Kamala vs very, very old Trump – with Biden gone, it is now a real race

What a difference a day makes.

Those who had worked to see him gone are now showering Biden with praise for what all Democrats agree has been a transformative Presidency.

Biden’s determination to hang on drove the New York Times editorial page to desperation. Star columnist and fellow Catholic, Maureen Dowd, writing her fourth major piece in as many weeks insisting that he step down, almost screamed in frustration on Sunday: Lord Almighty Joe, let it go!

Ironically, the architects of this unprecedented switch at such a late stage in the election cycle to the much younger candidate are two 84-year olds: Nancy Pelosi, the House Speaker Emeritus whose great strength always was that she knew how to count the votes; and Jim Clyburn, the Congressman from South Carolina who saved Joe Biden’s faltering campaign in 2020 by mobilising the black vote behind him, having figured out that the then leading candidate, Senator Bernie Sanders, was not the man to beat Trump.

Once again, this duo worked behind the scenes not just to get Biden out of the race in a dignified manner but to do it in a way that minimised damage, ensuring that the party would come together and be unified around one crucial aim – to beat Donald Trump.

At this late stage of the game, it is unlikely that the torch will be passed to anyone other than Harris, and the pundits have instead moved on to speculating who she will pick as her Vice President.

What a difference a day makes, indeed.

From the depths of division and despair, a new and exciting prospect emerged: a black woman president Kamala Harris – and a candidate to lead the country into the middle of the 21st Century who was born just after the Second World War.

Joyce Alene, the former US attorney for Alabama, wrote: “For Donald Trump to be taken down by a black woman, a prosecutor, is the poetic justice the country has been waiting for.”

The biggest source of contention within the party was over the fate of Harris if Biden stepped down. Those most supportive of Biden, such as Congresswomen Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and the Congressional Black Caucus, suspected wealthy donors were not just trying to dump a progressive president but to bypass the black woman who was next in line.

Make no mistake, doubts over Harris were genuine. She ran a lacklustre campaign for President in 2020 and Biden never afforded her the kind of platform where she could be allowed to shine. There was also a sense that she didn’t always come across as authentic.

These concerns have receded in recent weeks as she has looked increasingly impressive on the campaign trail and moving up to be the nominee will force people to re-evaluate her.

The progressive wing of the party did not warm to Harris in 2020 because of her record as a tough-minded prosecutor in California, but 2024 is a very different political landscape.

Being tough on crime is now seen as an asset and her debate skills might convince Trump not to show up for the second presidential debate in September.

What is extraordinary is how quickly things have turned around. Just a week ago pundits were declaring that the assassination attempt on Trump had settled the election.

Now, there is a palpable mood of excitement, even joy, among some Democrats, who see this election as a real contest.

Democratic strategists were already starting to feel better after Trump’s snoozer of a speech last Thursday night at the Republican National Convention.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TqFV0lycLlo&pp=ygUXdHJhbXAgYWNjZXB0YW5jZSBzcGVlY2g%3D

All week long, Trump sat like a plump Caesar occasionally nodding off as he watched with amusement at the circus in the convention hall as the once great GOP, the party of Abraham Lincoln, prostrated itself before the rapper Kid Rock and the former professional wrestler Hulk Hogan screaming about Trumpamania.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gBjl2ZKZyC8&pp=ygUKSHVsayBIb2dhbg%3D%3D

The subtext of the whole week was that the election itself was a formality: Trump had won already. His movement was an unstoppable force.

And he had the biggest endorsement of all: God himself had spared his life only days before so that he could continue his divine work on behalf of the Almighty in the White House.

Having whipped up the Maga faithful with their hundreds of fake bandaged right ears into a crescendo of excitement, he rose to deliver what is regarded as the most vital speech of any presidential election cycle, when tens of millions of viewers beyond your usual base are waiting to see what you got.

But he blew it.

He delivered a boring 90-minute ramble that began well enough with a description of his near-death experience shooting and calls for unity, but soon descended into its usual dark themes, bald-faced lies, mad raves against “crazy Nancy Pelosi” all while continuing his weird obsession with Hannibal Lecter who “likes to have his guests for dinner.”

Trump picked the shape-shifting 39-year-old J D Vance to represent the new generation of Maga. Not to be underestimated, Vance brings much greater intellectual heft, and he seems to be an effective messenger of the new economic populism that the Republicans are rolling out to expand their base.

But for all his claims to siding with the workers and the rural poor, Vance owes his political career to the backing of right-wing Silicon Valley billionaires, three of whom spent at least part of their childhoods in South Africa, though they are better known as the PayPal Mafia.

Peter Thiel spent $15-million to get Vance elected to the Senate for Ohio in 2022; Elon Musk announced that he will be contributing $45 million a month until the election to get Trump elected; while the most influential of all, David Sacks, a boy from Cape Town whose pro-Putin speech on the first night of the convention was adjudged by the New York Times’ conservative columnist David French to be one of the worst prime-time convention speeches he had ever seen.

Mark Cuban, the entrepreneur, and former owner of the Dallas Mavericks, had his own theory of why much of Silicon Valley, once assumed to be a stronghold of libertarian and socially liberal views, now leaned towards Trump.

“It's a bitcoin play,” he says. “Not because Trump is a far stronger proponent of crypto. It makes it easier to operate a crypto business because of the changes that Trump will make at the Securities and Exchange Commission.”

He says Trump’s lower tax rates and tariffs will be inflationary which will drive the price of bitcoin higher.

Some of the biggest financial backers of Trump are not the CEOs of Fortune 500 companies but Bitcoin investors.

The more general point is that this shows that Trump and his entourage, Vance and the faux populists, and their backers in Silicon Valley, are grifters. Biden’s weakness is that he was not able to communicate this effectively.

It took Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, a close ally of Harris, just five minutes on the Bill Maher’s Real Time on Friday night to dismantle the alliance between Trump, Vance, and Silicon Valley.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7XuIEg_Y4fM

“I think we’ve made it way too complicated and it's super simple. These are very rich men who have decided to back the Republican Party that tends to do good things for very rich people.”

If Kamala Harris can communicate more of this in the months that remain before the election this will be a real contest, because the majority of the American people actually favour Democratic policies on abortion, climate change, reform of the Supreme Court, building the care economy, global alliances, rebuilding industry and taxing the rich, to name just a few.

Having Kamala Harris at the top of the ticket could also be an inspiration for the one crucial group of voters who have been ignored by the GOP for years, and especially after having had their rights taken away by Trump’s Supreme Court: the women.

Which is why it was fitting that hours after Biden’s announcement, making Trump now the oldest presidential nominee in history, E Jean Carroll, the woman he was found to have been sexually assaulted by him in the dressing room of a New York department store, was able to point out:

“Suddenly he is looking very, very old.” DM