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We Are Living in a New Reality: Donald Trump 2.0
This column was posted today on the website
In the name of eradicating waste and fraud and “making America great again,” President Trump has found common cause with a highly organized 40 year project to create a “unitary presidency” and to unravel many features of the US’s regime of fairness and dignity. This project is most clearly laid out in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, a document written in part by Russell Vought, who has recently been confirmed as head of the Office of Management and Budget. President Trump has also found common cause with the wealthiest man in the world, Elon Musk, to whom Trump has given carte blanche under the auspices of a government department created with no congressional approval - the Department of Government Efficiency or DOGE - to fire federal employees and cut agencies without any discriminatory protocols. By this means, in the past four weeks, President Trump has been presiding over the dismantling of the world’s oldest and most influential democracy.
No one questions the importance of addressing the US’s trillion-dollar debt. And it would be naïve to suppose there are no areas of the federal government where waste could be cut. Nor would anyone dispute that the US system for handling matters relating to immigration is seriously broken. Over and above these premises, it is no secret that the situation of blue-collar workers in the US has been undermined by forty years of diverting industry overseas, leaving possibilities for livelihood, pride, and meaning-making in the dust. And beyond that, angst is understandably growing everywhere in the face of the world’s breakneck speed of change, leading all of us to believe deeply in the need for new approaches to governance.
The rapidity with which Donald Trump’s government has acted would be admirable if we could see that its initiatives were leading to a thoughtful reinvention of American institutions. And we can’t entirely dismiss that possibility in a few cases. But we are now seeing individuals with little knowledge and no experience of what our government does being let loose to apply a wrecking hammer. Elon Musk’s free rein allows him to eliminate all barriers to his own business interests, to be Donald Trump’s representative in challenging guardrails and checks that protect government, to blur the division between governance and politics. Some are arguing that it is now Elon Musk, not Donald Trump, who runs the US government. All these actions suggest the imposition of an authoritarian regime that takes no notice of Congress’s role in governance.
This is not conservatism, because conservatism means slow evolution, protecting existing institutions from rapid change. It is not populism, because populism operates in the interests of the non-elite, whereas many of the programs that protect the vulnerable have been placed on the chopping block in the first four weeks of this administration. These actions amount to an authoritarian takeover, where guardrails have been destroyed, and arbitrary orders delivered that require tests of allegiance or firing. A number of these actions are clearly contrary to the wellbeing of citizens of the US, and contrary to President Trump’s campaign promises to reduce inflation and increase the welfare of Americans.
Downsizing government at what cost?
Plenty of statistics are available, and the only difficulty with providing them is that they change every day. A comprehensive list of federal government layoffs as of February 19 can be found here. Some highlights: the federal government has offered early retirement to all federal employees who wish to take this offer, and so far 75,000 have signed on, though the program has been temporarily halted by a judge who is looking into the repercussions. DOGE’s layoffs will prioritize all probationary federal workers, which means anyone who has worked for the government for less than a year. Numbers involved are not entirely clear but there were 200,000 such workers as of March 2024, whose jobs are therefore immediately on the line. 1,300 of these are at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, making up one-tenth of the workforce in that body. The jobs of more seasoned civil servants are also on the line: 5,000 from the Department of Health and Human Services, 1,000 from the Department of Veterans Affairs. The Department of Education is having $900 million cut from its institute that tracks student performance, and it is unclear whether the institute will continue to exist.
Many who voted for Trump applaud all of the above as a good and necessary reduction in government spending. The crucial question is at what cost does all this occur to the American people and the country’s future as a democratic government?
Some provisional answers:
Firing seventeen Inspectors General without giving Congress the required 30 day notice removes government employees who are already doing precisely what President Trump claims he wants to do: eliminating fraud and abuse in government at the federal, state and local level. The logicality of this move can only be understood as a power play, testing the willingness of the system to push back, and showing that Trump-Musk will call the shots on how things are done even if they are being done very well already.
The directive to eliminate Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) programs, will make it difficult for anyone to speak honestly in public about racism or exclusion because they will be open to accusations of using DEI language. This could end up being one place where the issue of free speech will be put to the test.
Trump’s announcement that the Gulf of Mexico will now be called the Gulf of America seems laughable, but when Associated Press continued to use the term Gulf of Mexico because it serves an international clientele, it was shut out of the White House press briefings. This is even more serious than it sounds, because Associated Press holds a unique position in the journalism pool for its highly trusted and longstanding role in global journalism. It is the US’s largest, and until recently the world’s largest, press agency, servicing thousands of other journalistic outlets. Trump’s action is a highly thought-out tactic to assert power and create precedents for limiting free speech.
In bulldozing Federal agencies through the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, Musk has brought in a group of young people with no experience or understanding of the role played by government workers who now have to access government records and private information. The highly prized “right to privacy” is thus also being threatened. This situation plays out in its most acute form with regard to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), where Musk and his people initially attempted a level of access to information – through the Integrated Data Retrieval System - that even the head of the IRS does not have, because the need to protect this elaborate system is so prized. Fortunately, yesterday the Treasury Department cut across the White House’s acceptance of this and forbad DOGE from accessing individuals’ personal tax information, though DOGE is persisting in its bid to get access to medical files of the Social Security Administration.
With regard to the US’s stance on the global stage, the decision to cut over 800 existing programs from the US’s foreign assistance agency , USAID, and to lay off approximately 10,000 people employed by USAID, removes one of the most important means by which the US reinforces good relations with the rest of the world, quite apart from the substance of the work it does. This action is a brutal removal of humanitarian aid in numerous areas.
Abandoning Ukraine’s fight for freedom
Blaming Ukraine for the war it is fighting is a blatant untruth and a declaration that the US is no longer the world’s ultimate defender of freedom. US actions in the past week in relation to Ukraine have raised questions for Europeans about whether the longstanding Atlantic Alliance still stands. And the Trump administration’s criticism of the EU because “it has too many rules” and thus interferes with the goals of American tech companies has reinforced concern about the demise of trans-Atlantic ties. Comments one columnist, “The era of international gangsterism has arrived.”
In addition, Trump’s government has placed our justice system under assault. A series of examples of this are available, but consider, as one case, the offer made to New York Mayor Eric Adams to have his corruption indictment removed if he cooperates with the Federal Government’s immigration agenda as it relates to New York City. The prosecutor who was ordered to drop the case, a Republican who had, in her early career, clerked for two of our most far-right Supreme Court Justices, resigned immediately, and seven other prosecutors have followed suit. Now four deputy mayors of New York City are threatening to resign as a vote of no-confidence in their Mayor. People are taking a costly stand against Trump’s Justice Department, because they see a blatant attempt to introduce political manipulation into the legal system.
In sum, these actions and others threaten to endanger us all if they alienate us from our allies, undermine our dedication to truth, freedom and global humanitarian solidarity, and produce an apathetic population that is amenable to a power grab.
Highlighting the courageous actions of individuals who have found ways to push back is one valuable service we writers can provide. Another is to help our readers keep perspective on the larger significance of this turn of events.
Can we grow to meet our global challenges?
The emergence of so many democratically elected far-right governments that are questioning long-held assumptions about fair, just and inclusive politics, underlines that humanity is at a turning point. “Turning point” language has been used many times before but has never been more true. This moment of truth is prompted by the coalescence of a number of mounting challenges: pressures of immigration, climate change, shifts in understanding of the nature of morality and values, disrupted economic patterns caused by the pandemic, failures over the past forty years to address the economic realities of the hardest working people in a number of countries, not least the world’s wealthiest country, an overly intellectualized university-educated elite that lacks attunement to core economic needs of people not like them, accumulating power of a small number of the very wealthy, and a shifting international security picture that allows older assumptions to be called into question.
A large body of people exists globally who believe very significant changes are needed for us to be able to function on the planet both within our countries and in our relationships to others. Tensions between realism about a range of economic considerations, and concerns about justice, dignity and fairness, underlie the debate for even the most sincere and least self-serving people.
We, the residents of this planet, don’t have fully developed answers to these large conundrums. But we have many of the raw materials to create answers, if we will choose to use them. This is a moment of deciding who we are. It is not an academic matter, it is an existential matter. It is a time for those who believe we can grow to meet our challenges to find common cause by embracing essential honesty about our situation and truth in our discussions.
For Americans the future has arrived
The events of the past week force Americans to pull out of hibernation and get to grips with what is to come. Please see my post on the website of We Are One Humanity.
https://www.weareonehumanity.org/contributing-writers/kti0y21isenomhtk97iylsiu50brdo
American Bounty
This week Americans travel home for Thanksgiving. In spite of inclement weather forecasts, a record eighty million people will be on the move. Families will reconnect, turkey will be eaten, football will be watched. Traditionally we thank God for the extraordinary bounty of this country.
But many of us are right now feeling the ache of an election that divided us existentially. Nearly half of those who voted believe that the country is in danger: the stated determination of Donald Trump, the great disrupter, to throw into disarray institutions that have safeguarded this two-hundred-and-fifty-year experiment in democracy is a heartache. We are grieving. Those who voted for him did not necessarily like him – though some did. But a common thread among his supporters was a sense of desperation with things as they are.
We hope this Thanksgiving time will help us affirm all that we love and to deepen our connections with things and people that matter to us.
Why did the Democrats lose? Kamala Harris has largely been credited for running an excellent campaign, and her debate performance against Donald Trump on September 10 was remarkably good. Her weaknesses were that she did not address the immigration crisis and the economy adequately. She ran on democracy and abortion, and those proved not to be enough.
She was hampered by the process by which she became the nominee. By announcing before he chose her as his vice-presidential candidate in 2020 that he intended to choose a woman, Joe Biden made it hard for her to shake off an aura of his “diversity” choice. This tainted her in the eyes of the right, who have made what they call “wokeness” and “cultural Marxism” and “diversity, equity and inclusion” (DEI) the butt of their disparagement. Mr. Biden’s failure to bow out of the race a year earlier denied us Democratic primaries where candidates would have been tested. Then there is the fact that it has been extremely rare for a vice-president to follow their sitting president into office. George H.W. Bush did it in the 1988 election. The president who did it before Bush was Martin Van Buren in 1836. This is because it is so difficult to defend the record of your predecessor while trying to assert your distinctive potential. All this in addition to Harris having to overcome standard prejudices about a black female candidate.
Harris was also seriously hampered by the Democratic Party’s more longstanding confusion over its essence and role. The Democratic Party has come to represent the meritocracy of the elite, and in the process, the party has lost its attunement with working people and its traditional primary focus on the disadvantaged. Instead, its emphasis on cultural identity as an approach to empowerment has taken that to extremes, as seen with transgender issues that do not resonate with large numbers and make the party seem out of touch. In a country that has shifted to the right since 1980, Democrats have seen their passion for economic equality trashed as “Marxism” by the other party. The trick is to find a left-of-center position that resonates with a country whose composite national outlook falls to the right-of-center.
Of course, a party that feels no inhibitions about lying or about indulging in crowd-pleasing denigration is, unfortunately, going to have an advantage. Trump created and played on fear. He trumped up beliefs that the illegal immigrants of this country are taking jobs away from others who want them and making people unsafe, even though crime rates of immigrants are generally low. His reported intention to deport large numbers of illegal immigrants who have not committed crimes will draw down on numbers working in agriculture and contribute to rising food prices.
But the key point about the Trump victory is that Trump was able to appeal to a very large and disaffected group who believe they have been left out when it comes to sharing in the purpose, culture and bounty of this country.
People were incensed about inflation, but the problem was greater than that. In the years since 1981, the gap between the rich and poor in America has brutally widened. Wages have remained stagnant, while tax deductions for the wealthy have increased exponentially. In 2021, America’s richest 1 percent of households averaged 139 times as much income as the bottom 20 percent, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Trade unions have all but disappeared. Ronald Reagan’s administration removed regulation of guardrails on companies and limitations on stock buybacks. NAFTA (passed in the Clinton administration) encouraged sending basic industries overseas, leaving whole towns in the midwest with no livelihood. It was also on Bill Clinton’s watch that welfare ceased to be an open-ended entitlement from the federal government. Instead, money is now given as block grants to states, which distribute it according to their own formulas, often including a requirement that a person be working in order to get welfare. The new system introduced caps on length of time aid could be given and fines for those who did not comply with aspects of the regulations.
Former Secretary of Labor, Robert Reich, brought to America’s attention a few days ago that General Motors just last week laid off 1,000 workers, having laid off 1,500 workers last summer. The company mumbled that their bottom line could not meet the costs of paying these workers, but Reich reports that GM’s profits for this year will surpass its 2022 record profit of $14.5 billion. GM CEO Mary Barra’s compensation for 2024 is slated to be $27.8 million, making the ratio of her compensation to that of the average worker 303:1.
Historians tell us that revolutions happen not when things reach their worst but when things start getting better. At that point expectations rise, and then when things don’t continue to improve, people protest. The pandemic, interestingly, has ended up helping many in the workforce who benefitted from the hiatus during which they had federal assistance and were freed up to look for better paying jobs. Large numbers have moved from the service industry (restaurants, hotels, et cetera) into tech, which grew enormously during the pandemic. This raised expectations and gave people more sense of power, enhancing their hopes for more.
But the lives of those at the very bottom of the economic ladder may well have been permanently disrupted by the pandemic. COVID-19 mortality rates affected the economically disadvantaged disproportionately. Millions of Americans in the lower socio-economic tier are still suffering that psychological shock, as well as experiencing a disruption of the fragile economic balance of their lives. Government handouts during the pandemic reduced the poverty rate on the short term. Trump instituted those handouts, but it was left to Biden to end them once COVID-19 had receded. He had to do it, but he did it just as inflation was hotting up.
All of the above provides some background to the anger and the welcoming of disruptive populist politics we saw during the presidential election on November 5.
Will Donald Trump be able to meet the expectations of those who elected him? Right now, we don’t yet know which of his policy promises will come to fruition in his administration. Cabinet nominations indicate that in most cases loyalty to himself is a more important criterion than experience with the substance of the position. Six of his nominees had a role in preparing the Heritage Foundation’s 2025 Project, a policy blueprint for the new administration that reorganizes the federal bureaucracy to further a conservative agenda, greatly enhancing the powers of the presidency. It encourages Mr. Trump in his plan to fire as many as 50,000 civil servants in the federal government and designate their jobs as political appointments, thus allowing him to fill the bureaucracy with more loyal followers. Mr. Trump promises to place tariffs on imports from Canada, Mexico, and China on day one – an action that will result in further inflation. He also promises to lower corporate taxes from 21 percent to 15 percent, further enriching the wealthy.
Mr. Trump’s promise to improve the economic lives of working people seems unlikely to be achieved with such policies.
Privileged Americans have always been able to be complacent about the bounty and possibilities of this country. But in a country whose ethos of self-help seems bottomless, the disinclination to use government to redistribute resources has been a no-no written into the culture. This is a country founded, in the minds of many people, on an idea that freedom consists of minimal government action. Inroads into this mindset were made during the period bookended by Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson. Subsequently the pushback has been enormous, making Barack Obama’s success in passing a broader health insurance system that still left over twenty million uninsured a near miracle. What this election has made clear is that working people see through intellectualized notions of empowerment. They respond to words that resonate with their experience.
As we approach this Thanksgiving Day, we are thankful that our recent election occurred without violence. We recognize anew that our precious democracy requires participation and vigilance from all of us and we prepare ourselves to discover new ways to do that. And we ask ourselves, at a time when the frustrations of our workforce have been brought before us afresh, can we imagine a country that can redefine itself from being a self-help, me-first collective that denies its obligations to those left behind, to a country determined to allow everyone to thrive?
Thank you, Kamala Harris
Thirty-six hours to go…
And so, in the end, is it really about her being a woman?
Many particular factors have made this presidential election cycle exceptional: for starters, the inability of both parties to bring in new blood, making the two original candidates the oldest and second-oldest presidential candidates in American history; Trump’s legal convictions for sexual predation and graft; the extraordinary cult following of Trump that regards the legal convictions as irrelevant; the shear brashness of Trump in running a campaign of falsehood and crudeness, demeaning the office he seeks by shedding all appropriate decorum; the accompanying breakdown of the traditional Republican Party; the magnitude of economic challenges faced in the post-pandemic world that make the public deeply dissatisfied; the visceral sense of doom we feel about climate change; wars in Ukraine, Gaza, and Lebanon; above all, democratic values under attack not only in the US but round the globe. And then there was Joe Biden’s belated departure from the race.
While carrying all of this in my soul, the most outstanding moment of the election cycle, for me, was when Kamala Harris stepped forward firmly and showed she was ready.
Some, perhaps many, of us at one time or another have found ourselves in a situation where we had the chance to rise to being someone larger than we had ever been before. The decision to step towards that call is an act of will, tempered by knowing that we will have to grow to meet the challenge.
Kamala Harris’s situation on July 21 was of this order. It is a sobering honor to be the container holding an historic moment for everyone.
She knew without a doubt she was the person of the hour. The demands of the situation, rather than her being a woman or a person of color, were what called, and she has continued to present herself as the person best qualified to do the job she seeks.
Biden’s slowness to get to grips with his decline shortchanged her. She would have benefitted from primaries where she could have honed her message, and from a longer campaign where the public could become more familiar with her.
But Harris is not a person to linger with frustrations. She assesses her options and moves forward without drama. And when he finally decided, she was ready to go.
Abortion’s polarizing power
Even though Harris is not campaigning on gender, many are saying this is a presidential season defined by gender. One candidate is a proud and open sexual predator, convicted of sexual abuse and defamation against journalist E. Jean Carroll, and of falsely categorizing his hush money payment to adult film star Stormy Daniels as a campaign reimbursement.
Curiously, the same candidate, though originally a supporter of women’s right to choose, took up the anti-abortion torch when he recognized it would earn him the support of pro-life Christians in the Republican party. His appointment of three pro-life Supreme Court judges made possible the Supreme Court’s removal of a constitutional right to abortion through the Dobbs’ decision of 2022. Abortion policy has become the prerogative of state legislatures, twenty-two of which have since passed measures limiting abortion. In some cases, the new laws are so stringent that doctors are intimidated from performing related medical procedures that are essential to women’s health. Thus the “abortion issue” has turned into a “women’s health” issue.
As a nation and a people, we differ in our views about abortion. For some, the sacred right to life starting at conception transcends every other consideration in this matter, and that view deserves respect. But you can adhere to a personal moral and spiritual code that does not accept abortion and still recognize that a government ban is not a suitable solution. Not least it invites other seriously negative health outcomes for women and denies them the dignity of being able to make their own decisions about their body. This is Harris’s position.
Will the many women who feel strongly on this issue propel Kamala Harris to victory? According to Newsweek, the rise in numbers leaning towards the Democratic position on abortion has been largely thanks to women’s shifting views—up from 51 percent just before Harris entered the race in July 2024 to 55 percent in October. These figures are up from 48 percent in July 2023.
But a majority of men support abortion also. As of October 2024, 52 percent say they support the Democratic Party’s position. This is so even though the numbers of men supporting the Republican party’s position has risen from 33 percent to 40 percent in the past year.
As a result, Donald Trump is now tempering his message on abortion. He has refuted the notion, repeated by Kamala Harris in their debate on September 10, that he would pass a federal abortion ban. He takes credit for overturning Roe v. Wade but now makes confusing assertions along the lines that states should decide the matter.
Abortion is one of the polarizing issues – if not the single most polarizing issue – of our time. Costas Panagopoulos, a political science professor at Northeastern University, underlines how each new assertion on this subject from one side draws an escalating assertion from the other. "Those who align with the Democratic view, often advocating for broader access to abortion, appear to feel a stronger need to assert their stance as states enact more restrictive measures.” For this reason, says Panagopoulos, the issue of abortion is “becoming not just one of policy preference but one of identity for many voters."
The voting gap between men and women
But there are a number of other factors that put gender at the heart of this presidential campaign season, not least a sharpening of men and women’s differing views in general. Among all registered voters, 51 percent of women tilt to the Democratic party, and 44 percent to the Republican party. Young women say they’ll vote for Harris over Trump by a 33-point margin. Eighty-one percent of Black women support Harris. Women have been registering and turning out to vote in greater numbers than men in every election since 1980. And in this election cycle, women have been turning out for early voting in greater numbers than men.
Notable within these statistics is the fact that white women, when considered as a separate category, tilt to Donald Trump. Trump won the white women’s vote in 2016 and 2020. Now a key question for Harris is whether she can bring them across to her side of the line.
The Quinnipiac polls conducted throughout October show that in five of the seven key swing states, Harris had a significant lead among women (between 51 percent and 61 percent of likely female voters would vote for her), while Trump had a comparable advantage among men in the same states.
The gap between men and women creates an overall 21 percentage point divide, according to the Washington Post’s average of October national polls, where Harris leads by an average of 11 points among women while Trump leads by 10 points among men. This is roughly similar to the 2020 and 2016 national exit polls.
Another significant voting gap is the one between college educated and high school educated voters, which is 29 percentage points, with Trump ahead 10 points among people without a college degree and Harris ahead 19 points among those with one.
And the gap between men with only a high school education and women with a college education is 43 percent, reflecting two entirely different life experiences and mindsets. This highly significant statistic helps capture the nature of the deep social chasm in the US today.
Donald Trump’s 2017-2021 presidency contributed to a rise of women’s involvement in politics, as seen through demonstrations like the Women’s March of 2017 and more women running for elected office. Moreover, even though the #MeToo movement pre-existed the political rise of Donald Trump, it went viral following his victory, putting the spotlight on sexual misconduct as never before.
Same sex marriage
Another aspect of the gender issue at play in this election is that same-sex marriage could be challenged by the current Supreme Court if we have a Trump victory. Justice Clarence Thomas made this clear by issuing a concurring opinion at the time of the Dobbs decision in 2022 proposing that the Supreme Court “should reconsider” its past rulings codifying rights to contraception access, same-sex relationships and same-sex marriage.
In 2015, the Supreme Court found in Obergefell v. Hodges that state bans on same-sex marriage were unconstitutional. But 30 states still have laws on their books that prohibit marriage equality, so that if Obergefell v. Hodges were to be overturned, these state bans would come back into effect. To offset this possibility, three states – California, Colorado and Hawaii – will, on November 5, ask voters to vote on propositions affirming the right to gay marriage.
Are women finding greater self-confidence as a result of Harris’s candidacy?
Abortion, gay marriage, and sexual predation are topics we know well and they have been under discussion for some time, but gender took a further ironic turn last week when an ad was released where actress Julia Roberts tells voters — women specifically — that votes are secret and therefore, if you and your spouse disagree, you can vote for your chosen candidate and your spouse will never know.
The right-wing media were quick to criticize this appeal to marital deception. The purpose of the ad, of course, is to remind women once again that they have agency. As a result, one in eight women and one in ten men have revealed that they have at some time voted differently from their spouses and not told.
All of us women who have made the transition from a limited notion of our possibilities to putting ourselves out there in the high-stakes game of professional life, watch Harris with personalized interest. I sit in front of the TV and quietly tell her not to wave her hands so much, to lower the register of her voice, to smile less, to be more serious. We women have worked on these very things to ensure that we will be taken seriously. Even if I worry for her, seeing her blow those cautionary suggestions to the winds and be content to be herself is a delightful bursting of the bubble. I am taken by surprise…. Oh, maybe we can be ourselves after all. Maybe we actually don’t have to expunge from our self-presentation those things that men tend to ridicule.
“We don’t know who she is,” is a frequent complaint about Kamala Harris. Given the amount of time she has spent in large public gatherings with vast TV coverage, as well as social media’s efficient spreading of the word, it would be reasonable to ask why so many people say this. Is it because they are expecting something that they are not seeing? What is it they are looking for that, if she were a white man, they would not be looking for? Is “We don’t know who she is” really a statement of unease because they are looking at a black woman claiming the right to lead the most powerful country and they don’t know how that is supposed to look?
Of course this is the least of it for Harris. Her opponent makes a practice of demeaning anyone who disagrees with him. In the case of Harris, as well as other women, he feels entitled to use epithets like “weak” and “dumb as a rock.” There are “Trump or the Tramp” T-shirts. And the whole thing about her laughter. She introduced the idea we could laugh at Trump, pronounced him “unserious.” She proposed joy as an antidote to a national politics rife with ugliness and crudity. She brought a breath of fresh air. She got in return pejoratives suggesting her joy is the handiwork of an airhead. Nothing she does goes undisparaged by Trump.
In spite of the fact that Kamala Harris has been remarkably able in presenting herself as a post-DEI candidate, make no mistake, she has a thirty-five year career behind her in which, at every step, she was forced to overcome the tensions that her race and gender presented. As the daughter of highly accomplished immigrant parents – an Indian woman and a Jamaican man – she has succeeded again and again.
Harris is not ideological. She is pragmatic to her fingertips. She takes problems on their merits. She instructs her speech writers to cut away the fluff and sentimentality. She gets down to business. As a person of color as well as a woman, she knows that she has to be better than everyone else in order to be given a voice. In the fifteen weeks since her candidacy was declared we have come to know her as a person with trustworthy instincts who cares about the American people and wants to be a unifier.
She stepped forward assertively when the moment came, and has run a superb campaign, allowing the Democratic party to be a genuine player in this election cycle. Thank you, Kamala Harris.