A Truly Bizarre Presidential Election
Trump and Harris both have a fair chance at winning this election, but there’s no telling what could happen in these final weeks.
The upcoming US presidential election is just weeks away, which will bring an end to one of the most bizarre election cycles in recent memory — and given how strange US politics have been for the last eight years, that’s saying something.
The options have come down to former President Donald Trump running on the Republican ticket and current Vice President Kamala Harris on the Democratic ticket, but the path it took to arrive at those two candidates was incredibly convoluted.
Harris is a last minute replacement for President Joe Biden who had been running a reelection campaign until very recently when he dropped out under peculiar circumstances. Trump was always the preferred choice on the Republican side, but due to several legal cases Trump is involved in it was less than clear if he’d become the nominee or if he’d even be able to run an effective campaign — not to mention the two failed assassination attempts on Trump that took place recently, which would have taken him out of the race entirely had they been successful.
This election has highlighted how dysfunctional US politics have become, but it is still similar to previous, more typical elections in that it doesn’t really matter who wins in November as the worst aspects of the US government will undoubtedly continue regardless.
We can still acknowledge how truly bizarre this election has been, however, and as we near its end I feel it’s worth taking a look back at the shit show we’ve all been subjected to.
Joe Biden
When discussing how strange this presidential election has been, a good place to start is with President Joe Biden, who up until very recently was adamant that he intended on staying in the race and serving a second term.
To those who had been paying even the slightest bit of attention and aren’t complete partisan hacks, the idea that Biden was mentally fit to serve another term was always preposterous — one could even argue that he’s been unfit to serve the majority of his first term. However, officials within the administration, as well as their allies in the corporate media, still attempted to gaslight the American people into believing that Biden was “sharp as a tack” almost right up until he dropped out of the race.
As Biden’s term has progressed, so has his cognitive decline, and the propaganda put out to try and hide that decline became increasingly ridiculous and transparent. In the beginning Biden’s many gaffes were attributed to a supposed stutter, and because of that it was deemed ableist to point to examples of him misspeaking or losing his train of thought as evidence of his senility. More recently, the Biden administration and the corporate media adopted a new term called “cheap fakes” to explain away the many videos of Biden wandering aimlessly or looking lost and confused at major events.
“Cheap fakes” are of course a play on the term “deep fakes”, the difference being the latter refers to fake videos and images of real people that are most commonly generated by some form of artificial intelligence (AI), whereas the former refers to real videos and images that are supposedly deceptively edited in order to portray a false reality — in this case, that Biden is more mentally addled than he really is.
The problem with the “cheap fakes” narrative is that Biden’s cognitive decline has reached a point where it can no longer be hidden, and videos exposing that decline are far too numerous for them to all be explained away as being out of context or deceptively edited.
Despite speculation that Biden was too old and senile to serve another term from the very beginning of this election cycle, the Democratic National Committee refused to hold primary debates even though Biden faced challengers from within the Democratic Party.
At first it wasn’t even clear if Biden and Trump would debate, but after they both became their parties’ respective presumptive nominees a debate between the two candidates did take place. That debate was structured in a way that was very obviously meant to benefit Joe Biden: there was no live audience, each of the candidates’ mics were cut when it wasn’t their turn to speak, and the debate was hosted by CNN, a network that is blatantly hostile toward Donald Trump.
Despite the odd rules meant to give Biden an advantage, the current president was still unable to appear coherent. That isn’t to say that Trump came off as particularly impressive, but compared to Biden he seemed to at least be mentally sound. And with Trump’s mic being cut and him being unable to interrupt Biden, Trump actually came off as uncharacteristically calm and restrained — an ironic unintended consequence of trying to structure the debate in Biden’s favor.
That debate was the true death knell of Biden’s presidential campaign, as his poor performance finally forced the corporate media and the Democratic establishment to acknowledge that Biden is too senile to serve another four years (which should call into question whether he’s even mentally fit enough to finish out the rest of his first term, but for some reason not many people seem to be concerned about that).
Very shortly after that debate, Biden began facing calls for him to drop out of the race from top Democratic politicians and donors, but for nearly a month Biden and his campaign insisted that he was going to continue running. Biden did eventually drop out, but he did so in just about the strangest way possible.
From his personal X account — not from the official POTUS account — Biden posted an image of a letter written on his personal stationary and lacking the presidential seal, in which he said “while it has been my intention to seek reelection, I believe it is in the best interest of my party and the country for me to stand down and focus solely on fulfilling my duties as President for the remainder of my term.” That same day Biden put out another post on X and gave Vice President Kamala Harris his endorsement to be his replacement.
For the next few days, Biden basically disappeared from the public eye, and people even began speculating that he may have died as he had tested positive for Covid-19 about a week earlier. He did eventually give an address from the Oval Office in which he elaborated on his decision to drop out — and mostly assuaged the claims that he was dead — but many people are still skeptical that he came to that decision on his own.
According to reporting by renowned journalist Seymour Hersh, former President Barack Obama, as well as Vice President Kamala Harris and other major Democratic politicians, essentially forced Biden to drop out by threatening to invoke the 25th Amendment, which would have removed Biden from office if implemented successfully. Whether Hersh’s reporting is accurate or not, it is patently true that top Democratic politicians and donors incessantly urged Biden to drop out of the race, so much so that many people consider the whole ordeal to be a sort of palace coup.
As Biden’s reelection campaign came to an end, the stage was set for a new Democratic nominee to take his place. Rather than returning any semblance of normalcy to this election, however, the installment of Kamala Harris as Biden’s replacement has continued to make this one of the strangest and most unprecedented elections in modern US history.
Kamala Harris
After receiving Biden’s endorsement, Kamala Harris quickly went from being an exceptionally unpopular vice president to becoming a sensation within the Democratic Party and the corporate media, and both have tried to reinvent her as some sort of cultural icon. It’s fairly obvious that the recent hype around Harris has mostly been manufactured, but it seems to have also been somewhat successful in energizing the Democratic voter base.
It didn’t take long for Harris to begin receiving endorsements from many other influential Democrats, and within days of Biden dropping out she had gained enough support from delegates to secure her party’s nomination. Nearly a month later, she was giving her acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention as the party’s official presidential candidate. All of this occurred without a single Democratic primary voter casting a vote for Harris to become the nominee, and because of that critics have argued that the process was undemocratic.
For weeks Harris refused to do any interviews, and while she was holding campaign rallies during that time, she still faced criticism for her lack of unscripted media appearances. It has been widely speculated that the reason Harris is avoiding the press is because she has stumbled, rambled incoherently, or laughed at inappropriate or awkward moments so often over the course of her time as vice president that she is trying to minimize the chance of any further embarrassing gaffes that could potentially damage her campaign.
Harris did eventually give an interview with CNN’s Dana Bash, but she was oddly accompanied by her running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, which fueled speculation that Walz was only there to keep Harris from rambling or cackling as she is prone to do. It was mostly a softball interview, but Bash did press Harris on some issues, including her apparent shift on some of her previously held views on fracking and immigration.
“My values have not changed,” Harris said in response to a question about her previous support for a ban on fracking, a policy which she says she no longer supports. Many people (myself included) remain unconvinced that Harris actually has any values to speak of, however, as she appears to have shifted her stance on several issues in an attempt to distance herself from policies that have become unpopular with the average American — some of which she supported not that long ago, including while she has been the vice president. This isn’t something that is unique to Kamala Harris, as politicians from both major parties regularly engage in this sort of behavior, but given that she is currently running to be our next president it’s worth noting how fluid her supposed “values” really are.
Another issue Harris has changed her stance on is immigration. During her time as vice president — which included her holding the unofficial position of “border czar”, a position that much of the corporate press has dishonestly claimed she never held — the US has seen an unprecedented level of illegal immigration, but Democrats generally refused to acknowledge that issue until very recently.
Once the border crisis reached a level where even Democrats began to call on the Biden administration to do something about it, both Biden and Harris began to change their tone. This shift was highlighted in an exchange about immigration during Harris’ interview with Dana Bash.
“During the Biden-Harris administration,” Bash stated, “there were record numbers of illegal border crossings. Why did the Biden-Harris administration wait three and a half years to implement sweeping asylum restrictions?”
As part of her response Harris said that “Joe Biden and I and our administration worked with members of the United States Congress on an immigration issue that is very significant to the American people and to our security, which is the border. And through bipartisan work, including some of the most conservative members of the United States Congress, a bill was crafted which we supported, which I support.”
After Harris went on to claim that Donald Trump used his influence over congressional Republicans to sink that bill because “he believes that it would not have helped him politically” if it had passed, Bash asked “so you would push that legislation again?”
“Not only push it,” Harris responded. “I will make sure that it comes to my desk and I would sign it.”
Harris’ shift on certain issues would likely affect her campaign much more in a normal political environment, but due to the hysteria that liberals and Democrats tend to have over Donald Trump, the sole fact that she is his opposition seems to be enough reason for many of them to ignore her apparent hypocrisy and lack of principles — that she’s not a cognitively impaired octogenarian is just a bonus.
It’s not just Democrats who have come out in support of Harris, either. As reported by USA Today, “More than 200 Republicans who previously worked for either former President George W. Bush, the late Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., or Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris for president in an open letter”. Harris has also received public endorsements from former Congresswoman Liz Cheney and her father, former Vice President Dick Cheney.
This turn of events highlights how US politics no longer fall into a simple left vs. right/Democrat vs. Republican framework. While Liz and Dick Cheney are both life-long Republicans, they express a neoconservative worldview that Trump ran against in 2016 and which his voter base has largely rejected. During his first term in office, Trump failed to actually bring about a significant change in US foreign policy, but much of his rhetoric on the issue and his prominence among Republican voters represents a shift away from that neoconservatism. That faction of the Republican Party has begun to correctly perceive the current iteration of the Democratic Party as more in line with their worldview than the current Republican Party under Donald Trump, which is likely a leading cause for their sudden support for Harris.
Within weeks of officially becoming the Democratic candidate, a debate between Harris and Trump was hosted by ABC News. That debate was similar to the previous debate with Trump and Biden in that there was no live audience and each candidates’ mic was turned off when it wasn’t their turn to speak. Harris did a fairly decent job during that debate, whereas this time it was Trump who came off as a rambling old man. There have been talks about a second debate between Harris and Trump occurring sometime before the election, but as of now that doesn’t seem likely.
In mid-September, Harris gave a roughly ten minute interview to Brian Taff of Action News, an ABC affiliate in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. More recently, Harris gave another interview to MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhle, which was her first solo interview for a major network since becoming the Democratic candidate. The first of those two interviews was too brief to really provide any significant insights into Harris’ character or policies, and while that wasn’t the case with the second interview, it was so obviously biased in her favor that it felt less like an interview and more like a campaign ad. Even so, at least now she has something to point to when faced with criticism for her lack of media appearances.
With Kamala Harris as the nominee the Democratic Party is no longer held back by Biden’s increasing age and cognitive decline — or, to steal a catchphrase from Harris herself, the Democrats are now “unburdened by what has been” — and that has caused this to become a much closer race than it appeared to be just a few months ago. If Harris can successfully distance herself from her time in the Biden administration and win over enough independent and undecided voters in key swing states, she has a much better chance of beating Donald Trump in this election than Joe Biden ever did.
Donald Trump
To say that Donald Trump is a major figure in US politics is an understatement. Ever since he won the presidential election in 2016, Trump has dominated the Republican Party, maintained a fiercely loyal base of supporters, and garnered an enormous amount of media attention.
Depending on who you ask, Trump is either a dangerous, far right authoritarian bent on destroying democracy or he’s an American hero fighting the rot and corruption within the US government. Neither depiction of Trump is all that accurate, but he does seem to stray from much of the ruling class on certain issues, and that has been a major cause of both the hatred he receives from establishment figures and the strong support he gets from his base.
Trump’s prominence among Republican and right-leaning voters is undeniable, and were it not for the several indictments he received near the beginning of this election cycle there would’ve been no doubt that he’d become the Republican nominee. Those indictments — one in New York for misclassifying business records, one in Florida for retaining classified documents from his time as President, one in Georgia for election interference, and one in Washington DC for his role in the riot at the Capitol on January 6, 2021 — were clearly politically motivated as they were all based on novel legal theories and broad interpretations of the laws and statutes that Trump allegedly violated. They did sow some doubt as to whether he would win the nomination, however.
Unlike the Democrats, the Republican Party did allow for a primary process to take place, which included several presidential contenders taking part in three separate debates. Trump refused to participate in any of those debates due to the fact that he was the the leading choice among Republican voters by a very wide margin.
One by one each of the Republican presidential hopefuls dropped out of the race until it was down to Trump and former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, who stayed in the race until long after it had become obvious that she had no chance of winning. Haley was clearly the preferred candidate among the “never-Trumper” faction of the Republican Party, but that base of support wasn’t near enough for her to beat Trump in the primaries.
While Trump’s path to winning the Republican nomination seemed assured based on polls and primary results, questions remained about what would happen if one or more of his indictments ended in a conviction and possibly even a prison sentence after receiving the nomination or potentially winning the election.
In addition to his four indictments, Trump was even removed from the ballot in three states before the Supreme Court ruled that states lack that authority, at least when it comes to federal elections.
As CNN reported back in April:
Advocacy groups and critics of former President Donald Trump tried to remove him from the 2024 presidential ballot based on the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution, which says public officials who have “engaged in insurrection” are disqualified from ever serving again.
Three states — Colorado, Maine and Illinois — determined that this ban applies to Trump, because of his attempts to overturn the 2020 election and his role in the January 6, 2021, insurrection. Those three states decided to strip him from the Republican primary ballot, though those decisions were paused on appeal.
The US Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the Colorado case in February, and unanimously ruled in early March that Trump should remain on the ballot, because states don’t have the power to disqualify him from holding federal office.
In late May, Trump was found guilty on all 34 felony counts in his trial over misclassified business records in New York, which made him the first former US president to ever be tried and convicted of a crime. Rather than hurting his campaign, the verdict led to a swell of donations and support from Trump’s base. Trump’s sentencing date was recently pushed back until late November, which means it will take place after the election.
Over the summer, the Supreme Court threw a wrench into Trump’s case in Washington DC by ruling that there are some circumstances where presidents are entitled to absolute immunity for “official acts” taken while in office.
As Jacob Sullum wrote for Reason:
Challenging the federal prosecution stemming from his attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 election, Donald Trump argued that former presidents can be prosecuted for "official acts" only if they are first impeached by the House and convicted by the Senate based on the same conduct. The Supreme Court today [July 1, 2024] rejected that claim, which is based on an implausible reading of the constitutional text. At the same time, the Court held that a former president enjoys "absolute" immunity for "actions within his exclusive constitutional power," "presumptive" immunity for other "official acts," and no immunity for unofficial acts.
Since these distinctions require detailed, fact-specific analysis, the justices remanded the case to U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia to determine which parts of the election interference indictment can survive based on the Court's guidance. That decision probably means any trial in this case won't begin until after this year's presidential election. And depending on the outcome of that contest, the case may be dropped before it is resolved.
Within weeks of that Supreme Court ruling, Trump’s indictment in Florida for retaining and mishandling classified documents was dropped by the judge overseeing that case.
A superseding indictment for the Washington DC case, meant to work around the Supreme Court’s decision on presidential immunity, was unveiled in late-August, but it remains uncertain as to whether that case will even go to trial, let alone end in a conviction.
Not only has Trump faced unprecedented levels of lawfare designed to damage his presidential campaign, he has also survived two assassination attempts in just the last few months.
The first attempt was during one of Trump’s rallies in Butler, Pennsylvania, which occurred back in July, just days before President Biden dropped out of the race. In an incredible failure by the Secret Service — either out of sheer incompetence or willful negligence — a lone gunman, Thomas Matthew Crooks, was somehow able to get on top of a roof within shooting distance of Trump and fire off multiple rounds before being killed by a Secret Service counter-sniper unit. One of the would-be assassin’s bullets grazed Trump’s right ear, and it would’ve hit its mark had Trump not turned his head just a split-second before. With blood streaming down the side of his face, Trump raised a fist in the air and shouted “fight” several times as the Secret Service attempted to get him off the stage, which was captured in this indisputably iconic photograph:
Within days of Trump surviving a shot to his head, he appeared at the Republican National Convention and accepted the Republican nomination, still wearing a bandage on his ear (though many people have speculated that the bandage was no longer necessary and that he only wore it as a sort of PR stunt).
The second assassination attempt occurred in September while Trump was golfing at the Trump International Golf Course.
As reported by ABC News:
A Secret Service Special Agent was walking the perimeter of the golf club before spotting a rifle poking out of the tree line at 1:31 p.m., and the Secret Service fired 4-6 rounds of shots before the suspect fled, officials said. Trump had been "moving through the fifth fairway" and the alleged gunman was near the sixth green, according to acting Secret Service Director Ron Rowe Jr. Officials confirmed that there were about 300-500 yards between Trump and the suspect. Rowe added that the suspect did not fire, and Trump's whereabouts were not publicly available on his official schedule.
Unlike the suspect from the first attempt on Trump’s life, the second would-be assassin is still alive and is currently in pretrial detention, which means we’ll likely see more information about his motives come out in the coming months.
In the wake of all of this, a narrative has emerged that Iran — a country the foreign policy establishment has long wanted to go to war with, which is increasingly likely as the current situation in the middle east is reaching extremely dangerous levels — has been plotting to assassinate Trump. It has even been heavily implied that Iran was somehow involved in the first two attempts.
There has been no real evidence revealed to support this claim — other than intelligence agencies saying that some exists — but that hasn’t stopped the media and our political class, including Trump himself, from running with this narrative.
Personally, I think there’s far more reason to assume elements within the US government were behind the recent assassination attempts on Trump than there is to assume it was Iran. While there is no solid evidence to tie the US government to those attempts as of right now, there are plenty of aspects of both instances that should raise suspicion.
Little is known about Crooks or his motives, but many have pointed out that he had the appearance of the stereotypical mass shooter — a young white man with an assault rifle and apparent mental health issues. It is often speculated, and with good reason, that many mass shooters are the products of FBI entrapment cases gone wrong (that’s the generous interpretation), and evidence has even come out potentially linking the FBI to the would-be assassin. That isn’t to say that this evidence conclusively proves FBI involvement, but it’s a possibility that’s worth keeping in mind.
The suspect in the second assassination attempt, Ryan Routh, is a pro-Ukraine fanatic who even travelled to Ukraine to help recruit foreign fighters to Ukraine’s war effort against Russia. Given how involved the CIA has been in that war, it begs the question of whether Routh has any ties to US intelligence agencies. Trump has said he wants to negotiate an end to the war in Ukraine, and Routh may perceive a second Trump term as an obstacle to Ukraine “winning”, which is a possible motive for why he allegedly tried to kill the former president.
Despite all the lawfare and the two failed assassination attempts, Trump’s campaign has remained strong, and as of now he appears to have just as good of a chance at winning the presidency as does his opponent. A lot can happen in the coming weeks, however.
Other Candidates
RFK Jr.
There have been other notable candidates throughout this election, either running for third parties or as independents, but none of them ever really stood any chance of winning.
The most prominent of these is by far Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the nephew of former president John F. Kennedy, who first entered the race as a Democrat but later changed to an independent. Despite this change in affiliation, the Democratic Party still attempted to stonewall his campaign as much as possible.
For a time Kennedy was polling in the double digits, which is fairly uncommon for any candidate running outside of the two-party system.
RKF Jr. began his campaign by running against US involvement in the war in Ukraine and opposing the extremely authoritarian measures taken during the Covid-19 pandemic, which gained him a lot of support from people of all political persuasions who would like to see a significant challenge to the current system.
That momentum was later hindered by Kennedy’s ardent support for Israel and its brutal war in Gaza, which has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians. Many of the people who initially saw Kennedy as a true anti-establishment candidate felt like his support for Israel showcased a willingness to cave to the establishment on certain issues, which calls his other anti-establishment positions into question.
Recently, Kennedy suspended his campaign in several key battleground states — effectively ending his campaign altogether — and gave his endorsement to Donald Trump, which is another example of how US politics no longer fall into a Democrat vs. Republican framework.
Chase Oliver
Another third party candidate is Chase Oliver, who is running as the Libertarian Party candidate. While the Libertarian Party is the the third largest political party in the US, its candidates regularly fail to get more than 2-3 percent of the overall popular vote.
From a libertarian perspective, Oliver is good on many issues, which includes running against US support for the wars in both Ukraine and Israel, but his take on allowing children to take puberty blockers and other hormones and his lackluster opposition to the Covid regime have caused him to be somewhat controversial among libertarians.
To be fair to Oliver, he has said that he believes the government shouldn’t get in the way of children and teens beginning to transition their sex as long as the child, their parents and their doctor all agree it’s the right thing to do. And while he may not have come out as forcefully against the Covid regime as many think he should have, he never openly supported government mandates or lockdowns. Both of those stances are true to the libertarian belief of individual liberty over government authority, but many libertarians disagree with the way he talks about these issues, which they believe he should be more critical on.
Jill Stein
The last third party candidate I’ll mention is Jill Stein, who is running as the Green Party candidate for a third time since 2012.
The Green Party typically receives less votes than even the Libertarian Party, which means its candidates are very unlikely to win a presidential election. Many Democrats often accuse the Green Party of siphoning votes from the Democratic Party, but I’m willing to bet that most Green Party voters are far enough to the left that they would refuse to vote for a Democrat even without an alternative.
Lately, Stein has received some publicity from a recent spat between her and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a progressive member of the US House of Representatives from New York.
According to Newsweek:
In an Instagram story posted on Sunday [September 1, 2024], Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a New York Democrat, blasted Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein as "predatory" due to her multiple runs for the White House while struggling to grow the third party at the grassroots level.
…
Ocasio-Cortez accused Stein and the Green Party, which reached its current party status in 2001, for only putting its emphasis on presidential elections. To date, no Green Party candidate has ever held a federal office and only a handful have been elected as state legislators.
…
The Massachusetts native [Jill Stein] wrote in one post [in response to Ocasio-Cortez], "What's seriously predatory is pretending your candidate is 'working tirelessly for a ceasefire' [in Gaza] when in reality they're actively arming and funding genocide."
She wrote in a second post, "Democrats sue to kick us off ballots, hire operatives to infiltrate and sabotage us, lock us out of debates, fight ranked-choice voting, then act concerned that Greens have only won 1400 elections. So which party is authentic, and which is predatory?"
Stein and Oliver are the only two candidates mentioned in this article who have voiced any serious criticisms of US support for Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza, and even though neither one of them have any real chance of winning the presidency, their campaigns have at least kept the question as to whether the US should have any involvement in that war somewhat in the conversation during this election.
It Doesn’t Matter Who Wins
As is the case in practically all presidential elections in the US, it doesn’t really matter who wins in the end as the president is just the public face of a massive federal government. That government consists of many career bureaucrats working for federal agencies who will remain in their unelected — and unaccountable — positions regardless of who occupies the White House. Nothing highlights the reality of this so-called “Deep State” better than the current administration under Joe Biden, because his obvious cognitive decline makes it incredibly clear that he has not been the person calling the shots for quite some time.
During her time as vice president, Kamala Harris hasn’t really shown any indication that she’s taken a leading position within the administration either, which means whoever is calling the shots is someone the American people never voted for. And Harris’ clear lack of principles suggests that, like Joe Biden, she’ll be just another empty vessel for the ruling class to control should she win this election.
While Trump isn’t the anti-establishment hero his supporters claim he is, he’s at least unpredictable in that he has shown a willingness to potentially go against the ruling class on some issues.
Another aspect of this election that highlights how little the presidency matters is the fact that both Trump and Harris have held the levers of power over the last several years and neither one of them followed through on their promises or solved America’s problems in any meaningful way — I would even argue that they have both contributed to those problems. Both candidates are campaigning on bringing some much needed change to our system, and both promise to fix the economy, inflation, the border, and bring about peace and prosperity, but there’s no reason to believe either of them. This is largely due to the fact that many of their proposed policies require acts of Congress — an institution that is notoriously dysfunctional and polarized — but even where they could have had some effect on their own, they both failed to do so the first time around, so why should we believe things will be any different this time?
There are also certain aspects of the US government which seem to continue unabated regardless of who becomes president, such as the Federal Reserve’s role in our economic and monetary policy, the broad authority the administrative and national security states have over this country, and the violence and militarism of our foreign policy establishment. The most relevant example of this is the US government’s support for Israel, which both Donald Trump and Kamala Harris have vowed to continue (this is one issue where Harris’ rhetoric has actually been slightly better than Trump’s, but that’s probably only because a faction of Democratic voters oppose Israel’s war in Gaza and she’s attempting to get their votes, whereas most Trump supporters are also supportive of Israel). Even if RFK Jr. had somehow managed to win this election as an independent, his vocal support for Israel suggests that US policy toward Israel would not have changed, which shows that there are some issues that just cannot be solved by electing a different president every four years.
Conclusion
At the beginning of this election, people mostly seemed indifferent, as both Donald Trump and Joe Biden are unpopular with large swaths of the American public. However, it’s been almost impossible to ignore all of the crazy things that have happened over the course of this election cycle, and the closer we get to its end the more interested the general population appears to be.
The lawfare and assassination attempts against Trump have done less to damage Trump’s campaign than they have to energize his base, and Biden dropping out and being replaced by Harris has given the Democrats a much better chance at beating Trump, which has caused their voter base to rally behind her.
The most recent event that’s worth noting about this election is the vice presidential debate between Senator JD Vance and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, Trump’s and Harris’ respective running mates, which occurred just last week. That debate was likely the last debate the American people will get before this election ends, and there’s little reason to think that it had any sway on how US citizens will vote in November.
Recent polls suggest that both Trump and Harris have a fair chance at becoming the next president, but there’s no telling what could happen in these final weeks. There’s still enough time left for major developments and “October surprises” to take place and drastically alter the current trajectory of this election. Although we’re near the end, this incredibly bizarre election cycle is not quite over yet.
This article is not intended to persuade anyone to vote a certain way, nor is it intended to convince anyone not to vote. Anyone reading this should vote for their preferred candidate or withhold their vote if they so choose, but don’t be under the illusion that doing so will bring about any meaningful change, which is something this country so desperately needs.
The problems that America faces are deeply embedded into our system, and as long as we continue to place all of our hope in one elected official without also working to fix the broader system and significantly challenge the status quo, those problems are sure to continue regardless of who wins in November.
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