Of Failure. Look at literally everything she’s “been in charge” of:
She was the “border czar” – and the border is a disaster.
She was sent on a mission to Ukraine on the eve of the war. The joy and brat vibes had barely subsided at Hostomel Airport when the missiles started flying.
She was made the titular head of America’s space program – and NASA is, improbably, in worse shape now than ever.
Joe Biden sidelined her from most of the “duties” a Vice President usually has, because she’s just not competent. She is only running for President because Pelosi and Schumer realized the senescent Biden would leave a lot of money on the sidelines.
No World Leader Respects Her: As Border Czar, she has allowed biggest invasion of US history. If you’re Putin or Xi, you don’t have to guess what her affect as President will be, even if you leave out the cackling and the vapidity; she played an important role in helping turn San Francisco, and California, into the basket cases they are today.
Her alleged “toughness” as a prosecutor may be a chanting point.
There’s a reason Ukraine launched its hail mary offensive at Kursk, and why Israel is swarming the net with Hezb’allah; they see a possibility of a Harris presidency, and realize that four more years of vacillation, coddling Iran, and being the adenoidal little guy on the shetland pony rather than the knight on the huge horse is not going to end well for them.
She’s Radical. In 2019 – the one time in her career she’s had to systematically lay out a vision of a nation with her at the helm – she campaigned to the left of Bernie Sanders.
- Banning fracking
- Eliminating gas cars by 2030
- Decriminalizing border crossings
- Exalting sanctuary cities (she sued to prevent the Feds from cracking down on the ones we had back then)
- Mandatory gun buybacks by executive order
- Taxing unrealized capital gains
- Price controls
- Rent control
- Reparations
- Undercutting law enforcement (she pimped for the MInnesota Freedom Fund)
- Abortion til birth
- Federal funding of gender transition, including for illegal aliens.
And while she’s painstakingly avoided answering questions about any of these in this campaign, rarely going beyond “Oh, no I di-unt” when asked about her flips and flops, she’s also chanted that her principles haven’t changed.
Which ones?
She Is The Actual Threat To Democracy: The most terrifying thing about a Harris/Walz regime is that it would seek to redefine the deal between people, the states, and the federal government, and the separation of powers defined for each in the Constitution.
To the extent that they deign to talk about policies, they actively promote:
- Killing off the filibuster, specifically to jam down “codifying Roe“
- Ramming through the packing of the Supreme Court and, perhaps worse, bringing it under control of the Executive Branch with term limits and “ethics” guidelines enforced by…the executive branch.
- Changing voting rules, and federalizing control of elections to enable and promote ballot harvesting and, shall we say, emphasizing access over security
- Jam down making DC and Puerto Rico into states, adding four Democrat senators.
- Packing the Supreme Court, changing voting rules, ballot harvesting, adding new states to stack the Senate.
- Continue Biden’s abuse of executive orders. Remember – Harris enthusiastically signed on to Biden’s use of OSHA to to cram down vaccine mandates on 80 million Americans, cashiering thousands of people from the military, and trying to circumvent the limits on the exectutive branch to try to transfer student loan debt to the taxpayers. Actively promotes censorship.
- Harris and Walz will be disasters for the First Amendment; both favor censorship of “misinformation” – as defined by them. Both enthusiastically colluded with Big Tech to censor dissent about Covid, vaccinations, and every issue in the 2020 and 2022 elections that was inconvenient to the left. Walz created a thoughtcrime database.
- Harris and Walz’s antipathy toward the Second Amendment is a matter of record. While both claim to be gun owners – in Walz’s case, usually while in full Elmer Fudd costume – they also seek to make the Amendment meaningless at its original intent, defending The People against tyranny.
While the suspense may not be killing you, I sometimes find it clarifying, for me if not others, to list the cons (and, in this case hypothetically, pros).