By Steven Yates
September 14, 2024
[Author’s note: what follows is the opinion of its author, and should not be taken as the opinion of NewsWithViews.com, of its editorial staff, or of other NWV writers.]
By official measures, the other night’s “debate” between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris damaged Trump’s chances of winning this election.
Naturally I hope I’m wrong.
Because if Harris wins and the far left presidency-by-committee that we’ve had since January 21, 2021 continues much longer, the U.S. will look more like Venezuela with each passing year. It is conceivable that with Democrats mostly united behind their new figurehead and Republicans divided between MAGA remnants and its past (globalist) Establishment (Bushes, Romneys, Cheneys, etc.), the U.S. will be a one-party country by 2028.
By which time it will be possible to steal elections in broad daylight, the way Maduro just stole the recent Venezuelan election (the real winner was just granted political asylum in Spain).
Look: after three-and-three-quarters years of roaring inflation, out-of-control illegal migration, and two new foreign wars under Biden’s watch, this is (was?) Trump’s election to lose.
Harris was obviously coached with great care. I can picture her having undergone grueling rehearsals. Finally onstage, she approached Trump hand extended, making it impossibly awkward for him not to shake it. As they’d not met face to face before, she boldly introduced herself by name. I don’t think Trump anticipated that. It seemed to throw him, and he never got his stride back.
There was little of the trademark cackling for which Harris has been ridiculed, moreover — doubtless she’d been warned — and while her carefully scripted responses were seldom truthful, I didn’t hear any of her past lapses into word salad.
She is a former prosecuting attorney, and doubtless that’s what her handlers appealed to during her preparations.
Her voice wasn’t as annoying as Hillary’s, moreover, and she didn’t come across as an emotionally barren technocrat. Her facial expressions sometimes made me wonder if her handlers had studied Tucker Carlson, who’s perfected a trademark can-you-believe-this-crap frown of incredulity. Sometimes she just stared at Trump.
He and his team had to know, going in, that the moderators would handle her with kid gloves while all three of them tried to bait him.
Trump was right when he said afterwards, it was three versus one.
But to my reckoning, he didn’t seem all that well prepared. He might have assumed she’d be a pushover. Big mistake!
It should also have been given that he’d have to stay on point and either answer the questions asked or explain to the audience (according to Nielson ratings around 67.1 million tuned in) why the question was inappropriate.
Instead, he set himself up for ridicule. He hammered certain issues, like illegal migration, while neglecting things he should have said if he really wanted to portray the other side as incompetent and dishonest.
As valid an issue as illegal migration is, he didn’t handle it right.
Why on Earth did he start pontificating about Haitian immigrants eating pets in Springfield, Ohio?
Now I don’t know if that claim has any truth or not? I’m a long way from Ohio.
But in our post-truth world, Trump hurts himself with this sort of thing. It just sounds like something lifted off social media, which corporate media can label misinformation.
Public ridicule is effective because of how it appeals to emotions and is thus hard to defend against rationally.
It should be possible to observe, though, that as long as Democrats are engaging in it, their calls for unity ought to be seen as bogus.
Trump didn’t say this, either.
Next: when addressing the abortion and IVF issues, why did he say some states were killing newborn infants?
As bad as the pro-abortion death culture is (and Harris will make it worse!), no one is doing that! (So-called fact-checkers do get things right sometimes.)
Again, Trump set himself up to be taken down.
His best bet would have been just to say that abortion is not a federal issue. One of the consequences of the reversal of Roe was its being decided on a state-by-state basis.
Abortion is not a problem that will be resolved politically because it is a moral and spiritual problem. It is a worldview problem.
The way the Dobbs decision backfired illustrates this. You cannot change a culture’s dominant worldview by legislating against consequences. It’s like taking aspirin to fight cancer. Abortion will not go away until we somehow address the materialist death culture at that deeper level: fighting the cancer of materialism not with the aspirin of judicial decisions or legislation but having a serious conversation about what sort of worldview a society requires if it is going to remain civilized.
As for IVF, Trump made a remark that, had I been in the room, I’d have wanted to crawl under the nearest carpet:
“I have been a leader on fertilization.”
Ouch!
Trump did land some blows on how Harris has failed utterly on border security. That’s when he wasn’t talking about a few illegal migrants eating pets. He could have noted the effects of mass migration, legal or illegal, on Europe, where entire portions of major cities have become Muslim colonies.
Then asked those 67.1 million viewers/voters if that’s what they want the U.S. to look like four years from now.
Instead, why did he turn to the size of crowds at his rallies?
Again, he was baited, and gave in to something irrelevant to the issues facing the country — and in a broader sense, Western civilization as a whole!
Why, also, did he also allow himself to be drawn into a back-and-forth on January 6, and whether or not he really won the 2020 election?
Yes, he quickly corrected the moderator’s official narrative which omitted the crucial words peacefully and patriotically. As for that election, he may think he won, and we may think he won, but it’s history, and going back over it now isn’t going to help him win this election!
If anything, it again hurts him because too many Americans believe the official narrative! It won’t win over undecided voters in crucial swing states!
Trump could have emphasized such uncomfortable facts as that Harris becoming the Democrat candidate without winning a single primary vote, that she’d been soundly rejected by voters back in 2020, and that until very recently, she’d been less popular than Joe Biden. Her staff has huge turnover rates, moreover: a sign that behind closed doors, she’s probably not the nicest person to work for. She might be like Hillary in that respect.
Trump could have pointed out that she and her handlers, the presidency-by-committee (consisting most likely of the Obamas, the Clintons, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, a few other powerful Democrats, and possibly unknown others in the shadows), spent four years hiding the fact that Joe Biden has dementia, and since cognitive decline is progressive, eventually he was going to be unable to handle himself.
Hence June 27, a disaster for Democrats.
Kamala Harris contributed directly to this cover-up! This should be an indication of how fundamentally dishonest she is! Do we really want this person in the Oval Office?
All this would have been on point! Trump missed this golden opportunity to win back the hour.
Now, with Kamala Harris (age 59), corporate media can portray Trump (age 78) as the senile old man, using his chronic inability to get on message against him: a sign that it’s time to “turn the page” on him.
Trump botched an opportunity to own his interrogators on the war in Ukraine. Challenged point blank on how he would resolve the war quickly, something he’s said repeatedly he could do in 24 hours, he talked about everything else. He spoke passionately about the millions of people who have died needlessly on both sides, but not how to put a stop to the killing.
I’d hoped to hear something like: I’d bring President Putin and President Zelenskyy to the table in neutral territory and we’d not leave that room until we worked out and signed a binding deal. Each party would gain something, and each party would give up something. They’d shake hands and then go get the job done!
Details of such a deal?
None of your left wing media business! Trump could say. I’d have to be out of my mind to give the house away supplying you guys with any more specifics!
Trump missed other opportunities to score direct hits on Kamala. There was a pro-Palestinian protest going on outside. Eventually the situation in Gaza came up. Harris gave an obviously canned rehearsal of support for a two-state solution, ending with, “too many innocent Palestinians have been killed.”
“How many deaths are acceptable?” would have been my question. “Give us a number.”
For Trump this is a bit more complicated, however, because if Russiagate was a hoax, Trump’s fealty to Israel is well-known (so is Harris’s; this might be their biggest area of agreement no one will talk about).
Harris has also said in the recent pass, defending her supposed move toward the political center, that “my values have not changed.”
So does that mean she still wants to defund the police, as she did back in 2020? Does she still want to completely eliminate private health care coverage?
Despite saying otherwise, the other night? (Following the Biden dementia coverup, her honesty is an issue, remember?)
Trump, instead, kept referencing Biden, to the point where she retorted, “You’re not running against Joe Biden, you’re running against me.”
He stated, at one point, “She is Biden!”
No, she’s a full magnitude left of Biden! Trump needed to hammer this point!
Trump’s closing speech was solid, noting how Harris has been positioned for over three years to solve the crisis at the border and hasn’t done it, how “we’re a failing nation” and “being laughed at all over the world.” All true. I doubt very much that Putin would have gone into Ukraine, or that Hamas would have attacked Israelis, had they not sensed weakness in the most powerful nation in the West, had they not recognized that we’ve had almost four years of the weakest presidency and vice-presidency in recent memory. As a result, we’re indeed closer to a third world war than we’ve been at any time since the Cuban Missile Crisis.
It was too late to fill in the gaps and missed opportunities, though, or avoid leaving audiences with the impression that overall he was off-balance and struggling.
Trump made the same mistake he made upon entering office back in 2017: underestimating the opposition.
He’s said he has no plans for another debate. Maybe that’s just as well. I have friends who believe he’s nevertheless still going to win, if only because the Bidenista economy has been a disaster for ordinary people. Many of Trump’s supporters out in the hinterlands, friends argue to me, have basically gone silent. They’ll come out of the woodwork on November 5, knowing that at the end of the day, Kamala Harris is a hard-left radical, a product of the Diversity-Inclusion-Equity culture, who probably could not set up and run a lemonade stand by herself.
Who would not be where she is now without that presidency-by-committee we’ve had since January 21, 2021, and without corporate media’s manufacturing her image.
“What happens November 5 is what counts,” one person texted me yesterday.
I sincerely hope this is true.
Because what we’re seeing is indeed a mass media manufactured figurehead, a product of media corporations and the deep state.
As I’ve said previously, she’s now the Establishment candidate, a product of those terrified of a second Trump presidency.
Should she win and becomes the First Woman-of-Color President (white not being a color), leftist Democrats will celebrate dodging Trump’s “threat to democracy” while they continue pressing the political prosecution and personal ruination not just of Trump but of as many of his past and recent associates as they can. Some, such as Peter Navarro and Steve Bannon, have been jailed already.
The left is trying to ruin J.D. Vance as we speak. If Trump loses, Vance will likely be out of politics within a year. I, for one, won’t blame him.
Conservatives will lament lost opportunities while predicting the one-party state I mentioned. Expect it by 2028, if she wins. A Constitutional scholar from Berkeley (where else?) recently had a major article in The New York Times on how the Constitution itself is now a “threat to democracy.” This, too, should be a wake-up call. Under a Kamala Harris presidency we should expect moves to limit or even replace the document with a “woke” successor probably already composed and waiting in the wings.
A Constitutional Convention will do it.
By 2040 if not much sooner, the U.S. will have followed Venezuela into full-on corruption and oblivion. Perhaps a few or perhaps many intrepid states will have taken the steps going through with secession threats already being made. But that’s a different article.
© 2024 Steven Yates – All Rights Reserved
E-Mail Steven Yates: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com
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Steven Yates is a (still recovering) ex-academic with a PhD in Philosophy. He taught for more than 15 years total at several universities in the Southeastern U.S. He authored three books, more than 20 articles, numerous book reviews, and review essays in academic journals and anthologies. Refused tenure and unable to obtain full-time academic employment (and with an increasing number of very fundamental philosophical essays refused publication in journals), he turned to alternative platforms and heretical notions, including about academia itself.
In 2012 he moved to Chile. He is married to a Chilean national. Among his discoveries in South America: the problems of the U.S. are problems everywhere, because human nature is the same everywhere. The problems are problems of Western civilization as a whole.
He has a Patreon.com page. Donate here and become a Patron if you benefit from his work and believe it merits being sustained financially.
Steven Yates’s book Four Cardinal Errors: Reasons for the Decline of the American Republic (2011) can be ordered here.
His philosophical work What Should Philosophy Do? A Theory (2021) can be obtained here or here.
His paranormal horror novel The Shadow Over Sarnath (2023) can be gotten here.
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