Kamala Harris also, of course, brings her own demographics. She's a woman of color, which Suissa presumes to label as her sole qualification Vice Presidency or beyond.
The contempt is breathtaking.
Like Vance, Harris of course has her demographic role to play. More than half the electorate is female. The black, Caribbean, South Asian and other ethnicities she embodies represent a third or more of it (her husband is Jewish).
Of course, running as a woman of color comes with costs. We've never had a female president. But Hillary Clinton did beat Trump in 2016 by more than three million popular votes. The male, white Christian Nationalist resistance was beyond ferocious"and this year will likely explode on a whole new level.
Harris brings plenty of baggage, left and right, from her highly contentious career.
But as an accomplished 59-year-old attorney and prosecutor, she brings with her decades of brutally intense, highly complex, often contradictory public service. In 2007 she published Smart on Crime: A Career Prosecutor's Plan to Make Us Safer, about her contentious, mostly progressive ideas on legal reform.
Kamala served two terms as San Francisco's District Attorney, then twice as the Attorney-General of the nation's largest state. She worked four years as America's third female US Senator of color, and four more as Vice President of the United States.
Fifteen previous Vice Presidents have become president. Six have been elected on their own, including Nixon and Biden. Few have had greater prior preparation to actually handle the job than Kamala Harris. Few if any have had thinner preparation than JD Vance.
Vance's "middle finger to identity politics" includes his vehement misogyny, including the demand that women who choose to have abortions be tracked down and prosecuted by armed police. He is vehemently anti-LGBTQ.
Like Trump, who offered essentially to sell his presidency to the oil and gas industry for a billion dollars, Vance loves fossil fuels. He also hates wind and solar, which in Ohio have been devastated by a legislature recently turned toward a $1 billion nuclear power bailout by a $61 million bribe to a former Speaker of the House (who now resides in federal prison).
Suissa also bemoans the tendency of those on the left to equate Trump with Hitler. Vance, of course, has famously done just that.
The Donald still brands his his opponents as "vermin," a term favored by Hitler to describe Jews like Harris's husband.
In explicitly violent rhetoric, Trump vows "retribution" against those he dislikes. An actual functionary now has a "Dachau List" of more than three hundred designated "far left" targets. Public death penalty trials for "treason" have been floated for the likes of former Republican Congresswoman Liz Cheney (R-WY) and current US Rep Jamie Raskin (D-MD), who is also Jewish.
No previous major American presidential candidate has ever made such public threats. Richard Nixon had an "enemies list," but never talked openly of violent "retribution."
Trump's threats recall Adolph Hitler's fascist rhetoric leading up to his assumption of absolute power in the 1930s. Trump's Supreme Court has given the President unfettered authority to break any law, a staggering assertion absolutely alien to anything the Founders might have said at the Constitutional Convention in 1787. Far from an "originalist" interpretation, this astounding decree paves the way for the absolute power at the core of Trump's game plan.
From his January 6, 2021 attempted coup to the present and predictable future, Trump's absolutist rhetoric reeks of a coming dictatorship"backed by heavily armed MAGA brown shirts itching to open fire.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
