Stark Differences

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By Kenneth Tiven

Regardless of the vote count in each state, Donald Trump will claim, as he has for the past year, that only rigged voting could account for any loss. If Kamala Harris is the apparent winner, a replay of 2020 is anticipated; legions of Republican lawyers imploring judges in state courts to accept their challenge of counts and procedures in multiple states.

Trump can declare himself the winner and call supporters to Washington again, but he will not be allowed to use any government property for a demonstration. A replay of the Capitol insurrection is highly unlikely. The Biden administration controls the national government at least until Inauguration Day on January 20, 2025. The membership of Congress is difficult to predict since many House and Senate members are not seeking another term as bipartisanship has descended into rancour and dysfunction.

The differences between candidates and policies could not be more stark. This is written five days before the votes are coun-ted. Ex-president Trump, now a convicted felon, faces enormous legal problems unless re-elected. If president again, the 78-year-old Republican will receive power with immunity to criminal prosecution.

Both the candidates had contrasting major rallies this past weekend. They could not have been more different in tone and image. Harris spoke to 75,000 people on the Mall Ellipse in the same spot where Trump had urged his followers to attack the Capital Building, four years ago. The speech that celebrated the American idea and the American process was delivered flawlessly, with the conviction of a presidential address.

“Here’s what I promise you: I will always listen to you, even if you don’t vote for me,” Harris said. “On Day 1, if elected, Donald Trump would walk into that office with an enemies list. When elected, I will walk in with a to-do list. The fact that someone disagrees with us, does not make them ‘the enemy from within,’” she said. “America, for too long, we have been consumed with too much division, chaos and mutual distrust. And it can be easy to forget a simple truth: It doesn’t have to be this way. I pledge to listen to experts,” Harris said, “to those who will be impacted by the decisions I make. And to people who disagree with me. Unlike Trump, I don’t believe people who disagree with me are the enemy. He wants to put them in jail. I’ll give them a seat at my table.”

Trump’s big rally was at Madison Square Garden in New York City. Trump and multiple speakers delivered depressing versions of hatred about a failing America that doesn’t exist. While Trump’s remarks in his hometown of New York City went for more than an hour, they were overshadowed by comments made by warm-up speakers in the roughly five hours before his prime-time address. They included a comedian’s racist jokes about Puerto Rico, other Latinos and Black Americans. These were condemned by multiple Republican members of Congress. Speakers used increasingly inflammatory language to describe Harris. There was a lot of racism on the stage, while outside on the Garden’s wall, a projection from Democrats read: “Trump praised Hitler”.

At this famous arena and before one of his largest rally crowds, Trump railed against opponents he sees as “the enemy from within,” referred to Harris’ “low IQ” and described her as a “vessel” for those opponents, as mentioned earlier, and said in a potential war with China, the US “would kick their ass”.

“It’s just this amorphous group of people, but they’re smart, and they’re vicious, and we have to defeat them,” Trump said in explaining his use of “the enemy from within. And when I say the enemy from within, the other side goes crazy… They’ve done very bad things to this country. They are indeed the enemy from within. But this is who we’re fighting,” he continued.

While speakers, including Trump, were disparaging Puerto Ricans, Harris, the daughter of an Indian mother and a Jamaican father, was in Philadelphia talking about her “Puerto Rican Opportunity Economy Task Force”. A Trump-approved comedian had described Puerto Rico as a “floating island of garbage”. It is a Commonwealth whose residents are US citizens. Nearly half a million people of Puerto Rican descent live in Pennsylvania. The characterization drew condemnation and probably cost votes in critical battleground states.

Negative reaction to the racism at the Trump rally was swift. At a news conference to address the issue, Trump talked about everything else, but he couldn’t bring himself to apologize or even say that he disagreed with the other speaker’s comments. He described the rally as a love fest, basically his standard response to critics—they can believe him or their lying eyes.

As this last week before the official voting looms, Republicans are releasing favourable polling data and doing everything they can in words and deeds to give the impression that they are winning. In these final weeks, Trump has played only to friendly audiences rather than appeal to voters who may be undecided. Observers of political behaviour in tight elections believe he is losing, but he still thinks he can win in court.

—The writer has worked in senior positions at The Washington Post, NBC, ABC and CNN and also consults for several Indian channels

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