As the US election nears, Trump promises sweeping deportations and attacks on opponents, while Harris advocates for democratic norms and a people-centred agenda.
The best thing to be said of America’s 2024 presidential campaign season is it’s almost over. Donald Trump’s campaign has set a new record for vitriol, big lies and threats. No previous presidential candidate, dating back to the end of the 18th century, has ever vowed to “lock up” his political opponents or employed such Hitleresque characterisations of millions of immigrants as “vermin.” No previous presidential candidate I’m aware of has ever sought the office by vowing his presidency would be devoted to his own “retribution” against his own list of “the enemy within”, which begins with former Trump staffers who no longer support him and has told his supporters that “I’ll be your retribution,” too.
Trump could not have created the supposed enemies of his supporters all by himself, of course. It’s taken decades of Rupert Murdoch’s Fox “News,” talk-radio broadcasters in the mode of Rush Limbaugh, the conspiracy promoters on social media, and lately, Elon Musk’s remade Twitter ,now X, where far-right fabrications flourish, to convince those Americans who’ve become Trump’s base that feminists, various racial and religious minorities (who may bounce on and off Trump’s enemies list according to his whims), immigrants, liberals, elites (excluding the billionaires who are funding Trump’s campaign, of course), and just plain Democrats are all out to destroy America, following some obscure and alien ideology laid out by someone like Pol Pot.
Based on both media reports and the television ads I’ve seen while watching the current baseball World Series (L.A. Dodgers vs. N.Y. Yankees, a classic), Trump is closing by highlighting the threat that rampant transgenderism poses to the American way of life. His campaign has excavated an interview Kamala Harris gave in 2019 in which she said that convicts in California’s prisons have a right to switch genders, which presumably is proof positive that Harris poses a mortal peril to the roughly 98 per cent of Americans who aren’t transgender. If, somehow, she’s on transgenders’ “side,” Mr. and Mrs. America, she can’t possibly be on yours.
This closing blast was augmented last Sunday by Trump’s rally at New York’s legendary Madison Square Garden, where one comedian who preceded him to the stage referred to the American colony of Puerto Rico and its inhabitants as an “island of garbage.” Dehumanising though that was, the crowd of Trump-lovers “didn’t mind” it, said the Trump campaign’s press secretary, and Trump himself hasn’t repudiated it. As Puerto Ricans who live in the United States are American citizens who can vote in presidential elections, that may prove to boost the turnout of Harris voters among Puerto Ricans in such tightly contested swing states as Pennsylvania, where there are an estimated 500,000 Puerto Rican residents in a state of 13 million.
Harris voiced her own closing argument on Tuesday evening on the Ellipse – that part of the National Mall that abuts the White House, which was the site of Trump’s incendiary speech directing his followers, some of whom he knew were armed, to the Capitol on January 6th, 2021. She chose the spot as the perfect setting for what she believes to be, and what actually is, the fundamental difference between her and Trump: that she adheres to democratic norms in which her opponents have every right to oppose her and her policies, and that Trump believes that anyone who challenges him and his policies is his enemy and thus an enemy of the state. She vowed to treat her opponents with respect, and has said she’ll even appoint a Republican, assuming one can be found, to a post in her Cabinet.
As I noted in a previous column, however, polling has shown that defending American democracy is not a notably persuasive argument among the relative handful of voters who are still undecided. For them, the most effective message is a progressive-populist one, a pledge to go after Wall Street and powerful corporate interests with higher taxes that would fund such Harris policies as universal childcare, and with regulations that would pare back corporations’ domination of markets and price-setting. In a number of swing states, Harris ads making that point still saturate the airwaves, and she made forceful arguments along those lines in her address on the Ellipse.
One closing argument that Harris supporters should be making to those left-wing voters who say they won’t vote for her because she hasn’t broken with the Biden Administration’s carte blanche of arms provisions to the Israeli government, however, has not been made. Most of those won’t-vote-for-her electors – the vast majority of them young – have doubtless been horrified by the wholesale slaughter of innocent lives in Gaza. The argument that Trump has clearly said he’s fine with whatever Bibi Netanyahu is doing, while Harris has said she’s not, hasn’t persuaded many within this subset to vote for her, despite the best efforts of such left leaders as Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
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But to the degree that concern for innocent lives is key to these voters’ reluctance to support Harris, I think that their concern for innocent lives is precisely the way to convince those voters to cast a Harris ballot. The one campaign promise that Trump consistently makes in his otherwise stream-of-consciousness speeches – or, if you prefer, sewer of consciousness – is that he’ll deport record numbers of undocumented immigrants, whose number the government puts at roughly 11 million, but which Trump and JD Vance insist is really 20 million, or maybe 25 or 30 million, whatever. To that end, Trump vows to mobilise the National Guard, and if needs be, perhaps the army.
The effects of such a programme, even if it deports just a small fraction of those immigrants, would be catastrophic to countless families and communities. During his first term, Trump sought to stop immigration by having border guards separate children, including toddlers and infants, from their parents when apprehended at the border. Seven years later, there are still more, perhaps many more, than a thousand families that have not been reunited. As his promised mass deportations constitute the one programme Trump will surely carry out, there will be hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of US citizen children whose undocumented immigrant parents will be sent away, hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of undocumented immigrants who were brought here by their parents when they were small children and have lived nearly the entirety of their lives in the US, who will be sent to countries that are altogether alien to them.
These are innocent lives that can be spared from tragedy if Harris is elected. To the extent that concern for innocent life underlies some voters’ reluctance to back Harris, this is, I think, an argument that could push her over the top in some of the swing states where polling now shows Trump and Harris effectively tied. Trump has stoked so much anxiety through his lies about allegedly dangerous immigrants, which has rendered many of the swing voters not concerned about Gaza wary of backing Harris, that this is clearly not an argument that she herself could advance in the campaign’s closing days. It would be well, however, if prominent progressives took it upon themselves to do just that.
Harold Meyerson is the editor-at-large of The American Prospect, a former longtime op-ed columnist for The Washington Post, and the former executive editor of L.A. Weekly.