The US is now divided into two factions that spiritually are at war with the Constitution. The faction led by the Obama-Biden-Harris nexus created the fiction that Russia had brought about Trump’s victory in 2016 and in 2020 watched in silent approval as mobs destroyed the last months of Trump’s presidency. Trump departed from the Constitution more personally but less criminally with his stupidly irresponsible words before the Capitol on January 6, 1991. If Trump wins, the Democrats will probably again turn a blind eye when Antifa cuts loose. Notionally, Antifa stands for ANTI-FAscist, but it would be better termed, Fantifa, Fascist ANTI-FActualists, because they have no regard for either the truth or due process.
Either way, possible disaster awaits the next US President. If it is Trump, he will be blamed by the liberal media for whatever befalls his presidency, including the Fantifa riots. If it is Harris, and the American foreign policy sails into a tsunami-tornado-monsoon of her own making, the media will exonerate her. Not to do so would be so racist and misogynistic. Most certain of all is that the winner of the election will wake up with the worst victory-hangover in US history.
Russia, China, Iran, Yemen, Gaza, Israel, Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Saudi, Somali, Sudan, NATO, North Korea, Ukraine, West Africa and not least, the USA: all these are at war or on a war-footing. So many anti-missile missiles have been fired in the Israel conflict that the US is running short, and the US Navy’s Seventh Fleet now stands well off Iran and even Yemen, for fear of missile-attack. That the greatest navy in the history of the world has to hide from such a turbaned ragtag army as the Houthis is a clear indication how grave the situation is.
Domestically, the issues are barely less serious: global warming, fracking, hydrocarbon energy, freedom of speech, epidemics of obesity and drug addiction (prescription and otherwise), immigration, space-explorations, quantum technology, cyber-warfare, gun-control and abortion to name a few. Towering over them all is the USA’s Great Rift: there are two Americas, divided by a common language in which the same words have different meanings. Media values have collapsed: both The Washington Post and The New York Times routinely editorialise within their front-page news-reports, as even humble reporters personally call Trump a liar and a spreader of false claims. The Post recently carried a headline proclaiming: “How Trump could weaponize the FCC (Federal Communications Commission) against the media in a second term.”
The basis for this claim was that the FCC was investigating allegations that CBS had cut and spliced an interview with Harris, replacing some of her usual word-salad with an answer to a quite different question, the latter then being removed from the broadcast. “Not frivolous,” said a Commission member. “Big if true.” “Will look into it,” said another.
“The shift suggests how a re-elected Trump could install a more cooperative bureaucracy”, opined the Post, redefining two men merely doing their job as a “shift”. The consensus on both immigration and on what used to be called the sexes but is now known known as “gender” is gone. The Los Angeles Times last week indignantly reported that Trump and Vance had made “anti-transgender attacks”, while huffing: “Undocumented migrants have no safety net for retirement.”
What? Meaning that people really can change sex, and that the US government really should give life-pensions to all illegal immigrants? Similarly, the media routinely call the invasion of the Capitol after Trump’s inflammatory and stupid remarks on January 6 2021, an “attempted coup” or an “insurrection”, though since it was unarmed within the most heavily armed society in the world, it was neither. Naturally, the impromptu and uncoordinated nature of the invasion of the Capitol building has not been reflected in the savagery of the sentences handed out to idiots by a deeply politicised judiciary.
The same media and the Democratic Party bigwigs – Pelosi, Warren, Obama at alia – all treasonably hid the fact that President Biden was suffering from advanced senile dementia, not just recently but probably throughout most of his presidency, and still is today, while remaining in power. This has led to a series of catastrophic failures in US foreign policy: the surrender in Afghanistan, Russia’s attack on Ukraine, Hamas’s genocidal assault on Israel, and an illegal renewal of Iran’s nuclear programme, even as it planned a ballistic missile strike on Israel. These were not just defeats for US policy, they were humiliations – yet their co-author, Vice President Kamala Harris is running neck and neck with Donald Trump, not least because of the support for her by the “liberal” media.
(See what I mean by different meanings?)
Trump is clearly not a nice man, and often a horrid one, but what do you want in The White House: Mary Poppins? His record shows that he can deal with many complex issues, whereas Harris, being shallow, conceited, and lazy, cannot. If elected and is somehow smitten by a wholly unmerited access of common sense, she might allow herself to become a figurehead while a kitchen cabinet chosen by Barack Obama runs the country. However, he is not a Castlereagh, a Talleyrand or a Metternich, so ultimately, she would have to make her own big decisions. Having been probably the least capable vice-president in history, she would then become the least capable president. Yet nonetheless, she now stands a few Electoral College-votes, and perhaps a single county, such as Northampton, Pennsylvania, away from being the most powerful human being not merely in the world, but at this complex and perplexing point, perhaps in American history. It is the film script that no-one ever wrote because cinema audiences are not that stupid.
If Trump wins, he faces the prospect of a renewed urban insurgency of the kind that almost destroyed his presidency in 2020, most notably in Minneapolis. This city provided the Sarajevo-moment of the George Floyd killing, where the subsequent refusal of the Governor Tim Walz to call out the National Guard to repress a leftist-insurrection was a vital inducement for other Democratic governors to do likewise. Walz of course was rewarded for his act of municipal treason by being made Harris’s VP candidate. Meanwhile, over the past four years, the Democrat machine has been packing judges’ benches with loyal appointees to ensure a hostile reception for any legal actions by Trump’s teams challenging the authenticity of postal votes for Harris.
To be sure, the contestants for the White House must be insane, merely for agreeing to the possibility of having to activate the codes for America’s nuclear arsenal. That said, would presidents Putin and Xi not be enormously emboldened by the thought of such an incompetent, silly creature as Harris having to manage a developing confrontation such as the Cuban Missile crisis, and tickled pink at her response at being told of imminent pre-emptive strikes against the US over the North Pole and both the Atlantic and Pacific coasts?
Much of Silicon Valley, including Bill Gates, supports her, which proves that smart these days is not all that smart. The most important man in the world, Elon Musk, backs Trump. This counts. Musk almost singlehandedly saved both the US space programme and Ukraine with his rockets and his communications satellites, and he is also the world’s most successful manufacturer of electric-cars. More importantly, in the context of the election, he is the owner of the social media platform X, a letter that he has, quite brilliantly, trademarked, right under the nose of President Xi.
When Trump was in the White House, his foreign policy scared Peking and Moscow, because neither knew what he would do next, or how or when or to whom. Obama was easy: as if on a dotted line, he’d simply fold, as he did when Syria used chemical weapons. But when Syria tried it again, this time with Trump at the wheel, the President destroyed a Syrian air force base with Tomahawk missiles. On another occasion, Trump ordered airstrikes in Syria that killed up to 300 Wagner Russian mercenaries. Trump’s Abrahamic Accords rewrote the Middle Eastern rulebook, as US foreign policy opened channels between Israel and half a dozen Arab states led by Saudi Arabia. Most of them are sick of the endless war between Palestinians and Israel, which has cost them billions and earned them nothing.
Yet most of the gains made by Trump and his razor-sharp secretary of State Mike Pompeo were squandered by Biden as he attempted to resurrect the doomed pro-Iranian détente policies of Barrack Obama. This simply confirmed in the minds of the mad Islamist collective in Teheran that the US was not to be taken seriously. If Harris wins, it won’t be, with an Obama-picked cabinet along with revitalised policies of global appeasement, a prospect that Putin and Xi would relish.
Contrary to popular European fictions, Americans are not stupid. Their hi-tech economy keeps reinventing itself because of their native and innovative brilliance: the USA probably has about forty million people who are bright to exceedingly bright, and maybe some 10,000 individuals who clock in at quite close to genius. On the other hand, nine out of ten Americans have eaten a McDonalds in the past year, and one in eight of the entire adult population at some time or other have worked there. When Trump recently served McDonald’s fries and drove a dumper-truck marked “Garbage” (referring to what Biden had called Trump supporters) he spoke to nearly all Americans, no matter their IQ. He is a genius at addressing the American soul, whether it is about Big Macs or NASCAR, or stock-car racing, the sport of sports south of an extended Mason-Dixon Line, of which contests Harris has probably never heard.
Though the US economy might be fundamentally be sound, its corporate strategy of placing heavy investment in low-cost factories abroad has led to massive native deindustrialisation, which is now a strategic and human disaster. The Chinese built twenty-one submarines last year, the US built one, sort of. The US Navy is underfunded, while its ships are showing signs of wear: yes rust, visible on many superstructures, the equivalent of seeing a nun’s knickers while she’s still in them. Moreover, it is just possible that America’s major maritime fighting-platform, the aircraft-carrier, might soon be joining the quinquereme and the dreadnought in the maritime museum, in which case the world will be turning on its axis, with the global rules of war being totally rewritten. Is Harris remotely capable of understanding any of that?
Does Trump frighten me? He does: on tariffs, Ukraine, Taiwan, he could take fatal mis-steps, but we really don’t know what he’ll do. The unipolar world died with the new axis of evil: Russia, Iran, North Korea, China. They call the shots as much as Washington. It is not difficult to predict the result: it is impossible. But I’d prefer Trump to be in charge of all those unknown unknowns: simple.
Perhaps the only outcome that might possibly (though probably not) reunite a sundered USA is the least desirable: war with China. That is what the People’s Liberation Army is theoretically preparing for, with the celebration of the 100th anniversary of its founding in 1927 with the conquest of the island-home of the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, the 9th most valuable corporation in the world. Taiwan makes about a trillion silicon chips a year, including 90 per cent of the world’s advanced chips, and its workforce has created a unique body of complex skills that China cannot possibly replicate. Is that worth a war in 2027? Certainly not, but try telling President Xi that. Trump possibly could, whereas Harris certainly couldn’t, and that’s why the American people really have only one choice out of two. But that doesn’t mean they’ll make it. After all, didn’t they opt four years ago for a senescent narcissist who promptly slid into irreversible dementia, almost taking the US with him?
Kevin Myers is an Irish journalist, author and broadcaster. He has reported on the wars in Northern Ireland, where he worked throughout the 1970s, Beirut and Bosnia.
An accused cop or soldier, his human rights vanish like a lizard down a crack