Former President Donald J. Trump has called the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, a “love fest” and the jailed rioters “hostages.” Credit…Jason Andrew for The New York Times
It’s pretty clear to me that on Tuesday night, Vice President Kamala Harris won what may be the only debate between herself and former President Donald Trump.
I watched the entire debate. As Trump was speaking I myself thinking about Captain Queeg, the unstable skipper of the destroyer-minesweeper U.S.S. Caine in The Caine Mutiny movie. In the movie a doctor on cross examination admits that Queeg has symptoms that fit the profile of a paranoid personality disorder.
That is what I believe Trump has, a paranoid personality disorder.
Trump looked angry for most of the debate.
Sadly there is no requirement of mental fitness to qualify for president of the United States.
Donald Trump suffers from mental deficiencies and should not be elected president of the United States.
Here is his reply to the question of providing affordable child care. It is a word salad.
“It’s a very important issue. But I think when you talk about the kind of numbers that I’m talking about that — because the child care is, child care, it’s, couldn’t, you know, there’s something, you have to have it. In this country, you have to have it. But when you talk about those numbers compared to the kind of numbers that I’m talking about, by taxing foreign nations at levels that they’re not used to, but they’ll get used to it very quickly — and it’s not going to stop them from doing business with us, but they’ll have a very substantial tax when they send product into our country. Those numbers are so much bigger than any numbers that we’re talking about, including child care, that it’s going to take care.”
As identified by The Week magazine these were Donald Trump’s significant accomplishments during his presidency.
The judiciary
Trump’s “most lasting impact on the country” is likely the drastic reshaping of America’s courts, Business Insider said. By installing more than 200 federal judges, including 54 who “reshaped the ideological makeup of federal appeals courts” and three who drove a “generational shift in the highest court in the land,” Trump’s impact on the judicial branch of government overall will “continue shaping the American legal and political landscape for decades,” CNN said.
The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act
Trump’s 2017 tax bill — colloquially The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act — was arguably his “biggest legislative achievement,” which was intended, per Trump, to “super-charge the economy,” said Politico. It was also the “biggest tax overhaul since the Tax Reform Act of 1986,” the Brookings Institute said, but “skewed toward the rich” and “failed to deliver promised economic benefits,” said the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. One unambiguous takeaway: “U.S. corporations got to keep more of their money, and the U.S. government got less,” said Bloomberg.
Space Force
It was the stuff of jokes and mockery when Trump announced in 2018 that he planned to back a long dormant plan to create a sixth, space-focused branch of the U.S. Armed Services — the first new branch since the Air Force was founded in the wake of World War II. But just one year after its official founding in 2019, Space Force had “developed from a theoretical concept to an operational service fully engaged in a broad spectrum of activities,” West Point’s Lieber Institute said. While the Space Force’s annual budget grew over the first four years of its existence, that upward trend “will stop in fiscal 2025, for which the service is requesting $29.4 billion, down $0.6 billion from last year,” Defense One said.
Criminal justice reform
While much of Trump’s experience in the realm of criminal justice has been as a litigant, rather than policy expert, he nevertheless helped champion the historic First Step Act, the “most sweeping set of changes to the federal criminal justice system since the 1990s,” NBC said. The bipartisan-backed law “allows thousands of people to earn an earlier release from prison and could cut many more prison sentences in the future,” said Vox, and represents “modest steps to alter the federal criminal justice system and ease very punitive prison sentences at the federal level.” The law has shown “promising results thus far,” with beneficiaries showing recidivism rates “considerably lower than those who were released from prison without benefit of the law,” The Sentencing Project said.
The giddy excitement over the selection of Tim Walz for vice president may make Democrats feel good for the moment but it is unlikely to change the outcome of the November election. No one decided to vote for President Joe Biden based on his decision to select Kamala Harris as his running mate.
John McCain’s selection of Sarah Palin was not the reason he lost his election for president. Barack Obama wasn’t elected president because he chose to run alongside Joe Biden. Mitt Romney didn’t lose his White House bid because Paul D. Ryan was his pick for vice president.
So far Kamala Harris has not offered one thought about what she will do if elected president. We have all heard Donald Trump’s plans to raise tariffs, close the border, and expel illegal aliens among other promises. From Harris we have heard nothing.
Some of you may remember the 1984 US presidential campaign in which Walter Mondale used this slogan, “Where’s the beef?” to ridicule his rival for the Democratic nomination.
When President Biden courageously ended his reelection bid, he gave Democrats a golden opportunity to win in November. Now, many Democratic leaders and delegates seem intent on squandering that opportunity by rushing to make Vice President Harris the party’s nominee.
Their aim is to coalesce quickly around Ms. Harris as the heir apparent and forestall a nomination fight at the party’s convention next month. But for all her achievements and admirable service, Ms. Harris carries all the baggage of the Biden administration.
She, like Mr. Biden, has been trailing Donald Trump in polling and is unlikely to carry the handful of states — Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio and Pennsylvania — where this election will be decided. Democrats should take a deep breath and consider their options. If they are guided by data and political instinct, they can choose the candidate most likely to defeat Mr. Trump.
Name calling like saying Trump and Vance and their supporters are “weird” is playground nonsense.
I have yet to hear one thing that a President Harris will do once she is elected.
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