J. D. Vance, Tim Walz Vice-Presidential Debate a Draw

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

I started writing this just after I watched the October 1 debate between the two major-party candidates for Vice-President, Senator J. D. Vance (R-Ohio) and Governor Tim Walz (D-Minnesota), held at CBS Television Center in New York City with Norah O’Donnell and Margaret Brennan as moderators. If the first Presidential debate this year on June 27 between Donald Trump and Joe Biden was a clear victory for Trump – so much so that within a month Biden, under pressure from fellow Democrats, ended his campaign for re-election and endorsed his sitting Vice-President, Kamala Harris, instead – and the second between Trump and Harris September 10 was an equally clear win for Harris, the Vance-Walz debate turned out to be a draw.

The J. D. Vance who showed up wasn’t the crazy we’ve been hearing about in scattered news reports, the one who said the Democratic Party was run by “childless cat ladies” and the only reason post-menopausal women exist is to take care of their grandchildren. (Vance himself was raised by his grandmother after his mom flamed out on drugs, and he credits his grandma – whom he calls by the bizarrely infantilizing nickname “Mamaw,” pronounced “ma’am-awe” – with saving his life.) Nor was it the acolyte of Silicon Valley multi-billionaire Peter Thiel, who’s publicly questioned whether America should remain a republic and has given money to the man Vance names as his intellectual mentor, Curtis Yarvin, who has openly proclaimed that Americans need to get over their “dictator phobia” and accept one-man rule.

It was Vance, not Walz, who used the word “weird” in the debate (twice). Though Walz became known throughout America for having described the ideas and behavior of Trump and Vance as “weird,” he kept that statement in his sheath. For the most part, Vance and Walz came off as two well-meaning politicians who both want what is best for this country. There were a few fireworks, notably about women’s right to reproductive choice – on which Vance has definitively (at least for now) abandoned his former support for a nationwide ban on abortion and adopted Trump’s position that abortion legislation should be left to individual states – as well as on the Right’s allegation that Left-leaning Silicon Valley entrepreneurs are censoring Right-wing voices on social media.

One thing Vance did that was very savvy was blame Kamala Harris for every thing he thinks is wrong about the Biden administration and its policies. To hear Vance tell it, it was Harris who personally canceled all of Trump’s restrictions on immigration and opened the border to 25 million “illegal aliens.” It was Harris who made possible the explosion of fentanyl in the U.S. It was Harris who single-handedly drove up the price of housing in America by letting in all those “illegals” whom he and Trump will save the nation by deporting en masse. It was Harris who canceled Trump’s “drill, baby, drill” energy policy (even though the U.S. is producing and exporting more fossil fuels than at any time in its history, as Walz correctly pointed out) and thereby drove up the cost of everything in the U.S.

Vance ably zeroed in on one of the bizarre weaknesses of Harris’s candidacy. Like Hubert Humphrey, who ran for the Presidency in 1968 after unpopular incumbent Lyndon Johnson withdrew from his re-election bid, as the sitting Vice-President Harris has had to answer for everything Americans don’t like about the current administration while having had virtually no power to change it. Vance said time and time again that if Harris were really concerned about all the issues she’s been raising on the campaign trail, she could have been working on them from day one.

That ignores the fact that, as historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. once put it, the Vice-President of the United States has only one real function: to wait for the President of the United States to die. The first Vice-President, John Adams, called it “the most insignificant office the mind of man has ever created.” Whether they’re Martin Van Buren, Richard Nixon, Hubert Humphrey, George H. W. Bush, Al Gore or Kamala Harris, Vice-Presidents who run for the Presidency immediately to succeed the President they served under have the dual burden of being blamed for everything the people don’t like about the current administration while not being credited for the things people do like. (There’s a reason no sitting Vice-President won a Presidential election between Van Buren in 1836 and the first Bush in 1988.)

Vice-Presidents have only as much authority as the Presidents they serve under give them – as George W. Bush did with Dick Cheney or Barack Obama did with Biden. Absent a major grant of power from their President, a Vice-President has no independent authority at all – though in the first two years of Biden’s Presidency, with the U.S. Senate equally divided between Republicans and Democrats, Harris had to cast more tie-breaking votes on major pieces of legislation than any Vice-President in U.S. history. Republicans like to blame Harris for the situation on the U.S. border; they claim that Biden made Harris the “border czar,” and Harris blew the job.

Biden actually gave Harris far less authority on border issues than that. He tasked her with going to Latin American countries that send a lot of immigrants to the U.S. and doing what she could to discourage them from doing that. There’s some room for debate as to whether she did a good job even with that limited authority. The recent PBS Frontline documentary on Harris and Trump showed footage of an embarrassing speech Harris gave in Guatemala telling would-be immigrants, “Do not come,” and an even lamer interview with NBC News’s Lester Holt in which he cross-examined her about whether she’d ever visited the U.S.-Mexico border. (She hadn’t, but she’s been there since, most recently on a September 27, 2024 campaign stop in Arizona.) But it wasn’t the sweeping power to allow or block all immigration that Republicans have claimed Biden gave her.

As for Walz, he reminded me uncomfortably of fellow Minnesotan Hubert Humphrey in more ways than one. In his book The Selling of the President 1968, Joe McGinniss wrote about Humphrey (I’m quoting from memory here), “His excesses – he talked too loud and too fervently – were just annoying in person but became fatal on TV. A person on TV is a guest in your home. It is impolite for him to shout. Humphrey vomited on the rug.” Though Walz didn’t do quite as badly as that, there were still all too many portions of the debate where Vance kept his cool, while Walz at times visibly lost his temper and screeched at the audience.

Instead of the affable high-school teacher and football coach that’s come through in his social-media posts and the public speeches and TV appearances he gives alone, Walz came off as querulous, impatient, almost angry. If the purpose of a Vice-Presidential debate is to showcase which of these people should American voters trust if they have to take over the Presidency if the incumbent dies (a bigger risk with Vance than with Walz because Donald Trump is visibly old and infirm, as well as showing increasing signs of mental derangement), frankly Vance did a much better job on that score than Walz. That’s true even though Walz actually has executive experience as the governor of Minnesota and Vance, who’s been a U.S. Senator for less than two years, does not.

Walz was able to parry at least some of Vance’s most effective thrusts. When Vance claimed that Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and former Hawai’i Congressmember Tulsi Gabbard had endorsed Trump, Walz came back with a list of Harris’s endorsers that ranged from Bernie Sanders to Dick Cheney – and threw in Taylor Swift’s name for good measure. (Swift posted her endorsement of Harris on social media and signed it, “Taylor Swift, Childless Cat Lady.”)

Rachel Maddow’s Quite Different J. D. Vance Story

The J. D. Vance who appeared at the October 1 Vice-Presidential debate was a quite different character than the one MS-NBC host Rachel Maddow had profiled the night before on her regular weekly program (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VeVhHNSe9Ks). She began her story, after an apologia explaining that she hadn’t been sure she wanted to do it at all but decided to go with it on the eve of the debate with Walz, with one of her long introductions about Charles Walgreen, founder of the Walgreens’ drugstore chain, who in 1934 became convinced that the University of Chicago, where his daughter was a student, was indoctrinating her in Communism and “free love.” He launched a campaign to defund the university, and got a hearing before the Illinois legislature where his principal witness against the university was Right-wing author Elizabeth Dilling. Dilling went around the country in the late 1930’s and early 1940’s denouncing various public universities as hotbeds of Communism and free love, and according to Maddow her rhetoric lives on in Vance’s.

Maddow’s main source for Vance’s real views was a September 17, 2021 interview Vance gave to Right-wing podcaster Jack Murphy, whose full black beard makes him look like a malevolent Santa Claus. Vance told Murphy, “Our leaders now are so corrupt, so vile, that if you assimilate into their culture, you’re assimilating into garbage liberal culture. You’re not assimilating into traditional American culture. … You can’t teach that we live in a great country if the leaders are actively aligned against it. … Step one in the process is to totally replace – rip out, like a tumor – the American leadership class, and then reinstall a sense of an American political religion.”

“You said something that I should like to zero in on,” Murphy responded. “How do we effectively rip out the disgusting leadership class? … Because let me expand on that just for a second. It’s not just – obviously, elections. That’s one thing. But unfortunately, this evil leadership class has already taken over all of our institutions. … Aside from elections, how do we rip out this leadership class? If these institutions are rotted and corrupted to the core, this elite ideology is everywhere and in all these things, what other options do we have besides voting them out, which we’re seeing is ineffectual?”

Vance answered, “This is a tough question, but it is maybe the question that confronts us right now.” He mentions Curtis Yarvin, anti-democratic Right-wing author and blogger, as his inspiration. Maddow then cuts to a clip of Yarvin himself giving a speech in front of a banner reading “RAGE” – which he explains is an acronym for “Retire All Government Employees.” As he mentions what RAGE means, his audience laughs approvingly.

“The problem with this is, why have you never heard of this before?” Yarvin says, “Why has no one suggested this before? … You have a government in Washington. You’re either for it or against it. And what is a government? A government is just a corporation running a country, nothing more, nothing less. It just so happens that our sovereign corporation is very poorly managed, and there’s a very simple way to replace that, which is what all corporations have found. We simply delete them. We haven’t been able to do that for over 200 years. So it’s gotten a little bit stale.”

Yarvin went on to explain, “The other thing about getting rid of your government is you can’t say the limits of the government are the limits of the formal government. You have to say, well, what is the system, actually? And it includes a lot of things, including things that are called universities, that are funded by the state. It’s a very, very large system, and it also must be destroyed. Fortunately, there are a lot of very talented Americans who actually know how to run things and make things work, and they are generalists. You need to get these people, put them in a position of responsibility, and have them do their thing. And finally, you need a CEO, and a national CEO is what is called a dictator. It’s the same thing. There’s no difference between a CEO and a dictator. If Americans want to change their government, they have to get over their dictator phobia.”

The world heard that argument before in the 1930’s, when ideologues on both the Right and the Left claimed that democracy had reached the limits of its political capability and the future belonged to dictators: Hitler and Mussolini on the Right, Stalin on the Left. It seemed to have ended with the Allied victory in World War II – though in order to achieve that, the republics of Great Britain and the United States had to ally themselves with the Left-wing dictatorship of Stalin to beat the Right-wing dictatorship of Hitler. But as capitalist democracy reaches its limits, and as societies all over the world seemingly inexorably move towards a redistribution of wealth and income in favor of the already-haves over the have-nots, more and more people throughout the world are being seduced by the arguments of phony “populists” like Donald Trump, J. D. Vance and their counterparts in other countries that the “elites” are out to get them and only by smashing the system and substituting absolute one-man rule can their lives be made better.

America Gets Affable Vance, Not Dictator-Loving Vance

But the J. D. Vance (or “JD Vance,” as he rather oddly spells his name, evoking the old 1950’s and 1960’s abbreviation for “juvenile delinquent”) America got to see on October 1 was not the acolyte of fascist-loving Curtis Yarvin. It was the affable author of Hillbilly Elegy, his 2016 memoir that got seized on by much of America’s liberal community in search of explanations for how Donald Trump had been able to win the Presidency. Vance did a much better job of keeping his cool than Walz did, though there were a few issues on which the fangs got bared.

One was the now-notorious story both Trump and Vance have told on the campaign trail of how Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio are allegedly stealing people’s pet dogs and cats so they can eat them. On a previous appearance with Dana Bash on CNN, Vance had given a bizarre defense of this story that more or less acknowledged it wasn’t true but said it was necessary to make up stories like that to get the media to cover the “suffering” of the American people. When Vance brought that up, CBS’s co-moderator, Margaret Brennan, explained that the Haitians in Springfield were here legally under so-called “temporary protected status,” thanks to a program enacted and signed into law in 1990 by Republican President George H. W. Bush.

Vance immediately reacted as if Brennan had slapped him. He accused Brennan of violating the agreed-upon rule that the moderators would not “fact-check” the candidates. That was a rule put into place at the Republican Party’s insistence after the Trump-Harris debate, at which Trump claimed it had been “three against one” because the moderators were calling him on some of his lies and therefore, in Trump’s mind, joining Harris on the attack against him. Brennan called her remark a “clarification” rather than a “fact-check,” and for the only time all evening, the moderators used their agreed-upon power to cut off the candidates’ microphones, essentially telling the candidates to stop talking because nobody could hear them. Only we could still hear them, albeit with echo and at a lower volume, lending an oddly surreal touch to the moment.

Vance also claimed that the Affordable Care Act (ACA), a.k.a. “Obamacare,” had been failing when Trump took over and he “rescued” it. Walz correctly pointed out that Trump had promised to repeal the ACA on day one of his Presidency. He’d even signed an executive order to that effect, though the courts struck it down. Walz also described the dramatic moment when one of the many Republican attempts to repeal the ACA went down to defeat on the Senate floor after the late John McCain (R-Arizona) cast his famous thumbs-down vote against it. (This was the so-called “skinny repeal,” a bill no one – including the people who voted for it – wanted to become law. Its only objective was to get the issue before a so-called “conference committee,” in which House and Senate Republicans could have quietly negotiated a bill to take the ACA’s place.)

One of the most bizarre moments of the debate was when Vance claimed that Harris’s alleged “open border” policies had led Mexican drug cartels to make money by selling illegal guns to the United States. “Thanks to Kamala Harris’ open border, we’ve seen a massive influx in the number of illegal guns run by the Mexican drug cartel … then the amount of illegal guns in our country is higher today than it was three and a half years ago,” Vance said.

The truth, as is well known by people who’ve actually studied the issue, is the other way around. Mexican drug cartels routinely send their hit people across the border into the U.S. to buy guns and other weapons because Mexico has common-sense gun regulations and the U.S. doesn’t. As Michael Williams of CNN explained in a post-debate fact check, “An estimated 200,000 guns are trafficked from the U.S. into Mexico each year, the Mexican Foreign Ministry has said — an average of nearly 550 per day. In 2021, Mexico sued several U.S.-based gun manufacturers, claiming they ‘design, market, distribute and sell guns in ways’ that arm cartels in Mexico. Mexico strictly controls the sale of firearms. There is only one gun store in Mexico, and it’s controlled by the army. That makes the large-scale smuggling of guns from Mexico into the U.S., where laws are laxer and gun stores plentiful, unfeasible.”

Walz did step in it a few times during the debate. In explaining why he changed his position on a ban on AR-15’s, AK-47’s and other so-called “assault weapons” often used by mass shooters in the U.S., he said he had met with family members of victims of the Sandy Hook school shooting and they had convinced him to support a ban on these weapons. But he misspoke and said he had “befriended school shooters” – and Trump seized on his gaffe in posts to his social-media site, Truth Social. Walz also said he’d been in Hong Kong when the 1989 pro-democracy protests in Tienanmen Square in Beijing happened. He wasn’t, though he visited China in August 1989, two months after the protests and their brutal suppression by the Chinese military.

Mostly, though, the debate went surprisingly smoothly, especially given the rancor of the previous debates that included Donald Trump. Vance and Walz not only made a point of shaking hands at the start – something Trump hadn’t wanted to do before his debate with Harris, only she basically forced him into it – but did so at the finish. They even introduced their wives to each other at the end of the debate. The instant polls taken after the debate indicated that both men’s favorability ratings went up, and one online commentator called the debate refreshingly “normal” – to the extent that any event involving the Presidential candidacy of Donald Trump, especially with a part-Black, part-Asian woman running against him, could be “normal.”

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.

MS-NBC Documentary "From Russia with Lev" Promises Startling New Revelations – But Delivers Just One More Story of Donald Trump's Psychopathology

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Friday, September 20) I watched a new documentary on MS-NBC called From Russia with Lev, a pun on the title of Ian Fleming’s 1957 James Bond novel From Russia, with Love (note the comma in the title; the film version, made in 1963 and the second Bond movie with Sean Connery, omitted it). This was heavily promoted by MS-NBC in general and Rachel Maddow, who co-produced it through her company Surprise Inside, in particular. Maddow made a rare appearance hosting the 5 p.m. MS-NBC hour to push the movie (normally she just does Mondays at 6 p.m.), which was billed as a real-life James Bond story. Actually, if there’s a fictional secret agent Lev Parnas resembled, it was more Maxwell Smart than James Bond. Lev Parnas was born February 6, 1972 in Odesa, which was then part of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic and is now part of Russian-occupied Crimea in what is nominally the territory of the independent Republic of Ukraine. His parents moved the Parnas family to the U.S. in 1975 and briefly lived in Detroit before settling in Brooklyn. As Parnas himself tells it, while other Ukrainian émigrés he knew got educations and aimed for above-board careers, Parnas became a “hustler,” though in 1995 he was supposedly involved in finance as a broker. Parnas’s first contact with Donald Trump – or at least his businesses – came in the early 1990’s when he sold co-op apartments for the Trump Organization as a salesperson for Kings Highway Realty.

Over the next 20 years Parnas was involved in a number of shady business enterprises – Parnas Holdings, Global Energy Producers, and the charmingly if oxymoronically named Fraud Guarantee – until he and Igor Fruman, his partner in Global Energy Producers, hooked up with Trump’s 2016 Presidential campaign. When Trump won he invited Parnas and Fruman to the Inaugural events and put them in touch with Rudolph Giuliani, former Mayor of New York and former U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York. Trump gave Giuliani the assignment to dig up dirt on Joe Biden, Trump’s most likely – and most feared – opponent in his 2020 re-election bid. Giuliani in turn gave the job to Parnas and Fruman, covering their expenses as they traveled through vacation hot-spots in places like Vienna and Paris. At the time Ukraine had a pro-Russian President, Petr Poroshenko, and a state prosecutor (their equivalent of an attorney general) named Viktor Shokin who was widely rumored to be involved in Ukraine’s chronic government corruption. Parnas and Fruman lobbied Shokin to launch an investigation into Joe Biden’s son Hunter, who had just been appointed to the board of the Ukrainian energy company Burisma despite having no prior experience in the energy business. Then Poroshenko lost his re-election bid in a landslide to Volodomyr Zelensky, a comedian who had previously played Ukraine’s President in a TV sitcom and pledged to launch an anti-corruption drive. Even before he lost his re-election campaign, Poroshenko had fired Shokin after pressure from other countries – including the U.S., represented by Biden, then the sitting vice-president – demanded his ouster as a sign Ukraine was dealing with its corruption problem seriously.

Trump arranged for his own vice-president, Mike Pence, to go to Ukraine for Zelensky’s inauguration, but withdrew the Pence appearance after Zelensky turned down his demand that he do Trump the “favor” of investigating Joe Biden and his son Hunter. Trump also used Giuliani, Parnas and Fruman to get the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, Maria Yovanovich, fired because she’d refused to be part of the administration’s campaign to get the Ukrainian government to announce an investigation of the Bidens. Parnas soon learned the consequences of his failure to do Trump’s bidding when he was arrested in October 2019 for allegedly planning to direct funds from foreign governments in an attempt to influence U.S. relations with Ukraine. Along the way Parnas dumped his Trump-supporting attorney, John Dowd, and hired his own counsel, Joseph Bondy (who was extensively interviewed in the film), who sent word to the U.S. House of Representatives that Parnas would be willing to testify against Trump in impeachment hearings relating to the so-called “perfect phone call” Trump had made to Zelensky, seeking his announcement that he was investigating the Bidens in exchange for weapons the U.S. Congress had already promised Ukraine. (Other former members of Trump’s inner circle, including personal attorney Michael Cohen and staff member Cassidy Hutchinson, also turned state’s evidence against Trump after they fired their Trump-hired counsel and hired their own attorneys.) According to Parnas, that prompted the U.S. Justice Department, under the control of Trump appointee William Barr, to switch out the charges against Parnas and instead try him on campaign finance law violations. The idea was that if Parnas would go before Congress as a convicted felon on charges unrelated to Ukraine, his credibility as a witness against Trump would be reduced.

In May 2021, Parnas’s attorney Joseph Bondy wrote a letter to Judge J. Paul Oetken relating to the case. It read, “The evidence seized likely includes e-mail, text, and encrypted communications that are either non-privileged or subject to an exception to any potentially applicable privilege, between, inter alia, Rudolph Giuliani, [Trump attorney] Victoria Toensing, the former President, former Attorney General William P. Barr, high-level members of the Justice Department, Presidential impeachment attorneys Jay Sekulow, Jane Raskin and others, Senator Lindsey Graham, Congressman Devin Nunes and others, relating to the timing of the arrest and indictment of the defendants as to prevent potential disclosures to Congress in the first impeachment inquiry of then-President Donald. J. Trump.” While Oetken refused Bondy’s motion to dismiss the case, calling Bondy’s letter a “conspiracy theory,” evidence exists of a network between the FBI, Fox News on-air personality Sean Hannity, Right-wing journalist John Solomon and others to obtain privileged information about the case. In the final scene of From Russia with Lev, Parnas and Hunter Biden meet for the first time and Hunter Biden is startled when Parnas calmly informs him they had his personal bank records, leaked to them by a source in the FBI. Parnas himself says now that being arrested was the best thing that could have happened to him because it finally broke him free from the Trump cult.

MS-NBC hyped From Russia with Lev as a revelatory case study in how Donald Trump operates, but it’s really an all too familiar story of how Trump exploits people for what they can do for him and then coldly dumps them once he’s sucked them dry. Trump publicly denied that he’d ever known Parnas, and when he was confronted with photos of the two of them together, said, “I get my picture taken with everybody.” (He pulled the same trick with E. Jean Carroll, the woman he was found civilly liable for sexually assaulting in the mid-1990’s in an elevator at New York’s high-end Bergdorf Goodman’s fashion store.) In the end, all From Russia with Lev proves is that Donald Trump is a narcissistic egomaniac who will do anything to anybody in order to safeguard and increase his own power – and at least half of the country knows that about him already. The other half believes he’s a Messiah who can literally do no wrong, and that’s why the 2024 Presidential election is so maddeningly close in the polls, and if the pattern from 2016 and 2020 that Trump consistently does five percent better in the actual election than he does in the polls holds this year, he will be President again.

Harris Wallops Trump in September 10 Debate – But Will It Really Matter?

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

Well, the Great Debate between sitting Vice-President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump finally happened on ABC-TV September 10 – and by all reality-based accounts, Harris wiped the floor with Trump.

Harris had Trump on the defensive even before the two candidates took their podia and started speaking. Trump made a bee-line to his podium and tried to avoid Harris. Harris walked out with her arm outstretched to shake his hand – the traditional greeting at one of these occasions – and Trump at first tried to pull back. Then he bowed to the inevitable and reluctantly shook her hand.

Trump’s body language, not only in that encounter but throughout the debate itself, showed off the racism and sexism that are integral parts not only of his political identity but his personal life. That’s the reason why, aside from a couple of sidelong glances, he didn’t make eye contact with her even once during the debate. You are not my equal, Trump’s body language said. You’re a woman, you’re part Black, you’re part Asian and I shouldn’t have to have anything to do with you because you are subhuman.

The debate itself pretty much followed along those lines. Harris was visibly strong, in command of herself and ready and waiting to attack Trump on his most obvious vulnerabilities, including his boasts that he put the three justices on the U.S. Supreme Court that ended American women’s Constitutionally guaranteed right to abortion after 49 years. She went into the debate determined to go after Trump on everything from the size of his campaign rallies to whether the 2020 election was fair to the bizarre story cooked up virtually from nowhere about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio stealing people’s cats and dogs so they could eat them.

Just about everyone in a position to know about this story has publicly debunked it. The debate’s co-moderator, ABC News anchor David Muir, said that ABC News had checked that story with the Springfield city manager, who had told them there were no credible reports of immigrants from Haiti or anywhere else capturing and eating people’s house pets. Even the person who took the photo of a person carrying a goose, which got posted to Facebook and started the whole meme of “Haitian immigrants are stealing cats and dogs to eat them,” said the picture wasn’t taken in Springfield and he has no idea of the subject’s immigration status.

But that didn’t matter either to Trump or his running mate, Ohio Senator J. D. Vance, who have run with the story and said it was true. When I first heard it, it reminded me of the vile propaganda the Nazis (the original ones) spread about the Jews to convince non-Jewish Germans that they were the scum of the earth and therefore they should be killed en masse. Like the lies the Nazis told about the Jews, it was outrageous B.S. but it’s also being believed by a large number of people, including ones who worship Trump the way all too many Germans worshiped Adolf Hitler and believed he would be the strongman they needed to “make Germany great again.”

Throughout the evening Harris kept springing rhetorical traps for Trump – and Trump kept falling for them all. Perhaps the most telling moment came when Harris actually invited people to attend a Trump rally, not only because they wouldn’t hear Trump say anything about how he would make their lives better, but because people were walking out of them because his speeches were so nonsensical and boring. Trump reacted like Harris had suddenly slapped him in the face, claiming that his rallies were the biggest anyone’s ever seen (a repeated and very annoying rhetorical tic of Trump’s; in his world everything is the biggest, the best, or if it’s against him the worst, thing there’s ever been) while accusing Harris of paying people to go to hers. (At least that’s a slight improvement over Trump’s previous claim that nobody was actually going to Harris’s rallies and the images of crowds watching her speak were AI-generated fakes.)

Trump kept falling into traps like that virtually the whole night. Questioned by the moderators, David Muir and Linsey Davis, about a recent interview he gave with a young podcaster admitting that he’d lost the 2020 election “by a whisker,” Trump denied it and insisted he actually won the 2020 election and it was “stolen” from him.

Asked about abortion – one of the trickiest issues for Republicans these days because in every state that has voted on it since Trump’s Supreme Court reversed Roe v. Wade, the pro-choice position has won with 60 percent of the vote – Trump repeated his standard lies that “everyone” wanted Roe overturned and the issue returned to individual states. But he refused to say whether or not he’d sign a nationwide abortion ban if Congress passed one.

When one of the moderators quoted J. D. Vance as saying Trump would veto a nationwide ban (even though Vance himself has previously spoken out in favor of one), Trump said he’d never spoken to Vance on the issue and Vance had no authority to speak for him on it. Trump also repeated his lie that some states allow women to have abortions even after their babies are born – which, to her credit, Linsey Davis called him on. “There is no state in this country where it is legal to kill a baby after it’s born,” Davis said.

Trump also refused to say whether or not he wanted Ukraine to win its current two-year-old war with Russia. “I want the war to stop,” he said, leaving open the possibility that his way to “stop” it would be to broker a deal that would give Russia effective control, if not total sovereignty, over Ukraine. And when Harris said that “world leaders are laughing” at Trump, the one world leader Trump could name that supports him was Viktor Orbán, authoritarian leader of Hungary, whom Trump praised as “a tough person. Smart.”

And Trump also declared that he had nothing to do with the radical-Right “Project 2025” agenda concocted by the Right-wing Heritage Foundation under the title “Mandate for Leadership” (also the name of the document they gave Ronald Reagan for his first term in 1981). When Harris tried to hold him accountable for its blueprint, which is basically to remake the U.S. Presidency as a dictatorship, Trump proudly boasted that he’d never read it and didn’t intend to.

In one respect that’s believable – Project 2025 is 922 pages long and that’s 921 ½ more pages than Trump ever reads of anything – but 200 former Trump administration officials were involved in drafting Project 2025 and his vice-presidential nominee, J. D. Vance, wrote a foreword to a book explaining it written by its head, Kevin Roberts. The book was originally called Dawn’s Early Light: Burning Down Washington to Save America, but the subtitle was later changed to Taking Down Washington to Save America and its publication was delayed until after the November 5 election.

And, as they noted in their fact-check of the September 10 debate, “CBS News identified at least 270 proposals in the published blueprint that match Trump's past policies and campaign promises as he runs again for the White House.” At least one of them, the so-called “Schedule F” – an attempt to destroy America’s tradition of a nonpartisan civil service by reclassifying 50,000 Federal employees as “at-will” political appointees the President could fire at any time – was already ordered by Trump in October 2020. Because he lost the election, it never took effect and his successor, Joe Biden, rescinded Trump’s executive order just two days after becoming President, but it remains a long-term goal of Trump’s.

Spinning in the “Spin Room”

At some level, at least, Trump seems aware that the debate went badly for him. He made the unusual decision to go to the so-called “spin room” – the space where reporters interview surrogates for the candidates – himself. There he cited numbers, whose sources he did not name, as saying he’d won the who-won polls with 75 to 90 percent. (The one poll that said Trump won which any reality-based journalists have been able to trace came from a totally unscientific survey of viewers on the Right-wing Newsmax Web site.)

Yet on September 12 Trump angrily turned down Harris’s offer of a second debate. He posted on his oxymoronically named Web site “Truth Social,” “When a prizefighter loses a fight, the first words out of his mouth are ‘I WANT A REMATCH.’ Polls clearly show that I won the Debate against Comrade Kamala Harris, the Democrats’ Radical Left Candidate, on Tuesday night, and she immediately called for a Second Debate. … THERE WILL BE NO THIRD DEBATE!” (Trump is apparently counting the June 27 debate with President Joe Biden, which he won so decisively various Democrats called on Biden to exit the race, as the first debate and the September 10 debate with Harris as the second.)

Trump’s angry rejection of a second (or third) debate may be one of his stupidest moves yet. Not only does it make him look weak (one of his greatest fears), it runs against the experience of Ronald Reagan in 1984 and Barack Obama in 2012. Both of them had surprisingly failed performances in their first debates – Reagan against Walter Mondale and Obama against Mitt Romney – but recovered in their second debates and went on to win re-election. In fact, Reagan won in 1984 by so overwhelming a margin it remains the biggest single Presidential election victory in U.S. history. Not only did he carry 49 states (losing only the District of Columbia and Mondale’s home state of Minnesota), he won 58.8 percent of the popular vote.

Danger Signs for Harris, Especially on the Economy

And yet, despite her debate victory, there are still danger signs ahead for Kamala Harris’s campaign. She is still a woman, and we remember all too clearly the last time Donald Trump ran for President against a woman. If elected, she’d be not only the first female U.S. President but the first one of Asian ancestry and only the second African-American. (“How can she be both Black and Asian?” Donald Trump asked rhetorically. “The same way you can be both German and Scottish!” I replied.)

Because she’s a woman, Harris is routinely attacked as not being “tough enough” to take on other world leaders. We’ve had enough experience with women as heads of state – from Queen Elizabeth I of England, who took on Philip II of Spain, the leader of Europe’s greatest superpower at the time, and won, to Margaret Thatcher, Golda Meir, Indira Gandhi and Angela Merkel – to lay aside that ancient sexist canard that “women can’t be tough enough” to govern and lead major nations. But it persists.

And she’s still the representative of one of the most bizarrely unpopular Presidencies in American history. Though Joe Biden’s term has been objectively one of the best for the American people – unemployment is at a 50-year low, the stock market has steadily risen (despite Trump’s prediction in 2020 that a Biden victory would collapse it) and the U.S. post-COVID economic recovery has been the strongest in the world – most Americans don’t have good feelings about the economy.

The reason is stubbornly high inflation, especially in the two biggest items where Americans feel price increases the most: food and gasoline. Harris knows how vulnerable she is on this; that’s why she’s proposed controls on so-called “price gouging” by major food retailers. Other plans for what she calls the “Opportunity Economy” include a subsidy for first-time home buyers, and reinstating and broadening the child tax credit enacted under Biden but killed by Republicans after one year. Her plans have been criticized by some economists, and it will be difficult for her actually to implement them, but at least she has plans.

Trump, as he infamously said about his long-standing ambition to “repeal and replace” the Affordable Care Act during the debate, at best has “concepts of a plan” on the economy. The 2024 Republican Party platform, which echoes not only Trump’s fustian rhetoric but his 19th Century Style of Capitalizing All Significant Nouns and Verbs, promises as the first of its 10 chapters to “DEFEAT INFLATION AND QUICKLY BRING DOWN ALL PRICES” – but the actual proposals are just warmed-over Reaganism: increasing fossil-fuel energy production (which under Biden is actually at an all-time high for the U.S.), cutting taxes for the very richest Americans, deregulating and reducing government spending.

Indeed, one of the centerpieces of Trump’s economic plan – to the extent he has one – is jacking up tariffs, which are simply taxes American consumers pay on imported goods. Even Harris muffed this issue during the debate, calling Trump’s proposed tariffs “a national sales tax” and saying they would cost the average American $4,000 per year. (The progressive Center for American Progress Action estimated Trump’s tariffs would cost Americans an average of $3,900 per year; another group, the Tax Policy Center, said it would be $1,800, a bit less than half that but still a significant burden on many people.)

What Harris didn’t explain – and what Trump seems terminally confused about – is that tariffs are not taxes imposed on foreign countries or their governments. Tariffs are paid by the American people via higher prices on anything they buy that is either made abroad or depends on imported raw materials – in short, virtually everything. Gary Cohn, Trump’s economic adviser during his first (and hopefully only) term as President, tried to explain this to him. Trump wouldn’t believe him, and Cohn famously left that meeting muttering to himself, “What a fucking moron.”

Nonetheless, CNN’s instant poll after the debate showed, “[V]oters who tuned in gave Trump a 20-point advantage over Harris after the debate on handling the economy, 55% to 35% – a margin that’s slightly wider than his pre-debate edge.” Just what on earth did Trump say during the debate that would give anyone more confidence that he could handle the economy better than Harris? And there’s still more bad news for Harris in other polls. On September 4 Matt Vespa of the Right-wing Web site townhall.com published an analysis in which he said even Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight.com had calculated Trump’s odds of winning a second Presidential term as 56.7 percent, his best showing since July 31.

According to Vespa, Silver also predicted Trump would win five of the seven so-called “battleground states” that will decide the election (Pennsylvania, Georgia, North Carolina, Arizona and Nevada), while Harris would win the other two (Michigan and Wisconsin). “Of course, Silver doesn’t say Trump will win — no one should say that – but his Electoral College advantage has only increased since the Democrats’ convention,” Vespa wrote.

Why Is This Election Even Close?

It’s frankly unbelievable and amazing that the overall election is still as close as it is. On the eve of the debate, the New York Times released a poll it co-conducted with Siena College that showed the national popular vote as dead-even (Trump led 48 to 47 percent, well within the margin of error). Seeing Donald Trump and Kamala Harris together in the September 10 debate, and watching both his visceral contempt for her – including his refusal to look her in the eye, something a number of swing-state voters commented on in interviews with the British newspaper The Guardian – and hearing his insane babblings about infanticide and pet murder, it seems impossible that any reasonably sane person would prefer him to her as their nation’s leader.

And yet, according to the polls, almost half of all Americans do. As I remember telling friends during the 2020 Presidential campaign, it was hard for me to believe that anyone could have lived through the chaos of the first Trump term and decided, “Yeah, that was great! Give me four more years of that.” It’s partly due to the increasing polarization of American politics and partly because the Right has carefully constructed a media bubble (the Fox News Network, Right-wing talk radio and Web sites like Newsmax and One America News) by which people receive only “news” that reinforces their beliefs.

It’s also due to Trump’s extraordinary success at selling himself to the American people – or at least the Right-leaning half of it – as a uniquely messianic figure. I remember watching during the 2016 campaign a PBS documentary on the 1976 Presidential campaign that featured a clip of Ronald Reagan, who that year unsuccessfully challenged Gerald Ford for the Republican nomination, saying that anyone who believed he personally could change America misunderstood both him and the conservative movement. Watching that clip was a galvanic moment for me; it was as if the Gipper had come from beyond the grave to declare himself a never-Trumper.

When he finally won the Presidency in 1980, Reagan’s slogan was, “Let’s Make America Great Again,” and a lot of people during Trump’s campaign noted the similarity between Reagan’s and Trump’s slogans. But there was also a key difference: the word “Let’s.” Reagan was basically saying that reclaiming America for conservative values was a collective enterprise that needed public participation. Trump, by contrast, during his acceptance speech at the 2016 Republican convention presented himself as a unique figure who could transform America by the sheer force of his personality; he listed all the things he thought were wrong about America and said, “Only I can fix it.”

Trump’s messianic complex has only grown since then. It reached its peak – or its depths – when a would-be assassin took a shot at him at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania on July 13. Both Trump himself and his most ardent supporters proclaimed that he had literally been spared by God because the Lord wanted him to regain the Presidency and reclaim America from the horrors of liberalism. At the Republican convention Trump wore a bandage over his ear as if it were a badge of honor.

And Trump’s belief that the sheer power of his personality is enough to transform the world was on full display at the September 10 debate as well. He said that if he had remained in the White House, Russia would never have attacked Ukraine, Hamas would not have attacked Israel on October 7, 2023 and no Americans would have died in the withdrawal from Afghanistan – something Trump actually negotiated and Biden carried out.

America’s choice in 2024 is between a dedicated public servant who’s already shown her skills as a leader – as San Francisco district attorney, attorney general of California, U.S. Senator and Vice-President – and an egomaniacal psychopath. Though I haven’t agreed with everything Kamala Harris has said or done. I trust and admire her enough I’ve voted for her in every election in which I could.

I believe that, within the limits imposed by America’s capitalist republic, Kamala Harris will do her best to make ordinary Americans’ lives better – and Donald Trump will do his best to destroy America’s republican experiment and emulate his dictator heroes, including Vladimir Putin of Russia, Xi Jinping of China and Viktor Orbán of Hungary, in ruling America by decree and using the enormous power of the government to punish his ever-growing list of political, social and cultural “enemies” for the rest of his life.

And it will be for the rest of his life because it’s clear one thing Donald Trump will never do again is allow himself to lose power. If he’s returned to the Presidency in 2024, either in a free and fair election or by installing his minions onto election boards (as he’s already done in Georgia) and having them rig the results for him, he will be President for life, either by “terminating” the 22nd Amendment or by installing one of his children as what Latin Americans call an imposición candidate. Trump has already told his followers on the Christian Right that if they vote for him in 2024, “You’ll never have to vote again.”

Kamalamania!

The Enthusiasm Is Infectious, but Can It Last Until November 5?

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

Boy, did I get it wrong when I publicly predicted on this blog that the political pressure on President Joe Biden to withdraw from his 2024 re-election campaign would sink the Democratic Party’s already slim chances of retaining the Presidency in the November 5, 2024 election.

I thought that the public pressure from various Congressional Democrats on Biden to give up his campaign would fatally destroy his odds of beating Donald Trump in 2024 as he beat him in 2020. Instead, once Biden actually withdrew in a letter (two letters, actually, one announcing his own step-down and a later missive endorsing Vice-President Kamala Harris as his replacement) on July 21, nearly a month after his bizarre and woefully weak performance in a televised debate with Trump, Biden’s withdrawal seemed to release a torrent of energy and support among grass-roots Democrats.

I had expected a fratricidal civil war within the party as various candidates jockeyed to replace Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket. I also worried about Kamala Harris’s five big weaknesses as a Presidential candidate: she’s a woman (and we all know what happened the last time Trump ran against a woman), she’s part-Black, she’s part-Asian, her 2020 Presidential campaign flamed out quickly, and through most of Biden’s term her favorability/unfavorability ratings have been even worse than his. Instead the party quickly coalesced behind Harris and she’s closed the so-called “excitement gap” that was previously favoring Trump.

She’s closed more than that. The New York Times/Siena College poll has Harris leading Trump by four points in three of the key “battleground states” that will decide the 2024 election – Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania – though other polls have the races closer than that. She’s invigorated the Democratic Party and convinced many skeptical Democrats that they now have a chance not only to keep the White House but to preserve their Senate majority (important because if the Republicans control the Senate, it’s unlikely that any Democratic appointees will be confirmed to anything) and win back the House of Representatives.

I’m writing this on Saturday, August 17, two days before the Democratic National Convention is scheduled to begin in Chicago. At this time, the convention is essentially going to give President Biden his gold watch and send him off into retirement – even though he’s still going to be President for five more months. Then it will be time to celebrate new nominee Kamala Harris and her anointed running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, who’s everything Harris isn’t: a white guy, affable and nonthreatening, who looks like he just stepped out of the world of Leave It to Beaver; a 24-year National Guard veteran; a high-school teacher and football coach.

Walz seems to have got the vice-presidential nomination ahead of the two previous favorites, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro and Arizona Senator Mark Kelly. While Minnesota isn’t considered a “battleground state” – the last time a Republican Presidential candidate carried it was 1972 – the way Pennsylvania and Arizona are, Walz’s affable middle-class values are expected to help Harris win over skeptical Midwesterners. Walz also got the nod after Shapiro’s hard-line stance for Israel in the genocidal war in Gaza, and against college students who protested it, alienated Arab-Americans and other voters crucial to Biden’s 2020 win, especially in Michigan.

Also, Harris asked Walz point-blank if he ever wanted to be President, and Walz answered, “No” – just what Harris wanted to hear, given Shapiro’s naked ambition and record of throwing his political allies under the bus to advance his own career. (For more on this read Chris Lehmann’s commentary in the August 2 The Nation at https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/josh-shapiro-vp-kamala-harris-wrong/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Daily%208.2.2024&utm_term=daily). But one of the biggest things that got Walz the nod to be Harris’s running mate is the word “weird.” He’d been posting on the Internet about Trump and his running mate, Ohio Senator and Hillbilly Elegy author J. D. Vance (who for some reason likes to refer to himself as “JD Vance”), and their “weird” ideas about the country’s future, especially about how it should treat women. The word “weird” stuck and became an Internet meme.

And both Trump and Vance seem perversely to work hard to live up to the “weird” name. Trump’s odd perorations at his rallies about electric boats and sharks, his seemingly approving mentions of Hannibal Lecter (which as far as I can tell are part of his argument that other countries are flooding the U.S. with mental patients; he seems to be saying that at least some of these immigrants are cannibals), his ongoing insistence that windmills slaughter birds and his invocation of Sarah Palin’s old slogan “Drill, baby, drill” as his solution to virtually every problem certainly sound “weird,” especially to people not locked into the Right-wing media bubble.

Vance, in turn, is on record as saying the Democratic Party is run by “childless cat ladies” and that people with children should have more votes in elections than people without. He’s on record as calling for a nationwide ban on abortion – which even Trump, who boasts about having packed the U.S. Supreme Court with Right-wing justices who reversed Roe v. Wade, realizes is a political loser – and said the only reason for post-menopausal women to exist is to help raise and take care of their grandchildren. (Vance himself was raised by his grandmother, whom he called by the oddly infantilizing name “Mamaw” – pronounced “Ma’am-awe.”)

“Project 2025”: The Right’s Apocalyptic Blueprint for America’s Future

It also doesn’t help that, while Trump is trying to distance himself from “Project 2025,” a 900-plus page white paper the ultra-Right Heritage Foundation prepared as a guidebook for the next Republican Presidency (much the way they wrote a similar document in the late 1970’s that was largely adopted as a playbook by Ronald Reagan when he took office in 1981), its executive director, Kevin Roberts, wrote a book about it called Dawn’s Early Light: Taking Back Washington to Save America. The original subtitle was Burning Down Washington to Save America. Dawn’s Early Light was scheduled to be published on September 24, but it’s been put off until after the November 5 election. As much as Trump tries to edge away from Project 2025, at least 200 people who worked on it were former members of the Trump administration – and the foreword to Dawn’s Early Light was written by J. D. Vance.

The full Project 2025 report – called Mandate for Leadership, the same title the Heritage Foundation used for the set of recommendations they gave Reagan in 1981 – is available online at https://static.project2025.org/2025_MandateForLeadership_FULL.pdf. It begins with a preface that explicitly links it to the Reagan agenda: “Today, America and the conservative [sic] movement are enduring an era of division and danger akin to the late 1970’s. Now, as then, our political class has been discredited by wholesale dishonesty and corruption. Look at America under the ruling and cultural elite today: Inflation is ravaging family budgets, drug overdose deaths continue to escalate, and children suffer the toxic normalization of Transgenderism with drag queens and pornography invading their school libraries.

“Overseas, a totalitarian Communist dictatorship in Beijing is engaged in a strategic, cultural, and economic Cold War against America’s interests, values and people – all while globalist elites in Washington awaken only slowly to that growing threat,” the preface continues. “Moreover, low-income communities are drowning in addiction and government dependence. Contemporary elites have even repurposed the worst ingredients of 1970’s ‘radical chic’ to build the totalitarian cult known today as ‘The Great Awokening.’ [No actual Leftist or liberal I know calls it that. - M.G.C.] And now, as then, the Republican Party seems to have little understanding about what to do. Most alarming at all, the very moral foundations of our society are in peril.”

Among the most alarming parts of Project 2025 are its calls for the legal redefinition of the American family to include only traditional heterosexual families: a married man and woman, and their children. “The next conservative [sic] President must make the institutions of American civil society hard targets for woke culture warriors,” Project 2025 reads. “This starts with deleting the terms sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI), diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), gender, gender equality, gender equity, gender awareness, gender-sensitive, abortion, reproductive health, reproductive rights, and any other term used to deprive Americans of their First Amendment rights out of every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation, and piece of legislation that exists.”

The document then goes on to attack pornography. “Pornography, manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of Transgender ideology and sexualization of children, for instance, is not a political Gordian knot inextricably binding up disparate claims about free speech, property rights, sexual liberation, and child welfare,” the report reads. “It has no claim to First Amendment protection.” It calls for revival of the 19th century Comstock Act, which has not been used for decades but is still on the books, not only to ban pornography but to abolish medication abortion altogether through its clause forbidding the mailing of any substance or device usable for abortion or contraception. Project 2025 also calls for abolishing the Department of Education and replacing the Department of Homeland Security with an agency more single-mindedly focused on securing the border.

One key part of the Project 2025 agenda – the blandly named “Schedule F” – was already enacted by President Donald Trump in an executive order in October 2020. This called for the removal of civil service protection for 50,000 top-level federal government employees and their reclassification as “at-will” employees whom the President could fire at any time. Trump and the architects of Project 2025 that served in his administration were frequently stymied by career bureaucrats in the federal government who were loyal to the country and the ideals of good government, not to Trump personally. (Richard Nixon had much the same problem during Watergate.) Trump’s solution was to unilaterally abolish civil-service protection for 50,000 federal workers, returning us to the so-called “spoils system” by which administrations were filled with people who owed their jobs to the party in power, and knew it.

The “spoils system” lasted until the 1880’s, when President James A. Garfield was assassinated by a man who had volunteered for his campaign in hopes of getting a job out of it, then turned bitter and angry when he didn’t. In 1883, two years after Garfield’s assassination, Congress passed the Pendleton Civil Service act, which according to Google “required government jobs to be awarded to individuals based upon merit and not political affiliation.” Because he was busy first campaigning for re-election and then, after he lost, plotting illegal means to stay in power regardless of his defeat, Trump never had the chance to implement “Schedule F,” and on January 22, 2021, two days after he took office, President Biden rescinded Trump’s executive order. But turning the apolitical federal bureaucracy into an instrument of his political will has remained a major priority of Donald Trump’s – and we can expect him to do just that if and when he returns to the White House.

Harris, Walz and “The Politics of Joy”

When Vice-President Harris announced Tim Walz as her running mate, she said at a joint campaign rally in Philadelphia, “We both believe in lifting people up, not knocking them down. Do we believe in opportunity? Do we believe in the promise of America? And are we ready to fight for it? We both know the vast majority of people in our country have so much more in common than what separates them.”

And Walz added, “Thank you for bringing back the joy.”

By contrast, Trump recently told a rally audience in Manchester, New Hampshire, “We are a nation in decline, we are a failing nation. We are a nation that has lost its confidence, its willpower and its strength. We are a nation that has lost its way.” And on his social-media site, Truth Social, he posted this screed against Governor Walz: “TIM WALZ WILL UNLEASH HELL ON EARTH! He’s already pulling in MILLIONS to WIPE MAGA OUT.”

Ordinarily, Americans like candidates who feed them a message of hope and optimism. In 1980 and especially in 1984, when he won a landslide victory and carried 49 states, Ronald Reagan’s campaign proclaimed “Morning in America” and managed to make Right-wing politics seem cool. Taking office in the middle of the Great Depression in 1933, Franklin Roosevelt said in his first inaugural address, “[T]he only thing we have to fear is fear itself — nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.”

But, according to CNN political analyst Stephen Collinson on August 7 (https://www.cnn.com/2024/08/07/politics/harris-walz-happy-warriors-analysis/index.html), “Running a campaign rooted in hopefulness and good cheer at a time when many Americans feel demoralized and tired could backfire. After all, years of decaying economic security exacerbated by high inflation and elevated grocery prices during the Biden administration created the kind of conditions in which Trump’s populist demagoguery can prosper. If the vice president misjudges the national mood, her campaign could come across as oblivious to the concerns of many voters. It was noticeable, for instance, that while Harris pledged to bring down prices and fight for the middle class, her speech on Tuesday [August 6] was light on details of exactly how she would alleviate the economic stress that many people are feeling.”

That’s exactly what happened to the Democrats in 1968, the last time an incumbent Democratic President withdrew from his re-election campaign and installed his vice-president as the party’s new nominee. After a galvanic year marked by the assassinations of civil-rights leader Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Democratic Presidential candidate Robert Kennedy, and a convention in Chicago (also where it’s going to be this year) that literally turned into a bloodbath in the streets, Hubert Humphrey emerged from the convention and proclaimed the “Politics of Joy.” Later he realized how out of touch that sounded and changed it to the “Politics of Hope,” but he lost anyway as Richard Nixon and George Wallace between them got 57 percent of the vote to Humphrey’s 43 percent (a dramatic reversal from Lyndon Johnson’s liberal landslide just four years earlier) and set the stage for a Right-wing political and economic ascendancy that has continued, with only minor interruptions, ever since.

So I’m torn about Kamala Harris, not in terms of whether to vote for her – I’ve already voted for her in every election in which I could (for California Attorney General and U.S. Senator) – but in terms of whether she can win. My heart is with her, while my head thinks it’s preposterous to believe that a part-Black, part-Asian woman who bombed badly in her first Presidential campaign (though, then again, Biden bombed in his first two) and has been generally less popular than Biden can get elected President could actually get elected President in 2024. It’s comparable to believing in Santa Claus.

So far the Right in general and Donald Trump and J. D. Vance in particular have not been able to settle on a strategy to attack Harris. Trump made a big to-do when he addressed the National Association of Black Journalists and acted – or pretended to be – surprised that Harris is now identifying as African-American. “I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn Black, and now she wants to be known as Black,” Trump said. “So, I don’t know, is she Indian or is she Black?”

For once, Trump had said something with which I could identify. I certainly knew Kamala Harris was [East] Indian-American – that first name alone gave it away – but I didn’t realize she was Black as well until she said so in an early debate in the 2020 Democratic Presidential primary campaign. At the same time I think it’s preposterous that Donald Trump is saying, “Is she Indian or is she Black?,” without considering the possibility that she could be both. I even posted on my Facebook page, “How can Kamala Harris be both Black and Indian? The same way Donald Trump can be both German and Scottish.”

But the attacks on both Harris and Walz are surely coming. Already J. D. Vance has criticized Walz for retiring from the Minnesota National Guard months before his unit was deployed to Iraq. Walz served 24 years in the National Guard and Vance served six months in the Marines, though neither of them saw combat. Walz was stationed in Italy and trained soldiers to use weapons of war, including AR-15 style rifles, while Vance did his tour of duty in a comfortable, air-conditioned office in Baghdad’s Green Zone (the ultra-exclusive American enclave which Iraqis were not allowed to enter) writing press releases.

It’s not surprising that Trump’s campaign resorted to attacking Walz’s service record given that one of his campaign managers, Chris LaCivita, was behind the heinous “Swift Boat Veterans for Truth” effort in 2004 that tarnished John Kerry’s service record in the Viet Nam war and made it at best useless and at worst counterproductive. They even trotted out the old military insult, “stolen valor,” to denounce Walz. It’s also not surprising that Walz didn’t make Kerry’s mistake of waiting three weeks to respond. Instead he was on it almost immediately, saying it was wrong for either himself or Vance to attack the other’s service record and thanking Vance “for your service and your sacrifice.”

More to the point are the attacks coming from the Trump camp against Harris for having once advocated for a single-payer “Medicare for All” health care system and a ban on fracking during her 2020 Presidential campaign. Trump’s people have claimed that these “radical” stands prove that Harris is a closet Leftist who will destroy American values and undermine our aspirations for energy independence. Only in the topsy-turvy world of American politics could supporting a guarantee of health care for all Americans (something every other advanced industrial country in the world does for its citizens) and stopping a uniquely environmentally destructive means of fossil-fuel production when we should be moving away from fossil fuels be considered negatives.

But the attacks on Harris from the Trump campaign serve a double purpose for Trump and the Republicans. At once they make her seem like a dangerous stealth radical to large numbers of Americans who have been conditioned to believe national health insurance is “socialism” and a fracking ban is a dangerous sellout to environmental extremists, and a hypocrite to progressive voters (like me) who supported her old positions and resent how she’s pulled back from them.

We can expect a nasty campaign from Donald Trump, just like the ones we got in 2016 and 2020. The more Republicans like former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy; Brendan Buck, former aide to two previous Republican Speakers (John Boehner and Paul Ryan); Republican pollster Frank Luntz; and his own former aide, Kellyanne Conway, try to tell Trump that he can win on the issues of the economy, immigration and crime, the more he launches personal insults. So far he’s questioned her racial identity, denounced her laugh as “insane,” claimed that footage of a Harris rally at a Detroit airport showing 12,000 people was faked with artificial intelligence while his own rallies are drawing the biggest crowds anybody’s ever seen (they aren’t), and even proclaimed himself “better looking” than Harris.

Antics like this, which remind many voters of why they voted for Biden over Trump in 2020, led The New Yorker’s Susan Glasser to dub Trump Harris’s most effective campaign surrogate, “Donald Trump talks about Joe Biden constantly,” Glasser said August 16 on the PBS-TV show Washington Week. “He is also almost frenetic with the shifting of the media's attention and the public's attention, the excitement and crowds that Kamala Harris has generated. He has demanded, basically, pull the spotlight back to me, me, me. And, of course, when Donald Trump then talks and talks and talks, as he did just yesterday, he gave another press conference at his home in Bedminster, and, you know, this is the opposite of a disciplined, focused message about Harris. He's making the campaign about himself in a way that is very likely to benefit the Democrats.”

Some Things to Look Forward to About Harris

From my point of view it will be really nice to see Kamala Harris, not Donald Trump, take the oath of office as President of the United States on January 20, 2025. After Trump beat Hillary Clinton in 2016 (a race I called correctly, largely on the basis that thanks to three decades of Republican propaganda attacks on her, Hillary Clinton was one of the most hated women in America) I didn’t think there’d be a serious chance of a woman getting elected President in my lifetime. Now there is. It’s also nice that Kamala Harris is a decade younger than I am. I thought I’d reached a generational milestone when Obama got elected – the first President who was younger than me (I was born in 1953, Obama in 1961) – but since then Trump (born 1946) broke Ronald Reagan’s record as the oldest elected President and Biden (born 1942) broke Trump’s.

It will also be nice to see a genuinely liberal President from California, the state where I’ve lived all my life. So far the only California-born or California-resident Presidents have been Herbert Hoover, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan: not exactly a record to be proud of. And it’ll be nice to see a part-Asian, part-Black woman be the one who denies Trump his long-hoped-for second term. In fact, Kamala Harris unwittingly personifies everything about the new, struggling-to-be-born America that Donald Trump loathes: a mixed-race woman who’s professionally competent, and who can legitimately proclaim that she once prosecuted criminals while Trump is one.

In fact, one of the things I love about what’s happening to Trump is that the charge to hold him accountable is being led largely by strong, capable, powerful Black women. New York Attorney General Letitia James brought a case against his business, the Trump Organization, and won a judgment that the entire company was a fraud. Fulton County, Georgia District Attorney Fani Willis is heading a prosecution against him for leading a “racketeer influenced and corrupt organization” in his attempt to steal the 2020 election. Washington, D.C. district court judge Tanya Chutkan is presiding over special counsel Jack Smith’s case against Trump for interfering with the 2020 election results nationwide. And now Kamala Harris has emerged as his principal opponent in the 2024 Presidential election.

In 1927 Donald Trump’s father, Fred Trump, was a member of the New York branch of the Ku Klux Klan and got arrested at one of their rallies. Donald has never let us forget that he is the son of a Klansman both literally and spiritually. I love the karmic debt Donald Trump is currently having to pay for his decades of racism, sexism, moral rot, narcissism and corruption. There’s always a chance that he’ll be able to weasel out of it once again, as he’s done so many times before, aided by a large slice of the American voting population that has virtually accepted him as a new Messiah. (After the attempted assassination on July 13, both Trump himself and a lot of Republican supporters claim he had been spared literally by divine intervention.)

But for now, it’s Harris who’s riding high, gaining in the polls and looking more and more like a winner. And that’s a good thing, too, because while Trump looks to take America backwards (his slogan remains “Make America Great Again,” or “MAGA” for short, which led Hillary Clinton in 2016 to ask rhetorically, “Just when Donald Trump think America was ‘great’ and when does he want to return us to?”), Kamala Harris and Tim Walz want to take America forward to a multi-racial, multi-cultural, environmentally responsible, economically healthy future in which every American has a shot at the dream. And isn’t that what America is supposed to be about?