Shortly before 9:30 p.m. Eastern on Tuesday night in Philadelphia, the active volcano Mount Trump erupted, spurting geysers of glowing red-hot lava onto a blue suit. Thankfully, casualties were minimal, other than the GOP’s assumptions about winning the presidency.
By Jim Geraghty
The record of the Biden-Harris administration? (Oh, I’m sorry, is it now just “the Biden administration”? We’re just gonna forget Harris was there for the past four years? My mistake.) Let’s just say it’s bad enough to leave plenty of interest in a different approach.
Alas, Trump is only intermittently interested in running on the issues. As he demonstrated in his volcanic performance on the debate stage this week, he would rather run on conspiracy theories, a delusional defense of the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot, his imaginary victory in the 2020 election and the preemptive excuse that this fall he’ll be cheated out of another landslide.
Trump and his team seem convinced that the Biden record and Harris’s campaign of platitudes are so bad that centrists, independents and “the normies” will have no choice but to vote for Trump, no matter how unhinged he sounds in any given appearance.
This would also be a better election if Harris and running mate Tim Walz agreed to do the usual schedule of multiple sit-down televised interviews, news conferences and meetings with newspaper editorial boards. It is good that this month, the Harris campaign finally got around to adding an “issues” section to its website, although its fluffy-rhetoric-to-specific-details ratio is far from ideal. Harris pledges to “strengthen” our democracy, the Affordable Care Act, Social Security and Medicare, public education, our alliances, and our global leadership, as well as to “invest in America’s sources of strength.”
In a Harris administration, America apparently will be eating a lot of protein and lifting a lot of weights.
Harris had plenty of opportunities on the debate stage to lay out any significant policy differences she has with Biden. Instead, we got “I am not Joe Biden.” (Fact check: True.) She’s just offering the same policies and worldview in a younger and more polished package.
Despite the copious flaws of these candidates, both are just about guaranteed to rank among the top vote-getters in U.S. history. Last time around, Biden won with 81.2 million votes to Trump’s 74.2 million. Turnout increases almost every cycle — there’s always another four years of population growth — and the closeness of the 2024 election might convince the waverers that their vote matters more this time around.
At a Post event in July, an audience member noted that Thomas Jefferson said people get the government they deserve, and asked me, “Does the U.S.A. deserve Donald Trump?” I responded by quoting Clint Eastwood in “Unforgiven”: “Deserve’s got nothing to do with it.” Still doesn’t.
