The little girl who grew up to be president, “what can be, unburdened by what has been”…
“You know, I was supposed to be nice,” he said. “They say something happened to me when I got shot; I became nice. And when you’re dealing with these people, they’re very dangerous people — when you’re dealing with them, you can’t be too nice. You really can’t be. So if you don’t mind, I’m not going to be nice.”
They didn’t mind at all.
Donald Trump apologized to his rally crowd and promised that after his brief aberration of “niceness,” he would revert to “dark and menacing bastard”. Who noticed? In his charmless monotonic speech pattern that is so eerily lacking in affect, Trump chills non-MAGA adherents with his brand of cold indifference to others, a brand of viciousness he has used against foes and fools. In a way, being his foe is easier, the cruelty is expected. But ask Mike Pence about being part of the Trump “team” and the feeling of cold dispatch once he decided to defy Trump’s will.
Kamala Harris has that on her side- she has no illusions about the man she faces in November and the task at hand. She speaks the language of a prosecutor, so appropriate for the coming battle. Trump is engaged in a race against time, a race against the trials and convictions he faces if he loses. His campaign’s case-in-chief case, borrowing the language of the courts, is built on lies- some big, others bigger. When he awoke this week he found he had a new and younger opponent, one who was younger and accomplished, as a former prosecutor, senator, and vice-president on a ticket that defeated him with 7 million more votes. Trump’s first attempt at denigrating her was a straightforward and rather pedestrian, paint-by-numbers assault:
- Kamala Harris wasn’t bright enough (Personal)
- she didn’t pass her bar exam. (Professional
- she is a radical extremist, a socialist (Ideological)
- she is responsible for the crisis at the border (Political)
- she is a liar and she laughs funny. (well, laughable)
When he ended his little tirade his crowd dutifully cheered and hooted. What they heard was what he was really saying in code — she is black, Asian, a woman, and uppity!
All Trump worries about is the adulation he receives after each slight hurled at his opponent. Charlotte this week was his out-of-town rehearsal to try out his new schtick. What would stick and what works best in trying to demean his opponent taxes the mental skills of this simpleton. No matter, his crowd responds in lockstep returning his hate, violent language, misogyny, and racism. all timeworn battle cries for the misfortunates he has gathered as his base. The trick for the 46% candidate whose approval ratings and election results (46% in 2016, 46.8% in 2020) is to entice a few more into his lair, or to stop the unconvinced from voting. The reaction that followed Biden’s announcement of self-sacrifice and his unequivocal support of his VP had to put the Trump team on their heels. Taking the issue of age off the Democratic plate and serving it back on the GOP suddenly made Harris appear formidable and his arguments against her rather weak.
As Joe Biden might say, “Here’s the deal.” Harris doesn’t have to defend any of Trump’s accusations because they are meritless. The California Bar Exam has a much lower rate of first-time success (44%) than many smaller states like Hawaii or Montana (74%.) Trump, for his part, doesn’t even have an advanced or professional degree. A man who it is reported paid someone to take his SAT might think twice about comparing credentials. He went to college on a daddy scholarship. His boast of being at the head of his college class in 1968 rings false and inconsequential, especially since it is provably false. A young Donny Trump avoided the Dean’s List at Penn like he now steers clear of long stairs and therapy. While he brags about his degree from Wharton, he only attended for two years, and only after his brother Fred interceded to get him enrolled. He needed help getting in even though he applied when the acceptance rate was over 44% rather than the more selective 7% it is today. Frank DiPrima’s diary in 2017 tells of a conversation he had with his good friend Professor William T. Kelley who had the preppy #45 in class for a semester:
“Professor Kelley told me 100 times over three decades that ‘Donald Trump was the dumbest goddam student I ever had,’” DiPrima wrote for the Daily Kos.
“I remember his emphasis and inflection — it went like this — ‘Donald Trump was the dumbest goddam student I ever had’
DiPrima explained that Kelley told him this after Trump became a celebrity, but “long before” he was deemed a political figure.
“Dr. Kelley often referred to Trump’s arrogance when he told of this — that Trump came to Wharton thinking he already knew everything,” Di Prima added.
By Trump’s standards his own inability to manage the border, his part in dismantling abortion and health rights for women, his failed pandemic policies, and an economy that doesn’t compare to the Biden-Harris, or, for that matter his most recent predecessors. To make matters worse, the Biden-Harris record that boasts more job creation, higher wages, the best in world economic recovery after the pandemic, a lower rate of debt, and a record-setting stock market, requires bigger and better lies to overcome.
Trump’s Charlotte dress rehearsal was filled with easily disputed statements that won’t stand the scrutiny of even a sloppy fact check. His tactics are taken from an old and disreputable playbook used in the past by Joe McCarthy and embellished by McCarthy’s counsel and Trump’s father-surrogate, Roy Cohn. Lies told in torrents require time to disprove and by the time the truth catches up, their moment has passed. What worked to a degree in 2016 hasn’t worked in a general election since because the truth has finally caught up to the Trump lies. With each of the past elections since 2016, the emperor of BS has been losing his garments. Now that Biden has removed himself and his age as the central issue, he is left with the fig leaf of his own creation, his own VP choice, J.D. Vance, who hasn’t even sparked excitement among his base. Vance is Trump’s “in your face” candidate chosen to rub in the GOP assault on women’s reproductive rights. The excitement that Kamala Harris has managed to generate right out of the gate will pass but it will give way to the case she will mount against the candidate who stands in ignominy as being rated the worst president in U.S. history by presidential historians:
Historians have again named Donald Trump as the worst president in U.S. history, placing him 45th out of all the former American presidents in a new poll.
The poll surveys 154 presidential historians who are current and recent members of the American Political Science Association. Each respondent was asked to grade current and former presidents on 10 characteristics, including administrative skills, moral authority and economic management.
Abraham Lincoln came out on top among scholars as the nation’s greatest president, with University of Houston political science professor Brandon Rottinghaus saying in a release, “As presidential scholars reassess the impact of the modern presidency from administrative and cultural standpoints, we see significant shifts over time in what constitutes presidential greatness.”
Current President Joe Biden ranked 14th in his first appearance on the list, with a rating of 62.7/100 — higher than Barack Obama ‘s first rating in 2015 (58.2) and dramatically higher than Trump’s first rating in 2018 (13.0).
His longstanding boast as a self-proclaimed “genius” is Trump’s bête noire in this election. To win voters will have to ignore well-known truths about a candidate who has cried- better moaned- wolf once too often. They will have to forget what it was like in America during his first term. Forget the half million deaths due to COVID and his derelict response, pretending he knew better than his in-house experts. The overmatched stooge wondered aloud (!!) about the health-inducing properties of household bleach, horse pills, and ultraviolet light injections. The memories will have to forget the 545 children cruelly separated from their families plus the 6 who died as the Trump policy at the border used the children of immigrants to emphasize their willingness to exert cruelty to manage a crisis of their own making. They would have to put aside the knowledge that Trump inherited the lowest border crossings of the past 50 years under the Obama Administration, and that under Trump violent crime would rise from its lowest point since the Reagan Administration. And all this with the understanding that crime and immigration policies under Trump exacerbated crises that could have been avoided with bi-partisan support in the Senate. Despite that Biden-Harris policies have helped reduce violent crime to new lows and immigration crossings at the border are now better than the best results under Trump.
But I disagree with some who would focus the Harris campaign on a theme of “prosecutor vs. the convict”. Most if not all Americans have followed the court cases. They have been reported on in depth. They need to be reminded of his criminality but it is only a piece of the mass of issues that separates them as candidates. Most of us believe that Donald Trump never entertained the possibility of acting “nice” after his near encounter with death. They see him as a scofflaw and enemy of the rule of law. His base- many of whom are fully anti-authoritarian to begin with- are fully enveloped in his “rogue as martyr” persona. She needs to make him old, backward, and irrelevant. Remind us of his official status as a convicted felon, certainly, but don’t dwell on it. He has lost in the courts before and he and his base have moved on to see the courts as his persecutor. Most independent voters accept his guilt.
The rest of the country, the vast majority who would never think to vote for Trump, need to be convinced that the future depends upon their vote this year. If voters don’t vote, Trump wins. Negative campaigns that offer little hope advantage bad news candidates. As the Trump campaign features more of his unhinged reaction to Kamala Harris’ candidacy, as his rallies get darker and meaner, the Democratic message has to uplift us. Part of his charm- what is baked into his psychoses- is a penchant to burn things down. In a battle for the bottom, he wins hands down, he has no bottom. For Kamala Harris that is his gift. Elections generally favor aspirational candidates, who offer a hopeful message as compared to those who serve up fear as their coalescing message. As motivators, fear and hope are at opposite ends of the spectrum. Trump and his hostaged GOP have been inciting fear as their vision. It is difficult to think when one is afraid. Hope, on the other hand, is about the future. Hope, in the end, is a much stronger motivator. While it offers the promise of many ways forward, fear is a headlong journey back. Autocrats use it liberally to highlight what they suggest is the only way- their way out.
Harris wins if the battle is about tomorrow and not yesterday. The little girl, raised by immigrants, and whose story defines the American Dream, is tasked with saving it for another generation. Her candidacy is the definition of hope, the epitome of aspiration for women, minorities, immigrants, and the vast middle class. The better she makes that case, the more distance she puts between her American experience and that of most Americans as compared to Donald Trump’s, the better our chance to preserve democracy as we know it. Democracy turns privilege into rights that all share equally and when we are at our best, our wealth is measured in opportunities.
The autocrat holds each to himself- as if our freedoms impinge on his birthright. Years before he became president and was tasked with healing a divided nation, Lincoln had already formulated a response to those who advocated for the most divisive issue of his time. He has been adjudged our best president because, in part, he understood the importance of American democracy as a corrective to all forms of government that had come before it and will coexist with it in the future. His words were prophetic to our current place in time:
“Most governments have been based, practically, on the denial of equal rights of men…ours began, by affirming those rights. They said, some men are too ignorant, and vicious, to share in government. Possibly so, said we; and, by your system, you would always keep them ignorant, and vicious. We proposed to give all a chance; and we expected the weak to grow stronger, the ignorant wiser; and all better, and happier together.”
- Abraham Lincoln: His Speeches and Writings, by Roy Basler, Carl Sandburg, and Roy P. Basler
Let our greatest president’s vision haunt the man who sits at the bottom of the pile of presidents. In Lincoln’s America, a little girl born of immigrants of a family of color can become an heir to his vision. In an America contrived by her opponent, an ignorant army of weak and vicious men would drag her back in time.
Kamala Harris dismisses their vision with a simple phrase, “What can be, unburdened by what has been…”
Originally published at https://vincerizzo.substack.com.
