The following is a message I sent to a friend, who had expressed dismay that I had voted for Trump over Kamala Harris.
Politics is personal. We like who we like. But sometimes we don’t even like the people we like; we just see them as preferable to the alternative.
At the same time, lots of folks are trapped in information silos, which regulate what they see, read, and hear. The increasingly centralized nature of the internet fosters this. Basically the entire legacy media collaborated to conceal the fact that Joe Biden was failing badly, for years. Until it became impossible to hide. Some of us knew it as far back as 2019 because the evidence of it was glaringly obvious in the B-roll video, which never made it to official publication but found a permanent home on the Internet.
And now of course all the people who knowingly kept the fiction alive pretend to be shocked, absolutely shocked, that Biden was in such poor condition for so long, yet allowed to continue.
The story with Ms Harris is similar. For years the legacy press has fawned over her, but glossed over some very serious concerns. You mentioned ethical. There is an entire chapter dedicated to her ethical issues in a book called Profiles in Corruption, published in 2019, by an investigative reporter named Peter Schweizer. It’s serious, disqualifying stuff. And if you had read it, you’d most likely revise your opinion of Ms Harris. I certainly did.
There is absolutely no question that Harris committed multiple quite serious ethical violations. They are part of the public record and not disputed. The only reason that Harris was not disgraced and disbarred because of them was that she happened to be the darling of the California Democrat machine.
Now you don’t get to the highest levels of politics without basically selling your soul. If we knew everything there was to know about those who would lead us we would be shocked.
But what I find interesting about Trump is that he is hated by the very same people who once loved and admired him. Right up to the moment he switched parties and took that fateful ride down the escalator, that is. Then they turned on a dime.
The list of Trump’s negatives is lengthy. He just might be the most visibly flawed President, ever. At the same time, though, he is widely misunderstood. The bluster, the name-calling, the impetuosity, the ego, are all part of his public persona. His private persona is very different, almost like another person entirely. Arguably, that’s the real Trump. Bill Maher, a die-hard California liberal, found this out directly by having dinner, and a long intense conversation with Trump. And it changed his opinion. He still opposes Trump, but no longer hates or fears him. He understands. He said all this on his show, and was roundly condemned for it by people who didn’t want to screw up a perfectly good hate with facts.
Yeah, Trump is seriously flawed. But he is also seriously gifted, and much much smarter than his critics realize. After a decades-long career of billion-dollar negotiations, he understands power in a way few people ever do. You just don’t get to that level of achievement without having some pretty serious chops.
The entire Democrat and media establishment moved heaven and earth in 2020, and then again in 2024 to defeat Trump. Millions of people worked as one, with all the energy they could muster to destroy him, crossing many bright lines in the process. Yet somehow they could not prevail. He narrowly lost the first time, but convincingly won the second. Arguably the greatest political comeback in history. An extraordinary feat of will and pure by-god determination.
“Extraordinary” is not a term that has ever been honestly applied to Kamala Harris, though. For such a high-profile person, she is remarkably unremarkable. She’s a creature of the California Machine, a closed system of insiders and party favorites. Outside that artificial environment, she flounders.
The vice-presidency is the closest thing there is to an apprenticeship for the Presidency, and hers was a disaster by any honest reckoning. She was such a bad manager that she lost 93 percent of her staff in just the first three years. She performed so poorly that she was eventually sidelined, and had her few responsibilities taken away.
She would have been far out of her depth as President. She would have been a figurehead, much as Biden was in the last couple of years. She would have rubber-stamped decisions made by the anonymous Party insiders who elevated her.
The dirty little secret is that Biden chose Harris as insurance. It was an open secret going in that Biden was already having “issues.” It was also an open secret that Harris was incapable and widely disliked. Choosing Harris to be VP made it far less palatable for Biden’s Party to remove him from office through the 25th Amendment.
Trump is a symptom, not a cause. We have him because decades of slow rot, also known as business as usual, have brought America to the brink of ruin. The control panel is flashing bright red on every indicator, while people clutch their pearls and twiddle their thumbs. People voted for Trump out of something like desperation. He at least pretended to have a plan, while Harris seemed clueless. It was an obvious choice, though not an easy one.
I don’t see a “dumpster fire.” There’s some misfires, but also some real progress. I see a guy doing his level best against a fanatically determined opposition that hates him passionately, and wants him to fail, no matter how much collateral damage. This group ignores every success and amplifies every failure. It opposes absolutely everything he does, no matter how reasonable. There is literally nothing that Trump could do that they would approve of, other than resign or die. He could cure cancer, and in a manner of minutes tens of thousands would be out in the streets demonstrating for the right to die a painful, lingering death. I’ve never seen anything like it in my life.
Maybe I’m naive, but I think Trump really does love America, sees it failing, and wants to do his part to repair it before it’s too late. He didn’t have to do this. He could have retired to Mar a Lago and had a wonderful life. That would have been the sensible thing. Instead he chose to endure utter hell, inflicted by powerful, motivated people with deep resources and few scruples.
Why do they hate him so passionately?
Yes, he’s abrasive and narcissistic and sometimes a real dick. That’s too simple, though. I think the elites hate him because he threatens the Established Order that really runs the country. This group loves power and money far above country, and he threatens their cushy grifts. And because Trump was also part of that Order for many years, he also knows where the bodies are buried. This unnerves them, because there are a LOT of bodies.
And THAT is why they oppose him.
Anyway, that’s my $0.02.