The Witness Chronicles, August 6, 2024

Watching it fall apart and now, Walz

Photo by Vadim Bogulov on Unsplash

Donald Trump is Scared Sh*itless of Kamala Harris

And Vance is no help whatsoever

A black woman. An Indian-American. A prosecutor twice elected Attorney General of the biggest state in the union. A woman who can laugh at Donald Trump, then back it up with facts, over and over again.

In many ways this is the Trump campaign’s worst nightmare. And on top of that she is turning out to be a tough cookie under that contagious laughter. So you have a guy born with a silver spoon in his mouth versus a woman of color who is extraordinarily successful, even by Donald Trump’s white rich guy standards.

It’s not a great look. I sat on a bus yesterday and listened to three street people, including one black man, who live on the edge. None of them can vote because they have been in prison, but they spent the short trip gleefully loving Trump and talking about how a woman would totally screw everything up.

This the Trump party line, but it was not going down with other people on the bus, including the African-American driver in my northeastern city. If this is the constituency of Trump’s campaign, I don’t engage them, that is a useless task. But it told me that his rabid followers are not very compelling. In fact, they are wildly offensive to many.

It’s not a good look. I live in a liberal, very mixed race city so I don’t see sentiment in rural communities. But demographics tell us rural districts don’t have enough of an impact to counter votes from cities like mine. And Kamala Harris is stirring up excitement in our urban communities.

This is all terrifying to Republican right wing operatives. First, they don’t know these people, those Trump has been courting. But there appear to be a growing numbers of Republican politicians who are realized alienating huge numbers of American voters over race and gender issues is chilling their support from a growing number of voters.

A lot of us work with and hang out with a variety of people who are not Trump’s vision of what an American is. Just tonight, I had comversations with a wide range of people who don’t look like me, a stereotypical older white man.

The change Donald Trump cannot comprehend is that my age or racial profile has nothing to do with our conversations, on either end. We did not even consider it. And that is where America is going right now, not backwards to some Vance vision of a pregnant woman In the kitchen or Trump’s hatred of those who are from different places and backgrounds.

By the way, for what it is worth, Trump just raised the membership fee for Mar A Lago to a cool one million dollars.

He needs money, desperately. Harris is outraising him by two to one. But even more important, he needs to be insulated from reality, a reality Kamala Harris represents in almost every way he does not.

Tomorrow, as I write this, she will choose her running mate. All the candidates look like me, for good reason. I’ll qualify that, Pete Buttigieg is gay, but he has established his credibility as what I think will be a future President. But that makes sense. She needs the white male vote. We are still a huge voting bloc.

The difference between her and the Trump campaign is they really don’t really understand any of this. They are taking the low road, but I don’t think any of us want to live on the low road. It’s an irony. He appeals to those outside of success. But he doesn’t sell them real progress to change that.

Kamala Harris is no fool. She knows Obama’s message of hope resonated with a lot of people. Her emerging slogan is ‘never going back’, a brilliant attack on the hellhole future message of Trump.

I can only speak for myself but I am not going back. The Republicans have embraced a backwards story, where we go back to an idealistic vision of a past America which does not exist and never has.

They are selling a myth and Kamala is selling a positive vision of a future. And they just don’t seem to get it.

And that has them terrified and running in circles, trying every attack they can think of, not realizing that we are sick of attacks. We want a story of a future that is better. That’s all.

It’s not so complicated, right?

Update: Harris this morning chose Minnesota governor Tim Walz as her running mate. I think this is a good choice for a number of reasons, but he projects a calm and personable perspective that will be a great contrast to Vance’s creepy personality.

The Trump campaign responded to the news with the predictable blather about how Walz is a dangerous liberal, blah blah blah.

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