PBS’s September 24 “Frontline” Special “The Choice” Compares Kamala Harris, Donald Trump

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

Every Presidential election year for the last 30 years or so, PBS’s long-running documentary series Frontline has done a two-hour program, a month and a half before the election, comparing and contrasting the backgrounds of the Democratic and Republican candidates. They call it “The Choice,” and this year’s “Choice,” aired September 24, 2024, is especially significant because the Republican candidate has already served as President and been his party’s nominee for the third straight election cycle.

The Democrat, in turn, is the incumbent Vice-President who got thrust to the top of the ticket when the incumbent President, Joe Biden, flamed out spectacularly in his June 27 debate with Republican Donald Trump. In fact, he did so badly that for the next month or so, various Democrats in the party’s upper leadership called for him to withdraw from the race, lest his poor showing not only cost him the election but drag the whole party down with him. As happened in 1968, when an incumbent Democratic President abandoned a faltering re-election bid, his Vice-President stepped into the breach.

More than usual among major-party Presidential opponents, Donald Trump and Kamala Harris represent quite different lifestyle paths and parts of the mosaic of America. Trump was born into money, though not the élite, aristocratic “old money” of Manhattan. His father, Fred Trump, was a real-estate tycoon who made his money in the outer boroughs, particularly Queens (where the Trumps lived) and Brooklyn. Fred Trump was also an outspoken racist. In 1927 he joined the New York branch of the Ku Klux Klan and was arrested at a Klan rally along with seven others.

Fred Trump, son of German immigrants to the U.S. whose family name was originally “Drumpf,” married Scotswoman Mary Anne McLeod in the 1930’s and the couple had five children. Fred at first groomed the oldest, son Fred Trump, Jr., to take over the Trump real-estate business, but according to Trump family biographer Gwenda Blair, Fred, Jr. “wasn’t a killer. His father told the boys to be killers, but Freddie was never a killer. He wasn’t hyper-aggressive, he wasn’t hyper-competitive.” Instead of staying in the family business, he trained to be an airline pilot. Later he became an alcoholic and died in 1981 at age 42, 18 years before Fred Trump, Sr.’s death.

“My grandfather treated him so poorly, with such little respect, and made his life miserable,” said Mary Trump, Fred, Jr.’s daughter and a clinical psychologist. “Donald was able to watch what my grandfather considered the mistakes that my dad made. He took that lesson to heart and became the killer, the tough guy, the person who would do anything in his power to be the winner. Could never be wrong, could never admit a mistake, and avoided being kind, because all of those things, in my grandfather’s universe, spoke to an unforgivable weakness. And my grandfather finally started to see in him the son he wanted.”

Asked by talk-show host Rona Barrett in a 1980 interview whether one has to have a “killer instinct” to succeed in business, Donald Trump said, “I think you have to have some, to a large extent. I think you do have to have at least a winning instinct. I think that the world is made up of people either with killer instincts or without killer instincts. And the people that seem to emerge are the people that are competitive and driven and with a certain instinct to win.” In another TV interview, with Barbara Walters, Trump said, “I learned a lot of things from Fred [Jr.], but I did learn for myself that I don’t want to be open. I don’t want to make myself vulnerable.”

During Donald Trump’s childhood, according to biographer Marie Brenner, “Donald was always the kid in the family who would start throwing birthday cake at all the parties. That you would build up a tower of blocks, he would come knock your blocks down.” In order to discipline him, Fred Trump sent his rambunctious, authority-challenging son off to military school – where, unlike a lot of similarly rebellious kids, he actually liked it. Confronted for the first – and almost certainly only – time in his life with strict institutional rules and enforcement mechanisms, Donald thrived in the structured environment. He rose to be a student cadet corps leader and got to march in front of his troop in a big parade in Manhattan.

For decades Manhattan had been the elusive goal of the Trump family company. As Fred gradually stepped back from day-to-day control in the early 1970’s and Donald took over – with cash infusions from his dad whose size has been estimated from $1 million (Donald’s own figure) to $65 million, $200 million and even $400 million (the number Kamala Harris cited when she debated Donald on CNN on September 10) – Donald built Trump Tower, an elaborate skyscraper in Manhattan with gold fixtures and an overall air of gilded tackiness.

The Trump Tower project also showcased Trump’s airy disregard for objective reality and anything that gets in the way of his dreams. “When he built Trump Tower, he got a whopping tax abatement that was intended for poor areas of town,” said Gwenda Blair. “His building was built a block away from Tiffany's. That was a deteriorating area of town? I don't think so. You can get away with almost everything. And Donald took that to heart. That's the only metric that counts.”

“The rules don’t apply to him,” said another Trump biographer, Jonathan Karl. “Even the number of floors in Trump Tower is essentially a fraud. From the lower floors, he skips a bunch of numbers so that it has more floors than any other building of the same height. You go in the elevator, you can't go to the 7th, 8th, 9th or 10th floor, because they don't exist.”

But years before Trump Tower opened, the Trump Organization (as Donald insisted on renaming the family business when he took over) hit a snag. Two civil-rights organizations reported them to the authorities for systematically discriminating against Black people in renting their apartments. The complaints reached the U.S. Department of Justice, who filed a lawsuit alleging that the Trump Organization illegally made business decisions out of racism. Trump’s regular attorneys advised him to settle the case quietly, admit guilt, sin no more and move on. That was the last thing Trump wanted to hear.

Instead Trump went looking for a new lawyer, and he found him in Roy Cohn. One of the most notorious figures in American history, Cohn had prosecuted Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in 1951 for stealing the so-called “secret of the atomic bomb.” In 1953 he had become chief of staff for the notorious Red-baiting Senator Joseph McCarthy (R-Wisconsin). McCarthy fell from power in 1954 and died in 1957, but Cohn had a Plan B. He relocated to New York and became a high-priced consigliere, advancing his clients’ interests with such flagrant disregard for the law that in 1986 he was disbarred. A year later Cohn, a closeted Gay man who prided himself on defeating all attempts in New York City to pass laws protecting the civil rights of Queer people, died of complications from AIDS – a contradiction which led author Tony Kushner to make him the principal villain of his play Angels in America (1991).

David Marcus, Roy Cohn’s cousin, was extensively interviewed for the Frontline show. He recalled, “When they met, Roy said to him, ‘You might be guilty. It doesn’t matter. Go after the Justice Department. Don’t ever admit guilt.’ … That was a defining moment for Donald Trump. Donald Trump was on the ropes. There was no doubt they had discriminated. There was no doubt there was wrongdoing. And yet, Roy Cohn showed him that you can turn around a situation just by ignoring the facts and going after your attacker. Trump countersued the Justice Department for $100 million. … His countersuit didn’t work, and in fact he did end up quietly settling out of court, but Roy went on the offensive and said this is a victory — Trump was vindicated. He knew before anybody else did that the court of public opinion is often more important than a court of law. The lesson [Trump learned] from Roy Cohn was don’t go the way the establishment does. Don’t play by the rules.”

Kamala Harris: Growing Up Biracial in Berkeley

While Donald Trump was born into money and trained by a no-nonsense father to be ruthless and uncompassionate, Kamala Harris came from a mixed-race middle-class family. Her father, Donald Harris, was a Black immigrant from Jamaica; her mother, Shyamala Gopalan, was (East) Indian and also an immigrant. The two met at the University of California, Berkeley, where he was a development economist and she a researcher in endocrinology. Among other things, she discovered a gene implicated in breast cancer. The Harrises met in 1962 and married in 1963. Kamala was born October 20, 1964 and her sister Maya was born January 30, 1967.

In 1966 the Harrises left Berkeley for academic positions in Illinois and Wisconsin. By 1970 Donald’s and Shyamala’s marriage had broken up, and Shyamala was forced to raise Kamala and Maya as a single mother. Shyamala and the Harris girls moved back to Berkeley, and the girls went to the Shelton School, a combination day-care center and elementary school catering to African-American women. “Mrs. Shelton would quickly become a second mother to Maya and me,” Kamala would recall in her memoir, The Truths We Hold. Stymied when a professional position she thought she deserved went to someone else, Shyamala moved herself and her children to Montréal, Canada to teach at McGill University.

The culture shock was severe on the Harris children. All of a sudden they were in a colder climate than they were used to, cut off from their friends and in a predominantly French-speaking area where there were very few other people of color. “She talked about the life she left behind a lot,” said Wanda Kagan, Kamala’s best friend in Canada. “That was another commonality we had; my family was in America. That’s actually what was so nice about our friendship, seeing how she and myself navigated ourselves to fit in to that world, two different worlds, and bridge the gap between them.”

Wanda Kagan harbored a deep, dark secret, and Kamala ultimately wormed it out of her. “I was being abused at home, both physically and sexually,” she recalled. “I didn’t seem myself some days. Once I was confronted with her out-and-out asking me. I decided to tell her that I was being molested and abused at home. Her first reaction was, ‘How long have you been going through this, Wanda?’ Once I talked about it with her, then she [said], ‘Well, you’re just going to have to come and stay with us.’ I was really emotional and heartfelt when they said I could come and stay with them. It wasn’t just that I went to live with her. I saw that passion and that compassion in her. Basically she was taking a stand and fighting for my rights back then, 40 years ago, to be able to do what I wanted with my body. She was a child, too, 15, 16 years old, with such a powerful voice and fighting for what’s right.”

In 1982 Kamala Harris returned to the U.S. and went to the historically Black Howard University in Washington, D.C. Named after Oliver Otis Howard, the white man who headed the Freedmen’s Bureau after the Civil War to help newly freed ex-slaves adjust, Howard was best known for its law school. Its graduates, including Thurgood Marshall, Spottiswood Robinson and Robert Carter, had been the leading attorneys in the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education, which declared racial segregation in public schools unconstitutional.

Though Harris did not attend Howard’s law school – she returned to California and got her law degree at Hastings in San Francisco – she thrived there. She joined a Black sorority, Alpha Kappa Alpha. One of her sorority sisters, Jill Louis, recalled, “Our womanhood was celebrated in Alpha Kappa Alpha. It was a celebration of women and their capability. It was enough just trying to be a Black person in America in the 1980’s. Women were still being boxed out of a lot of opportunities and a lot of serious jobs, and so you had to come with extra credibility. You had to come with extra preparation.”

Harris also used Howard’s proximity to the national capital to build her political contacts. She interned with U.S. Senator Alan Cranston (D-California), a liberal icon. Harris also worked at the Federal Trade Commission and the National Archives (ironically enough, since the Archives would launch an investigation into Donald Trump’s allegedly illegal retention of classified documents when he left the Presidency in 2021). When she got back to the Bay Area and graduated from Hastings, she shocked her family by taking a job as a prosecutor with the Alameda County District Attorney’s office.

“She’s becoming a prosecutor at a time when Black communities are literally under siege,” said Jamilah King of Mother Jones magazine. “Specifically in Oakland and Alameda County in the 1980’s, it is literally ground zero for the crack cocaine epidemic. You have tremendous amounts of violence in Black communities. You have overpolicing. So it was a controversial decision in her family and her community. … Ultimately I think her argument was that, ‘Look, in order for us to change the system, we have to have people within it who are willing to open the doors, who are willing to listen, who are willing to sit at the table.’ And that’s what she did.”

In the early 1990’s Kamala Harris started a sexual relationship with a man 30 years her senior: Willie Brown, then Speaker of the California State Assembly and later Mayor of San Francisco. Her Right-wing opponents have seized on this, using it to portray Harris as an untalented bimbo who slept her way to the top. As Speaker, Brown appointed Harris to the California Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board and later to the California Medical Assistance Commission. In 2002 Harris decided to make her first run for political office, declaring her candidacy for District Attorney of the City and County of San Francisco.

It was a longshot. It meant running against her boss, long-time San Francisco liberal icon Terrence “K.O.” Hallinan, who had recruited her for the San Francisco D.A.’s office and put her in charge of the Career Criminal Division. “The coalition she put together is a very rare one in San Francisco,” said Joe Garofoli, senior political affairs reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle. “She had the rich people in Pacific Heights, with folks in the Bay View, the Black neighborhood, and then the Castro, the LGBTQ neighborhood. It’s a very unusual triangle of power there. Because of who she is, how she grew up, the diversity of experiences she had, she does feel comfortable walking into any room.”

Ironically, one of her tactics against Hallinan was also a favorite of Trump’s: paralipsis, meaning saying something by saying you’re not going to say it. “She stands up behind Hallinan and says, ‘I’m not going to be like Terrence Hallinan and talk about the lawyers in his office having sex on the desks. I’m not going to behave in that way and bring up these type of things,’” Garofoli recalled. “The room erupts in applause, and that kind of defanged it after that.”

Trump Gets Bitten by the Presidential Bug

Donald Trump had been thinking of running for President ever since 1980, when he did the pioneering interview with Rona Barrett that led off the Frontline show via a clip. “Trump is actively thinking about politics by the late 1980’s,” said former House Speaker Newt Gingrich. “Oprah actually asked him, ‘Are you going to run for president someday?’”

Trump’s answer was, “Probably not, but I do get tired of seeing the country ripped off.”

Gingrich also suggested that Trump’s desire to be President came at least in part from the established 1-percenters in New York City looking down at him because his family had made their fortune in the outer boroughs instead of Manhattan, “There’s a sense in the back of his head that if you want to prove to the Manhattanites that you made it, and they won’t let you prove inside their world, well, what if you just become president of the whole country?” Gingrich said.

During the 1980’s Trump became a national celebrity by co-writing an alleged autobiography, The Art of the Deal. The book was actually written by its named co-author, journalist Tony Schwartz. Though Schwartz was interviewed for the Frontline program, his most revealing comments on Trump’s book project were made when Jane Mayer spoke to him for an article in The New Yorker published in July 2016, when the thought of Trump as President was more a bizarre dream than a conceivable reality (https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/07/25/donald-trumps-ghostwriter-tells-all). The normal way a ghost-written autobiography is created is the ghostwriter interviews the subject, gets a rough account of his or her life in their own words, edits it and puts it into readable form for a book.

But Schwartz soon found that he couldn’t do it that way with Trump because, as Schwartz told Mayer, Trump “has no attention span.” Schwartz recalled trying to interview Trump, only Trump would look fidgety, “like a kindergartner who can’t sit still in a classroom.” Schwartz told Mayer, “Trump has been written about a thousand ways from Sunday, but this fundamental aspect of who he is doesn’t seem to be fully understood. It’s implicit in a lot of what people write, but it’s never explicit — or, at least, I haven’t seen it. And that is that it’s impossible to keep him focused on any topic, other than his own self-aggrandizement, for more than a few minutes, and even then … . If he had to be briefed on a crisis in the Situation Room, it’s impossible to imagine him paying attention over a long period of time.”

Schwartz’s most revealing comment about Trump was his observation about Trump’s dubious – to say the least – relationship with the truth. “Lying is second nature to him,” Schwartz told Mayer. “More than anyone else I have ever met, Trump has the ability to convince himself that whatever he is saying at any given moment is true, or sort of true, or at least ought to be true.” As I pointed out in my Zenger’s blog post after the June 27, 2024 debate in which Trump wiped the floor with Biden, “When I read that article, I immediately thought of George Orwell’s novel 1984 and in particular his concept of doublethink. It’s impossible, I think, to understand both the sheer scale, scope and audacity of Trump’s lying and the reason he’s been so successful at it without understanding Orwell’s idea of doublethink, which he explained as follows:

“‘Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them. The Party intellectual knows in which direction his memories must be altered; he therefore knows he is playing tricks with reality; but by the exercise of doublethink he also satisfies himself that reality is not violated. The process has to be conscious, or it would not be carried out with sufficient precision, but it also has to be unconscious, or it would bring with it a feeling of falsity and hence of guilt. …

“‘[T]he essential act of the Party is to use conscious deception while retaining the firmness of purpose that goes with complete honesty. To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies – all this is indispensably necessary. Even in using the word doublethink it is necessary to exercise doublethink. For by using the word one admits that one is tampering with reality; by a fresh act of doublethink one erases this knowledge; and so on indefinitely, with the lie always one leap ahead of the truth.’”

Time and time again, Donald Trump has engaged in doublethink. Privately, in conversations with his aides or friendly podcasters, he agrees that he really lost the 2020 election, but publicly he still insists he “really” won and it was “stolen” from him. When he and Harris debated on CNN in Philadelphia September 10, reality-based observers said Harris clearly won – but Trump insisted that he won and cited a lot of unscientific B.S. “polls” from ultra-Right-wing outlets like Newsmax to “prove” it.

He’s insisted that his administration did a great job managing the COVID-19 crisis in 2020 when the reality-based world scored his response as terrible. Indeed, the Frontline filmmakers included footage of some of Trump’s shambolic COVID press briefings but not the worst one of all: the one in which he mused publicly that maybe you could kill the virus by drinking or injecting bleach. I vividly remember the body language of a real scientist in the room, Dr. Deborah Birx, who looked stricken by the possibility that she and her colleagues would have to divert themselves from work that might actually help solve the crisis to disprove Trump’s toxic fantasies about bleach.

Trump’s people have also repeatedly tried to explain to him how tariffs work. Tariffs are just taxes, imposed by the American government and paid for by the American people. The only difference between tariffs and other sorts of taxes is they’re imposed on goods imported from foreign countries. Trump hasn’t listened to them; for some reason he still insists that tariffs are somehow paid by foreign countries that create the goods or services they’re imposed on. When his first-term economic advisor, Gary Cohn, tried to explain to Trump that tariffs are paid by American consumers (and therefore the huge tariffs Trump is pledging to impose if he gets back into the White House would only spark inflation big-time), Trump wouldn’t believe him. Cohn left that meeting muttering under his breath, “What a fucking moron.”

Trump’s ignorance and know-it-all attitude has hurt him not only politically but in his businesses as well. His Wunderkind reputation flamed out in the late 1980’s when six of Trump’s businesses ran out of money and declared bankruptcy. (Trump maintains that he’s never personally declared bankruptcy, which is technically true, but six companies he owned or controlled have.) What bailed him out was, ironically, his TV show The Apprentice. Under the tutelage of producer Mark Burnett, Trump got 14 years’ worth of showcases that presented him as the most intelligent and successful capitalist of all time – and thanks to a really advantageous deal he made to host the show, he also earned enough money from it to pay off the losses on everything else he was involved in.

Harris Stumbles Into the Vice-Presidency

Kamala Harris’s term as District Attorney of San Francisco hit a major speed bump just four months into her tenure, when she was faced with having to prosecute the killer of San Francisco police officer Isaac Espinoza. To the disgust of virtually everyone in the San Francisco Police Department – and of U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein, former Mayor of San Francisco and the most powerful woman politician in California – Harris chose to stick with her campaign pledge not to seek the death penalty against Espinoza’s killer. At Espinoza’s funeral Feinstein openly called for the execution of Espinoza’s murderer, to roaring cheers from just about all the police officers in attendance – and Harris sat in the back of the room, trying not to be noticed.

Nonetheless, after eight years as San Francisco’s District Attorney, in 2010 Harris decided to run for Attorney General of California. The race was so close that some media outlets actually called it for Harris’s Republican opponent, L. A. District Attorney Steve Cooley – but she squeaked through to victory after all. As Attorney General, she went after medical organizations that charged excessive fees for treating Medicare and Medi-Cal patients; fought back against banks and home lenders that she said had exploited California home buyers; won a settlement against the high-tech industry forcing them to disclose just what information they were demanding from their customers and what they were doing with it; and refused to defend Proposition 8, the initiative to ban same-sex marriage, in state court.

Harris won a bid for the U.S. Senate in 2016 – ironically making her a junior colleague of Feinstein. The Frontline documentary vividly dramatizes the bizarre quandary she found herself in of having to celebrate her own win the night Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton for the Presidency. She tore up her prepared victory speech, spoke from the heart, and said, “I intend to fight. I intend to fight for Black Lives Matter! I intend to fight for truth and transparency and trust! I intend to fight! I intend to fight for a woman’s access to health care and reproductive health rights! … I believe we’re at an inflection point. I believe we are at a place that is similar to that place and time when my parents met when they were graduate students at UC Berkeley in the '60’s and active in the Civil Rights Movement. … Do not despair. Do not be overwhelmed. Do not throw up our hands when it is time to roll up our sleeves and fight for who we are!”

As a Senator, Harris became known nationally mainly for her prosecutor-style cross-examinations of Trump’s appointees, including his first Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, and Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. She achieved enough political credibility that in 2020 Harris declared herself a candidate for President – but her campaign went nowhere, despite a spectacular moment in which she challenged the eventual winner, Joe Biden, over his former opposition to busing schoolchildren to achieve school integration. Addressing Biden directly, Harris said, “[T]here was a little girl in California who was part of the second class to integrate her public schools and she was bused to school every day, and that little girl was me.”

But Harris’s 2020 Presidential campaign flamed out before it ever got to a primary or caucus state. Partly that was due to press reports that she mishandled her staff and frequently rode them too hard, Also, as Los Angeles Times reporter Noah Bierman told Frontline, “For all the excitement she has, it starts to fizzle because she fundamentally does have trouble defining herself. She’s not an ideological person, and in a primary campaign, people want to know what your ideology is, because you’re choosing among Democrats. So everybody knows Bernie Sanders stands here, Elizabeth Warren stands here, Biden stands here, Pete Buttigieg stands here. Where is she? And they don’t know, and she doesn’t do a good job of defining that, and she seems to be unsure of where she is.”

Nonetheless, Biden ultimately chose her as his running mate. Actually she wasn’t his first choice; by some reports that was Senator Amy Klobuchar (D-Minnesota), who had had much the same political trajectory as Harris: county prosecutor, state attorney general, U.S. Senator. But Klobuchar was not liked by the Black community because they blamed her for the death of George Floyd, choked to death by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin and three colleagues. The reason for the Black opposition to Klobuchar is as both county attorney and state attorney general, she’d had the opportunity to prosecute Chauvin for previous complaints of police brutality 17 times – and she hadn’t. Klobuchar ultimately withdrew from consideration as Biden’s Vice-President and recommended he pick a person of color instead. He chose Harris – to the public consternation of Donald Trump, who was amazed that Biden would pick a running mate who had made such a dramatic public statement against him. (Later, in 2024, Trump would pick Ohio Senator J. D. Vance, who had once said Trump “could be America’s Hitler.”)

Trump’s “Strange Messenger” Support Among Evangelicals

One of the oddest aspects of Trump’s rise in popularity, his ability to win the White House once and his strong chance of getting back into power this year, is the extraordinary alliance he’s built up with evangelical Christians. The Frontline documentary introduced me to a woman who had more to do with that than any other single individual: Paula White. A self-proclaimed evangelist without any degree or formal ordination as a minister, White set up shop with her then-husband Randy White as the Without Walls Church in Tampa, Florida in 1991. She bailed on that church in the early 2000’s and allegedly stole equipment from it to set up her new church, New Destiny Christian Center, in Apopka, Florida. Paula White divorced Randy and remarried to a member of the rock band Journey, and she started a TV show in 2001 that attracted Trump’s attention.

The Frontline documentary features a bizarre scene in which Paula White literally conducts a laying-on-of-hands blessing of Donald Trump. “He knows that I don’t play when it comes to things of God,” White tells Trump. “I secure his children. I secure his calling and his mantle in Jesus’ name, Amen. I tell him, ‘You wear a mantle that you don’t fully understand.’ He receives that and takes that in. He trusts me. He trusts my voice. You see, I don’t believe anything is coincidence. I believe there is such a thing as destiny. And I believe that God will raise up a man for such a time as this.”

A number of people have questioned how Donald Trump, who is so many things the evangelical Christian community claims to hate – a serial adulterer, sexual predator, casino owner, urbanite – has become their favorite. Part of it is in the concept of “strange messengers”: the belief that God sometimes summons chosen ones precisely from the most unlikely places and gives them a divine mission to do His will on earth. Trump also cemented his standing with the evangelical community by giving them a big win on the most important political issue to them: abortion. As he likes to brag, it was Trump who put three new justices on the U.S. Supreme Court that created the six-justice majority that overturned Roe v. Wade (1973) and allowed states – and, ultimately perhaps, the federal government – to ban abortion.

Trump served a tumultuous four years as President from 2017 to 2021. He started his term with a ban on immigrants from 10 nations, nine of them majority Muslim countries. His minions detained migrants in outdoor centers in unspeakable conditions, and separated children from their parents. Trump also tried to extort the newly elected Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelensky to start a specious investigation of Joe Biden and his son Hunter in exchange for military aid Congress had already authorized for Ukraine – which led to the first of Trump’s two impeachment trials. He stonewalled Robert Mueller’s special-counsel investigation of alleged Russian collusion in his 2016 win and appointed a new Attorney General, William Barr, who sandbagged Mueller’s report with a wildly inaccurate “summary” of it.

Nonetheless, Trump and his people were expecting a landslide re-election victory – until the COVID-19 pandemic hit. According to Brad Parscale, who directed the digital side of Trump’s campaign until Trump summarily fired him, “By February of 2020 you see Trump’s popularity skyrocket. We come into a poll, I show him in the Oval, and he was winning in a landslide. He had a battle map that no one had seen since Reagan. That is February of 2020. And I remember going home that night and seeing the pictures coming out of China, and Italy, and other places, of COVID.”

Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump in the November 2020 Presidential election, but Trump refused to admit that he’d lost. Instead, he followed Roy Cohn’s old playbook: insist that the “defeat” was actually a victory, that it was “statistically impossible” for him to have lost, and lobby state officials like Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” him votes that would swing the election in those states to Trump. After filing 60 lawsuits in various courts and losing all of them – even before judges he’d appointed – Trump made one final play aimed at disrupting the certification of Biden’s Electoral College win on January 6, 2021.

Trump sent out a message on Twitter calling his followers to come to Washington, D.C. on January 6. “Statistically impossible to have lost the 2020 election. Big protest in D.C. on Jan. 6. Be there, will be wild!” Trump’s message said. Trump followed it up with a speech to his assembled followers on the Ellipse in Washington, D.C. on January 6, telling them to march on the U.S. Capitol and promising, “I will be there with you.” Though he wasn’t – the U.S. Secret Service detail told him they couldn’t guarantee his security if he marched with the crowd – Trump seemed to be emulating the 1922 March on Rome in which Benito Mussolini took absolute power in Italy and set up the first fascist dictatorship.

Ultimately the January 6, 2021 rioters broke into the Capitol, smashed things and defecated on the floors, clubbed Capitol Police officers with flagpoles flying U.S. flags, and carried the Confederate flag on the Capitol floors – something the real Confederates during the Civil War had never been able to do. Five people died as a result of the riot, and Trump watched the whole thing on television for over three hours, resisting any attempts – even from his own children – to get the crowd to stop. When he finally did issue a stand-down order, it was one in which he said he loved the rioters, blessed them and said, “Remember this day.”

As has happened so often before, the aftermath of January 6, 2021 looked bleak for Trump – but he rebounded. When Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell and House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy initially denounced him as morally responsible for the riot, Trump’s huge base of support within the Republican Party snapped them both back in line within days. The Democrats launched a second attempt to impeach Trump, but McConnell sandbagged it first by not scheduling the trial until after Biden took office and then saying the criminal justice system could prosecute Trump. Later in June 2024 the U.S. Supreme Court gave Trump a virtual get-out-of-jail-free card when they created a whole new doctrine of Presidential immunity that virtually ensures Trump will never see the inside of a jail, even if he loses the 2024 election.

Harris Muffs the VP Gig, but Finds Her Voice on Abortion

Meanwhile, in the reality-based world in which Joe Biden was President and Kamala Harris Vice-President, Harris muffed her first big assignment. It was to go to Central American countries like Guatemala and lobby them to develop their own economies so their people wouldn’t feel the urge to migrate to the United States. Unfortunately, Harris stuck her foot in her mouth big-time when she made a speech in Guatemala saying, “I want to be clear to folks in this region who are thinking about making that dangerous trek to the United States-Mexico border. Do not come. Do not come. The United States will continue to enforce our laws and secure our border.”

She put her foot even farther down her mouth when she gave an interview to NBC News anchor Lester Holt. When Holt tried to question her credentials on dealing with border issues by saying she’d never actually been to the U.S.-Mexico border, she got defensive and said, “I’m here in Guatemala today. At some point, you know, it — We are going to the border. We’ve been to the border. So this whole thing about the border, we’ve been to the border.” When Holt insisted that Harris had not been to the border, Harris replied, “And I haven’t been to Europe. [Laughs] I don’t understand the point that you’re making.” Her non-response not only fed Republican propaganda that Biden had made her his “border czar” and she’d failed, it scared her off one-on-one interviews with TV reporters. Even when she finally gave one with CNN’s Dana Bash on August 29, she brought along her running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz.

What saved Harris’s political career was, ironically, Donald Trump’s biggest policy win for the radical Christian Right: the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision on Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Center which reversed Roe v. Wade. As she had on the night she won her U.S. Senate seat but Donald Trump won the Presidency, Harris tore up her prepared speech before EMILY’s List, a political action committee to raise money for pro-choice women candidates, and spoke from the heart: “Well, we say, ‘How dare they! How dare they tell a woman what she can do and cannot do with her own body. How dare they! How dare they try to stop her from determining her own future. How dare they try to deny women their rights and their freedoms.’ … So to all here I say, let us fight for our country with everything we have got. God bless you, and God bless America.”

The events of the 2024 Presidential campaign have been so galvanic they have whipsawed the country. Joe Biden flames out in the June 27 debate with Donald Trump, and multiple Democrats demand that he step down. Donald Trump is the victim of two assassination attempts, one on July 13 just before the Republican convention – which he attends wearing a pillow-shaped bandage on his ear – and another one September 15. After a month hemming and hawing, Biden finally realizes the inevitable and ends his re-election bid on July 21. Harris picks Tim Walz as her Vice-Presidential nominee August 6 over the initial favorite, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, who’s considered a problematic choice because Shapiro is too strong a supporter of Israel to win back Arab-Americans and other voters concerned about the fate of the Palestinians.

Through it all, the race has stayed literally too close to call. The initial polls taken both before and after the September 10 CNN debate are tightly locked within the margin of error. It seems utterly insane that anyone could see the two major-party candidates on television and not realize that Kamala Harris is a competent, professional administrator who within the limits of the system will do her best to help Americans, while Donald Trump is a psychopathic windbag obsessed with his own petty grievances and a desire to take America back to a racist, sexist, wealth-worshipping, environment-destroying past. America’s – and the world’s – future is literally on the line. Political cynics like to joke that before every election, pundits claim that this is “the most important election in American history” – but this time, the pundits who say that just may be right.