The New York Times editorial board is a group of opinion journalists whose views are informed by expertise, research, debate and certain longstanding values. It is separate from the newsroom.
By Jamelle Bouie, Opinion Columnist– November 2, 2024
Credit…Eric Ruby for The New York Times
To conclude my Friday column on the stakes of the 2024 presidential election, I quoted a passage from Sean Wilentz’s 2005 book on the rise of American democracy. Here’s the passage, which I want to quote again because it’s a great piece of prose and directly relevant to an observation I want to make.
Democracy is never a gift bestowed by benevolent, farseeing rulers who seek to reinforce their own legitimacy. It must always be fought for, by political coalitions that cut across distinctions of wealth, power and interest. It succeeds and survives only when it is rooted in the lives and expectations of its citizens and is continually reinvigorated in each generation. Democratic successes are never irreversible.
Democracy is on the ballot next Tuesday. Democracy was on the ballot four years ago, and it was on the ballot four years before that.
Will democracy ever not be on the ballot? Are we doomed to exist in a world in which every contest for national leadership has critical stakes for the American system of government?
I won’t say yes — but I won’t say no, either.
The reason I won’t say “yes” is that there is a real chance that the Republican Party will back away from the ideological hostility to democracy that defines the MAGA tendency. If Donald Trump loses — thus leading the party to its fourth consecutive defeat (in 2018, 2020, 2022 and 2024) overall in national elections — ambitious Republicans may finally decide that he and his movement are a dead end for the party. In that world, presidential elections will still have the highest stakes of any of our electoral contests, but we may not be fighting over the fate of self-government itself.
But the reason I won’t say “no” is that there will never be — and there arguably never has been — an election in which we won’t be faced with the choice of how inclusive or exclusive we want our democracy to be. Even in a hypothetical future in which the Republican Party is not led by a would-be autocrat, it will almost certainly still be a party that opposes mechanisms designed to make it easier to participate in the political process. It will still be a party that tries to use the counter-majoritarian elements of the American system to its benefit. It will still be a party that opposes the robust use of federal power to protect voting rights.
Democracy will continue to be on the ballot, in other words, because there will still be a partisan divide on whether you want democracy to be broader and more inclusive than it has been. And if we ever find ourselves in a place where that isn’t true, democracy will still be on the ballot for the simple reason that democracy is not a steady state. It will always demand that we participate and keep constant vigil.
What I Wrote
My Tuesday column was an analysis of Donald Trump’s rally at Madison Square Garden. In short, I wasn’t impressed.
I’m sure that to some observers, all of this — even the terrible racist jokes — looks like the confidence and resolve of a determined political movement. But I think it’s just the opposite. Far from showing strength, the Madison Square Garden rally showed that however vicious and virulent its leaders and supporters might be, the MAGA movement is a spent and exhausted force, even if it is not yet defeated.
My Friday column was on the stakes of the 2024 presidential election for the Constitution.
We were not given a democratic Constitution; we made one. We unraveled the elitist and hierarchical Constitution of the founders to build something that works for us — that conforms to our expectations. But nothing is permanent. What’s made can be unmade. And at the foundation of Donald Trump’s campaign is a promise to unmake our democratic Constitution.
New York Times Editorial Board Rips Apart Donald Trump in Single Paragraph
Liam Archacki – November 2, 2024
Brian Snyder
The editorial board of The New York Times just eviscerated Donald Trump in a single paragraph.
The piece, published on Saturday, was only the Times’ latest attack on the former president during the run-up to the election, but the searing indictment was all the more brutal for its brevity.
Rhetorically matter-of-fact, the piece succinctly lays out many of the reasons Trump’s critics think his second term would be disastrous for the country—the implicit point being that nobody really needs a lengthy review of all Trump’s actions; everyone already knows what he’s about.
Last week, the Times’ editorial board published a longer and nearly as scathing article urging voters not to elect Trump.
“Donald Trump has described at length the dangerous and disturbing actions he says he will take if he wins the presidency,” the piece reads. “We have two words for American voters: Believe him.”
Many major publications have endorsed Harris in the upcoming presidential election.
Another even lengthier editorial called Kamala Harris, Trump’s Democratic opponent, “the only patriotic choice for president,” citing Harris’ vow to unite the country and describing Trump as “morally unfit for an office that asks its occupant to put the good of the nation above self-interest.”
Presidential endorsements from newspapers have been a point of debate in recent political discourse after The Washington Post’s owner, billionaire Jeff Bezos, blocked the paper’s planned endorsement of Kamala Harris. The decision prompted multiple resignations from the Post’s editorial board, and significant criticism from throughout the journalism world.
The billionaire owner of The Los Angeles Times, Patrick Soon-Shiong, also controversially ordered its editorial board not to endorse a presidential candidate.
Joining the Times’ in endorsing Harris are other major publications such as The Boston Globe, The Atlantic, and The New Yorker, among others. The New York Post endorsed Trump.
What I Truly Expect if an Unconstrained Trump Retakes Power
By Michelle Goldberg, Opinion Columnist – November 1, 2024
Credit…Damon Winter/The New York Times
Lately, I’ve seen conservatives taunting liberals online by asking why, if we really think America could be on the verge of fascism, our bags aren’t packed. “It’s tempting to begin trolling my anti-Trump friends by asking if they are liquefying assets, getting passports in order, etc.?” Scott McConnell, a founding editor of The American Conservative, posted on X. National Review’s Michael Brendan Dougherty said something similarly snarky: “So fascism is here and you’re not doing what people did when fascism showed up, which is contemplating emigration in terror or joining armed resistance.”
These jabs seem meant to mock the dread many of us are living in. But despite their bad faith, they’ve lodged in my mind, especially during the late-night insomniac hours when I’m up panicking about what’s going to happen on Tuesday. They’ve goaded me to think through what I truly expect to happen if an unconstrained Donald Trump retakes power, and what it would mean to raise children in a country sick enough to give it to him.
Many people I know who have the privilege to do so are in fact making contingency plans; friends whose family histories entitle them to European passports have secured them. But while I’m having lots of half-idle conversations about emigration, I’m not living my life as if either tyranny or exile is imminent, even though I believe, in keeping with assessments by prominent generals who’ve worked closely with Trump, that he’s a fascist.
Partly, I just feel frozen with horror. This awful liminal period is like waiting for the results of a biopsy, and it’s hard to reason clearly about the future until there’s a prognosis. Beyond that, a lesson of modern autocracy is that ordinary life, or at least a diminished version of it, can go on even as democratic hopes are slowly strangled.
My single biggest fear about a Trump restoration is that he keeps his promise to carry out “the largest domestic deportation operation in American history.” As The New York Times has reported, that would mean sending ICE to carry out “workplace raids and other sweeps in public places aimed at arresting scores of unauthorized immigrants at once,” and warehousing them in a network of newly built prison camps.
If this happens, there will almost certainly be large protests. And when they break out, it is not far-fetched to think Trump would order the military to violently suppress them; the generals now warning about a second Trump term say he wanted to do just that in the past. This is what I envision when I think of MAGA fascism: people demonized as “vermin” being dragged off to camps, while dissent is violently crushed by the armed forces. I don’t know how anyone who has listened to Trump and those around him can dismiss this scenario as hysterical.
There will, I assume, be persecutions of Trump’s more high-profile enemies. We know that Trump, in his first term, harangued Attorney General Jeff Sessions to prosecute Hillary Clinton, and the ex-president and his allies have been clear about their intention to end the independence of the Justice Department. Mitt Romney is taking seriously the possibility that Trump will use the government to go after him, telling The Atlantic’s McKay Coppins, “I think he has shown by his prior actions that you can take him at his word.” Gen. Mark Milley, who was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Trump and President Biden until he retired last year, told the journalist Bob Woodward that he fears Trump could have him recalled to duty and court-martialed for disloyalty. Anyone significant enough to threaten Trump could find themselves targeted.
And it won’t be only the powerful who need fear attacks by the MAGA state. Just look at those who’ve found themselves in the cross hairs of America First Legal, an organization headed by the former Trump aide Stephen Miller, which The New York Times called “a policy harbinger for a second Trump term.” It has sued charities that help women pay for abortions, Maryland schools that “expose children to radical gender ideology,” and “woke” corporations — including the N.F.L. — trying to increase diversity. In a second Trump term, Miller and his allies will be able to deploy the power of agencies including the Justice Department, the Department of Education and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission against their foes.
Often, of course, they won’t have to; we’re already seeing troubling signs that some plutocrats are obeying in advance. The Washington Post’s decision to quash its editorial board’s endorsement of Kamala Harris shocked so many of the paper’s readers because it seemed, despite the Post owner Jeff Bezos’ insistence to the contrary, like an act of corrupt capitulation.
As The Post itself has reported, Bezos’ companies have billions of dollars in government contracts at stake, and during the last Trump administration, the president went out of his way to punish the billionaire for Post coverage he didn’t like. In 2019, The Post reported, Marc Short, then Mike Pence’s chief of staff, told leaders of Bezos’ space exploration company, “You have a Washington Post problem.”
The transition from democracy to autocracy is a process, not an on-off switch. By the end of Trump’s first term, when the president was pressuring state officials to change vote totals, staffing the highest levels of government with thugs and lackeys, and, eventually, siccing a vigilante mob on the Capitol, we’d already gone farther on the path to authoritarianism than I’d once thought possible. The place we left off at in January 2021 will, in all likelihood, be the starting point for a Trump administration in 2025.
Johnny McEntee, who started as a Trump bag carrier, had by the end of Trump’s presidency become so powerful that some referred to him as the “deputy president.” As The Atlantic reported, he turned the Presidential Personnel Office, an agency in charge of hiring and firing political appointees, “into an internal police force, obsessively monitoring administration officials for any sign of dissent, purging those who were deemed insufficiently devoted to Trump and frightening others into silence.”
Now a leader of Project 2025, McEntee will most likely have a major role in staffing a new Trump White House. He recently called — with the kidding-not-kidding sneer common to MAGA — for scrapping the 19th Amendment, the one giving women the right to vote.
Days out from the election, pointing out the potential nightmares ahead feels like screaming into a void. Trump’s deep contempt for liberal democracy is, as they say, baked in. When Milley called Trump “fascist to the core,” and when Gen. John Kelly, a former Trump chief of staff, said that he wanted to rule as a dictator, the political debate wasn’t about whether they were correct, but about whether their words would matter. (The consensus seemed to be no.) So those of us who recognize what Trump is lurch forward to Tuesday, a coin flip away from losing what we thought was our democratic birthright, trying and often failing to think through the aftermath of the unthinkable.
But even if the unthinkable happens, it won’t happen all at once. Hannah Arendt wrote, in “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” about how the dislocations of World War I created a mass of stateless people who lived “outside the pale of the law.” Seeing these people deprived of human rights, those secure in their citizenship did not generally worry about their own. “It was precisely the seeming stability of the surrounding world that made each group forced out of its protective boundaries look like an unfortunate exception to an otherwise sane and normal rule,” wrote Arendt.
My kids keep asking anxiously what will happen if Trump wins. I tell them that their lives won’t change, that we’ll have to try to stand up for others who are more vulnerable, but that we ourselves will be fine. The last two words I only say in my head: “For now.”
Michelle Goldberg has been an Opinion columnist since 2017. She is the author of several books about politics, religion and women’s rights, and was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize for public service in 2018 for reporting on workplace sexual harassment.
By Jamelle Bouie, Opinion Columnist– November 1, 2024
Credit…Damon Winter/The New York Times
What does it mean to say that “democracy is on the ballot” on Election Day?
In her speech on Tuesday in Washington, D.C., delivered from the same place near the White House where Donald Trump incited a crowd to attack the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, Vice President Kamala Harris said it was a question of whether Americans “have a country rooted in freedom for every American” or whether they have one “ruled by chaos and division.”
It was a question, she said later in her remarks, of whether the United States would “submit to the will of another petty tyrant” and become a “vessel for the schemes of wannabe dictators.”
The vice president was not wrong. Election Day will be a referendum on whether we want an autocrat in office — a plebiscite, of sorts, on the very idea of government of the people, by the people and for the people. But Harris’s answer is incomplete. Also at stake on Tuesday, when it comes to the question of American democracy, is the future of the Constitution.
Will it continue into the 21st century as Frederick Douglass’s “glorious liberty document,” or will it legitimize an American-style authoritarianism as a new “covenant with death,” to use the words of Douglass’s erstwhile abolitionist ally, William Lloyd Garrison.
It is important to remember that the Constitution was neither written nor ratified with democracy in mind. Just the opposite: It was written to restrain — and contain — the democratic impulses of Americans shaped in the hothouse of revolutionary fervor.
“Most of the men who assembled at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787 were also convinced that the national government under the Articles of Confederation was too weak to counter the rising tide of democracy in the states,” the historian Terry Bouton writes in “Taming Democracy: ‘The People,’ the Founders, and the Troubled Ending of the American Revolution.”
The framers’ Constitution would tamp down on and bind the democratic energies of those Americans who thought their revolution stood for something more egalitarian — more revolutionary — than what its leaders and leading figures imagined. It would channel democratic energy through divided institutions backstopped by counter-majoritarian rules and requirements, each designed to make it as difficult as possible to turn popular energy into governing majorities.
In short, the founders built a limited, exclusionary government centered on elite management of the people’s affairs. But by the start of the 19th century, it was clear that the people would not allow the Constitution to contain their democratic impulses and aspirations. The American Republic would not be as limited or as exclusive as the framers had envisioned.
Broad literacy and the wide availability of newspapers, pamphlets and books brought a vibrant culture of political debate and contestation. The emergence of organized political factions and, later, formal political parties brought large numbers of Americans into the political process, transforming the very nature of the union.
As Americans democratized their culture, their Constitution followed. They reshaped their constitutional order around political parties and embraced mass political participation as an integral part of the system.
You can see the vibrancy of this early form of American democracy, as exclusive as it still was, in the multitude of movements and minor parties that emerged throughout the antebellum period. There were Know-Nothings and Anti-Masons and Free Soilers, Liberty Party partisans and groups like the Wide Awakes.
“In America,” Alexis de Tocqueville observed during his tour of Jacksonian America, “democracy is given over to its own inclinations. Its pace is natural and all its movements are free.”
Out of the contradictions of America’s nascent democracy came a catastrophic civil war. And out of the practical and ideological demands of that war came the most expansive and, to that date, most inclusive vision yet for American democracy, encoded in a set of amendments that reconstituted the union as a nation. The 13th Amendment abolished chattel slavery. The 14th Amendment enshrined birthright citizenship and guaranteed the “privileges and immunities” of that citizenship. And the 15th Amendment outlawed racial discrimination in voting, giving Congress all the authority it needed to enforce that prohibition.
It should be said here that it wasn’t simply the act of amendment that changed and further democratized the Constitution. A political document as much as a legal one, its character and meaning are realized as much through practice and the everyday challenge of making it work as they are in law and legislation. Which is to say that if the Constitution that emerged out of the Civil War was more democratic than the one that helped produce that war, a good part of that was because Americans themselves, like the freed people of the South, fought to realize their democratic aspirations.
They were joined, in subsequent decades, by Americans of many other backgrounds. Over the next century and through great effort, American democracy would grow in fits and starts to include women and a broad variety of immigrant groups. And while Black Americans would suffer under the long night of Jim Crow, they would continue their struggle for equality, inclusion and recognition.
We were not given a democratic Constitution; we made one. We unraveled the elitist and hierarchical Constitution of the founders to build something that works for us — that conforms to our expectations.
But nothing is permanent. What’s made can be unmade. And at the foundation of Donald Trump’s campaign is a promise to unmake our democratic Constitution.
Consider his priorities. He wants to use the law enforcement arm of the federal government to harass his opponents and exact “retribution” on his political enemies.
“I will appoint a real special prosecutor to go after the most corrupt president in the history of the United States of America, Joe Biden, and the entire Biden crime family,” Trump said last year. In September he threatened “Lawyers, Political Operatives, Donors, Illegal Voters, & Corrupt Election Officials” with “long-term prison sentences” if they are found guilty of voter fraud, which Trump seems to equate with any form of political opposition.
Trump also wants to deport tens of millions of people from the United States, which will inevitably include American citizens, whether they’re the children of undocumented immigrants or students demonstrating in support of Palestinians. “Immediately after taking the oath of office, I will launch the largest mass deportation program in American history,” Trump said at an event in Texas last week.
To accomplish this, the former president intends to use the 1798 Alien Enemies Act, which allows the president to detain and deport noncitizens from countries at war with the United States. The idea, if it needs to be spelled out, is to classify undocumented immigration as an act of war and use the law to remove foreign nationals from the United States without due process. To obtain the personnel necessary to carry out deportations on such a large, national scale, Trump would deputize local and state law enforcement as well as deploy the National Guard.
It is not just that Trump would attempt these power grabs — which would, on their own, introduce a level and degree of state repression heretofore unseen in American history — but that he would have the support of a legal and political movement eager to constitutionalize his actions as a legitimate exercise of presidential power. Trump would act in an authoritarian manner, and his allies would then write that authoritarianism into the Constitution.
That, in fact, is what the Supreme Court did in Trump v. Hawaii, when it turned a blind eye to the clear evidence of racial and religious bigotry driving the former president’s “travel ban” (neé Muslim ban) and freed the administration to impose its restrictions under a theory of broad (or perhaps a better word would be “credulous”) deference to the executive branch.
The court took a similar approach this year in Trump v. United States, when it gave the president a broad grant of criminal immunity from prosecution for “official acts.” Rather than reckon with the overwhelming evidence that Trump abused the office of the presidency in an illegal effort to overturn the results of an election he lost, what is in effect the Republican majority on the court turned the plain meaning of the Constitution on its head, freeing future presidents — including, perhaps, a future President Trump — to abuse their power under cover of law.
More so than most of his predecessors, Trump strained against the limits of the presidency. He never understood that the office was bound by higher law — that his power wasn’t absolute. He never understood that he was an officer of the Constitution and a servant of the people; he never understood that he was a subject and not the sovereign.
It was because of this fundamental misunderstanding — itself tied to his bottomless solipsism — that Trump tried to twist and turn the presidency into an extension of his ego. To the extent he failed to accomplish this, it was only because he was stymied by those around him — officials who chose to honor their commitment to the Constitution over the interests of one man. Those same officials now warn that if he is given another term in office, he will rule as a tyrant.
America got lucky. It won’t get lucky again. Free of the guardrails that kept him in place the first time, affirmed by the Supreme Court and backed by allies and apparatchiks in the conservative movement, Trump will merge the office of the presidency with himself. He will shake it from its moorings in the Constitution and rebuild it as an instrument of his will, wielded for his friends and against his enemies. In doing so, he will erode the democratic assumptions that undergird our current constitutional order. And he will have the total loyalty of a Republican Party that itself is twisting and abusing the counter-majoritarian features of the American system to undermine and unravel democracy in the states it controls.
“Democracy is never a gift bestowed by benevolent, farseeing rulers who seek to reinforce their own legitimacy,” the historian Sean Wilentz writes in “The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln”:
It must always be fought for, by political coalitions that cut across distinctions of wealth, power and interest. It succeeds and survives only when it is rooted in the lives and expectations of its citizens and is continually reinvigorated in each generation. Democratic successes are never irreversible.
Most Americans have lived only in a world where democracy was secure, where democracy was assumed. On Tuesday we’ll decide if we want to stay in that world or leave it behind.
The Sun endorses Kamala Harris and Tim Walz to lead the nation
The Las Vegas Sun – October 20, 2024
Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris and running mate Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz join hands during a rally at the Thomas & Mack Center Saturday, Aug. 10, 2024.
The upcoming presidential election presents a pivotal moment for the United States, offering a choice between preserving democracy or sliding into autocracy.
The Republican Party has nominated a womanizing narcissist and aspiring dictator as its candidate. He and his supporters believe in trampling on the rights of women, providing greater protections to guns than schoolchildren, silencing the history and existence of people of color and LGBTQ+ people, forcing working class families and seniors to choose between food and medicine and ceaselessly attacking the immigrants who dream of a better life.
The Democratic Party, on the other hand, has nominated a leader who will fight to preserve the rights and institutions that have made the United States the envy of the world while championing the promise of the American dream. She believes in fighting for the rights of women to choose what happens to their body, protecting children from criminals armed with weapons of war, preserving Social Security and health care programs that Americans have paid into their entire lives, giving a helping hand to those in need and creating pathways to citizenship for immigrants who contribute to our economy and our communities.
Kamala Harris represents a bridge between the measured approach of Joe Biden and the hunger for change that drove millions to support Donald Trump. While we understand the belief held by many Americans that they are being left behind, Trump is not the answer. His disregard for democratic institutions, tarnishing of the judiciary and inability to conceive of a government that serves anyone or anything beyond his personal interests are the hallmarks of an aspiring dictator. Harris, on the other hand, offers the stability and confidence of a veteran public servant and the bold vision, energy and adaptability that is needed in a rapidly evolving world.
As vice president, Harris has proven herself a capable ambassador who will strengthen America’s alliances and project a position of strength to our adversaries. For a nation still recovering from the damage to its international standing under Trump, Harris represents a return to stronger ties to our allies, determined resistance to our enemies, principled diplomacy and a strong defense of democratic values. She will not coddle our enemies and betray our friends as Trump did.
Harris’ work in the U.S. Senate reinforced her credentials as a champion for middle-class and working families. She supported legislation that aimed to lower health care costs, protect Social Security and Medicare, and expand affordable housing — issues that resonate with older Americans who have spent their lives contributing to society and now seek dignity in their twilight years. Harris’ push for measures to combat climate change, from reducing greenhouse gas emissions to investing in clean energy, aims to address not only immediate health concerns but also an understanding of the long-term effects that current policies will have on future generations.
A former prosecutor and California attorney general, Harris has demonstrated a commitment to public safety while championing reforms that aimed to make the justice system more equitable. Her tenure focused not only on holding wrongdoers accountable but also on creating pathways to rehabilitation — policies that resonate with voters who believe in the Constitution’s promise of safety, security and accountability that are balanced against liberty, fairness and a commitment to second chances for those who earn them.
Yet, it is not just her experience that makes Harris the right choice — it is also her vision. As the child of immigrants and the first woman of color to serve as vice president, she has already made history and inspired a new generation to believe in the promise of American democracy. Those experiences have inspired her vision of a government more representative of the people it serves — no matter their social, cultural, geographic or economic background.
At the Democratic National Convention, she spoke of rebuilding the middle class and creating an “opportunity economy where everyone has the chance to compete and a chance to succeed.” Tellingly, she accepted the nomination for the presidency on behalf of “every American, regardless of party, race, gender or the language your grandmother speaks,” “everyone who has ever set out on their own unlikely journey,” and “people who work hard, chase their dreams and look out for one another.”
This language reflects Harris’ understanding that every American has a story to tell and that many of those stories share the common threads of overcoming hardship through hard work and the strength and support of family and community. She is genuinely interested in those stories, interested in who we are as Americans, what we want our future and our children’s future to look like and what she can do to help realize those dreams.
For American women, the ability to pursue a vision of their own choosing is growing increasingly difficult as dozens of states with GOP-controlled legislatures impose oppressive restrictions on women’s rights to control their own bodies and receive lifesaving medical care.
Beyond reproductive rights, women also continue to bear the brunt of lawmakers’ failure to support paid family leave, affordable child care, an extension of the child tax credit or even the Equal Pay Act. While in the Senate, Harris sponsored or cosponsored legislation championing each of these issues.
Older voters too have a particular stake in a Harris presidency. With Social Security and Medicare facing long-term funding challenges, the nation needs a leader who will protect and strengthen these programs. Harris has pledged to do so while opposing efforts to privatize or cut benefits. Furthermore, her emphasis on affordable prescription drug pricing is an issue of immediate relevance to all of us, but especially seniors who often struggle with high health care costs.
Her vice-presidential running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, shares Harris’ vision for leadership and governance that serves all Americans. It’s what inspired him to become a high school teacher, a football coach, an adviser to the school’s gay-straight alliance and a mentor to generations of young people trying to navigate decisions about the next steps in their soon-to-be adult lives. Walz also carried that vision into the governor’s office, where he cut taxes for the middle class, expanded access to prekindergarten and ensured that no child would go hungry at school, all while balancing the state budget.
Just as Harris stands in sharp contrast to Trump, Walz stands in sharp contrast to Trump’s running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance. From what we can tell, Vance’s only notable accomplishments since graduating from Yale Law School in 2013 have been helping billionaire venture capitalists make more money; founding a charity that didn’t help anyone except for Vance, who used it as a front for his political ambitions; and serving as an advisory board member for an organization that helped create the Project 2025 plan to destroy democracy and eliminate numerous civil rights.
Some readers might ask why we don’t note Vance’s time in the U.S. Senate among his accomplishments, but the reality is that he has accomplished nothing as a senator. Not even one of the 57 legislative bills Vance authored passed the Senate. Of course, Vance’s failure to do his job while collecting a taxpayer-funded salary is also likely related to his spending the past two years licking the boots of Trump and spreading bizarre and hateful theories about women in American life and inventing disgusting stories about Haitian immigrants. Vance’s bigotry does not appear to have a bottom, nor does his craven opportunism have limits.
The fact that Trump chose Vance as his running mate while Harris chose Walz underscores the differences in their judgment. While Harris seeks a commitment to public service and common good, Trump seeks nothing more than a “yes man” who can fulfill his pathetic need to be surrounded by people who stroke his ego and are willing to hate anyone Trump wants him to hate. Worse, Vance has made it clear that if faced with the same choice that Mike Pence faced when Congress was certifying the Electoral College vote, Vance would soil the Constitution for Trump.
It’s telling that Trump and Vance speak of America in the darkest terms and invent one imaginary crisis after another. They describe a chaotic, violent and evil America that is nothing like the lived experience of our citizens. They are lying. And like a long list of political villains before them, they trade in fear for power’s sake.
Harris and Walz on the other hand, don’t shirk from the challenge to improve policies and programs that need to be improved. But when they look at America and they describe their vision, it is filled with hope, inclusion and mending the wounds that have been inflicted by political vandals like Trump. The contrast could not be more stark: Harris and Walz love this country, its people and its freedom, Trump and Vance only want to own it. Harris looks at Americans and sees promise and opportunity that should be nurtured. This is what this nation needs in a leader.
One can’t ignore the striking differences in economic policies either. Trump’s crazed plan to institute massive tariffs to support his equally crazed plan for multitrillion-dollar tax cuts will doom America to a deep recession and burden future generations with trillions of dollars in additional deficit spending. His tariffs will cause massive inflation as the costs of the tariffs are passed on to American consumers and American companies. They will also result in retaliation from other nations targeting U.S. business and industry, crippling our economy.
We need to be clear-eyed on this: Trump’s tariff plans are not workable and not serious. They will deliver gigantic wealth to the richest Americans today, while saddling future generations with the bill for Trump’s debt. It’s a grift on a multitrillion dollar scale. Trump has bankrupted nearly all of his businesses; his current proposals will bankrupt this country for a generation or more. Virtually every responsible economist who has analyzed Trump’s plans warns of disaster if he’s allowed to get ahold of our economy again.
Harris, meanwhile, wants to ensure the middle class can thrive with detailed proposals to improve home affordability, small business creation and guarantees not to raise taxes on the middle class. While we believe her plans need further refinement in a variety of areas because the deficits are larger than we would like (but a fraction of the deficit spending Trump, the king of bankruptcies, has in mind) we have absolute faith in the idea that Harris will pull together a coalition of the brightest minds to bring about the strong economy that America deserves. When Harris speaks of an “opportunity economy,” she is serious.
In choosing Harris, Americans have an opportunity to elect a candidate who embodies both steadiness and a commitment to optimistic change. Her career is defined by a dedication to justice and equity, and her vision for the country prioritizes the needs of everyday Americans over the interests of the elite. She has shown she can rise to the moment and unite the country across generational and racial divides. Her leadership promises a government that works for all, restoring trust in public institutions while forging a path to a fairer, more sustainable future.
We can, in other words, choose to vote to make life better by putting people in office who believe in America and its people. Or we can vote to put people in office who want to divide further into camps, who have enemies lists, promise to put troops in the street and retaliate for dissent and repression.
That’s not a hard choice.
The country stands at a crossroads. A vote for Harris is a vote for renewal, stability and a government that genuinely serves the people. It is time for a leader who represents progress without abandoning the values that have long defined America. Kamala Harris is ready to take the helm and steer the nation forward. Americans deserve it. America demands it.
Vice President Kamala Harris, before tens of thousands at the Ellipse near the White House, said Tuesday night: “The United States of America is the greatest idea humanity ever devised. A nation big enough to encompass all our dreams, strong enough to withstand any fracture or fissure between us. And fearless enough to imagine a future of possibilities.”
Hmm. Hard to tease out the nuanced distinction between Harris’ graceful rhetoric about the greatness of our country and Trump’s “We suck.” But the difference is there, I promise.
Kamala Harris offers unity and inspiration as Donald Trump divides and demeans
Democratic Presidential nominee Kamala Harris campaigns at the Ellipse near the White House on Oct. 29, 2024, to give her closing arguments before Election Day.
The former president was coming off a weekend rally at Madison Square Garden in New York City that featured vile racism, profanity and enough hate speech to, I would hope, anger God. The “giant garbage can” line has become a part of his schtick, as he paints America as a crime-ridden nation overrun by immigrant gang members, rapists and murderers.
It’s all hogwash, of course, but it’s all he’s got. That and the lies he emits like a flatulent prune-farm dog.
Harris spoke from the same place where Trump, on Jan. 6, 2021, fomented an attack on the U.S. Capitol. The location was wholly intentional, as was her infinitely more mature and unifying message.
“America, for too long we have been consumed with too much division, chaos, and mutual distrust,” she said. “And it can be easy then to forget a simple truth: It doesn’t have to be this way. … It is time to stop pointing fingers. We have to stop pointing fingers and start locking arms. It is time to turn the page on the drama and the conflict, the fear and division.”
Vice President Kamala Harris and second gentleman Doug Emhoff wave to supporters after her presidential campaign speech at the Ellipse near the White House on Oct. 29, 2024.
Chaos and mutual distrust? Conflict, fear and division?
What could she be talking about?
Trump says fellow Americans represent ‘a great evilness’
Earlier in the day, Trump said of Democrats: “This is a sick group of people, I’m telling you. There’s a great evilness. You know, we want to come together as a country, but there’s a lot of evil there.”
At his night rally in Allentown, he continued going after Democrats: “Who the hell can win an election with open borders, transgender everybody, men playing in women’s sports? … Allow millions of people through an open border totally unvetted, totally unchecked, they come from parts unknown, they come from countries you’ve never even heard of, and then you find out that they came from jails and mental institutions, no, no, they cheat like hell and it’s a damn disgrace.”
Former President Donald Trump campaigns for reelection on Oct. 29, 2024, in Allentown, Pa.
Oh, I see, that’s the fear and chaos and divsion Harris referenced.
After hearing Trump’s rambling, I wish she had said, “We have to stop pointing fingers, and also stop using run-on sentences filled with weird fabricated nonsense.”
Harris, by contrast, said this from the Ellipse: “The fact that someone disagrees with us does not make them the enemy within. They are family, neighbors, classmates, co-workers. They are fellow Americans, and as Americans, we rise and fall together.”
She also said: “Unlike Donald Trump, I don’t believe people who disagree with me are the enemy. He wants to put them in jail. I’ll give them a seat at the table.”
Harris’ humility vs. Trump’s hubris
Harris showed humility – something Trump is allergic to – during her speech: “Look, I’ll be honest with you, I’m not perfect. I make mistakes.”
Trump, earlier in the day Tuesday, described people who may or not exist allegedly telling him how wonderful he is: “They said he’s the greatest president we’ve ever had. And then one of them said, ‘Sir, you’re the greatest president of my lifetime.’ … I said, ‘Does that include Abe Lincoln?’ Yes, sir. ‘Does that include George Washington?’ Yes, sir. I said, ‘That’s good.’ ”
The differences are stark as day and night
Harris said: “Donald Trump has spent a decade trying to keep people divided and afraid of each other. That is who he is.”
Fact check: True.
She continued, “But America, I am here to say: That’s not who we are.”
That part will be determined next week. It’s grace vs. the garbage can.
Here is The Atlantic’s endorsement of Kamala Harris, first published on October 10, 2024. For the third time in eight years, Americans have to decide whether they want Donald Trump to be their president. No voter could be ignorant by now of who he is. Opinions about Trump aren’t just hardened—they’re dried out and exhausted. The man’s character has been in our faces for so long, blatant and unchanging, that it kills the possibility of new thoughts, which explains the strange mix of boredom and dread in our politics. Whenever Trump senses any waning of public attention, he’ll call his opponent a disgusting name, or dishonor the memory of fallen soldiers, or threaten to overturn the election if he loses, or vow to rule like a dictator if he wins. He knows that nothing he says is likely to change anyone’s views.
Almost half the electorate supported Trump in 2016, and supported him again in 2020. This same split seems likely on November 5. Trump’s support is fixed and impervious to argument. This election, like the last two, will be decided by an absurdly small percentage of voters in a handful of states.
Because one of the most personally malignant and politically dangerous candidates in American history was on the ballot, The Atlantic endorsed Trump’s previous Democratic opponents—only the third and fourth endorsements since the magazine’s founding, in 1857. We endorsed Abraham Lincoln for president in 1860 (though not, for reasons lost to history, in 1864).
One hundred and four years later, we endorsed Lyndon B. Johnson for president. In 2016, we endorsed Hillary Clinton for more or less the same reason Johnson won this magazine’s endorsement in 1964. Clinton was a credible candidate who would have made a competent president, but we endorsed her because she was running against a manifestly unstable and incompetent Republican nominee. The editors of this magazine in 1964 feared Barry Goldwater less for his positions than for his zealotry and seeming lack of self-restraint.
Of all Trump’s insults, cruelties, abuses of power, corrupt dealings, and crimes, the event that proved the essential rightness of the endorsements of Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden took place on January 6, 2021, when Trump became the first American president to try to overturn an election and prevent the peaceful transfer of power.
This year, Trump is even more vicious and erratic than in the past, and the ideas of his closest advisers are more extreme. Trump has made clear that he would use a second term to consolidate unprecedented power in his own hands, punishing adversaries and pursuing a far-right agenda that most Americans don’t want. “We believe that this election is a turning-point in our history,” the magazine prophesied correctly when it endorsed Abraham Lincoln in 1860.
This year’s election is another. About the candidate we are endorsing: The Atlantic is a heterodox place, staffed by freethinkers, and for some of us, Kamala Harris’s policy views are too centrist, while for others they’re too liberal. The process that led to her nomination was flawed, and she’s been cagey in keeping the public and press from getting to know her as well as they should.
But we know a few things for sure. Having devoted her life to public service, Harris respects the law and the Constitution. She believes in the freedom, equality, and dignity of all Americans. She’s untainted by corruption, let alone a felony record or a history of sexual assault. She doesn’t embarrass her compatriots with her language and behavior, or pit them against one another. She doesn’t curry favor with dictators. She won’t abuse the power of the highest office in order to keep it. She believes in democracy. These, and not any specific policy positions, are the reasons The Atlantic is endorsing her.
This endorsement will not be controversial to Trump’s antagonists. Nor will it matter to his supporters. But to the voters who don’t much care for either candidate, and who will decide the country’s fate, it is not enough to list Harris’s strengths or write a bill of obvious particulars against Trump. The main reason for those ambivalent Americans to vote for Harris has little to do with policy or partisanship. It’s this: Electing her and defeating him is the only way to release us from the political nightmare in which we’re trapped and bring us to the next phase of the American experiment.
Trump isn’t solely responsible for this age of poisonous rhetoric, hateful name-calling, conspiracies and lies, divided families and communities, cowardly leaders and deluded followers—but as long as Trump still sits atop the Republican Party, it will not end. His power depends on lowering the country into a feverish state of fear and rage where Americans turn on one another. For the millions of alienated and politically homeless voters who despise what the country has become and believe it can do better, sending Trump into retirement is the necessary first step.
If you’re a conservative who can’t abide Harris’s tax and immigration policies, but who is also offended by the rottenness of the Republican Party, only Trump’s final defeat will allow your party to return to health—then you’ll be free to oppose President Harris wholeheartedly. Like you, we wish for the return of the Republican Party of Ronald Reagan, Bob Dole, John McCain, and Mitt Romney, a party animated by actual ideas. We believe that American politics are healthiest when vibrant conservative and liberal parties fight it out on matters of policy.
If you’re a progressive who thinks the Democratic Party is a tool of corporate America, talk to someone who still can’t forgive themselves for voting for Ralph Nader in 2000—then ask yourself which candidate, Harris or Trump, would give you any leverage to push for policies you care about.
And if you’re one of the many Americans who can’t stand politics and just want to opt out, remember that under democracy, inaction is also an action; that no one ever has clean hands; and that, as our 1860 editorial said, “nothing can absolve us from doing our best to look at all public questions as citizens, and therefore in some sort as administrators and rulers.” In other words, voting is a right that makes you responsible.
Trump is the sphinx who stands in the way of America entering a more hopeful future. In Greek mythology, the sphinx killed every traveler who failed to answer her riddle, until Oedipus finally solved it, causing the monster’s demise. The answer to Trump lies in every American’s hands. Then he needs only to go away.
Former President Trump called fascist; what does term mean?
Wes Woods II, Ventura County Star – October 29, 2024
Former White House Chief of Staff John Kelly called his former boss and 2024 presidential candidate Donald Trump a fascist, a term that’s getting a closer look.
“Well, looking at the definition of fascism: It’s a far-right authoritarian, ultranationalist political ideology and movement characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy,” he said.
Kelly said the definition described Trump.
“So certainly, in my experience, those are the kinds of things that he thinks would work better in terms of running America,” he said.
Kelly added: “Certainly the former president is in the far-right area, he’s certainly an authoritarian, admires people who are dictators — he has said that. So he certainly falls into the general definition of fascist, for sure.”
President Donald Trump and White House chief of staff John Kelly in 2017.
Did Trump respond?
Former President Trump criticized Kelly on his social media site Truth Social on Wednesday afternoon.
“Thank you for your support against a total degenerate named John Kelly, who made up a story out of pure Trump Derangement Syndrome Hatred!” Trump wrote. “John Kelly is a LOWLIFE, and a bad General, whose advice in the White House I no longer sought, and told him to MOVE ON!”
“Yes, I do,” she said at a CNN Town Hall event with Anderson Cooper. “And I also believe that the people who know him best on this subject should be trusted.”
What is fascism?
According to the Merriam-Webster dictonary, fascism is “a populist political philosophy, movement, or regime that exalts nation and often race above the individual, that is associated with a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, and that is characterized by severe economic and social regimentation and by forcible suppression of opposition.”
According to the Cambridge dictionary, the word means “a political system based on a very powerful leader, state control, and being extremely proud of country and race, and in which political opposition is not allowed.”
According to dictionary.com, it means “a governmental system led by a dictator having complete power, forcibly suppressing opposition and criticism, regimenting all industry, commerce, etc., and emphasizing an aggressive nationalism and often racism.”
Jimmy Kimmel Makes Plea to Republicans Ahead of Election: “This Is About Sanity and Security and Democracy”
Carly Thomas – October 29, 2024
Jimmy Kimmel kicked off his latest episode of Jimmy Kimmel Live! with a message directly for moderate Republicans.
Ahead of the show, the host posted on social media, asking for people to “ask a Republican you love” to watch Wednesday night, as he has a “special monologue” for them.
“I assume you’re watching this because you care about the person who asked you to watch it, or maybe you’re just open-minded and not afraid to hear somebody who might not agree with you speak,” Kimmel said to kick off the show. “Either way, thank you for giving me 15 minutes of your life to talk about Donald Trump. Maybe you love him, and you’ll vote for him no matter what he says or what he does. Maybe you hate the other side so much you’ll look past anything he says or does. Or maybe there’s a little voice in the back of your head saying, ‘I might not want this guy driving the bus.’”
The host continued, “But what I’m asking you to hear isn’t what I have to say, that doesn’t matter. I want you to hear what he’s saying. Most Americans — and you are probably one of them — don’t have time to watch his rallies and his speeches and all the interviews. because you have other things to do. But I don’t have other things to do. This is all I have to do. And because I don’t have other things to do, I’ve seen all or at least part of every interview, every speech, every all-caps social media post from this man for the past nine years.”
Over the nearly 20-minute monologue on Wednesday’s episode, Kimmel made a point to only “focus on words that came out of his [Trump’s] mouth.” He played dozens of clips of the former president making comments about a range of topics, including his health care plan he’s been teasing since 2016, childcare, windmills as well as things that are “not real.”
“Aren’t you supposed to be running for President? Aren’t you supposed to be worried about important topics? Kimmel asked at one point. “And here’s the thing, it’s kind of funny, these silly, random rants of his, and it would be fine if he was hosting a podcast or selling knives at the farmers market. But he’s supposed to be leading us. People are listening to him and the country is getting crazier because he makes it OK to be nuts.”
Later, the host emphasized how presidents typically don’t sell products. However, there’s one “who sells a lot of them.” Kimmel proceeded to show a video montage of all of Trump’s ads for products he sells, including Trump coins, coffee table book, trading cards and a “God Bless the USA” bible, among others.
After also noting that several Republicans and former Trump administration members have confessed they’re not endorsing Trump this election, Kimmel began to wrap up his monologue with a message.
“Either he doesn’t care about the truth or he has a hard time understanding what the truth is. Both very bad options!” he said. “So now we have an election on Tuesday, and Trump has made it very clear that if he wins, it was an honest election. And if he loses, it was a rigged election.”
Kimmel continued, “He has no plan to lower grocery prices or to make us safer or to protect the border. The only plans he has is to file lawsuits, legal challenges, settle scores and punish his enemies. … He wants to turn it into ‘Of me, by me, for me.’”
“Listen, politics in a lot of ways is like sports. You probably just root for the team your dad roots for. Maybe you’ve been a Republican your whole life. That’s your team and it feels wrong not to vote for them. But this time around, you wouldn’t be alone. You have a lot of company,” he added. “Most elections are about policy. This one is not. This is about sanity and security and democracy.”
