Not That It’s An Issue

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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).

22 thoughts on “Not That It’s An Issue”

  1. I’m curious to know – what behavior in the last few months of Trump’s presidency were of such great concern to you, that you must hold your nose to vote for Trump over Kamala/Walz/Obama?

  2. Mr. Mitch,

    Thanks for that exceptional overview of the alternative to the guy who sends mean tweets.

  3. I will never understand why people believe that voting for neither candidate somehow magically allows a third, vastly better candidate to win. It is binary. The Republican or Democrat MUST win, and that’s a good thing. Whatever reservations, qualms or concerns you may have about Trump, get over it and vote for him. I assure you the Democrats have absolutely zero compunctions about voting for Harris, or for an old yellow dog, or for a brass-plated idiot.

    But let me make one suggestion for you. If you really have those concerns, do NOT vote for Donald Trump, with a clear conscience if that concerns you. No, you just vote AGAINST Kamala Harris, a clear, logical, moral, common-sense choice and you can be on the side of the angels.

  4. what behavior in the last few months of Trump’s presidency were of such great concern to you

    • Telling Georgia voters to stay home from the Senate election.
    • His pointless attacks on Kemp and GA’s SOS.
    • Not so much the last few months, but the candidates he got behind – Lake, Oz, etc – didn’t do the GOP any favors
    • And yeah, his personality kinda grates on me. All due respect to his policy accomplishments, pinky swear. The guy just wears me out.

  5. I was a Never Trumper during the 2016 primary, but voted for him in the general because, well, Hillary. I will happily vote for him in 2020, and now in 2024, though I was and am a DeSantis guy. I have been very disappointed by Trump’s acolytes who seem to have devolved into a true cult of personality. Even the mildest criticism of Trump is met with a wave of “RINO” and “GOPe” insults. And the attacks by Trump and the Trumpkins on DeSantis and his supporters (“Desimps”) was deranged.

  6. JamesPh,

    seem to have devolved into a true cult of personality. Even the mildest criticism of Trump is met with a wave of “RINO” and “GOPe” insults. And the attacks by Trump and the Trumpkins on DeSantis and his supporters (“Desimps”) was deranged.

    Yep. The whole “we’ve got to destroy the GOP to save it” vibe was really misguided.

    And I get it – Trump smacked down the people who gundecked the Tea Party. MIghta been good to stop there.

  7. Trump has changed things and he’s revealed things that I should have understood before. When you see Dick Cheney, Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelenskyy all supporting Kamala Harris, it tells you something important — what all of the opposition is really about, at bottom, is protecting rice bowls.

    My fear about Trump initially, and the reason why I was a NeverTrumper as well, was that I assumed he would betray the people who trusted him. I always expected Pelosi and especially Charles Schumer to wheedle him into getting what they wanted because of Trump’s desire to make deals. But for reasons that will likely be left to the historians to figure out, they treated him as an implacable enemy. It still feels like a strategic blunder.

    Trump has a lot in common with certain figures in the sports world – Ty Cobb, Ted Williams, Bob Knight, like that. They were all highly successful and highly combative people who seemed to get in needless feuds, but the one constant was if you attacked them, they would punch back much harder. If you listened to them and tried to understand where they were coming from, they would be much more willing to have a dialogue.

  8. I suspect those of you who are not enthused by Trump have answers to these questions. I’d like to learn the answers.

    Do you believe the 2020 election was stolen? Not what can be proven in court – what do you believe?

    Do you believe Democrats will try to steal the 2024 election for Kamala?

    Do you believe there is someone who can generate enough voter enthusiasm to overcome the margin of Democrat cheating to win the election for the Republicans?

    Who is that person?

    If that person was not in the race (shot, heart attack, plane crash) and was replaced on the ballot, would you be relieved even if the replacement candidate lost?

  9. Bigman,

    Do you believe the 2020 election was stolen? Not what can be proven in court – what do you believe?

    It looked that way at the time and still does.

    Do you believe Democrats will try to steal the 2024 election for Kamala?

    Of course.

    Do you believe there is someone who can generate enough voter enthusiasm to overcome the margin of Democrat cheating to win the election for the Republicans?

    Maybe.

    Who is that person?

    Don’t know.

    Not sure what your final question means. I don’t want anyone to die.

  10. Last evening, I heard that a GOP lawyer, fact checked Kommissar Kamala’s claims that she “prosecuted international criminals”. He stated, and you lawyers here can confirm or deny, that he could find no evidence of her ever having done so. He claimed that cases of that magnitude are referenced and documented by West Law and he couldn’t find any cases that she was involved in.

    On another note, Kimberley Guilfoyle, ex wife of Gavin Newsom and current fiancée of Don Jr; relayed KK’s blatant discrimination and hatred for women that oppose her. Guilfoyle made a run for CA AG and after she lost, she sought a position within KK’s fiefdom, only to be thwarted by KK personally. Further, KK bragged about sponsoring and shepherding a law in CA, that allowed convicted males, many of them sex offenders, to claim they were trannies and get placed in women’s prisons. Can anyone guess what happened? Several rapes and subsequent impregnation of several female inmates. There is a group of formerly incarcerated women that are fighting against CA and this law. Their web site is womenIIwomen.com. There is also a retired male detective calling these laws out.

  11. Mr. D, you’re right, that last question was poorly phrased.

    Let’s try this: If Trump were no longer the Republican candidate, but was replaced by somebody else who lost the election to Kamala/Walz, would you be relieved?

    I’m asking because that seems to be the mind-set of Republicans who have announced in favor of Kamala: it would be better to lose gracefully than to win with Trump.

    Is that how SITD readers feel?

  12. If Harris wins, we’re looking at the fourth term of Obama. If the Donks take both houses of Congress you will not recognize the USA in four years. Maybe not recognize the world. I’m in for Trump, way lesser of evils.

  13. I’m asking because that seems to be the mind-set of Republicans who have announced in favor of Kamala: it would be better to lose gracefully than to win with Trump.

    If you’re a Beltway operative you can fill that rice bowl either way. Most of us are not Beltway operatives and I don’t work for Raytheon or Halliburton, so it’s definitely not my mindset.

  14. I’m scared either way. On one side, you have Obama/Harris/Walz, who are basically Communists and could destroy our way of life. On the other hand, you have Trump/Vance, who do not seem to understand that Putin is trying to reconstitute the old USSR, including brutal suppression of civilians. It is not an accident, for example, that most of the long range rocket attacks in Ukraine are on apartment buildings and hospitals and the like, not legitimate military targets, and about a third of Hezbollah’s rocket arsenal comes from Russia.

    My take is simply that if Putin doesn’t give a rip that the missiles he’s supplying are going to be aimed at civilians, it becomes difficult to negotiate with him. You rather do what Reagan did; containment and strategic confrontations. I don’t see Trump and Vance understanding that–and of course Harris and Walz are not much better.

    We are in an era of profound naivete regarding international relations, it seems.

  17. bike, if it’ll make you feel any better, the sources I follow are adamant that that Putin has totally ruined Russia’s near term future. He may even pay for it in his lifetime.

  18. jdm; just the opposite, in fact. I have been praying for Ukraine to win this war for not just Ukraine, but also Russia, as a strong defeat would have at least some chance of unseating not just Putin, but also the FSB. I don’t want to see ordinary Russians suffering any more under their neo-Stalinist leader. I want the neo-Stalinist leader six feet under, and with him his buddies from the FSB. It is sad to see the lives of 6-700,000 young Russian men ruined for Putin’s little hissy fit.

    And it shocks me that the party of Reagan increasingly does not see what is going on in Russia–that it’s not just a regional fight, but rather an effort for Putina to start reconstituting the old USSR.

  19. Bike,

    As a Reaganite who advocated Ukrainian independence back when we were told the USSR was “here to stay”, and sees “bleeding Putin white” as a useful goal, combined with no desire to bankroll *yet another* eternal quagmire, I’m in kind of a bind.

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