As the US election enters the home straight, the happy vibes of Vice-President Kamala Harris’s late entry into the race are being tempered by a feeling of dread that a brainsick nutcase could, in three weeks, be re-elected leader of the most powerful country in the world.
The race remains a dead heat, with the seven states – Georgia, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Nevada and Arizona – that will decide the electoral college all within the margin of error. It could be that the polls have tightened thanks to an avalanche of partisan Republican surveys, but there is now a full-blown freakout and an epidemic of sleeplessness in liberal America.
The Harris campaign has done most things right, including trashing Trump in their sole debate, rolling out a policy agenda in double quick time that is exponentially more coherent than Trump’s, assembling a coalition that extends from the Alexandria Ocasio Cortez left of the Democratic Party to former Republicans like Dick and Liz Cheney, and projecting positive energy and hope for the future.
But as he has done since he came down the Trump Tower “golden” escalator in 2015, Trump continues to suck up most of the attention.
(As Pete Buttigieg eloquently described it in May 2020, he understands why people and the media are “mesmerized” by Trump’s tweets because “it is the nature of grotesque things that you can’t look away”. – Ed)
In recent weeks, Trump has gone full fascist, deploying extreme rhetoric against immigrants who he has labelled “animals” and rapists released from dungeons and mental asylums to slash the throats of hard-working Americans. He wants to execute those who repeatedly enter the US illegally.
On Saturday, Trump travelled to Coachella in the middle of California to declare that the US was “under occupation” and he would “liberate” it from “the enemy within”. This included “all the scum that we have to deal with that hate our country”.
Trump, threatening his critics with retribution, revenge and jail, wants to sic the military and the national guard on his own countrymen who he sees as bigger enemies than China or Russia.
“Kamala’s reign of terror ends the day I am elected. She is finished.”
Anyone who has been around long enough knows that this is the real Trump, and that a second term, without the minimal guardrails of the first, should scare the hell out of everyone, not just Americans.
According to the new book by Bob Woodward, General Mark Milley, the former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, believes his former commander-in-chief is a “fascist to the core” and “the most dangerous person ever”.
The journalist Aaron Rupar who has covered all of Trump’s major speeches this year has witnessed the rhetoric growing darker and darker:
“Trump’s closing message is a full blown hate campaign against black and brown people. Historians will look back in astonishment that this terrifying reality wasn’t the subject of wall to wall coverage and commentary in weeks leading up to this election. He’s not hiding anything.”
Through all the madness Trump continues to chase fast bucks. He is not even trying to hide his crypto scams, while continuing to hawk $100,000 watches and “Trump bibles” that, it now transpires, were made in China.
“This is his superpower,” the comedian Bill Maher exclaimed almost in admiration. “You don’t even notice the insanity because it’s so ubiquitous.”
Trump’s bet is that while his crazed rhetoric is too radical for suburban middle-of-the-road voters – who are being blitzed with hundreds of millions of dollars in anti-Harris television ads – he is reaching out to mostly apolitical young men who haven’t made up their minds yet.
He is hoping to rile up the Gen Z “manosphere” who are struggling to get ahead and feel society is privileging women. The campaign hopes to turn out enough of them to compensate for the sizeable number of Republicans – more than a third of those who supported Trump’s main challenger Nikki Haley in the primaries – who say they will vote for Harris.
Even some young black men are Trump-curious, and Barack Obama had sharp words for these “brothers” at a rally in Pennsylvania last week: “Part of it makes me think that you just aren’t feeling the idea of having a woman as president, and you’re coming up with other alternatives and other reasons for that,” he scolded.
It is hard to envisage the puffy, orange-faced old croaker with a ridiculous comb-over as a manly model for the bros. Rumours about incontinence spread on social media this weekend after he appeared to fart loudly during an appearance in Detroit.
His declining mental acuity finally made it on to the pages of the ultra-cautious New York Times last week (“Trump’s Speeches, Increasingly Angry and Rambling, Reignite the Question of Age”).
Elon Musk
But Trump does have a more than adequate stand-in – the South African-born oligarch Elon Musk who brings the brio that the 78-year-old may lack.
Musk, whose postings on X, the platform that he owns, are generally shallow, crude and often false, is viewed as a hero and a genius by a generation of young men who would like to be as rich, as powerful and as successful with the opposite sex as he is.
He is like a weirdo version of Bruce Wayne aka Batman, with his cool hi-tech cars and his phallic spaceships, a caped avenger coming to rescue Gotham from wokedom. (Not for nothing has his essentially undriveable Tesla truck been renamed the Incel Camino.)
Polls show that young men are more likely to be influenced by Musk’s endorsement of Trump than young women are by Taylor Swift’s endorsement of Harris. At the Coachella rally this weekend, the crowd spontaneously started chanting “E-lon, E-lon”, perhaps hoping that their great hero would emerge and frolic joyfully in the air as he did at a rally in Pennsylvania the previous week.
Musk is busily attempting to buy the election for Trump with money and lies. He has spent up to $180-million on his America PAC and has even moved to Pennsylvania to oversee Trump’s field campaign in the most critical battleground state.
He has rallied other billionaires behind Trump, and turned X into a cheerleader for the campaign, in return for which he has been promised a lead role in running and cutting the government down to size – like he did, disastrously, with X.
Abuse of truth
Trump’s actual running mate, the unlikeable JD Vance, appears to have been eased out into becoming the face of the campaign on mainstream television where he is doomed to endlessly evade the question of whether Trump lost the 2020 election.
What Musk and Trump share, apart from their egotistical and narcissistic personalities, is an aggressive abuse of the truth. And they are both driven by an insatiable desire to win at all costs.
Does Kamala Harris have what it takes to overcome this ultimate alliance of male entitlement? If she falls to the same fate as Hillary Clinton, will a major US party ever nominate a woman for president again?
Harris is being urged to be more assertive about who she is, more willing to break with her boss, President Joe Biden, and to play to her biggest strength – that she is not Donald Trump.
The New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd complained on Sunday that Harris wasn’t doing enough: “Where is the fierce urgency of beating Donald Trump?”
Campaign spokespeople are calling for calm, saying they expect the race to be neck and neck up until election day. They are resisting any urge to raise expectations, remembering how crushing it was when these were dashed when Hillary Clinton lost to Trump in 2016.
But some of the first glimpses at early voting, including vote by mail, show surprising strength for the Democrats. In Pennsylvania, according to Tom Bonier, a veteran Democratic strategist, the turnout by black women is 248 % of what it was in 2020.
Is this what we’re in for? Will black women, historically the most disenfranchised of Americans, be at the forefront of saving democracy again? DM