Still Undecided?
My Thoughts on the Presidential Election:
I have always been a lover not a fighter, a peacemaker rather than a troublemaker. That means that I naturally tend to keep my opinions on controversial political matters to myself. Put simply, I value friendships over scoring political points. That is why I have long resisted expressing my preference regarding the upcoming presidential election.
As well, I recognize the extreme polarization surrounding the upcoming election. By expressing my preference, I fear disappointing or, worse, alienating friends who disagree with me.
For those who disagree with the opinions that I am expressing, I assure you that your disagreement in no way affects my love and respect for you. Good friends can disagree without being disagreeable. And, I admit my fallibility and am open to correction of any opinions that I express.
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Though we may disagree on the upcoming election, I find that the one issue that often unites us is a mutual disappointment with both candidates.
Here's why I find both candidates objectionable.
Donald Trump is boorish (if you don’t know what the word means, look it up) and can be utterly and exhaustingly brash. And, of course, he is narcissistic, probably pathologically. Additionally, he exaggerates to the point of blurring the line between hyperbole and truth-telling. Finally, he speaks rudely about people he doesn’t like or who don't like him and seems to derive pleasure in taunting others especially the media.
In defense of his goading of the media, Trump is, with rare exception, treated by most media outlets unfavorably. The non-profit Media Research Center that monitors bias in the mainstream news outlets reports that once Kamala Harris was determined to be the Democrat’s presidential candidate by a cabal of influential Democrats bypassing democratic norms, 84% of the news reporting about Harris has been positive while 89% of the reporting of Trump has been negative. The same media routinely quote many of Trump's cringiest comments out of context to make him appear worse than he is.
And the news media are consistently untruthful.
For example, the media continue to misreport Trump's statements about the extremists that participated in the Charlottesville protests on the campus of the University of Virginia in 2017. Even the liberal leaning fact-checker Snopes has debunked the false accusation that Trump referred to white supremacists as “very fine people.”
Yet, the media continue to falsify Trump’s Charlottesville comments and other out of context statements. It is these frequent misquotes that give credibility to Trump’s lampooning of the media as "fake news.”
On a related matter, Trump has been criminally indicted for fomenting an attempted insurrection on January 6 attributed to his intemperate rhetoric. Yet, his opponents absolve themselves of any responsibility for two assassination attempts on Trump’s life in spite of their fiery rhetorical attacks against Trump and their endless comparison of him to Hitler. Most damning is the relentless accusation that he is an existential threat to democracy.
I am not defending what took place on January 6 but in fairness the media reports continue to be false. For example, on October 24, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez claimed that almost 10 people died on January 6 in the Capitol riot and her statement was unchallenged by the media. A quick fact check proves her claim to be false. https://www.factcheck.org/2021/11/how-many-died-as-a-result-of-capitol-riot/
I could go on but enough said.
On the other hand, Kamala Harris is, in my judgment, intellectually vacuous. She initially failed the California bar exam and did not register to vote until she was 29 years old. The fact that she won not one delegate in the 2020 Democratic presidential primaries and was the first candidate to drop out showed how unpopular and outclassed she was.
Even her supporters have difficulty pointing to one accomplishment of Harris during her years as Vice President. Most infamously was her assignment to bring the border crisis under control. At the time, her role was referred to, even by the media, as the border czar. However, she now disputes that title though the responsibility for addressing the causes and finding solutions to the border crisis was clearly assigned to her. While the number of illegals crossing the southern border increased in record numbers under her watch, she repeatedly asserted in interviews the preposterous claim that the border was secure.
She is on record as saying that she was the last person to leave the Situation Room assuring President Biden of her concurrence with the decision regarding the disastrous manner by which American troops were pulled out of Afghanistan resulting in the death of 13 US soldiers and over 100 Afghans at the Abbey Gate entrance to the Kabul airport. The debacle also included the abandonment of the strategic Bagram Air Base and Afghans who had supported the troops along with the decision to leave behind billions of dollars of military equipment.
In fact, according to Biden’s own account, Harris supported and participated in every decision made by the Biden Administration during the past nearly four years. Yet, now, as a candidate, she seeks to distance herself from the embarrassing failures of the Biden/Harris years and flip-flops on numerous policy positions. For that reason, she has earned the moniker of “Kamaleon.”
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In spite of her very public role as Vice President in the Biden Administration, Harris is largely a phantom presidential candidate who avoids press conferences and other non-scripted public appearances. Her long delayed interview with CNN, prerecorded and edited, after being named the Democratic presidential candidate portended that any future public events would be carefully choreographed to her advantage.
The choreographing is essential due to Harris’ inability to respond to questions spontaneously without verbal meandering. Most recently, Harris was featured in a town hall with Latinos televised on Univision. One of the cameras panned Harris at an angle exposing a teleprompter. The teleprompter was immediately turned off until the camera was removed.
Most disturbing was the CBS 60 Minutes interview that was edited to delete her muddled answer to Bill Whitaker’s question regarding her support of Israel’s war effort and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The edited answer made her appear more coherent. This manipulation by the media has contributed to the dramatic drop in the public’s confidence in the objectivity and trustworthiness of mass media. Concomitantly is the decline of journalistic ethics.
As previously noted, the media treatment of Trump contrasted to Harris is stark. Within 48 hours following the forced withdrawal of Joe Biden from the Democrat ticket, Kamala Harris was transformed from a failed Vice President into the reincarnation of St. Joan of Arc. In November 2021, Business Insider reported that a USA Today/Suffolk poll showed that her favorability rating at the time was 28%, the lowest for a vice-president in history. This sudden transformation certainly can only be attributed to deft marketing by a fawning media and a visceral hatred for Trump by his political and media opponents.
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I am often asked, most recently by my cardiologist, how can someone like me, a religious person (using his term) support such an immoral person as Trump? I acknowledge that his question is fair. There is a group of self-identified evangelicals led by Jim Ball, National Spokesperson for the Evangelical Climate Initiative, who proudly identify as Evangelicals for Harris thereby claiming to have taken the moral high ground. Supporters include notable evangelicals such as David French, editorialist for the New York Times, Russell Moore, editor of Christianity Today magazine, Curtiss Chang, Good Faith podcaster, and others.
However, a sordid past lurks over both of the presidential candidates. Harris' sexual misbehavior is in many ways as scandalous as Trump’s. Harris began her political career by having a sexual tryst with the politically powerful Willie Brown, Speaker of the California State Assembly and former Mayor of San Francisco. At the time, Brown was separated from his wife, Blanche, though still married to her. Harris was 29 years old (the same year that she first registered to vote) and Brown was 60 years old when their extramarital romance began.
According to her biographer, Dan Morain, in his book, Kamala’s Way: An American Life, Brown admitted the extra-marital affair and acknowledged that he appointed her to two cushy government positions, purchased a BMW for her, and had her escort him on several junkets including a trip to Paris.
Also, Harris' current husband, Doug Emhoff, admits that he impregnated his daughter’s nanny and teacher, Najen Naylor, leading to the split up of his marriage. Following his divorce from his wife, Kerstin, Doug Emoff allegedly physically abused a woman he dated while escorting her on a trip to the Cannes Film Festival according to newspaper accounts. The physical abuse was corroborated by three of the woman’s acquaintances on the night the incident occurred.
And then there is Tim Walz, Harris’ running mate on the Harris/Walz ticket. Walz is a compulsive liar. He has lied about his “combat” military service and military rank while in the National Guard; his coaching career (he was an assistant coach, not the head coach as implied) of a Nebraska high school football team in 1996. The previous year he was arrested for driving under the influence (clocked at 96 mph in a 55 mph zone) and later paid a $200 fine on a reduced charge of reckless driving. He has lied about his educational degrees and falsely claimed that he was named the Outstanding Young Nebraskan by the Nebraska Chamber of Commence.
The mendacity and sexual indiscretions within the Harris camp do not justify Trump’s misstatements and dalliances but it does not allow Harris to be viewed as his moral superior. I truly wish that I did not have to make a choice to vote for persons with the moral flaws of Trump and Harris but, as historian Carl Trueman wrote, “Unfortunately Mother Teresa is not on the ballot this year.”
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When comparing the policies advanced by Trump and Harris, the moral comparison between the two becomes less murky. For example, Trump’s views on abortion have moderated but, in my judgment, his policies are certainly far more virtuous than Harris’. Trump recently announced his willingness to support the right of abortion for the causes of rape, incest, fetal deformities and the risk to the life of the mother and he has stated that if Congress passes legislation to prohibit abortions, he would not sign the bill into law.
He has declared that abortion policies will be left to the States, which was the Dobbs v Jackson Supreme Court decision that overturned Roe v Wade. His moderating position on abortion has evoked criticism from both the pro-life and pro-choice camps. His views have disappointed strict pro-life advocates and have not endeared him to the radical feminists’ advocacy for “women’s reproductive rights" (a euphemism for elective abortions without any restrictions).
Or compare the moral implications of the following positions of the two candidates: Trump's determination to deport illegal immigrants guilty of crimes and Harris’s advocacy of tax-funded transgender surgery for incarcerated illegals.
So maybe the more appropriate question is how can a religious person (again, using my cardiologist's term) vote for either candidate?
These policy positions aside, most distressing to me about Kamala Harris is her ideological bent towards socialism/Marxism. Now that she is the Democrat candidate for President, her radical leftist views have been scrubbed to make her appear to be a more centrist candidate. This sleight of hand is purely a political ploy. Unfortunately, her makeover is believed by voters whose only sources of information are the “alphabet” media – ABC, CBS, NBC, MSNBC (the worst), CNN, NPR, and the print media most notably the New York Times and the Washington Post.
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Finally, and most ominously, the following is the reason, in my opinion, that a Harris/Walz election rather than a Trump/Vance election is the true existential threat to democracy.
Many people have made fun of Harris’ oft quoted phrase: “What can be, unburdened by the past.” I initially dismissed her frequently stated comment as merely word salad. I have since come to understand the danger lurking behind these words.
Note the following:
Recall that President Obama aspired to “fundamentally transform America.” Harris is asserting that the fundamental transformation of America requires the deconstruction (or “unburdening of the past”) of what America has been (essentially a free market economy that produces winners and losers) in order to replace it with what America “can be.” And what America can be is the achievement of equity, a goal that is foundational to Harris’ political and economic objectives.
Harris clarifies the difference between equality and equity. Equality is equal opportunity. But, she insists, equal opportunity does not guarantee equal outcomes since, in her words, we do not all start out at the same place. Equity requires equal outcomes, which means that we should all end up at the same place. See
The fact is that Harris’ oft repeated, publicly stated definition of equity (equal outcomes) is shorthand for Karl Marx’s celebrated phrase “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” Again, the only way to attain equity (or to end up at the same place) is to take from those who have and redistribute it to those who have not thus achieving equal outcomes. Any way one slices it, Harris is promoting a socialist/Marxist agenda.
Little attention is given to Harris' parental influence, an influence that has very likely been highly significant. Her father, coincidentally named "Donald J." Harris, is a Marxist economist from Jamaica who taught at Stanford University and her Asian-Indian mother, whom Donald met as a fellow student at UC Berkeley, was a politically active SJW – social justice warrior.
The residual influence of her socialist/Marxist upbringing is complemented and in many ways exceeded by her choice of Tim Walz as her running mate. Walz’s policies mirror hers. If elected, they will potentially have 8 years to fulfill the goal of fundamentally transforming America from a free market economy to a government regulated economy, thereby achieving economic equity.
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In addition to their economic views, both Harris and Walz have implicitly attacked the First Amendment. Recent statements made by Harris and Walz align with comments made by former Secretary of State John Kerry at a group session at the World Economic Forum in Davos.
In Kerry’s statement, he expressed discomfort with the spread of social media sites because he feels these sites allow for the dissemination of disinformation. He claims that the First Amendment is a problem because it unfortunately allows speech that the ruling class deems to be disinformation or untruths. Hence, the government has collaborated with social media sites such as Facebook, YouTube, X (formerly Twitter) and search engines like Google to censor opinions or views that contradict or even question the views deemed acceptable by the government.
I am reminded of the Ministry of Truth in George Orwell's book, 1984, in which “truth” is that which is approved by Big Brother, the central government. Kerry laments that the First Amendment allows speech that contradicts whatever the government or elitists deem to be true.
This fact has been confirmed by the purchase of Twitter by Elon Musk and the deep dive into the stored information of Twitter by independent journalists including Matt Taibbi, Glenn Greenwald, Michael Schellenberger, et al. Most recently, Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta (Facebook), expressed his regret for acquiescing to the government’s pressure to remove postings that challenged the government’s position on specific issues. Zuckerberg’s admission and public expression of regret is indisputable proof of government censorship of speech.
And speaking of Orwellian policy, few people outside of the State of Minnesota are aware that during the COVID lockdown, Governor Walz established a hotline to monitor compliance with his 2020 stay-at-home order. He encouraged Minnesotans to snitch on their neighbors who violated the stay-at-home mandate by calling the hotline. Such policies are chilling examples of totalitarianism.
In terms of social policy, Harris/Walz are committed “woke” politicians who focus on victimization, entitlement, and identity politics over meritocracy. Put succinctly, if elected, Harris/Walz, not Trump/Vance, will move America closer to socialism/Marxism than at any time in the 248 years of our history.
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A friend of mine recently reminded me of one of Winston Churchill’s most memorable statements. “Socialism,” he said,” is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy. Its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery.”
Though some may dispute my high opinion of Winston Churchill, I see him to be an heroic person. After reading historian Andrew Roberts’ biography of Churchill, I have developed an even greater appreciation for his leadership and courage at a critical moment in the history of the United Kingdom.
To his critics, Churchill was legendary for his brusque language and overuse of alcohol. But he possessed the leadership and implemented the policies that guided Britain successfully through the imminent darkness of Naziism. I am convinced that Trump is up to the challenge of defending America from creeping socialism/Marxism. And, when I consider my grandchildren, I must make the decision that is in the best interest of the future for my family and my country.
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We are now in the enviable position of comparing the accomplishments of four years of a Trump presidency with the nearly four years of a Biden/Harris presidency, which is the first time voters have had that advantage since 1893. Only one time in American history was a president elected to two non-consecutive terms. Grover Cleveland was elected to his second term as president after suffering defeat to Benjamin Harrison following his first term, thereby allowing voters to compare Cleveland's first four years with the four year term of Harrison.
According to the American Presidency Project at the University of California-Santa Barbara, the Trump Administration’s accomplishments during his term as President prior to the COVID restrictions included record high employment, a 1.9% inflation rate, secure borders, the appointment of constitutional/originalist judges, low unemployment across all demographic groups especially among blacks and Latinos, energy independence, strong national defense, protection of religious liberty and freedom of speech, and on and on.
For a comparison of the Trump and Biden economic records see Addendum below.
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Paraphrasing John Stuart Mill, the 18th Century British philosopher, when faced with a binary choice both of which are undesirable, choose the one that will result in the lesser harm.
Considering domestic policy and national security, I have decided to vote for a Trump/Vance administration and against the existential threat to democracy posed by a Harris/Walz administration. For those who cannot understand the nuance between rejecting Trump's personal flaws while supporting the policies and achievements of a Trump administration, I am sorry.
If you disagree with my conclusion, I respect your opposing position and encourage you to vote your conscience. I hope that you will extend to me the same courtesy.
To my cardiologist and sincere Christian friends who still wonder how I can vote for a moral reprobate, I concede that Trump is not a model of moral integrity.
But God can draw a straight line with a mighty crooked stick.
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Addendum:
Source: Federal Reserve; Bureau of Labor Statistics; Energy Information Agency; Nasdaq Historical Data
